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“Or you could call the other one Benti.”
Russell burst out laughing, like I’d surprised him. “Oh man,” he said, shaking his head, still smiling as he slung his bag around and unzipped it, took out his phone, and unlocked the screen. “That’s great. I’ll have to tell them—”
“Your phone is still charged?” I asked, surprised.
He looked at it and shook his head, then dropped it back into his bag. “Just died.”
“Sorry about that.”
“You should be. The pun was so good it made me use the last of the battery in an attempt to share it.”
“Well, I’m glad you liked it. Just like the Bens and your facts, my best friends always complain whenever I pun too much.”
“These are the twins?”
“Yeah, Katy and Didi. Because…” I hesitated.
“What?”
“Well—I kind of make a lot of them,” I confessed as I played with my Silverspun bracelets, hoping this wasn’t a deal-breaker. “Didi is always saying how a pun is a joke nobody enjoys. Katy kind of gives me a little grimace whenever I make one, like she’s acknowledging something happened, but nothing good. And my ex, Alex, said every time I made one, I was somehow causing him to get less funny.” Russell laughed. “But I can’t help it! It’s how I was raised.”
“How you were raised?”
“Well, my dad’s in advertising. So it was just the coin of the realm in our house. Puns, wordplay… you need to be good at them to come up with taglines and product names, so it just became second nature. It wasn’t until much later that I realized most people not only don’t find them funny, but actively dislike them.”
“Fools. Ingrates.”
I grinned. “Thank you.” The fear I’d had—that we wouldn’t have something to talk about—was gone. Why had I been worried? This was fun. It was easy, like I’d always known it would be when it was right. We walked a few steps in comfortable silence before I realized something and turned to him. “Wait, what was the fun fact?”
“It’s really okay.”
“No, I want to know! You can’t just dangle a fun fact and then not deliver on it. Fact, please.”
“See, now there’s been all this buildup. It can’t possibly deliver.”
“Um, I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
He looked at me with a half smile, and I smiled back, just reveling in how… right this felt? Like we were throwing a ball back and forth without having to talk about what sport we wanted to play or what the rules were. Just like we both automatically knew. “It’s that Chuck Taylor was an actual person. Converse were essentially invented by him. He was a shoe salesman and part-time basketball player.”
“Whoa.” I thought about my own Chucks—cute, but with practically no support, and not a shoe I ever would have exercised in. “People used to play basketball in those?”
“Converse used to be the official shoe of the NBA! They were huge in the sixties and seventies. In fact, they were basketball shoes before they were… I don’t know…”
“Walk-around shoes?”
“Exactly.”
I slowed, then stopped as I looked around. “I think this might be it.”
“I think you’re right.”
We were at the beginning of a street, what another brown sign—the same style as the one near the bus station—proclaimed as HISTORIC DOWNTOWN JESSE! EST. 1865. On either side, there were low one- and two-story buildings lining the street. They were made of dark red bricks or wood, and seeing this long street—with the mountains rising up behind them—made me feel like I was suddenly living inside one of the many, many Westerns my dad had made me watch over the years.
We started walking down the street—and I could see that most of the buildings had the raised or curved sections above them that screamed stereotypical Western town, like we’d just wandered onto a movie set. But it didn’t look like any of the buildings were general stores or saloons any longer. Some were boarded up, but most seemed to have current businesses in them—A Touch of Class beauty salon, Jesse Chamber of Commerce, This & That Resale Emporium. But exactly none of these currently looked open. We passed the Prospecting Museum, which was next to the Stagecoach Souvenir Store—both closed. I realized it was getting later on a Sunday, and it maybe didn’t seem like Jesse was the most happening town to begin with, but still.
We were walking down the center of the street—while there were a few cars parked in front of meters, there was nobody driving, so it felt like this was safe. I found I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d wandered back into another time. The iconography of all the buildings and the mountains rising up all around us were familiar in a way I hadn’t been expecting. It could have come straight out of Unforgiven—except with lines on either side of the road for cars to park, and fire hydrants, and no Clint Eastwood looking for revenge.
“So when they said historic,” Russell said, “it seems they meant it.”
