Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (13 page)

“What do you think, Tammy?” Lizzie asked.

Tamara from high school would have bought a 50’s poufy poodle skirt and declared it a day, but that wouldn’t have gained any ground with Dallas. We were walking by a juniors shop. I paused and stared into the window. “Look at that black lace dress,” I commanded. It was short and form-fitting with a heart-shaped bodice.

“It’s a bit revealing, don’t you think?” Linda asked.

“Nah,” I replied, walking in and grabbing a lace dress in my size off the rack. After a few minutes of looking around the store, I convinced Jane to try on another LBD with less lace but a similar cut.

“Not bad,” Jane said as we posed together in front of the three-way mirror. “Where’d those come from?” she asked, gesturing toward my top half.

“A damn good push-up,” I told her, adjusting the straps on my dress. I ended up buying the lace dress, a boa, and few other cleavage revealing tops.

“That’s a lot of glitter,” Lizzie said, eyeing my purchases.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I replied. “We’re in Florida, after all.” I figured I would have to be less invisible if my clothing stood out.

“But what decade is that dress supposed to be in?” Linda asked as we left the store.

I paused, fingering the feathers on the boa peeking out of my shopping bag. “I got an idea. Lizzie, do you mind stopping by the drugstore on our way home?”

I decided Jane and I would go as two of Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible girls. We completed the day of shopping by buying bright red lipstick and black liquid eyeliner.

There was only one snag in my Finally-Get-Dallas-to-Notice-Me plan…

“The stomach flu?” I asked Jane when I stopped by to pick her up before heading to the party.

She nodded down at me from her top bunk, looking pale.

“Well, I’m not going without you,” I told her, rubbing my finger along my bottom lip. It came away with some of the lipstick I’d spent ten minutes applying.

“Oh, Tammy, just go,” she rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m not long for this world.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

Jane rolled back over to raise her eyebrow at me.

“How can I go dressed like this by myself?” I gestured toward my slinky dress.

“You’ll be fine.” Jane grabbed a bucket placed on the dresser below her bunk. “But, Tammy, don’t go by yourself, and, whatever you do, don’t leave by yourself.”

As I left Jane’s room, I could hear her retching into the bucket.

“Don’t we make quite the odd couple?” Linda asked as we ventured from Gandhi. She was dressed in her signature style: a pink Beauty and the Beast T-shirt and khaki shorts with sensible sandals.

Lizzie was a vision of the 1960s in her tie-dyed T-shirt and hippy-style rounded green sunglasses. “You look like you could be from Kappa,” I told her when she came out of her room.

“Wow,’ Lizzie replied, looking me up and down. “Dallas would be a fool if he didn't go for you.”

I adjusted the boa. According to my research, the Simply Irresistible girls didn’t wear black feather boas, but it made me feel a little less naked by wearing it. “What do you think Dallas will go as?”

Linda and Lizzie exchanged a glance before Linda shrugged. “Who knows.”

It turned out Dallas didn’t dress as anything, but we didn’t find him for an hour after we arrived at the party. “Ooh, look, you could win a trip to the Bahamas,” Linda said, walking over to a table perched to the side of Delta complex. She picked up a pen and began filling out the form. Lizzie followed suit.

I hastily filled out my name and then turned to glance around the complex. LaVerne, dressed as a flapper, was draped over a pinstriped suit-clad Eric on the make-shift dance floor. True to form, the other Eckhart girls were dressed similarly to me, if not even more scantily-clad. Also true to form, most my classmates/fellow partygoers seemed wasted as they lurched around the dance floor or called out to arriving friends more loudly than necessary.

“Now what?” Lizzie asked.

The Florida humidity was causing the feathers on my boa to stick to my neck. I unwrapped it and waved my hand back and forth, trying to cool off. “I don’t know. Do you see Dallas anywhere?”

The heads of my two friends swiveled back and forth. “No,” both of them replied.

“Hey, Hairy Toes, where’d those come from?” Glossy Hair from Calculus appeared by my side and gestured toward my chest. I shooed him away.

I patted my hair, already feeling pieces of frizz that managed to spring free from their tight bun. And the wire from my push-up bra was cutting into my chest. This was not exactly how I pictured I would look. “Should we just leave?” I asked.

“Not before they announce the results of the Bahamas contest,” my roommate replied.

Thankfully it was only a few minutes before they revealed the winners.

“Tammy T. Tymes!” A senior from Student Council announced my name into the mike on the temporary stage.

“I won! I won!” I hoped Dallas heard my name and was making his way to the podium to congratulate me. He’d gather me in his arms and sweep me into his arms with a movie-style kiss on the mouth. Although, in all fairness, I probably should take Jane to the Bahamas with me…

“What?” I asked the senior after I reached the stage.

“A free pizza and two pops at Papa Georgio’s on the Bay,” she replied.

“Not in the Bahamas,” I clarified.

“No.” She flashed a grin at her audience—a few glassy-eyed sophomores—who stared back at her. The rest of the partygoers had fled back inside the Delta dorms for more drinks or were dancing, music-less, on the dance floor, LaVerne and Eric among them.

“Well, thanks for nothing,” I told her as I was shoved off the stage by a junior.

I tucked the pizza coupons under the straps of my dress and headed back to my friends.

“Are you ready to go?” Lizzie asked.

“We haven’t found Dallas yet,” Linda reminded her.

“Whatever. This party is laming out, and I gotta write a Heritage paper tomorrow,” Lizzie replied.

For the second time that day, I was hit with inspiration. “Listen, you guys head back to the dorm. I’m going to find Dallas and ask him to walk me home.”

“Suit yourself,” Lizzie replied. She and Linda began walking away.

I glanced around the complex. The winner for the Bahamas trip hadn’t come forward, despite the fact they repeated his name at least twice over the loudspeaker. Roger Something-or-Other. He was probably off getting drunk somewhere, I mused. And where was Dallas?

Inspiration depleted, I headed toward Ibsen. The door stood propped open by a beer bottle. There was no use knocking on Dallas’s door, as it also stood open. Dallas was laying on his egg crate, surfing the TV. The crab I’d given for his birthday was perched on top of the stereo on Sonofabitch’s side of the room, its little claws hanging over the speakers.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked from the doorway.

“Watching football highlights. What’s up?” He continued to click through channels.

“Are you not going to the party?”

“Nope. Where’s your partner in crime?”

“If you mean Jane, she’s not feeling well. And Linda and Lizzie left already.” I stepped into the room, giving him full view of my outfit. He didn’t even flinch. Needless to say, this was not the reception I was hoping for. I took a deep breath and asked, “Will you walk me home?”

After a brief pause, during which I was sure he could hear my heart beating, he finally nodded and shut off the TV. He sat up and tucked his feet into the Adidas slides lying next to his bed. He strode out of the room and then waited in the hall for me to follow him.

Dallas didn’t say anything as we walked the path back to Alpha. I couldn’t help feeling the height difference between us was perfect. Corrie was taller than I, and Kellen was barely 5’9” , which meant the Corrie was couldn’t wear heels higher than two inches or risk being taller than her boyfriend. Even in my platforms, Dallas towered over me.

I peeled the coupons out from under my dress strap to clutch them in my hand. It would be so simple to just ask him to go with me now. But the sullen look on his face stopped me. We waked in silence, Dallas’s long arms hanging limply at his sides. I had to struggle in my shoes to keep up with him so that we were walking side-by-side instead of me following him a few steps behind. He came to an abrupt stop on the edge of Alpha’s atrium.

“Thanks for walking me home,” I told him, turning around to face him.

The lights from Alpha’s dorms cast shadows on Dallas’s face. He lifted his hand, palm up, as if to say,
it was the least I could do.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

He shrugged before tucking both hands into the pockets of his shorts. “Nah.”

“Well, I’m sure you have some important football highlights to get back to,” I replied for lack of anything else to say.

He pulled one hand out of his pocket long enough to give a half-hearted wave and turned back toward Delta.

As soon I as I got inside my dorm room, I slid out of my conforming outfit, hanging my black boa on the banister of our bunk bed. I couldn’t help but notice the stuffed animals normally decorating the top of Linda’s desk—a crab, Eyeore, and two Winnie the Pooh’s: one dressed normal and one dressed as a bumblebee—were all posed in sexual positions, with Eeyore mounting the crab and the bee Pooh’s head buried in the other Pooh’s lap.

“Linda,” I hissed.

She stirred. “What?”

“Did you lock the room when we went to the party?”

“Of course,” she replied, suddenly awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Not much.” I gestured toward her computer monitor. “Just that.”

“Ooh,” she said, disgust in her voice. “I did leave it unlocked when I went to wash my face.” She rose from bed and rearranged her creatures. “Who would have done that?”

I shrugged. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”

She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Did Dallas walk you home?”

I nodded. “Yeah, after I begged him to.”

“Oh.” She peered at my steely face and declined to say anything else. “Well, good-night then, I guess.”

“Good night.”

Chapter 10: The Free Pizza is a Guarantee

F
or about a month after the complex party—and after he started Club Volleyball—I didn’t see much of Dallas. I didn’t hear from him either, until he called our room to ask how to spell the word “redundant.” After I spelled it for him, I managed to work up the nerve to ask him if he wanted to come over and watch some John Cusack movies that weekend.

“Oh, are you guys having a movie marathon?” The term ‘you guys,’ hung in the air like a lead fishing weight.

“Yep. Me and Linda and Lizzie and maybe Jane,” I said, emphasizing the latter name a little more than necessary.

“Probably. Although I’m not sure what I’m doing this weekend.”

I ended up waiting up for him at the picnic tables alone, Sonofabitch-style, long after my friends had gone to bed. I was convinced that as long as he continued hanging out with my friends and me, he’d catch on to how fabulous
I
was and fall madly in love with
me
. I thought all I had to do was play the game exactly right, and then just wait until he realized how much he liked me. Me, not Jane. Or Linda. Or Lizzie.

But it wasn’t working. I was miserable, thinking about him all the time, wondering why he didn’t realize how perfect we would be as a couple. It was time to get over him. For good.

“I’m over him,” I told Linda and Jane as I scrubbed off my red toenail polish the next day.

I could feel Jane gesturing something over my head. “Heard that one before,” she said.

I was examining the length of my toe hair when the phone rang. I looked over at Linda and then down at my toes again.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” Jane asked.

“We’ll let the machine get it,” Linda said, crossing her arms.

I nodded. The answering machine clicked on and Dallas’s voice filled the room. “I’ve got hooters in my room now, guys! Hooters!”

The three of us looked at each other. “Oh yeah, apparently he got a stuffed owl,” Linda said. “He was talking about it in Heritage the other day.”

“Does anybody want go over to Ibsen and see it?” I asked.

“No,” Jane and my roommate replied simultaneously.

I grabbed my razor and headed to the bathroom.

“Listen, Tammy,” Jane said when I returned. “We’ve been talking…” Jane glanced over at Linda. “And we’ve agreed that you need to either get over Dallas for real, or just Sroot the Free and ask him out. It’s time to take a shit or get off the toilet. You’re driving the rest of us crazy. Lizzie too.”

Linda nodded vigorously.

“How am I supposed to actually ask him out? The only modes of transportation between the two of us are rollerblades and a bike with half-deflated tires.”

“Well, I wouldn’t e-mail him,” Linda said unhelpfully.

~*~

I decided not to go home for Thanksgiving. We only got a few days off, and I’d much rather hang with my roommate than my sister and Kellen. Linda’s parents stayed in Minnesota, but her brother offered to have a small meal in his apartment in Orlando. He also was getting us free tickets the day after to go to the theme parks.

I harbored a secret hope that Linda’s brother Donny would be handsome and we’d fall in love that weekend, but Donny was a male version of Linda, down to the coke bottle glasses and Goofy T-shirt. I also quickly discovered Linda’s
Fargo
accent became much more pronounced around fellow Minnesotans.

The meal itself was uneventful. Donny had picked up a rotisserie chicken from the local grocery store and we had canned green beans and watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
when dinner was over. The next morning the three of us got up early to head to Epcot.

“Are you having fun?” Linda asked in her ever-cheerful voice, turning toward me as we waited in line in front of a giant geodesic dome. The bright sun revealed several light-colored hairs on Linda's upper lip.

“Uh-huh,” I told her, frowning as we passed a woman dressed as The Little Mermaid. I tried to stop myself from having negative thoughts, but I felt bitter all of a sudden. I was usually cheery whenever I managed to get off campus, as if there was still a real world that existed outside of Eckhart, but I was feeling like an unwelcomed member of it. I had survived nearly an entire semester of my freshmen year of college and what did I have to show for it? Nothing. No stellar grades, no boyfriend, not even a first kiss. At least I hadn’t dropped out of my major like most of the people I knew.