“I have a theory that the tacos in the cafeteria are made out of stray cats.”
Mr. Johnston laughed along with the rest of us. “Yes! But is that a scientific theory, Mr. Cody?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
Ben shrugged. “I don’t have any observations to back it up. Just a hunch. Based on taste.”
Mr. Johnston kept driving toward his point over the laughter. “And what do we call a ‘hunch’ in science? Anyone?” He pointed at me. “Kate?”
“A hypothesis?”
“Bingo! And how is an unproven hypothesis different from a scientific theory?”
Lindsey spoke up again. “A scientific theory is the best explanation for something based on all the evidence we have so far. You can use it to make predictions.”
“Very good.” Mr. Johnston smiled, mission accomplished. “Remember that words have specific meanings depending on context. When we say that evolution is a ‘scientific theory’ we mean it’s the most likely explanation—the one strongly supported by all of our observations of the natural world.”
Rachel was waving her hand like a castaway in choppy water. “Yes, Rachel?”
“But nobody was here three hundred and seventy-five million years ago to observe anything. So, how can we say that Iowa used to be an ocean if no one saw that?”
“We observe the evidence.” Mr. Johnston smiled. “Even if you don’t witness an event firsthand, there’s always plenty of evidence to be found.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Like what?”
Mr. Johnston smiled. Then he passed around eighteen plastic buckets, assigned partners at random, and sent us out to look for coral fossils in a ditch behind the school—roughly twelve hundred miles from the nearest ocean.
I can hear the basketball pinging on Ben’s driveway from half a block away. Pausing at the corner of the front hedge, I watch him shoot free throws. He is sweaty and shirtless.
It is unseasonably warm.
Bounce-bounce.
Bounce-bounce.
He spins the ball to his hip, then squares and shoots.
Thwfft.
Precision, timing, balance, concentration: Ben in his natural habitat.
Until that day in the ditch during Mr. Johnston’s class last fall, neither of us realized we’d stopped speaking beyond a quick “hey, how’s it going?”
It happened so slowly—us taking each other for granted. The ebb and flow of our separate lives became a steady current, carrying us toward different pursuits.
Ben shot up almost a foot the summer after sixth grade and traded his cleats for high-tops. The promise of Hawkeye basketball has a chokehold on this town, and any boy who crests six feet in seventh grade is drafted without mercy. The Friday night lights on the Coral Sands football field in October can’t hold a candle to the ones in the gymnasium come December. Our football team has never done very well, and soccer is fine for girls, but varsity basketball? They get all the glory—and, lately, the Division 1 scouts.
Ben and I were still in classes together, but over time the familiar has a way of getting covered up by layer after layer of life, the everyday sediment of homework and practice and parties and who eats lunch where. Our moms talked a lot when his dad filed for divorce a couple years ago, but I didn’t know how to bring it up with Ben. I’d wanted to tell him that I was here for him, that I missed him, but it seemed weird to walk up and say, “Heard your parents are splitting up.” So, we just continued to nod at each other as we passed in the hallway.
Maybe digging around in the dirt made us remember being kids again. Whatever the reason, tromping through that culvert out behind the school last September, all of the ease I used to have with Ben came flooding back. It only took five minutes, and we were laughing like six-year-olds at soccer practice.
I read a novel last summer, and there was a scene where two people saw each other again after a long absence. The author wrote, “It was as if no time had passed at all.” At the time, I wondered how that could be. There’s no way to stop time from passing or people from changing. Ben’s most rapid and dramatic change had been his height—practically overnight—but lots of other changes had been more subtle. In many ways, Ben had grown up right in front of me, only I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d missed all the tiny changes because they’d occurred so slowly.
We learned last year in biology that the cells in our bodies are completely replaced by new ones every seven years. Ben and I are literally different people now than we were as children—fundamentally changed on a molecular level.