Sharks & Boys Read Online Free

relationship is like a rubber band.”
    The first time I heard about the rubber-band principle was in eighth grade during lunch. Pam and I were sitting together on the front lawn, sharing her ham sandwich. She held a rubber band between her two index fingers.
    “Tension is good. It’s what you want. But when I start doing this”—she moved one of her index fingers closer to the other one—“I lose the tension. And the relationship ends.”
    I watched the rubber band slide down her finger and dangle in the air.
    “So I’m a finger?” I asked her. “And the guy I like is the other finger?”
    “Exactly,” she said. “And the relationship is the rubber band. And that’s why you should never chase a guy. When you move closer, you lose the tension, ultimately dooming your relationship to be nothing more than a flaccid loop of elastic.”
    I stared at the dangling loop.
    “Okay,” I said. “But using this model, you never get to touch your guy.” I held my fingers up and imagined a rubber band stretching between them and two people never meeting. Love seemed hopeless.
    Pam took a big bite of her sandwich and shook her head. “The rubber band is a psychological metaphor. Physical stuff works differently. You’re totally allowed to touch your guy.”
    “Cool,” I said.
    Pam was always so smart about life. And she had an impressive vocabulary. Plus, her mom made pretty good ham sandwiches. We were close all through junior high. Then she started dating Billy Rome and I started dating Wick, and my life took off in a new direction.
    In hindsight, our coupling seemed destined. The year before we dated, Wick and I had the same biology class. We knew each other, obviously, from twin studies. And we were both on the swim team. And we’d had that early iguana encounter. But even though fate had put us in the same classroom five days a week, and in the same swimming pool twice a week, nearly the whole year passed before something romantic happened.
    Then, there was the field survey assignment during summer break. There were a dozen different things you could do. Test water at Lake Champlain. Sample soil in Waterbury near the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory.
    Collect and dissect flowers near the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. Wick and I ended up in the same field survey. We both signed up to take granite samples from Rock of Ages in Barre. I don’t even care about granite. I don’t even know how it happened. One day, I drove to Barre to complete a boring assignment. The next thing I knew I spotted Wick’s head a few people in front of me in line at the granite quarry.
    He was so mature. He saw me and made his way to me. And so we toured the whole quarry together. Laughing at each other’s mausoleum jokes. Offering each other breath mints and pieces of chewing gum. And then, afterward, instead of getting into our separate cars and driving back to Burlington, he suggested getting a panini at a restaurant in Montpelier. And he didn’t stop dialing up the romance there. When we got to Sarducci’s, instead of letting us take a table indoors, he requested a table on the patio that overlooked the Winooski River.
    He was a prince. He didn’t sit there and talk about himself while he ate his sandwich. He asked me a lot of questions about my life. He wanted to hear my thoughts on everything from deforestation to the flat tax. We talked about Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Nadine Gordimer’s short stories. He asked me personal questions about what it felt like to be a fraternal twin. I mean, he was curious about how I perceived my individual identity. It reminded me of the phrase “fit like a hand in a glove.” During our panini moment, Wick was the hand and I was the glove.
    And when I thought things couldn’t get any better, the most mind-blowing thing happened: everything got better. Wick started talking about how we seemed to be in each other’s orbits: biology, swim class, twin studies. And I loved that idea. I wanted