The Problem with the Other Side Read online

  She said, “Oh! but before I do—I gotta tell you something that I just remembered. You’ve got to swear not to tell anybody else.”

  I wasn’t expecting this. I nodded and said, “I swear.”

  She motioned for me to lean closer to her.

  I did.

  She looked around to make sure we were still alone, then she turned back to me and whispered, “. . . I heard that Ms. Rothstein is attracted to you.”

  After a moment, I grinned and said, “Nice try.”

  Sallie slapped her thigh and said, “Damn! I so thought that was gonna put you flat on your back!”

  I said, “I’m tellin’ you—black people don’t faint. But that was a nice try, real talk.”

  Massaging her other foot, she said, “Oh God, I can’t wait till this play is over. I only did it ’cause I was bored and Ms. Rothstein talked me into it.”

  I said, “I only did it ’cause my sister kept buggin’ me about how I need to start taking more extracurriculars because that’s what colleges are gonna be looking for and how I did nothing during freshman year and how tenth grade isn’t too early to start.”

  Sallie gave a knowing nod and said, “Yeah, my stepmom pretty much said the same thing. But I hate sports, so theater was the only thing that seemed interesting.”

  As Sallie and I continued talking on that staircase, I found myself realizing something.

  I was attracted to her.

  Like, legit attracted to her. The kind of attracted where things in your body that are normally slow speed up . . . and things on your body that are normally soft get very firm, if you don’t mind me being up-front about the front.

  It was so strange to be feeling like this about her. It was like I was meeting her for the first time, but I’d known her since last year when we were both in the same freshman English class. And just to stay in Real City: I thought she was pretty back then. I think it’s her eyes. She has these dark, dark eyes—two tiny round pools of chocolate pudding—that form an interesting clash with her blond hair. And she has this deep, anchorwoman voice that makes her sound older than her fifteen years. She had it even as a freshman last year. Whenever she raised her hand to answer one of Mrs. Lorimar’s questions, I always found myself kind of hoping my classmates would stay quiet so I could hear her voice.

  So I’ve always thought Sallie Walls is pretty.

  But it wasn’t till that staircase conversation (and the stuff that happened right before it—the Post-it note, Tuco & the handcuffs, etc.) that I realized that Sallie Walls is . . . sexy. For those of you who aren’t feeling me on that, pretty & sexy aren’t necessarily the same jam. You can be pretty but not sexy. And you can be sexy but not pretty (though most times you are—let’s not front). I mean, check it out: Beyoncé is pretty. But Rihanna is sexy. Feeling me yet? A sunrise can be pretty, but you wouldn’t want it next to you in bed. You want to wake up with it, not to it. The good news is that pretty can turn into sexy overnight. You can go from pretty to sexy just by staring at someone a certain way. But, for some reason, it’s rare for Sexy to get downgraded to Just Pretty. I guess it can happen; I just hope it never happens when I’m around. Pretty fades. But Sexy usually stays.

  And Sallie definitely turned from pretty to sexy on that staircase. And it really surprised me.

  See, I’m gonna tell you something about white girls, and I’m saying sorry in advance because some of you might get offended by this, but I gotta keep it 100: I’ve found a lot of white girls attractive . . . but I’m usually not attracted to them. Before Sallie, I just never really found white girls sexy. I know there are some mad exceptions out there, but a lot of the white girls I’ve known—mainly here in school—are just too played-out and corduroy to be sexy. Either they’re stuck-up or they’re fake or they’re spaced out or they dance when they know they can’t or they worship Nutella or they wear UGGs or they like Justin Bieber or they talk with that annoying vocal fry at the end of every damn sentence.

  But not Sallie Walls. She’s the apple in a land of bananas. She’s funny. She’s interesting. She’s nice. And she knows how a train can rescue you if you’re ever handcuffed to a dead prison guard.

  But you know what’s really interesting, though? At first, I thought Sallie was sort of racist. While Ms. Rothstein was making announcements and giving us the post-rehearsal notes, I’d always catch Sallie giving me this kind of uptight glance every ten seconds like she was worried I wasn’t going to give her dollar back to her. And when I gave it back, she’d take it and smile quickly with her face turning slightly red the way people do when you catch them being someone you weren’t supposed to see—like a shoplifter. Or a cheating spouse. Or a bigot.

  “Oh, there you two are!” the nun said when she spotted us on the staircase. “We were wondering where you were. Ms. Rothstein is about to give her notes.”

  “Okay, we’ll be there,” Sallie told her.

  The nun walked back into the dressing room.

  Sallie and I smirked at each other, then she sighed and said, “Well, I guess all good things really do come to an end.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She put one of her pumps back on.

  On an impulse, I reached down for her other pump and held it toward her like I was offering a gift. “May I have the honor?” I asked.

  She smiled and said, “Sure.”

  She extended her foot toward me and I slowly slipped the shoe back on her.

  She said, “Thank you. You’re not a freak or anything, are you?”

  I laughed and said, “What kind of question is that?”

  She said, “No, it’s just—the only guy who offers to put a girl’s shoe back on her is a shoe salesman, or a freak.”

  I said, “You left out a third possibility—Just A Nice Guy.”

  She said, “Some of the freakiest freaks are nice guys. They’re usually nice guys Thursday through Saturday and freaks Monday through Wednesday.”

  “Well you’re in luck: today is Friday,” I said, then I reached down to take her arm so I could help her off the step.

  She gave me her arm and let me lift her up. “Wow, how ‘nice’ of you,” she said with a grin.

  “Well, I try to—”

  She suddenly gasped and grabbed my shoulder. “Oh shit!” Her face had turned instantly red and there was a terror in her eyes I hadn’t seen before; she seemed to be looking at something just over my shoulder.

  My heartbeat starting to hammer, I said, “What?”

  She quietly said, “Oh my God . . . Don’t move . . .”

  “What is it?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

  She slowly said, “. . . There’s a rat on that step just two inches behind your head . . .”

  I looked at her for a moment, then smiled and said, “Nice try.”

  “Damn!” she said.

  “I told you—BPDF, baby!”

  She looked confused. “Huh?”

  “Black People Don’t Faint,” I said. “When are you gonna learn?”

  “I think I’m learning,” she said as she walked with me back to the dressing room. Every few seconds I could feel our shoulders brush against each other’s and every time they did, I felt a kind of lump form in my throat . . . something that happens whenever I’m standing or sitting or walking right next to someone I’m mad Into.

  That was my first official conversation with Sallie Walls, and by the time it was over I was in love with her. That’s how romantically gangsta she is. There’s a song from the 1970s that my grandfather liked—“It Only Takes a Minute to Fall in Love.” Pre-Sallie, I’d always thought that song was bullshit.

  By the time we got back to the dressing room I realized I had a new problem on my hands: I wasn’t sure if she felt the same way about me.

  But Hope gave me a shout-out when Sallie asked for my phone number right before we
said Goodnight. I gave her mine and she gave me hers.

  We spent a big part of that weekend talking on the phone and FaceTiming and learning more stuff about each other. Besides loving The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the other two Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), we found out we both also had mad love for watching stand-up comedy shows on Netflix. And not only that, we both broke out the hate-orade for stand-up comedians who sing or play music during their performance.

  “I can’t stand that shit!” I told Sallie over the phone.

  “Me neither!” she said. “Why can’t they just stick to comedy? I mean, if I want to hear music, I’ll go to Spotify or something.”

  “Truthanasia,” I said. “Singers don’t tell jokes in their songs; why do comedians have to sing?”

  “I know! Can you imagine Taylor Swift stopping in the middle of a song to say, ‘So a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer walk into a bar . . .’”

  I laughed. Actually, that still makes me laugh, and she said it three months ago.

  On Monday and Tuesday Sallie and I met after school at Knight Park across the street and sat on a bench and watched A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More on my phone. We’d already seen both movies a hundred times, but that was on our own; we wanted to watch them together so we could comment on different things. It was cold in that park—November was doing its thing—but it didn’t really bother me; most of the time, I didn’t even notice the cold—I was too busy wondering if this beautiful, funny girl sitting just two inches away was feeling me as much as I was feeling her.

  As I tapped my way toward Netflix to pull out A Fistful of Dollars Sallie said, “I wonder why they call them ‘spaghetti westerns.’ Nobody ever ate spaghetti in any of the movies, or did I miss something?”

  I said, “I read somewhere that it was because all the movies were made with Italian production companies. That’s actually kind of an insult, though. I mean, if I was Italian and somebody called my movie a Spaghetti movie, I’d be offended as hell. I mean, that’s kinda like calling a Tyler Perry movie a Fried Chicken & Biscuit movie. Or a Jackie Chan movie a Moo Shu Pork movie.”

  Sallie said, “Oh, yeah.” She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I never thought of it that way.”

  As the whistle and smacking whips of the movie’s opening music started our shoulders touched; she didn’t move hers away, and I didn’t move mine away. My heartbeat slipped into Speed mode again.

  “Is this music bacon or what?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and arousal-free.

  She nodded. “It’s so lit. I love that whistle. I read that Ennio Morricone—y’know the composer—used the whistle because it was an instrument that made him think of being by yourself; being alone. And Eastwood spends a lot of time by himself in these movies. Well, maybe not so much the other two, but definitely this one.”

  As the movie ended—my boy Eastwood on his horse, casually riding away from the three corpses on the ground—our shoulders were still touching.

  “Now that’s how you end a cowboy movie,” Sallie said. “No sentimental stuff. Just ride away after doing what you needed to do. It’s tough, just like the cowboy’s way of life. Brutal and true.”

  I said, “Yeah. Oh, and look at that—no closing credits: just The End.”

  Sallie said, “Yeah. It’s like the director was saying, ‘You want closing credits? Fuck you. Life during this time was too tough for closing credits. All you’re gonna get from me is The End.’ Tough and to the point.”

  Watching For a Few Dollars More the next day was slightly disappointing, with a nice-sized slice of promising. Disappointing not because of the movie (Sallie and I agree that it’s better than Fistful but not as bacon as Good/Bad/Ugly), but because our shoulders didn’t really touch this time. Now for the Promising: when the bank explodes Sallie put her head on my shoulder. I acted all cool of course, like everything was normal, then I kind of panicked when I realized she might’ve been dozing off and had put her head on my shoulder simply as part of the accidental affection you give the person next to you when you’re falling asleep—no matter whether that person is Mom or Manson.

  Trying to keep my voice panic-free, I said, “You asleep?”

  “No,” she said. “Just comfortable.”

  By the time Eastwood rode away with the six corpses in his carriage—and the $100,000 in his bag—and The End popped up on the screen, I began to think that maybe Sallie liked me just as much as I liked her.

  Things only got better over the next two months. We texted each other in class. We ate lunch together. And on the weekends when we didn’t have a heavy homework load or an upcoming test we got together and hung out: sometimes we’d take the bus to Cherry Hill Mall or to the Cherry Hill Loews movie theater; sometimes we’d ride the PATCO to Philly to run up the Rocky steps; sometimes we’d stay local and walk around Newton Lake. And every day after school we continued meeting at Knight Park to sit on our bench and watch videos: sometimes Netflix stuff, sometimes YouTube.

  During all this I got to learn more things about her. Her middle name is Diana. She was born and raised in Collingswood, New Jersey where our school is. She and her older sister Leona lost their mother when she was four years old. Their father remarried when Sallie was nine but, unfortunately, he passed when she was eleven, leaving her and her sister with the stepmother, who—fortunately—is the Coolest Stepmother In The World, to quote Sallie. Her favorite dessert is cherry pie with vanilla ice cream. Her favorite candy is Skittles. And though she likes Nutella, she doesn’t love it. (Thank God.)

  And I guess that brings me to February, where we’re at now. Some of you might be wondering if we’ve kissed yet, and as much as I’d like to say yes, I gotta stay in Real City and say no. We hug hello and hug goodbye, and our shoulders stay glued when we watch videos and there’s been some flirty arm-touching and face-touching. But no kiss yet. I’m not sure why we keep putting it off. There have been times when, right after our goodbye hug, she’s given me this “Anything else for the Cause?” look but I didn’t go in for the kiss because . . . I don’t know. Maybe I was nervous. Or it was out in public, and I’ve never been down with PDA. And there have been times when I wanted to go in for the kiss but she seemed like she wasn’t ready. I mean, check it out: What if I go in for the kiss and she pulls back and says, “Whoa, what’re you doing?! We’re just friends”?

  The closest we’ve come to kissing was last month, and our lips weren’t even involved. We’d finally got around to watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly together after putting it off all through December. I guess the delay was because we both knew the movie is mad long and we wanted to wait till both of our schedules were clear so we could watch it unbroken; we both hate having to pause a movie till the next day. So on this one afternoon that was so warm it was like January had gotten whacked in the head by Mother Nature’s skateboard and forgotten how to be itself Sallie and I sat on Our Bench, hit up Netflix, and watched our favorite movie together. When we got to the Tuco & the Train scene, it happened: Sallie put her hand on my hand. And I looked at her and smiled. And then I put my hand on her hand. And my heartbeat turned into an Olympics track star again.

  I can’t believe I just wrote that. If some other guy wrote that and I was reading it, I’d tease the hell out of him for getting all mushy and wack and sprung and poetic over a girl. I mean—doing the hand sandwich on a park bench? It doesn’t get more corduroy than that. But here’s the thing: You know what my problem is? Deep down, I’m a damn romantic. And that comes straight from Real City. I was one of those losers who welled up when Kate realized Leonardo had frozen to death in the middle of the Atlantic but my insecure ass actually had the nerve to make fun of my cousin Cora for crying all through the second half of the movie when I watched it with her. I’m a damn romantic. There are a billion mofos out there—why did Cupid have to go and add me to his cav
e of captives? I hate being a romantic. You know why? Because the engine that a romantic runs on is the heart. And just like an engine, it breaks down. Or even worse: it just breaks. And then you’re nothing but a bus going nowhere, stuck in a bad neighborhood, with nothing to look at but condemned buildings, brick walls, and broken hopes.

  So anyway: a hand sandwich with cheese—that’s the closest Sallie Walls and I have come to a kiss.

  Until today.

  It happened this afternoon, during Period G when we both have a Study Hall.

  We’d each asked our teachers for a pass to “go to the bathroom” so we could squeeze in a quick nice-to-see-your-face chat.

  As Sallie and I were walking down a staircase—not Our Staircase but another one in the school—I suddenly slipped on something that felt like a sheet of paper and down my ass went. I fell back and probably would’ve cracked my head against one of the steps if Sallie’s arm hadn’t been a buffer that kept my body closer to 90 degrees than 180. But her arm cushion still couldn’t stop me from landing on my back about three steps down.

  “Oh my God, Uly, are you okay?! Are you okay?!” Sallie asked as she scrambled down toward me. She had the same terror in her eyes that she’d had that night when she used the invisible rat to test the BPDF theory; but this time the terror was real.

  “Yeah, I’m cool,” I grunted as she took my arm to help me up.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again when I was on my feet.

  “Yeah, I’m cool,” I said, trying not to wince too hard from the pain that was shooting back and forth in my lower back.

  She slightly squinted at me and said, “I don’t believe you.”

  With my best reassuring smile, I said, “I told you—I’m cool.”

  Her face still rocking the skeptical squint, she said, “Bend to the left.”

  I bent to the left. “See?”

  She said, “Now bend to the right.”

  I bent to the right. “See? I told you—it’s all bacon.” And it was true. The pain was actually starting to get lost.