The Beautiful Truth

// 1

It was one of those perfect, late-summer-on-the-brink-of-of-fall, middle-America evenings, and I wondered, as I walked up the Parrish's driveway, if old Mrs. Harris next door hadn't called the cops already to complain about the volume of Pete Townshend's guitar. Baba O'Riley was blaring from his dad's stereo.

"Dork," I muttered, just as Talyn looked up to see me lean against the garage door frame. It was probably inaudible, considering Pete, but he got the gist.

He gave me a tilted smile, and reached across the box he'd been taping up to turn down the Who. "Loser," he shot back and rifled the nearest football at me with an accuracy that could have been mistaken for inhuman had he not been the nation's number one high school quarterback.

I easily made the catch, and rolled my eyes, lobbing the ball onto a pile of identical sporting goods against the wall. "What are you doing with more boxes? You've been there for two months already."

"I forgot some stuff," he shrugged, picking up what I expected was an impossibly heavy box and walked it around to the open trunk of his mom's SUV, parked in the driveway.

Maybe it seemed so because I hadn't seen him since he left for Southern California eight weeks ago, but Talyn moved like a god—he seemed to glide, rather than walk. He exhaled loudly as he slammed the trunk closed, then stood back to take a look at me. I rolled my eyes.

"Lookin' good, Sawyer!" he exclaimed, gliding toward me with open arms and a blinding grin.

In typical fashion, I rolled my eyes again, but smiled in spite of myself and wrapped my skinny arms around him, letting his body engulf mine in a suffocating embrace.

I'd lived in the house across the street from Talyn Parrish my whole life. He and his family moved into their house when we were both eight years old. His dad came to town to coach the high school's football team, and things got off to a rough start for the Parrishes. The high school had just won the state championship the season before, but their coach and more than half the team had since departed for one of those Oklahoma colleges, and Terry Parrish had some big shoes to fill.

We were on the bus to school the Monday after the first loss of the season, and some older kids were razzing poor Talyn, who used to be skinny and awkward, and he looked like he was about to cry. It took all the courage I had to speak up. Before he'd gotten to town, I had been the target of their teasing. I was skinny, and smart, and where everyone else in town had a dad obsessed with football, mine was obsessed with writing a book that would be as critically acclaimed as the first one he'd had published. Add to that the fact that my mom had apparently gotten so tired of his resulting erratic, insomniatic behavior that she'd just up and left us both less than a year earlier, and my dad and I were the talk of the town—crazy Kerry Fitzgerald and his motherless daughter with a boy's name.

Anyway, knowing more than an eight year-old probably should, I boldly told Jimmy Roller he had no room to judge anybody because everybody knew his dad spent more time at the local strip club than at home most nights, and I informed Sam Pryor that I'd rather have no mom than one that was a raging booze hound like his. Then I invited Talyn Parrish to sit next to me, and we had pretty much stuck together ever since.

Eventually, though, Talyn grew out of his awkwardness, as I always knew he would. He had the perfect genetics for football, and by the time he was thirteen, everybody in town knew he was going to be a star. His dad worked and worked, and finally, six years after moving here, had a team in the playoffs. The speculation about how long the Parrishes would be around had stopped, and hero worship took its place.

There was no denying it, either, that Talyn Parrish had grown into a good-looking man. I often laughed, thinking of the long line of movie-star-ish quarterbacks at USC that had preceded him, and couldn't wait to see what he'd look like on television. I, on the other hand, was still a skinny, nerdy girl, who had a body most girls were jealous of, but boys never seemed to notice. And no one understood why Talyn Parrish, school superstar and hometown hero, still hung around with that girl from across the street.