Staring at her in a way boys never stared at her. And instead of dropping his eyes right away, he’d held her gaze and asked, “Anything else I can help you with?”
And for a moment, it had felt like he was flirting with her. But no…that couldn’t be the case. Again, guys never looked at her that way. She was a three on the Connecticut boys cabin’s hotness scale. It was probably a misinterpretation due to his accent.
Tess averted her eyes and made something up about needing more sunscreen. But the moment had left her weirdly flushed, even though it was still the cool hours of the morning. She had to be reading all sorts of things into the interaction that weren’t there, but it had felt…intense.
And maybe that was why she hesitated this morning before taking a deep breath and joining him under the tree.
“Hey,” he said with a lopsided grin.
“Hey…” she managed over all the static in her head. He was so fine, she almost forgot what she came here to say. But after a few brain skips, she managed to add, “It’s July Fourth. It’s a free day.”
“Yeah, I know,” he answered, standing up a little straighter. “But I wasn’t sure if that included you too. And I, um, wanted to make sure you had help.”
Tess drew herself up to her full height too. But that still made her a lot shorter than him. Five two to his six-foot plus. “No, none of us are working. Everyone has the day off, including my mom. And me.”
“Oh…” He scraped a hand over the back of his head with a chagrinned look. Then he gave her a confused frown. “If you’re off, why are you here?”
“Because I was afraid you might be here waiting for me,” she admitted with her own sheepish look.
He raised his eyebrows. “So you got up early on your day off just to tell me I didn’t have to get up early?”
“Yeah.” Tess let out a sigh. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I did.”
He looked to the side. “Okay, uh, thanks. I probably would have figured it out after fifteen minutes or so. You didn’t have to get up…”
He trailed off, and her stomach churned with thoughts of how this must look to him. So unnecessary and desperate. Like all the girls who found excuses to make their way to the nearby lake in bikinis when they heard the Connecticut boys were over there shirtless and taking a dip.
“Okay, I should probably—” she started to say, pointing a thumb in the direction of the home trailer.
At the same time, he asked, “Hey, want to have breakfast in town, since we’re both up?”
Tess blinked, shocked at the request. “Um, the closest town is Athens, and the buses aren’t running today, so it would be about a sixty- to ninety-minute walk.”
He glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe we could drive.”
She followed his gaze to her mom’s van, parked on the other side of the work trailer.
So he did want to borrow the van, which had “God’s Work Youth Missions” plastered across its side. Just not the way she thought.
“Oh, I mean, maybe,” she answered, her stomach ping-ponging at the thought of spending time with Benjamin outside of camp. “But I don’t have a license.”
“I got one,” he assured her. “My brother taught me to drive and took me to get my license as soon as I turned sixteen. I just need the key.”
So that was how she ended up having breakfast on the Fourth of July at a little diner just up the street from Ohio University. With the guy half the other girls on the mission trip were crushing on.
Despite his good looks, Benjamin turned out to be surprisingly easy to talk to. As it turned out, he’d also read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, along with the other two books she’d brought with her: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, and Feed, by M.T. Anderson. Why? He couldn’t quite say.
“Class or something. Dunno…” he mumbled vaguely.
But his recall was as good as if he’d read all the books from her summer reading list right along with her over the past few weeks. He wasn’t like the other jocks Tess had observed during her short time in American high school. He could actually think critically enough about texts to talk about them thoughtfully. Over breakfast, they’d had a significant conversation about British Imperialism, the expanding universe, and whether or not the internet would one day go directly into people’s heads.
Tess thought yes. But Benjamin told her there was no way.
“I come from a long line of Irish mob guys. Believe me, if there’s a way to break into something, crime’s trying it. Tell you what, in ten years, cybercrime will have become such a problem, nobody will even be talking seriously about that Feed concept anymore.”
Later, when Tess discussed the book with her AP English, she’d think of Benjamin Brady Keane, and bile would rise in her throat. So fast, she’d have to run out of the classroom with her hand clamped over her mouth without time to ask for a bathroom pass.
But by the time their food was long gone, she found herself utterly charmed.
