“Now,” I say, “let me stipulate one thing right here. When jumping off anything high into a body of water, a dude should always remember to keep his legs together at impact. It will be very painful otherwise. I know from experience.”
Pain shoots across her face. She is the absolute best audience ever.
“On top of that, I also didn’t take into account that if you jump from a very high place you are going to shoot very far down into the water. I mean, deep. And I didn’t think to take an extra breath before going under either. So there I am, underwater for what feels like ten minutes. My eyes are bulging. I’m kicking and flailing, nothing but a gray ceiling of water above me. A newspaper headline flashes before my eyes—IMBECILIC
YOUTH PLUNGES TO DEATH FROM TUSKOGEE BRIDGE.
“Then I see it—a pale circle of light shining through the water—and I know I can make it. My head breaks through the water, and sweet, sweet oxygen fills my lungs. Saved!”
I settle back in my chair. “By the time I got to the bank, I was almost sober, and here comes Ricky shooting down from the bridge like an arrow. ‘Hold your legs together,’ I yelled. But he couldn’t hear me, and splat.” I clap my hands again and she jerks back again.
“Anyway, obviously we both lived to tell the story, but I’m not sure we can have children now.”
Aimee smiles the biggest I’ve seen yet. “Wow,” she says. “That’s about the most amazing thing I ever heard.”
Chapter 22
“So,” I say, picking up a slice of pizza. “How about you? Do you have any good stories?”
She thinks for a moment. “Well, I remember that time we had English together sophomore year, and Mrs. Camp got called out of the room, so you stood up in front of the class and delivered this whole lecture about symbolism in that old movie Dumb and Dumber. You had the whole class cracking up, but Mrs. Camp wasn’t too happy when she came back in.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Dumb and Dumber, that’s like one of my all-time favorite movies.”
“And then there was the time I saw you surfing on the hood of a car and it ran over a curb and you went flying off into a hedge. I thought, Oh my God, he’s dead! But you just jumped right up and got back on the car. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah, vaguely.” It’s kind of flattering that she remembers these things, but I wasn’t looking for more stories about me. “What about you?” I ask. “Don’t you have some stories about yourself?”
She scrunches up her nose. “I’m boring.”
“No, you’re not. Think about it. You’re probably the only person in here who’s out roaming the neighborhoods at five o’clock every morning, even during the school week. I think that’s pretty amazing.”
She smiles. “Well, I guess some things have happened on the paper route that are kind of interesting. There was this one time—I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not.”
“You can tell me anything.”
“It’s kind of gross,” she says. “It happened back when I was twelve.”
And I’m, like, shaking my head over the notion that her mother’s had her slaving away in the paper route mines since she was prepubescent.
“Back then,” she goes on, “my big sister was still helping with the route, so Mom would drop me off with a bag and I’d deliver my houses walking while she and Ambith delivered another section. It wasn’t till I was fourteen that she let me drive sometimes. So I was walking along kind of daydreaming—or actually, I guess you’d call it early-in-the-morning dreaming—and all of a sudden this man walks out from behind a hedge, totally naked!”
“Jesus. What’d you do?”
“I dropped my bag and took off running. I must’ve run four blocks before I saw our truck, and I stood in the middle of the street waving for Mom to come down and get me.”
“Did she call the cops on the dude?”
“Uh, actually, no.” She looks down at her limp pizza. “She made me go back and get the bag and throw the rest of my houses.”
I can’t believe it. What a mom! “I’ll bet you were pretty scared walking around there with some naked maniac in the bushes.”
“I was,” she says. “I kept thinking I heard something sneaking up from behind me. Later, I saw him walking around from the back of another house, but this time he got in his car and drove off. It was a Lexus. I always thought that was odd.”
“Next time that happens, don’t let your mom make you go back.”
“Next time? Do you think it’ll actually happen again?”
“Well, no, maybe not that exact thing.”
I’m getting ready to explain some of my theories on the prevalence of the weird in daily life, but I’m interrupted when some girl I don’t remember ever seeing before barges up and says to Aimee, “So, he finally got here, did he?”
Aimee’s head sinks toward her shoulders. “Hi, Krystal.”
I stand up the way a gentleman should and put out my hand. “My name’s Sutter Keely. Glad to meet you.”
She doesn’t take my hand. “I know who you are.”
Aimee goes, “This is Krystal Krittenbrink.”
And Krystal’s like, “We’ve been friends since second grade.” Somehow she makes it sound snotty, like I’m an insignificant insect in the scheme of their glorious friendship. I know her type—all her life her parents spoiled her and told her she was “the most specialest little honey-bunny snookems in the world” and she never figured out that the rest of the universe doesn’t necessarily share that opinion.