Never Enough by Denise Jaden Page B

brewer.
    “Nah, it’s okay.” He still sounded anything but comfortable, and I felt bad for bringing him here. This seemed like a whole new level of weirdness.
    “Have a seat.” I motioned to the couch. “I’ll get us some cookies.” I headed for the pantry without waiting for a response. Was Marcus worried that I was going to jump him, or what? That didn’t make sense. We’d been alone plenty of times backstage and at the Arts Club. When I returned, he sat on one end of the couch, straight and tall, like he was waiting to jump up and say “Bingo!” I sat at the other end, leaving enough width for a set of major appliances between us, and placed the open bag of cookies on the table. Therewere only four left in the package, though I was sure Mom had just bought it a couple days ago.
    Marcus helped himself to a cookie.
    I flicked on the TV, and after five minutes of sitcom fun, I could feel him start to relax. He even laughed. An actual laugh out of Marcus. I watched his face jiggle in my peripheral vision.
    When one of the characters used the word “footling” Marcus twisted his mouth to one side.
    “You don’t know what it means either?” I asked.
    When he shook his head, I ran upstairs and grabbed my dictionary from beside my desk. I traipsed back down with it already open.
    “‘Footling: Adjective . . .’” I read out. “Means trivial or silly.”
    “So ‘footling’ and ‘Loann’ are, like, synonyms,” he said.
    “Ha, ha.” I forced my eyes together in a glare, even though his joking made me feel suddenly bubbly.
    “I like to learn new words,” he said.
    I tried to think of a good word to get back at him. But it had to be something really smart. One he didn’t know.
    I thumbed through my dictionary. One of my photos I’d used as a bookmark slid out and landed on the floor between us. It was one from the backyard, a squirrel with its tiny paws reaching out toward the camera. The sky was dull behind the little rust-colored guy, and it made him stand out like a shot of color in a black-and-white movie.
    Marcus picked it up. “Cool,” he said, looking at it for almost a full minute. “You have anything else like this?”
    I nodded, swallowing hard. He kept staring at me, waiting for me to elaborate, so I raced back up to my room and returned with the pictures of the oak tree.
    He studied these even longer. My knee bounced against the coffee table. I’d never seen anyone so taken with anything I had done before. Looking at Marcus’s face, I wanted to cry from joy or take his picture, I wasn’t sure which.
    He held the photo a few feet away from him and squinted.
    My armpits moistened. “You’re going to start snoring any second, right?” I said with a forced laugh. Now that he was analyzing them, they probably weren’t that good after all and I felt the need to intercept him from saying so.
    “You know,” he said at last, “this might be perfect for that outdoor scene.”
    I crinkled my brow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “For the play.” He tilted his head. “I wonder . . .” He clucked his tongue a couple of times, keeping me in suspense. “If we could blow this up on the screen somehow. You know, at the back of the stage.”
    And that’s how we came up with our brilliant idea: To create a photo-set.
    By the time Claire and Mom ambled through the door,Marcus and I had written down nearly a hundred different photo possibilities for me to track down. Marcus said he could help with the computer projection part of things, which was great because I had no idea where to start with that. I casually called out, “Hi,” to Mom and Claire, while Marcus kept writing down new ideas.
    Mom’s mouth dropped open and she quickly snapped it shut.
    I laughed under my breath, trying not to acknowledge her weirdness. Holy heart attack, Batman, Loann has a boy in the house!
    “Mom, this is Marcus. My friend from school.” I expected a similar scene to when Josh had