Page 20 of Given Our History

“Why history, though?” he asked. “No offense, you just seem too…” He drew back from the eyepiece, frowning. “Interesting, I guess, to care about a bunch of boring names and dates.”

“But history’s so much more than names and dates,” I said. “It’s about people.”

“The one thing I don’t understand,” he muttered before returning to the eyepiece.

“You might understand them better if you read about them more. Humans haven’t changed all that much.” I meant to pause, to wait and see whether I’d piqued his interest, but excited words were already bubbling to the surface. “There’s graffiti in Pompeii that just says ‘Aufidius was here.’ And there’s this kid’s homework from Russia like eight hundred years ago that’s full of doodles of his teacher and stuff, the same way people doodle in their notebooks today.” I hesitated, then added, “I can lend you some books, if you want.”

His expression was doubtful. “You brought them with you to camp?”

“No. I mean, not all of them. Right now I’m reading this super old book by this Roman guy called Tacitus, all about emperors and politics and stuff.” Not that he had asked about any of that. My cheeks warmed; I was thankful he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. “But I could maybe mail you some of them.” I had no idea how much it cost to mail books. The only thing I’d ever mailed was a letter to the president when I was nine, asking for his signature on a petition I’d written to get more books for my local library. “You could read them and then we could talk about them over the phone. It would be sort of like our own book club. Except I’d have to read them first before sending them to you. Or you’d have to convince your mom to let you buy your own copy.”

“That sounds sort of fun, I guess.” He grinned. “The Long-Distance History Club: transcending time and space.”

I beamed right back at him. “I’ve got a copy of Lectures on the Philosophy of History in my backpack. I’ll loan it to you later.”

“I’m looking forward to it already.” Teddy’s soft gaze lingered on me for a few seconds before he returned to the telescope. He scrunched up his face as he peered through the viewfinder and inched the telescope to the left. His glasses were hooked in the collar of his T-shirt.

I picked at a blade of grass. “My mom offered to let me switch to public school,” I confessed. “A couple months ago. I think she overheard us talking.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to go to public school, so it doesn’t really make a difference.”

He pulled back from the telescope again, this time looking at me with an unreadable expression. “Why not?”

“Well, the girls are probably kinda mean, for one,” I said, thinking of the girls at Izzy’s birthday party. “Plus, if I went to public school, then I wouldn’t get to come here and see you. Or any of my other friends.” He didn’t say anything, but his thick eyebrows pinched together. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, too quickly. He pretended to busy himself with the telescope, though I had a feeling he’d lost track of what he was looking for. “It’s just—” He straightened up. “It feels weird that you have other friends and I don’t.”

“Just Izzy,” I said. “And anyway, you have Darvish.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, “I guess that’s true.”

But he didn’t seem entirely reassured, so I racked my brain for something else to say, and for some reason, one of my dad’s proverbs popped into my head. It felt apt, in a way. “My dad always says ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’” As soon as the words slipped out, I realized how odd they were. Was I the bird? I hadn’t meant to imply that he shouldn’t have other friends, no matter how much the thought inspired an odd sort of jealousy in me.

Teddy nodded sagely. “Abraham Lincoln.”

I choked on a laugh. “What?”

“It’s just this joke I found on the internet,” he said sheepishly. Even by the milky light of the moon, I could swear the tips of his ears were turning red, and he hunched his shoulders as he resumed his search of the night sky. “People always attribute quotes to the wrong people. So every time someone quotes something, I pretend Abraham Lincoln said it.”

I grinned, but the urge to correct him was strong. “It’s not a quote, it’s a proverb.”

“Proverbs can be attributed to the wrong people, too.”

“Proverbs can’t be attributed to anyone. That’s why they’re proverbs. They’ve been around so long that no one remembers who said them.”

“Found it,” he announced. I shot him a quizzical look. “Mercury. Do you want to see?”

I marked Mercury on the worksheet and pulled my headphones from my neck, setting my CD player aside. I pushed myself off the grass and brushed the butt of my jeans with my hands. Teddy’s eyes tracked the movement for a split second before he tore them away, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He stepped aside so that I could peer into the eyepiece. It was all black, but then I blinked and shifted and it wasn’t: just slightly off-center in the vast nothingness was a pale white sliver, like a pinkie nail.

“It’s so blurry,” I said.

“You can adjust it—”

I knew full well that you could adjust the settings on a telescope, and I was about to tell him as much, but then he was standing right behind me, and my brain screeched to a halt. He guided my hand toward the knob. His face wasn’t far from my ear, and he was breathing through his nose—unsteady, wavering breaths, like he was trying to force himself to breathe normal, and suddenly I was aware that I wasn’t breathing at all. This wasn’t the first time we’d stood this close—we’d been tied together during the three-legged race, and that was only our second time meeting. We knew each other much better now, so this should have been less weird, but somehow, it wasn’t. “I see it,” I said, heart pounding in my throat, but he was already drawing back. I pulled my face from the telescope to find him sinking into the grass where I had been sitting.

“What are you doing?” I asked warily.