Love Edy by Shewanda Pugh

smile broad when he clapped
Wyatt on the shoulder.
    “Now that’s more like it,” he said. “Start
inviting us. Or find something better to do.”
    That afternoon Edy texted him in study hall,
asking what happened at lunch. It was then that Wyatt saw the black
guy who’d blocked his exit from class before the Dyson twin run in.
This time, he could recall the boy’s name. Kyle Lawson. One of
Hassan’s boys.
    How had he forgotten?
    Wyatt turned back to his phone, all the
while considering. He thought of Edy’s eyes, sweet, brown,
enchanting. He thought of her mouth, full, lush, and tempting. He
thought of her touch and wanted it, in his hand, on his skin. He
thought of Kyle, looked over, and thought again.
    Wyatt deleted the text message, concentrated
on facing front, and avoided Edy’s questioning stare.
    ~~~
    Days passed. Edy with
Wyatt, Edy with Wyatt, EdywithWyatt. Hassan knew because
people were so eager to tell him.
    But why did it bother him
so?
    Hassan ventured over to
his bedroom drawer and pulled out a weathered, well creased world
map. Blue markings delineated every place he and Edy had been by
land, sea, or air in every time zone on earth. Copenhagen. Cape
Town. Cairo. Kolkata. Bangkok. His parents’ hometowns of Delhi and
Chandigarh. Back when their fathers fled the city limits at the
slightest promise of research, Hassan and Edy hadn’t been far
behind, wide-eyed, pitiful, and determined to go. They’d get lost
in cities others saved pennies to go to. As a boy, Hassan swore
that he and Edy would turn his battered map blue, visiting every
place that man inhabited and maybe one or two places that man
didn’t.
    He hadn’t counted on
growing up.
    Hassan folded the map away
without looking at it and ventured to the window. Edy’s
window faced back, eclipsed in darkness, swallowed in the
still of the night.  
    He wasn’t
jealous.
    He absolutely wasn’t
jealous.
    Hassan shut his eyes and
pressed the flat of his forehead hard against iced and unforgiving
glass. Redirect. Redirect to a big play, to the adoration of all
those girls, to tossing the pigskin with Nathan. Edy. Edy and
Wyatt. Edy.
    Damnit.
    Hassan lifted his head.
He imagined Edy calling her new friend on a night she couldn’t
sleep, a night like this one. She wouldn’t know that Hassan stood
there, watching, willing to come if only she’d call.
    He imagined Edy wanting
Wyatt for company after some fitful sleep, welcoming him as
if he were
Hassan. And Wyatt, Wyatt skulking across the yard and up their tree
before yanking open her bedroom window. And Hassan knew what he
would do, what he would do when the doors were shut and the windows
were shut, and only the two of them were alone.
    The corners of his mouth
snatched down and hands clenched into merciless fists.
    Wyatt would slip into her
bedroom and lace his fingers with hers. He’d draw her in
close, hand at the little dip above her backside. But would she
tilt for him and welcome him? Would she want him? Because that was
the question, wasn’t it?
    Hassan turned from the
window with a groan.
    Wyatt would kiss, touch
her, and would slip underneath Hassan’s window to do it.
    Never.
    Hassan pulled on jeans
over pajama pants, slipped into a hooded sweatshirt and crept
downstairs, careful to avoid the creaking third stair. Once out, he
ventured to the edge of the yard and became the silhouette facing
Edy’s house. 
    What did he hope to
see? Or learn?
    He squinted at her window.
Frost slicked the tree he’d need to climb to get in, though it was
a feat he’d accomplished before. Carefulness and a steady hand
would bring him to her.  
    But then
what? 
    Once, invitations had been
unnecessary, and he could have yanked her window open at any hour
of any day and she’d have been there for him, for whatever he
needed. 
    Wyatt had changed
that.  
    Except he hadn’t. And he
had. 
    Hassan’s wanting to
protect Edy had begun like all things good: pure and
unsullied with the mark