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stuttering so hard.
    “Maybe it’s just nerves,” Natalie suggested, wiping her fingers with a napkin.
    “You think? Maybe he’s just crazy…most of them are…”
    “That’s a nice thing to say…”
    “Well, it’s the truth,” he said, shrugging his broad shoulders. “That’s why I couldn’t be a teacher…”
    “And, what might you want to be?” she asked, pressing.
    Brandon Greene shrugged his shoulders, as if he hadn’t given it much thought. “That’s a good question…”
    “And what’s your major again?”
    “Business Administration, the last time that I checked…”
    “Was that a personal choice?”
    He shook his head. “Of course not…I wanted to be an astronaut, but both my parents warded it off as a pipe dream…so…in order to run my father’s company one day, I need the business experience…”
    “And? What does your father do?”
    “My, my, don’t you ask a lot of questions?” he asked, looking surprised, his blue eyes bigger than she’d ever seen them.
    She wouldn’t admit to him that she was curious about him, that she’d always been that way, but something had held her back from asking too many questions. There was almost a part of her that felt intimidated whenever he was around her.
    “My father is a contractor and owns his own business,” Brandon said with a sigh. “All the way up in Saratoga. He’s been building houses for years…I always used to want to help him when I was younger. I guess he always thought that I’d be the one to take over the company when he retired.”
    “How noble of you,” she said with a smile.
    “Yea, well,” he sighed. “I suppose someone’s got to do it.”
    Natalie took a sip of her juice and said, “An astronaut, huh?”
    Brandon chuckled. “Yea, it sounds cheesy, but we visited the Kennedy Space Center one year and I was hooked…for an entire year, my wall was covered with stars, and planets were hanging from my ceiling and I begged my mom for this flimsy rocket ship that I saw in a toy store, that you could actually climb in. Yea, I would take naps in there, dressed in my astronaut suit.”
    “So, you really were a loser,” Natalie concluded, nodding her head and looking at him teasingly.
    She watched his cheeks flush crimson.
    “Oh, really?” he began. “You’ve never wanted to be anything so bad that you’d take it that far?”
    Sure she had. She remembered when Mama bought her an actual stethoscope for her seventh birthday and she’d go around the brick bungalow, placing the cool metal on her mother’s heart, listening to her heartbeat on cool, rainy autumn afternoons, when she wasn’t working. She would sneak up on her grandmother as she slept, would play doctor while Sidney played nurse, and three-year-old Maya played the patient. Natalie would examine her little sister, the way the doctor did to her, while Sidney tried to steal it away from her, making her cry when she was successful. Yes, for as long as she could remember, being a doctor was all she’d dreamed about, was all she’d ever wanted. Being a doctor meant that she could be a hero like Wonder Woman. She could make enough money so that her family didn’t have to work, didn’t have to worry about struggling.
    “I’ve wanted to be a doctor,” she admitted to him quietly, playing with the napkin, twisting it between her fingers. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
    He seemed pleased with the answer, nodded slightly, and said, “I can tell…”
    “You can?”
    He nodded again. “I can tell that you’re smart and that you’re giving…you’d make a perfect doctor…”
    “I could be evil…a complete you-know-what…”
    He shook his head this time. “No, trust me, everything that I need to know about you is in your eyes…”
    Who was this boy, really? Thinking that he could see things in her eyes? What lines he was feeding her! He must think that she’s stupid. Yes, that’s it, stupid and crazy…

    But, she was walking beside him