Free Cold Fury by T. M. Goeglein Page B

again, settling for something meaningless like, “Brown. He’s got brown hair.”
    All of that changed with Max.
    I found him endlessly fascinating and had an overwhelming need for the people in my life to know all about him. It was impossible to stop talking about him to my parents, or Lou, or Doug, or, frankly, anyone who would listen.
    In fact, talking itself was the best thing about Max.
    Besides his smile, and how tall he was, and that he liked all of the old movies I did, he and I talked for hours about everything.
    We talked at school before Classic Movie Club, then afterward about the movie we’d just seen, and then later, on the phone, about school and our families, about politics and baseball (he’s a White Sox fan, ugh!), and about the world in general. There were no uncomfortable pauses or goofy utterances or trying to sound cool—the conversation just flowed. I noticed that we both naturally avoided slang, and we agreed that every kid in the world saying exactly the same thing over and over again sounded idiotic. But the best part of talking to Max was the simplest—he made me feel interesting. As someone who had never opened up to many people outside of her family, it was a wonderful, weird sensation to have such close attention paid to my thoughts and opinions. It was as if, in my years of mental and emotional solitude, I’d warehoused a vast array of exotic information, and I’d finally found someone to share it with. Whether it was sports or movies or yeah, even slang (Max informed me that “hipster” was actually from the 1940s; I countered with “geek,” enlightening him on its early-1900s German origins), we usually ended up talking about how something began. In the three weeks leading up to my birthday, if Max didn’t think of me as a girlfriend, then I was definitely a friend who was a girl. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I had to admit that our constant chatter was a good way, maybe the best way, to get to know each other.
    And then, when he asked me to the spring dance—something I had wanted so badly—I couldn’t have cared less.
    That’s because, a few seconds earlier, he said something even better.
    He told me I was gorgeous.
    Actually, he didn’t use the word gorgeous and maybe he didn’t realize he was paying me a compliment, but he’d said it, and then he asked me to the dance.
    Let me clarify—he kind of asked me.
    We were staring at a flickering screen in the theater room at Fep Prep, just me, Max, and Doug, with Doug grazing from a family-size bag of Munchitos, his junk food of choice. He’d recently been on a “great Italian directors” kick—we watched films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Rossellini—and had developed a minor obsession (he was easily obsessed) with the director Vittorio De Sica. First we watched The Bicycle Thief , which was the saddest movie I’d ever seen, and then Marriage Italian Style , which was about a guy cheating on one girlfriend with another girlfriend. It starred Sophia Loren, with whom Doug developed another minor obsession, and we moved on to an old Hollywood film she starred in called Houseboat .
    Sophia Loren was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
    On-screen, her face glowed and her body shimmered.
    It was at that moment—the greatest of my life—that Max whispered, “Hey . . . you look like her. Especially your eyes. You have little bits of gold in there.”
    I thought I heard him wrong. I was scared to move, scared to breathe, and the seconds that followed felt like hours. Finally I said, “Who?”
    “Her,” he said, nodding at Sophia, whose face filled the screen like a sexy angel. I didn’t know what the scene was about and didn’t care—all I knew was that Max told me that I looked like her . I was about to say something witty (i.e., stupid) when he said that his mom was forcing him to go to the dance and that maybe I should suffer too. I said something back like, “Yeah. Whatever. Maybe,” while trying