Ginny invited me over for dinner the second night she was home. I was sitting on the porch swing with Media Man, grilling him about his intentions, but I shut up when the yelling started.
It’s warm in Scoville, and all the walls are thin, and that’s why gossip spreads so quick. When Ginny came out on the porch, she wasn’t crying. She wouldn’t, but her eyes were red, just a bit around the edges where I’d notice and the other people who really looked at her would notice. Where her dad never did.
Media Man noticed. He stood up from the swing and wrapped the whole of his wingspan about her, and I liked that. I called him Scott after that.
Senior year came on strong. Ginny didn’t tell me much about school. She only talked about Scott. How Scott was being annoying, or how Scott was being sweet, or how Scott had a piece published in an anthology, whatever that is. And I tried asking her about school once, and her words got all short, and I felt bad, and I asked her about marriage instead, and she thought he might propose, but she wasn’t sure. So we talked about dresses, just in case.
People in town said Ginny was going off to war. They said it wasn’t a big deal because all the hard work was done, and now the army was just babysitting. Mrs. Gallagher put an ARMY sticker on her car.
I saw her sitting in the driver’s seat of that car in the grocery store parking lot once. She was crying, and I thought about going and talking to her, but she would have been embarrassed. I let her cry instead and didn’t talk about it. That dropped rocks in my stomach. Big ones.
I called Ginny a few nights later. I told her how Marcus had proposed. I told her I said yes. She said she was happy for me. I told her I loved her and would forever. She said she loved me too. We both knew what we meant, but we pretended we didn’t. I didn’t tell her about her mom.
Ginny went to war. They put her picture up in the post office with her address underneath so people from town could send her letters. She got a lot of mail. By the end of her first month abroad in the desert, she knew about every affair, embezzlement, mishap, and closeted homosexual in Scoeville.