Free Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom Page A

me
,
    M
.                              
    I was bored by August. Mrs. Hills house was about a hundred degrees during the day. We had so many fans on we couldn’t hear each other, which was fine with me. She gave me two more cups, and every once in a while she’d point out some handsome white guy on the soaps and say, “Now, that’s a nice young man,” as if the next step was for me to call CBS. Rachel and I were sort of talking again, but she had a new boyfriend, a sophomore who followed her everywhere and smiled when she made fun of his devotion. After teaching retarded children how to swim and learning how to French-inhale, I had nothing to do. Finally I called Max. I put the receiver down when he answered.
    He knew who it was and called me back, crying that nothing mattered but me, and I heard my mother making a cup of tea, and I could barely picture him in my mind while he talked and cried. He was a speck.
    For a long time I wouldn’t take a ride home, even in badweather. I did good deeds and played solitaire. I read Baudelaire and I read Georgette Heyer. I spent my mother’s money on the movies and gas and began to watch boys again and smile at them. My body was humming, a cheerful, wild tune just behind everything else. And then I wanted to talk about the books and the boys with Max, and I smelled coffee and Barbasol in my dreams, and we started again.

Speak to My Heart
    I was not a cheerleader, I never played team sports, and I never watched them; I never showed school spirit, but I did like the basketball players. I even watched the NBA on TV once, but they were too much for me: huge, big-veined men, hard as trees, plunging across the floor on their big bandaged legs. The basketball players at my high school were all damp skin and calcium deposits, a few good-sized, broadening young men, the rest just tall, lanky boys with cornsilk hair flopping in their eyes until it got ridged and wet in the second half, or brown mushroom Afros wobbling slightly as they ran up and down the court. The white boys got dark half-circles under their arms and big blotches in the middle of their chests and backs, but the black boys ran water. And Huddie Lester soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night. I was tutoring a ninth-grade girl more interested in not being left back than in actually learning how to read, and we took breaks every ten minutes. During the breaks, Yolanda ran wild in the halls, jimmying lockers and xeroxing her ass in the teachers’ lounge; I watched Huddie shoot hoop.
    I watched them practice three Fridays in a row and finallyHuddie dribbled over as they broke up into groups of four, shooting endlessly, a dozen balls swishing through nets, bouncing against the hard white backboard and the hard shining floor.
    “You like basketball?”
    “It’s okay. At least you have to think when you play. Or at least you look like you’re thinking.” Inside, I was smashing my head against the wall.
    “Yeah, we think. You tutor Yolanda McKee?”
    It turned out Yolanda was good friends with Huddie’s cousin Abigail. We could hear her singing in the hall, loud and sweet, behind the noise of the boys. He rested his hand on the bleacher and bounced the ball lightly, looking somewhere between me and the gym door.
    “You go out with Allen Schreiber?”
    “No. He’s just a friend.”
    “Jon Schwartz?”
    “No. Is this a quiz?”
    “Yeah. One more.”
    “Okay. Could you stop that?” If he was going to ask me out, if he liked me
that way
, he’d stop dribbling.
    He spun the ball up on one skinny brown finger and we watched it turn, orange, black, orange. He popped it down his arm.
    “How about pizza after practice? We finish at five, I don’t have to get to the store right away today.”
    I don’t know how I said anything. My ears rang yes and my blood jangled and we sat there grinning and breathless until we heard the janitor hollering at Yolanda.
    “Meet you at the bike rack at