Tami didn't have a chance to apologize to Eric at church on Sunday, because only his mother was there. Reverend Hayes shook her hand in the church doorway and said, "It's good to see you, Janet. Where is the rest of your family today?"

"Eric's a little mortified about the game," Mrs. Taylor told him. "He didn't want to face anybody today, so I let him skip church."

"So he's home with Mr. Taylor?" Tami asked. She hoped he wasn't getting chewed out all morning by his father.

"No. My husband left this morning to drive to Midland. He's meeting with a man who might want to buy Taylor's this summer, if the bar has met certain financial benchmarks by then."

"He's already thinking of selling it?" the Reverend asked, sounding a bit alarmed. Tami thought perhaps he was afraid that his favorite hangout might undergo a negative transformation in different hands.

"I want to move closer to my daughter in Dallas when Eric goes away to college," Mrs. Taylor said.

"And how is John handling Eric getting benched?" the Reverend asked.

"Well, you know," Mrs. Taylor said. "He can be a bit hard on Eric."

A bit hard? Tami thought. A bit?

"But right now," Mrs. Taylor continued, "no one's harder on Eric than Eric himself."

[*]

Eric wasn't in school on Monday. Tami supposed he'd played sick so he wouldn't have to see Mo lifted on shoulders and carried through the halls. She didn't want to see it either. She looked away.

Rumors of Mo and Tami's break-up drifted like ghostly voices through the school. Some people were saying Mo cheated with Anita, others that Tami cheated with Eric. Tami fantasized about slapping both Mo and Anita across the face, or somehow humiliating them in front of the entire school, but she didn't do it. She chose avoidance instead. During her 2nd period P.E. class, she ran on the far outside of the track, away from the chattering cheerleaders. All day, she used the girls' bathroom in the freshman/sophomore wing. She skipped lunch and locked herself in a bathroom stall for an afternoon cry. She skipped 4th period English, too, because she shared that class with Mo. It was the first class she had skipped since her sophomore year, but this time she didn't go off campus to hang with older friends. She just slunk off to the school library and read the assigned poetry selections, or tried to, but the one by Edna St. Vincet Milay made her choke:

I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

After she read that, Tami closed the book and put her head down on top of it. She wished with all her might that she could run backward through time to that day when Mo first asked her out and say, "Sorry, but I don't date football players."

[*]

Tami's father didn't expect her at work on Monday afternoon, which was good, because after school she secretly drove twenty miles to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Dillon, where she asked to be tested for STDs.

Later, when she parked her car on the street in front of the parsonage, and got out and opened the front door, she heard music drifting from her sister's room – a song that had been popular this past year by a British band called Naked Eyes. The lyrics assaulted her ears:

You made me promises, promises
Knowing I'd believe
Promises, promises
You knew you'd never keep

She shut the front door. Why was the world conspiring to constantly remind her of Mo's betrayal?

Shelley knew by now that Tami had broken up with Mo, but Tami's little sister hadn't had much to say about the fact other than, "You'll get over him. He's not that hot anyway."

Tami now walked down Main Street. She needed the air, and the movement. She needed to get away from Shelley and that song. And maybe, just maybe, she needed to peek in the coffee shop to see if Eric was there.

He was, already putting up the last chair, even though it was only 6:49. She walked in, turned the sign to closed, and locked the door.

He looked at her warily.

"Can we talk?" she asked.

"I'm too busy to talk," he said. "You know, because I've got to get a blow job from Anita in the back room later."

"I'm so very sorry I said that." Tami walked up to the table where he stood. "I wasn't in my right mind. I took my anger out on you, and I'm sorry." She took one of the chairs off, flipped it over, and sat in it.

He just stood there. She was afraid he was going to walk away, but then he took the opposite chair and did the same. "Of course," he said, "not even Anita would give me a blow job now, the way I played at State."

"I'm sorry if what I said distracted you."

"I should have been able to focus, no matter what was on my mind. I trained all season for that moment. As my dad pointed out, Mark Garrity's grandma died Wednesday, and he was still focused. But I wasn't. I don't know. Seeing you that hurt…I was worried about you."

"Why didn't you tell me you thought Mo was cheating?"

Eric sighed. "How? How was I supposed to tell you that without becoming a tattle tale in my team's eyes and breaking your heart? I mean, how do you feel right now?"

"Like the ground just got ripped out from under me." Her voice quivered, and she choked back tears. "You still should have told me. I was…" She lowered his voice to a whisper. "I was having sex with him. Do you know how many guys Anita's been with?"

"Didn't y'all use – "

"I went on the pill when we started...you know."

"Oh."

"And we were going steady. And he was a virgin the first time we did it. Unless he lied about that too." Of course, she had lied about that.

"Oh."

"He knows Anita's been all over, so hopefully he used condoms with her. But I got myself tested this morning just in case. You should have told me he was cheating! I thought you were my friend!"

"I am your friend, Tami. I hate seeing you like this."

"How long do you think he was cheating with her?" When Eric tightened his jaw and looked toward the door, she said, "I have to know! I have to know at what point our relationship became a complete lie. I have to know which parts of it were true and which weren't!"

"I can't tell you that." He looked back. His eyes were soft pools of sympathy. "I don't know. I don't know when it started. I just saw them flirt sometimes, and I suspected it. And I saw her get in his truck after practice a few times, starting sometime in October."

"October? They've been sleeping together since October?"

"I don't know. He could have just been giving her a ride home for all I know."

"But that's not what you thought, was it?" Her eyes simmered with a jumbled stew of emotions.

"I didn't know for sure. It's not like he bragged about Anita in the locker room. He bragged about you."

She slammed her palm down on the table, which shook. "It doesn't make any sense!" she shouted. "Why would he do it? Why would he do it and keep saying he loves me?"

Eric had averted his eyes when she hit the table. He returned them to her now. "Probably because he does love you. But just because he loves you doesn't mean he deserves you."

"If he loved me, he wouldn't have done that. He must have stopped loving me. Maybe he never loved me."

"Love is different for guys. They can more easily separate the physical from…you know…the emotional."

"Can you?" she asked.

"I don't. Doesn't mean I can't."

She shook her head. "It was always lie. He never loved me."

"I don't think that's true. But one thing's for certain. Mo's a jerk. And a fool. And you're going to be better off without him. You'll see that in time. And one more thing. I never lied to you. I'm not a liar. I don't lie for anyone."

"That's like six things," she said with a weak smile, and a laugh that was almost a sniffle.

He smiled back, and something in the tender sadness of his smile tugged so violently at her heart strings, that she began to cry. She covered her face with her hands. She knew it wouldn't prevent him from seeing her cry, but it would prevent her from seeing him see her.

Tami's face was still in her hands, though she was getting her tears under control, when she heard a clink against the table. She let her hands slide away from her face and saw that Eric had put a box of tissues on the table and, next to it, a white ceramic plate topped by a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a fork.

"It's good," he said. "It's the best dessert we've got."

[*]

When Eric walked her home later, it was uncomfortably quiet for half a block. He was looking at the shop windows, across the street, at the pavement, everywhere but at her.

At last, she spoke. "Did you skip school today because of the game?"

"Yeah," he said. "I let down my team. I just couldn't face those guys today. I don't want to face them tomorrow either."

"You got that team to State in the first place, Eric. The Tigers have never played State before. They know that."

"Well, thank God Mo pulled it off," he said. "That'll make it easier for me than if they lost because of me."

"Don't thank Mo for anything," she muttered.

"I didn't thank Mo. I thanked God."

Tami unbuttoned her coat. It had gone up to 68 today. Texas never seemed to know if it was fall, spring, or winter. "Everyone in this town thinks God cares a great deal about football," she said. "And maybe he does. Maybe that's what takes up all his time, because he sure doesn't seem to care about me."

"Well," Eric said softly. "Maybe he just has something better in store for you, and he couldn't give it to you until…you know."

"My mom always says, when God closes a door, he opens a window."

"Yeah," Eric said. "Exactly."

"But who wants to crawl through a window?"

"Depends what's on the other side, I guess."

It grew quiet between them again. Eric hadn't said anything about Boone, and his silence on the subject unnerved her. "Please don't tell anyone what I told you about Boone. I've never told anyone that before."

"I won't."

She knew he wouldn't. That's not why she had said it. She wanted him to give some indication that he didn't think less of her for it.

"Have you ever done anything stupid like that?" she asked.

"Lisa was my first." He looked at his feet on the cobblestone as he walked, his hands in the pockets of a brown leather jacket. "Well…my only, I guess. So far."

"But not your first everything, right?" Tami didn't know what she was hoping for. She didn't particularly want to hear he'd received oral sex from random girls at parties, but she also wanted some reason to believe he didn't judge her.

"She wasn't my first kiss. But other than that…pretty much."

"I wish I could turn back the clock and undo that night with Boone," she said. "But I can't. I was foolish. I made it into something it wasn't, and I had no reason to. He didn't even speak to me the next day in school."

Tami wanted Eric to say something, anything. It's okay. Or I know you're not a slut. Or people make mistakes. Something. But he just kept walking with his hands in his pockets.

"You ever do anything you regret?" she asked.

It was several more footfalls before he spoke. "I had a good friend in elementary school. He was kind of a…a geek type. But we lived on the same street and we played in each other's houses all the time. From third to sixth grade. Four years we were friends. We used to play a lot of Risk and Stratego and trade comics and stuff."

He didn't say anything else for a while, so she asked, "And you regret that?"

"No. I regret that when I got to junior high, and I got on the football team in 7th grade, and my teammates made fun of him…" Eric sighed. "I turned my back on him. And I didn't just turn my back on him. I made fun of him with them." Tami glanced at Eric. He looked choked up. His teeth were gritted together, so his next words were slightly muffled. "I betrayed my best friend." He shook his head. "I was just trying to fit in, you know?" he said. "I guess that's what you were doing, at that party, huh? Trying to fit in?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, "that was definitely part of it."

"But you felt bad," he said softly, "and you never did anything like that again."

A great sense of relief flooded Tami. He understood.