We met afterward at our old high school football field.
The gates were still open, so we went inside and sat beneath the bleachers, where we had spent plenty of evenings talking about everything and nothing.
Russell leaned back against the metal support and sighed.
“We are terrible at this.”
“At what?”
“Dating.”
I laughed. “Speak for yourself.”
He looked at me pointedly. “You’re sitting under football bleachers with me after another awful date.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“It proves your judgment isn’t much better than mine.”
I nudged his shoulder, and he laughed. Then his expression slowly changed.
“What if we never get it right?” he asked.
I thought he was still joking. “We’ll survive.”
“What if we’re both single forever?”
Before I could answer, Russell held out his pinky.
“If we’re both still single at 60, we stop being idiots and find each other.”
I stared at him.
“Sixty?”
“Seems like enough time to admit everyone else might have been right.”
“We’ll be ancient.”
“You’ll still be bossy.”
“And you’ll probably be bald.”
“I’ll buy a hat.”
I laughed, but Russell wasn’t laughing anymore.
For just a moment, he looked at me in a way that made my heart beat harder.
“If we make it to 60 and neither of us has found the right person,” he said more softly, “maybe it means we already did.”
I should have said something then.
I should have told him we didn’t need another 41 years to find out.
Instead, I wrapped my pinky around his.
“Deal.”
Two months later, Russell left for college three states away.
At first, distance barely changed us.
We wrote constantly. Long letters arrived every week, filled with little things that probably wouldn’t have mattered to anyone else.
Russell told me about his roommate who never cleaned anything, the cafeteria food he claimed could qualify as a science experiment, and the professor who seemed to dislike him on sight.
I wrote about the bookstore where I worked while studying to become a teacher, my classes, my family, and all the ordinary things I still wanted him to know.
