Page 6 of The Difference Between

He grins a tiny-toothed grin then leans to the boy sitting with Amanda. “Clint.” Clint eyes him. “Miss Reese is my girlfriend.”

Amanda’s face looks as though she’s just found a box full of kittens who shit glitter.

“Aww!” Her hands fly to her mouth. “That is the cutest thing ever. Miss Reese is my best friend you know.” She winks at Davy. “We should double date.”

Wow.

“Okay everyone.” I pin Davy Crockett with a look to reel him back in. “We have reading dates every Thursday for the rest of the year unless you want us to break up. What do you want us to read about?”

He shrugs. “Glass?”

Everyone else in the room is lost in books with bright illustrated covers, and somehow, I’ve become the make-believe girlfriend to a kid who can’t read but is happy to learn about the market value of a material that’s been made for thousands of years.

I won’t argue.

“Works for me.”

Miss Green sings a too-cheery tune that involves clapping and ends with “Eyes on me,” making little faces turn to her as she explains their exit strategy.

Davy Crockett obediently stands. “My birthday’s next week,” he tells me. “I’ll be eight.” In my silence, he adds, “Old enough to be your boyfriend.”

I laugh. He’s persistent, I’ll give him that.

The next week, I bring him a piece of sea glass from my mom’s antique store for his birthday and a comprehensive book on glass and its applications for us to read together. The week after that, his parents have drilled a hole in the glass and it’s hanging from a leather strap around his neck.

I teach him to read the words sand, glass, and fire; he gives me a picture of stick figures holding hands in front of a volcano with our names written in large letters on the top and the caption I lava you.

“My dad helped me write it,” he says, shy.

Amanda swears it’s the cutest thing she’s ever seen, and my mom hangs it on the fridge like it’s a prized possession meant to be displayed. My asshole sisters frame the damn thing and hang it on the wall next to my parents’ wedding picture one night while I’m at work.

By the time the semester is over, I know more about glass than most people on the planet, and the boy—Davy Crockett as I call him right until our last day together—knows how to read.

He asks me to marry him with a Ring Pop.

“I can’t today,” I tell him.

“When I’m old enough and you’re rich?” he asks, his little voice filled with infinite hope.

“By then,” I say, “I’ll already be married to someone else.”

He considers this. “But if you aren’t?”

Despite the absurdity of the situation, I laugh. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

He grins like this means something. I don’t have the heart to tell him it doesn’t.

One

Twenty-Three Years Later

Life would be so much easier if everyone listened to me.

Especially my sisters.

Especially amid any kind of stressful situation.

Especially when they are the ones at the hospital with our mother who is having brain surgery and I’m over seven hundred miles away, on the brink of walking into the biggest meeting of my career.