Boot(s)

5- Boots

Bobby O'Callahan

I knew I was overreacting, but at that point in my life all I cared about was basketball and him. So when Jessie kissed me in front of him like we had planned, and his face lit up like he'd been waiting for us to get together for years, I couldn't help but cry myself to sleep.

For some reason Jessie and I had this idea that if he saw me with someone else, he'd step in and admit all the feelings I so desperately wanted him to have. All the feelings I so desperately wanted him to reciprocate. We were kids, and I was stupid. Of course he didn't like me like that. He had a different girlfriend every week!

And even if he did, it would have had to be between us. And Jess. Pop was conservative, Atlanta was no better, and Georgia was worse. I know Boots, and he wouldn't have been able to do it. Hell, even I didn't know if I would have been able to do it. I nearly collapsed on the spot when Jessie first accused me of having a-little-more-than-friends feelings about him.

We were sitting on my bed after school, Jessie flipping through the pages of Seventeen and me studying the pages of my playbook. I had been getting wrapped up in inappropriate thoughts and images of things that were certainly not written up by coach.

I looked up at Jess suddenly consumed with one thought. "Did Boots say he was gonna come to the game tomorrow?" She had seen him last, on one of their weekly running dates.

The question was stupid, of course. Boots always came. But my head was filled with hearts and Petey's name was on a loop in my brain so I was saying absentmindedly idiotic things.

She didn't bother looking up at me. I watched as she dog-eared a page of Seventeen where Mischa Barton was promoting some makeup brand. 

"Yeah. 'Course he is."

Satisfied, I turned my eyes back to coach's drawings. I could focus now.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Jessie's head rising slowly. And then I could feel her eyes boring carpenter bee sized holes into the side of my head.

I glanced over at her, raising my eyebrows. "Yes?"

Her voice was even and unperturbed when she announced that I was in love with Boots.

"Are you crazy, woman?" was the first thing out of my mouth. "I'm, what, I'm—me? What the heck, Jess?"

She was having none of it. She just shook her head. "Bo, I'm not stupid. I'm quite smart. I'm actually mad at myself for not realizing it sooner."

I tried to sputter out more accusations of her psychosis, but all she did was laugh at me, cross her arms, and ask me once again why I hadn't told her sooner.

Since that day, Jessie had been trying to help me figure out some way to tell him, or show him, or figure out if he felt the same. ("He'd be crazy not to, Bo," Jess always said.) We came up with the least damning way to gauge his thoughts—the kiss—and Jessie told me she'd figure out the perfect time to it, and that I shouldn't worry. Turns out the perfect time for her to do it was after the best basketball game of my life.

That night, between my tears, Jessie's back rubs, and a pint of Larry's Homechurned, I lay awake trying to figure out a way to move through this—my feelings for him—and not let it affect the friendship I had grown to cherish more than anything.

But as fate would have it, I didn't have to work through much.

Two days later was the first time I saw Boots since the game.