Read Almost Like Being in Love for Free Online

first—pleeeeease? Fine! Talk to him first! I hate it when you whine. What do we say to him? Should we tell him we’ve seen the movie twenty-three times? o! He’ll think we’re stalking him. What if he has us thrown out for assault? Would you settle down!

    After about nineteen seconds, Travis put his hand over my mouth and said, “Stop talking. I’ll handle this.” Then he got up, grabbed my arm, and dragged me behind him—even though I’d suddenly lost the use of both my legs. Me the quarterback. Me the shortstop. Shaking like a fucking leaf just because I was about to meet the most important human being in the universe.

    “Bobby?” said Travis. Di Cicco looked up from his New York sirloin with question marks in his eyeballs and replied, “Hey, man.” Holy shit. He even sounded like Bobby Di Cicco!

    “Sorry to bother you—” Travis began. But by then Bobby had noticed me swaying and probably figured I was going to have a heart attack on his chives if he didn’t do something fast—so the next thing we knew he was up on his feet shaking our hands and thanking us for stopping by.
    'This isn’t happening.( Then Travis started asking him questions about movies and directors and other people I never heard of before, and pretty soon you’d have thought they were army buddies who were catching up on old times. '“Where do you get the balls?” I asked him later. “That was nothing,” he said, shrugging it off. “Now, Lauren Bacall—she was a tough room to play.”( We wrapped it up by doing our Tony Smerko imitations for him—and he even pretended we weren’t assholes.
    Oh, yeah. I squeaked three times. Travis didn’t squeak at all.

    Once he’d autographed two packs of sugar for us with his actual hands, we paid the bill (who could eat?), then tumbled out of there like a couple of 4-year-olds with a new yo-yo and spent the next twenty-five minutes standing on the corner of 51st and Broadway, rehashing it from start to finish so we’d never forget a single word as long as we lived. And suddenly I was so fucking grateful for Brigadoon, I could have hugged the world. It was almost like being in love.

    Neither one of us remembers much about the cab ride back to Grand Central. Times Square was all lit up, summer was around the corner, and we were just beginning the rest of our lives. But we didn’t care about any of it. We’d met Bobby Di Cicco. Eating steak. With mortals.

    What do you do when you’ve peaked at 18?

    Travis Puckett
    Room 214
    BECKLEY SCHOOL
    TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

    THE PUCKETT/DUBOISE DEBATES

    TRAVIS: It was only dinner!

    GORDO: It was a date. Trust me in this arena. Whose idea was it?

    TRAVIS: His. We were down at the batting cage working on my stance again when—

    GORDO:Were his hands on your ass?

    TRAVIS: Well, yeah, but—

    GORDO: It was a date. Travis, I hate being the one to break this to you, but you’ve only got about twenty-four hours of sanity left. Use them well.

    TRAVIS: What was that supposed to mean?

    Craig McKenna
    Room 311
    BECKLEY SCHOOL
    TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

    I kissed him. I fucking kissed him. First our noses touched and then I kissed him.

    I shouldn’t have smoked the joint. I knew that was a mistake! But what else can you do when you’re playing catch by a lake and it starts to pour? If there hadn’t been one of those metal arch things with the benches underneath, it never would have happened—we’d have jogged back to school, wet and unkissed. This was a conspiracy!

    Say no to drugs. They’ll only ruin you. And I’m the proof: one toke and his eyes got bluer, two tokes and I’d have killed for his smile, three tokes and I couldn’t remember a time we didn’t know each other, four tokes and I would have woken up Brigadoon for him. My life is over.

    Okay. Slow down. There’s probably a good explanation for this.

    1. It was an accident.
    How? You tripped over a rock and your mouth fell on his?

    2. It’s only a phase.
    Yeah. Like taking