Love All: A Novel by Callie Wright

jock, either. For some reason, Sam seemed to like being saddled with Carl and me.
    “Hey,” said Sam, collapsing on the bleachers two rows below me. We had only seconds to talk before his dodgeball game began.
    The fluorescent gymnasium lights flashed on Sam’s hair and I resisted the urge to pet him. He’d changed into a fresh set of gym clothes—black Umbros and a T-shirt that said SECOND ANNUAL COOPERSTOWN SOCCER KICK —and I inhaled deeply, dizzy from the smell of his detergent. When he leaned over to tie his Sambas, I spied his swimsuit tan line above his boxers, and I wondered if Megan had seen it, too.
    On the gym floor, Mr. Yonkey bounced a single red ball and tooted his whistle to call the boys over. Sam didn’t move.
    I took a deep breath. “So?” I said.
    “What?”
    I rolled my eyes. “Megan.”
    Sam shrugged. “Nothing happened, really. Carl and Wylie and Doug just said I should go for her.”
    Effing Carl.
    “We kissed,” he admitted.
    “Like once?”
    My heart thudded in my chest as Sam looked down at his hands, then back up at me.
    “Like a few times.”
    “And?”
    “And what?” asked Sam. “It’s not like I’m going to write her or anything. Why do you care, anyway?”
    Yonkey blew his whistle and said, “Move it, men!”
    “I better go,” said Sam. He looked back once, then Q-Berted down the bleacher seats to join Yonkey on the gym floor.
    In my math notebook I drew three connected circles, a Venn diagram for our friendship, a chain-linked triumvirate for Sam and Carl and me. Where Carl and I overlapped was in the way we made room for each other in our lives, our front doors always open, and in our mutual adoration of Sam. We courted his affections, and when we couldn’t have him, which was often enough, we always had each other, and in that way Carl was my best friend. Where Sam and I overlapped was in the way he reached under his desk during history class to lay notes folded in the shape of right triangles on the very top of my knee, and in the way he used a pen during study hall to draw random images—a pine forest, an open book, our lunch monitor’s shoe—in dark-blue strokes on the soft underside of my arm. At the heart of our three-way union was the language we had created, our mother tongue, but with one thousand words at the ready, I still couldn’t tell Sam that I had missed him while he was gone.
    *   *   *
    Before the final bell of the day we were in Sam’s Badass Scirocco Scirocco, tearing out of the parking lot at top speed, just ahead of the school-bus traffic. Tennis didn’t start until three thirty and we had minutes to kill. First stop, Stewart’s for snacks: pork rinds and Dr Peppers and fifty-cent gumballs from the Titan Big’un machine, then on to my house, where we could catch the first half of The Jenny Jones Show before practice.
    Our house was a Victorian two-story at the base of Bassett Hall, which had been an orphanage when Poppy was a kid, then offices for Bassett Hospital. Next to Bassett Hall were the tennis courts where our school tennis team played, visible from our kitchen window and also upstairs from Poppy’s new bedroom.
    We found Poppy in front of the TV where I’d planted him that morning. He’d traded in his plaid pajamas for khakis and a wool work shirt but was still sporting his robe and slippers, which Nonz never would’ve allowed, and he hadn’t combed his hair or shaved or applied Vicks VapoRub to his nose.
    I sat on the corduroy couch next to Poppy and nabbed the remote. “Have you ever seen Jenny Jones ?” I asked. Every episode was about oversexed teenagers. It was by far our favorite show.
    “Who?” asked Poppy.
    Sam kicked back on the purple couch below the TV. “Poppy,” he said, “how do you like your new digs?”
    “Where’s your grandfather been keeping himself?” Poppy asked Sam. He and Sam’s grandfather had gone to CHS together a thousand years ago. “That man has a hat of mine.”
    “He says you