The Book of Luke (18 page)

L
ucy and Josie were waiting for me at Starbucks as planned. I’d had two hours to try and figure out what to make of my gift and how I’d pitch it to them. And it hadn’t been easy. I knew what they’d think. And I couldn’t blame them. Two months ago I would have been thinking the same thing.

Josie had her face in this month’s
Cosmo,
but as soon as she heard the door open she glanced up at me and looked relieved. “We thought you’d never get here. I’m on my fourth vanilla Frappuccino.”

“Sorry, I had some stuff I had to take care of.”

“So, how’d it go?”

I slipped the tickets out of my pocket and fanned them out on the table.

Josie grabbed one of the tickets and held it up for inspection. “A basketball game? It’s your birthday and he gets you tickets to a basketball game?”

“Not just any game,” I clarified, already feeling defensive. “A Celtics-Bulls game.”

Lucy took the ticket from Josie’s hand. “Oh my God, this is bad. He’s never going to change—although it should be a great game. These tickets aren’t easy to come by.”

I silently thanked Lucy for her knowledge of all things sports.

“You know,” I said as I pulled out a chair and sat down, “I was thinking about this on the way over, and maybe he has changed.”

“He got you basketball tickets, Emily. That would be like you getting him a gift certificate to Sephora.”

“Maybe not,” I continued, ready to change her mind. “Yes, they’re basketball tickets. But he specifically got tickets for Saturday’s game against the Bulls—the Chicago Bulls, see?”

Josie shook her head. “Not really.”

“He had a choice between Knicks tickets on Friday—and they’re in first place—or Bulls tickets. He picked the Bulls because he knew I missed Chicago.”

Josie nodded as if she was starting to understand. “Ah, I see where you’re going with this.”

“I think Emily may be right,” Lucy agreed. “It really did require some forethought.”

“Will he be picking you up in a limo or anything? Taking you out to dinner beforehand at some fabulous Boston restaurant?” Josie wanted to know.

“I don’t think so,” I conceded, sensing that even if Josie understood that Luke had put considerable thought into my present, without a lobster dinner it really didn’t count for much. “We’ll probably have hot dogs at the game or something.”

Josie pondered this for a minute. “Well, he may not be one hundred percent better, but at least it sounds like he’s making progress. Job well done.”

Her accolade did not make me feel any better. In fact, I felt worse.

The night of my birthday, Luke picked me up at seven o’clock. We had forty-five minutes alone in the car and I wanted to savor every second. So what if there was no long black limo waiting for me in my driveway, no bouquet of red roses, or a lobster dinner? And it didn’t even matter that it was raining and the traffic was horrible and when we got to the tollbooth we got in the fast lane by mistake even though we didn’t have a pass, because it just gave us more time to talk. We covered everything from the college letters that were a mere two weeks away (Tufts was Luke’s first choice) to graduation and what we’d do once school let out. We pretty much talked about everything except the topic that loomed over my head like that huge weight that falls from the sky and lands on some unsuspecting cartoon character—the time capsule and my contribution to it.

“My uncle has a house in Falmouth,” Luke told me, taking my hand and laying it on his thigh. I could feel his muscle contract every time he moved his foot over the break. And each time he slowed down to change lanes or accelerated to pass a car, the only thing I could think was,
You’ve got to love a guy who runs a mile each day in lacrosse practice
. And then I’d think,
Did I just think that
? Because I most certainly could not love the guy next to me who runs a mile each day in lacrosse practice. Because that would be just about the worst thing ever. Worse than getting deferred from Brown. Even worse than having Sean break up with me. It would be a mistake I wasn’t sure I could recover from—betraying my best friend.

I would have proved that I was no better than anyone else, no better than an admissions officer who says one thing but means another, or an ex-boyfriend who does what’s convenient for him regardless of how it makes someone else feel, or a father who lets his family leave because he’s thinking of no one but himself.

Luke squeezed my hand. “I was thinking that it might be fun to head down to the cape for a weekend.”

He may not have come right out and said it, but there was no mistaking what Luke meant. He meant that he thought it might be fun if
we
headed down to the cape for a weekend. Together. As a couple. And even though I knew I was supposed to be thinking about
me
versus
him,
and how all of this was going to end the day I put the guide into the time capsule, I wasn’t. All I could think about was
us
.

Well, it wasn’t
all
I could think about. Luke didn’t come out and say it, and there was no sidelong glance that would even make me think he was implying it, but there was something else that immediately popped into my mind: sex. Sex with Luke.

Not because there would be a romantic sunset along a stretch of deserted beach, or some canopied bed in a quaint cottage. Not because it fulfilled some notion of how my first time should be, or because it was exactly like I’d always imagined it would be. But because it was Luke. Because somehow I knew it would feel right, even if sleeping with the guy my best friend wanted was all wrong.

“Are we going to be late?” I asked when we finally pulled into the parking garage just after eight o’clock.

“We’ll be okay,” Luke told me. “But we’re going to have to make a run for it.”

“Do you have an umbrella?”

Luke held out his empty arms and looked at them. “Does it look like I have an umbrella?”

It had been so long since I cared about teaching Luke any lessons, I almost didn’t even realize that this was my chance to give him a tip. “Maybe you should carry one in your car, just for situations like this,” I told him, but my heart wasn’t really in it. In fact, the idea of running through the rain with Luke almost sounded like fun.

“I’ll remember that. But for now, this will have to do.” He handed me his coat and pointed to my head. Even I had to admit—it was way more thoughtful than an umbrella.

“What about you?” I asked, ducking under the jacket.

“A little rain never killed me before. Just run fast.”

He grabbed my hand and the two of us made a sprint for the Fleet Center.

We managed to make it to our seats just before tip-off. And they were great seats.

“How’d you get so lucky?” I asked, still shaking the rain off. It wasn’t the most attractive look, but at least I’d managed to cover my face with the coat so my makeup wouldn’t run. My water-logged shoes were in much worse shape.

“My dad’s company has season tickets,” he explained and I instantly deflated.

Was it really possible that, despite my insistence that the tickets were a good thing, Josie and Lucy were right? Was it possible that two tickets to a Celtics-Bulls game didn’t mean he’d thought long and hard about how we should celebrate my eighteenth birthday, that he’d gone to great lengths to secure tickets to an otherwise sold-out game? It just meant his dad handed him some spare tickets?

“Oh.” I tried not to sound as disappointed as I felt.

“You have no idea what I had to go through to get these tickets,” he went on, not even appearing to notice I’d slumped down into my seat and was pressing the heel of my shoe against the chair in front of me so hard it was trickling water onto the concrete floor. “A guy my dad works with was supposed to have them tonight. I had to promise to walk the guy’s dog when he goes away for a week this summer and mow his lawn the entire month of June.”

“Oh.” I perked right up, leaking shoes and all. “Really?”

Luke smiled at me. “Yeah. Really. So you better know how to work a lawn mower, because I’m not doing it by myself. The guy owns like three acres.”

I smiled back and reached for his hand. “You mow, I’ll supervise.”

“Oh, you’ll do more than that. Ever used a weed whacker?” Luke grinned and squeezed my hand.

“No, but I’m a quick study,” I assured him and squeezed back.

“So, what do you think? Pretty cool, huh?” Luke pointed down at the floor, where a slew of players in green and red jerseys were running down the court. “I was almost afraid you’d wear a Bulls T-shirt or something tonight. I know how you Chicago fans are.”

“What? And get us killed? I know better. My dad took me and TJ to a few Celtics games before we moved.”

“Is he still a Celtics fan or did moving to Chicago change him?”

What an interesting way to pose a seemingly innocuous question. Did moving to Chicago change my dad? Only if you counted that it made him not want to live with us anymore.

I let go of Luke’s hand and stared at the green lines outlining the parquet floor. “I’m not sure my dad’s ever going to move back with us,” I answered.

He reached for my hand again and lightly stroked my skin in circular motions, like he was tracing my name in script or something. “You really think he’d stay there?”

I shrugged. “Who knows.”

“Don’t let it bum you out. Maybe you’ll wake up one morning and there he’ll be, in your kitchen cooking eggs and bacon, or something. Things change, you know. I mean, look at us.” Luke glanced down at our intertwined fingers and for a second I felt a stab of guilt, or maybe it was just my stomach grumbling—I
was
starving. “Freshman year you would never have come to a game with me and you would never have held my hand.”

“Sure I would,” I told him, not all that convinced it was the truth.

Luke frowned, like he knew I was kidding myself. “Owen, sure. Maybe even Matt LeFarge or Curtis. But not me.”

I didn’t bother trying to deny it. He was right. Freshman year I wouldn’t have been with Luke. Would I even have been so willing to make him my project if he was still the quiet, slightly pudgy kid with the braces and cowlick? Could I really be that shallow?

I must have looked worried, because Luke reached over and put his hand under my chin, forcing me to face him. “I’m glad you’re here with me now.”

“Me, too,” I told him, feeling only slightly less guilty.

“Are you hungry?” Luke asked.

“Famished,” I told him, and placed an order for one hot dog.

With Luke gone to get the food, I actually started paying attention to what was happening on the court, and by the time he got back I was so into the game, I didn’t even notice him standing there holding a cardboard carton with our dinner inside. But I did notice something. The Jumbotron suspended from the center of the ceiling, a huge video screen that showed instant replays, the score, and even a few announcements.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY
,
SCOTT
flashed one message.
WELCOME NEWTON CLASS OF
’86 read another. I figured it was only a matter of time until I noticed a message especially for me, some grand gesture orchestrated by Luke.

“Are you in the market for a new investment advisor?” Luke asked, pointing to the Fidelity ad lit up next to the instant replay screen.

I took my eyes off the Jumbotron just long enough for Luke to pass me our dinner.

“No, just checking it out,” I explained.

“Must be really interesting, you seemed pretty captivated by it.”

“No, not really,” I mumbled, and then sheepishly added, “I thought maybe you would have had them put up a birthday message on the sign, or something.”

“Up there?” Luke pointed to the huge screen where an instant replay of a three-point shot was playing.

“Yeah.” Now I felt ridiculous.

“Do you have any idea how much these seats cost?” He held up his dinner. “And this hot dog? This Coke?”

I looked down at the cardboard carton in my lap. “No.”

“Obviously.” Luke shook his head at me and reached for his hot dog.

“I’m sorry. I love my hot dog. See.” I took a bite and rubbed my stomach with my free hand. “Mm, delicious.”

“It better be.” He still didn’t look at me. “Eat up, you need all the energy you can get. I don’t know if I have enough money left over to get the car out of the parking garage, so we may be walking home.”

“I can use the exercise,” I joked, but Luke didn’t laugh.

We sat there in silence while everyone around us yelled and cheered and clapped. I attempted to eat the barely warm hot dog that probably cost Luke eight dollars, but I didn’t feel all that hungry anymore. I just felt ungrateful. I felt like a total bitch, which, a few months ago would have made me happy, but now only made me feel lower than low.