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“I think more signs should do it. Get you really excited about merging ahead! Or exiting right!”
I laughed. The sign pointed to the left, down a paved, dusty road that ran between the bus station and the gas station, away from the highway. “Let’s check it out. I can’t say I’ve ever been to a prospecting museum before.”
“It’ll be a first for me, too.”
We started walking down the road together. There was a sidewalk near the bus station, but it ended when we passed it, and then it was just the road with its yellow line, faded in places. There was nobody else out that I could see, and after having spent the last three days surrounded by more people than I’d ever seen in my life, it was giving me a bit of whiplash.
I glanced over at Russell. There was so much I suddenly wanted to say—so much I wanted to ask—that I wasn’t sure where to start. He looked back at me, one eyebrow quirking up, and I wondered if he’d just had the same thought. “So.”
“So,” he echoed, smiling at me.
I cast around for what to say next. I wanted to just get to the point where we’d gotten all of the small talk out of the way, and we’d talk about…
I realized, startled, that I actually didn’t know how this worked. In all my movies, you never actually heard the getting-to-know-you conversations. They were usually covered in a montage, with some pop song playing over it, and by the end of the montage, everyone was firmly in love.
We were kicking up dust with every step, and I looked down at Russell’s white Chucks. “I’m worried about your sneakers.”
“My sneakers?”
“I mean, aren’t they going to get dirty?” They were gleaming white at the moment, including the laces. How had he managed to keep them so clean during the festival? It felt like everything I owned was covered in a fine layer of dust.
“I don’t mind. I’ll get to take home a souvenir of historic Jesse, Nevada.”
“Still.” I shook my head. “Maybe it wasn’t the day to wear Converse.”
Russell looked over at me with a grin. “Fun fact! Okay, so—”
“Wait—did you just say fun fact?”
He blushed, which I was actually kind of glad to see. It meant that I wasn’t the only one getting embarrassed and turning red around here. And somehow, it made him seem more approachable—not just a guy with perfect teeth and shoes who had everything together. Someone who’d just said fun fact and whose ears were currently bright red.
“Um. Maybe? Never mind.”
“No, it’s good. It’s cute.” A second later, I wondered if I should have said that. It was like I’d just said the quiet part out loud, admitted why we were both out here wandering around together on the pretense of trying to find a charger. Or at least that was why I was out wandering around with him. But I was hoping that he liked me, too. He did, right? Otherwise, why all the eye contact and door holding?
And more than that—it was just a vibe I was getting. A sense from him that he was as aware as I was about the space between us, and when it widened or narrowed. How I was suddenly so much more tuned in to my hands and how near they were to his and how I could have reached out to him without even extending my arm all the way. I didn’t think my stomach would be regularly swooping and dipping—as though I were on a roller coaster only I could see—if he wasn’t feeling some of this too.
He shook his head. “My friends are always making fun of me for them.”
I couldn’t quite suppress a giggle. “For your fun facts?”
“Yes! Just like that. That’s just what they do. In fact, Tall Ben—”
“Sorry, Tall Ben? That seems to imply the existence of Short Ben. Or at least Medium Ben.”
Russell laughed, then took a breath, like this was going to be a story. “Okay, so there are two Bens. We’ve all been friends since fifth grade. And when we were younger, Tall Ben was really tall.”
“I mean, I should hope so. Otherwise it’s false advertising.”
“Well, keep that in mind. It becomes relevant later. So there we were. Russell and the Bens—”
“Excellent band name—”
“But then in eighth grade, Regular Ben started to grow really tall. And now he’s the tallest of all of us. He’s like six inches taller than Tall Ben. But at that point, you can’t just go around changing people’s names. Tall Ben was just Tall Ben.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, we decided to look at it like Starbucks. Where tall is actually the shorter drink.”
