Love Edy by Shewanda Pugh Page A

of selfishness.  
    But
then it changed, warping from the inside out till the
nasty workings of its interior revealed their true
selves.
    Rain began to fall. It
pelted in freezing needles, demanding his attention. What was
happening to him? What was happening to them?
    The answers he sought were
right there, beneath his nose, if only he could focus.
    He didn’t want Edy with
Wyatt Green. It ate at every good thing in him, till only the
nastiness remained.  
    He wanted to call her
name, if only to know that she’d still answer, that she still felt
the connection that always drew them near. 
    He wanted to tell her
about how little he trusted Wyatt and how it blistered to be
replaced. Those feelings had him standing beneath her window in the
rain at night. He imagined himself gaining courage, scaling the
tree and telling her the truth, whatever that meant.
    No. 
    Don’t even
think.
    Sports kept him
disciplined and discipline was a gift.
    He redirected and
considered the options.
    He didn’t want Edy with
Wyatt. There were ways to address that. As for everything else . .
. he wondered how much things had truly changed.
    They still saw each other
every day at school and for dinner most nights. They still
whispered across the dinner table and had covert conversations with
their eyes at school, around their parents, everywhere. And she
still visited him on the sidelines after every game, albeit with
the pale one in tow. Each time Hassan saw him, he had an
irrepressible urge to bury him under the earth, take Edy by the
hand, and . . .
    He envied Wyatt. Not for
the time he spent with her, but for the unhindered way he looked at
her. As if loving her were the most natural thing in the
world.
    Hassan’s head began to
throb.
    Girls called him. All the
time. Girls who liked the idea of a guy who could strong-arm
on the field, who could take an everything or nothing moment and
come out victorious every single time. He thought of the
redhead whose name he couldn’t recall. He thought of other
girls, too.
    The week after her, some strange girl had
sauntered up to his locker and planted her mouth on his, right in
front of the guys. At a party the following weekend, an older girl
with beer-laced breath had pinned him to a wall and asked why he
hadn’t taken advantage of her yet. He’d stared, at a loss for
comebacks that usually came easy. At another party, one where he’d
rushed too many beers, the blonde cheerleader Sandra Jacobs had
offered to dance with him, only to grind so rough and rugged his
hard-on sprung like a jack-in-the-box. A whisper in his ear said
she wanted to go upstairs and liberate him. She had been easier to
get rid of. Another week and another party brought a girl named
Adelita, also keen on freeing the rod. The easies came faster than
he could count, faces a blur, with temptation lasting the length of
a lit match before revulsion settled deep.
    He would make himself enjoy them. Girls who
wanted to kiss and touch and make him their first, all because of
what he did on the field.
    He tried to imagine wanting to talk, to open
up, to share the strangeness of this new life with one of them. He
tried to imagine his moments of weakness before games: the
vomiting, the trembling, the uncertainty. He couldn’t do it.
    Hassan pictured a girl among them that could
switch from English to Hindi and Hindi to Punjabi on a whim. They
would leap from the technicalities of football to the jumbled
thoughts that waded in his head: on politics, religion, philosophy,
or what it meant to be American and the child of immigrants. He
tried to imagine a girl not laughing when he pondered the
likelihood of reincarnation and figured out how to link even that
to football. Then he tried to imagine her not being Edy.
    It wasn’t the first time
he’d had the thought, only the first time it weighed so heavy, and
shoved so insistent. Still, he rejected it, buried it, and managed
a laughed for being absurd.
    Girls called him all