How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend (13 page)

I imagined some exotic cuisine. Thai food maybe, or sushi. “Sounds great,” I said.

We walked outside to his truck. As we drove through town, my spirits rose. Daphne had finally found me a cool, outgoing, fun, passionate, understanding guy. The only thing more I could wish for was that Jesse would see me with him.

Then we pulled up to Warren's Bar & Grill. I had never been there, because it's a bar first and a grill second.

“They serve great ribs here,” Nathan said as he turned off the ignition. “Have you ever ridden a mechanical bull?”

I didn't move from the truck. “Um, don't you have to be twenty-one to get in?”

He released his seatbelt and opened his door. “Yeah, but the bouncer is a friend of mine. You won't have a problem as long as you're with me.” He stepped out of the truck, and I reluctantly followed, walking with small steps toward the door.

Nathan went on, filling the quiet with talk about the bar's band and how they had country swing lessons every Friday night. All I could think about was:
What will happen if I get caught during a police raid of this place?

I mean, how serious was underage trespassing? For example, would Judge Rossmar—who'd gone into considerable detail about how I could be incarcerated if I got in trouble again—would he consider it a bad thing if I went into a bar?

I stopped a good ten feet in front of the door. Just stopped and stared at the building.

“What's wrong?” Nathan surveyed me, then put one hand on his hip. “Don't tell me—you hate country music, don't you?”

“No, it's just that it's illegal for a minor . . . and I'm already on probation and all—”

His eyebrows lifted. “You're on probation?”

This is not the kind of information you want to divulge on a first date, and he actually took a step away from me. “Probation for what?”

“Oh, not anything bad,” I said quickly. “The school caught me with stolen frogs, but it wasn't my fault, and they were already dead . . .”

Which is also not something you want to tell a guy on the first date and probably didn't make the situation any better. “It's a long story,” I said, “but I can't get in trouble again.”

His gaze traveled from me to the front door and back again. “Okay, no trouble then.” He let out a nervous laugh. “I promise not to start any barroom brawls if you don't.”

My feet moved forward again. I needed to stop worrying about every little thing. Of course nothing bad would happen. The police didn't raid bars for no reason. Besides, I wouldn't actually drink or anything.

We walked inside and sure enough, no one carded us. The guy at the door and Nathan exchanged greetings and beyond that no one paid any attention to us.

I guess I'd expected the place to be some dark, cramped, smoke-filled room, with a bunch of broken-down, half-conscious men parked at the bar. Instead the room was big and well lit. To the side of the bar was a dance floor, eating area, and a pool table. Several planters with huge silk trees were scattered throughout the room, and pictures of horses lined the walls.

We walked slowly across the floor. “You want to play a little pool before we eat?” Nathan asked.

“I don't know how,” I said.

He turned toward the back of the room where the pool table stood and motioned me to follow. “No problem. I can teach you.”

I followed after him, feeling grown up. Here I was with a guy in a bar playing pool. So there, Jesse.

Nathan picked up two cue sticks and handed one to me. I leaned up against the table while he captured all of the balls inside a triangle thing.

“This is the eight ball,” he told me, pointing to the black one. “It's the most important ball on the table. You've got to watch it carefully.”

I don't know what made me look up right then. I mean, Nathan had just told me to watch the eight ball, but instead I glanced up.

It was then that I saw Dad, Gabby, and another couple coming straight across the room. They hadn't seen me, but stopped with their backs to the pool table and surveyed the place as though looking for somewhere good to sit.

I dropped to the ground, cue stick and all.

There is probably a reason children should pay attention to their parents' schedules, and if I ever sneaked out again I would definitely find out where Dad and Gabby planned on going first. But really, you couldn't blame me for being surprised. I mean, since when did they like country music, ribs, or pool? Granted, maybe I didn't know that much about what Gabby liked because I tried to block out her presence as much as possible, but still, the woman was in her forties. You wouldn't think she'd step foot in a place with a mechanical bull.

“Okay . . .” Nathan tilted his head to look at me. His voice took on that tone you use when you talk to small children. “What are you doing on the floor?”

I peered around the table's leg to see if my parents were still there. They were. If I had wanted to spit on Gabby's pink flowered heels, I could have. “Shhh,” I told Nathan. “Pretend I'm not here.”

He leaned down toward me, his eyes wide. “And where am I supposed to pretend you are? The moon? The funny farm maybe?”

“Shhh,” I said again. “Don't look at me.”

He straightened, looked at the cue stick, then shot me another glance. “So, do you have some medication or something that I should know about?”

I motioned toward the pairs of legs on the other side of the table and mouthed the words, “Those are my parents.”

“Oh.” He nodded and lowered his voice. “And they won't be happy to see you in a bar? I can explain that we just came in for the ribs. It's not like we were drinking or anything.”

I shook my head. “I'm supposed to be grounded right now.”

He nodded again, more slowly. “Grounded, huh?”

Let me say right now that despite Daphne's assurances that she was setting me up with an understanding guy, she really hadn't.

An understanding guy would realize why I had to crawl over to the nearest planter, wait there until the coast was clear, and then dart out the front door like the place had caught on fire. An understanding guy would not pretend that he didn't know me as we walked across the parking lot, or act all ticked off because now his bouncer friend would think he was hitting on mentally challenged girls. I mean, I'm sure the people who noticed me crawling across the restaurant floor figured I had a legitimate reason for doing it. Like maybe I'd lost a rolling contact and was trying to find it. Up close and really fast.

I tried to laugh the whole thing off, but the ride back home was silent and awkward. The only thing Nathan said was, “So your parents don't let you out much. Any particular reason why?”

Like I was going to explain anything to him after all that.

Chapter
10

A
ll Saturday we cleaned for Dante's party. Gabby didn't buy any ice sculptures or hire a band, but she did decide on a theme for his party: Patriotic. Everything was done in red, white, and blue. The dishes, the tablecloth, the sugar cookies—her outfit. It was blue velour. We had star-spangled centerpieces and Fourth of July lights leading up to the doorstep from the sidewalk.

At seven thirty Raine, Charity, Stephen, and Brandon showed up. Gabby and Dad went upstairs. “But,” Gabby told us pointedly, “we'll be down to check on you.”

During the next half an hour a dozen freshman boys showed up, all of whom had signed my petition and seemed to think I personally wanted them to come hang out with me. And okay, I might have smiled when I asked them to sign their names, and maybe I'd flirted a little on account of being desperate to get my quota of signatures, but really, you'd think Dante would be grateful. But no, every time he passed me on my way somewhere trying to avoid or lose one of them, he'd say, “So tell me again how you don't use people like Wilson and I do?”

Yeah, I hoped Wilson was having as hard a time with all the girls he'd flirted with as I was having with my freshman groupies.

I tried to deflect some of the guys toward Charity and Raine, but Charity immediately pulled out her I-can't-date-until-I'm-sixteen defense to ward them off, and Raine invented a jealous boyfriend from Swain Academy. His name was Thor, and he spent all of his free time weight lifting and ripping off the limbs of guys who spoke to her.

If you ask me, Raine totally took the coward's way out, but if I'd thought of it first, I would have invented a story just like it. In fact, I would be dating Thor's twin brother, Zeus, and then we could double to prom.

But no, it didn't occur to me until it was too late to jump on the Thor bandwagon, so I was stuck with a constant herd of freshman guys encircling me.

Emily, the freshman girl who'd given her phone number to Dante, showed up with her friend, Isabella, and the two of them sat perched on the couch next to him, trying to out-flirt each other. They called him “Mr. President” and asked if he had any interns yet. This made Charity glare at him and mutter things into her drink.

Dante didn't notice her reaction. No one did, and I wondered how long this sort of thing had gone on before I'd picked up on it.

Daphne came with a guy named Derek from Swain, who was muscley enough that he might very well have spent a lot of time in the gym with Thor, but luckily none of the freshman guys asked.

At eight forty-five Dante cornered me in the kitchen. “Do you think these are all the people that will show? I've got your friends, my friends, and a small flock of freshmen. That's it.”

I didn't know what to say, so I shrugged. “It's a cozy party. That's not a bad thing.”

“I've got a twelve-foot sub sandwich in the kitchen that we've eaten a little over three feet of. We won't be able to fit the rest of it in the refrigerator. I'll have to go out looking for homeless people to give it to.”

“No you won't. Those freshmen are skinny, but they eat a lot.”

Dante clenched his jaw and looked at the table. The overflowing bowls of potato chips, the neatly arranged plates of cookies, the stacks of unused red, white, and blue dishes all seemed a pathetic reminder of our goal.

Wilson was going to win the election by a landslide. This meant my friends and I would see our social standing slide even further. My brother would carry around this experience as one more reason to be cynical about life, and I'd have to eat a pair of shoes.

Plus, after a week or so of leftovers, both Dante and I would have an aversion to submarine sandwiches and Fourth of July decorations for the rest of our lives.

Dante picked up the cordless phone and the white pages. “I'm calling anyone who answers their phone and personally inviting them here.”

Well, as long as his plans didn't involve blazing potted palms, I wasn't going to protest.

A little after nine o'clock the doorbell rang and Dante let Rich, Brett, and Shane inside. They were part of the delinquent crowd at the high school. The type of kids who spent more time smoking in the parking lot than they ever spent in front of books. Mostly they wasted their weekends drinking, and apparently this weekend wasn't much different, since none of them appeared to be sober. “Hey, thanks for inviting us,” Rich told Dante. “Wilson wouldn't let us in to his party with our friend.”

“Your friend?” Dante asked.

“Yeah, our buddy Jack Daniel's.” Then all three of them laughed like this was hilarious.

Brett leaned over and patted Dante on the shoulder like they'd known each other forever. “You've got our vote, man. You're the greatest.”

Dante smiled stiffly and motioned them toward the kitchen. “Well, you don't need your friend here. I've got nine feet of sandwich for you to eat.”

The three stumbled off in that direction, talking to each other instead of us, until Shane called out, “Hey, you got any tequila?”

“No, but there's Cokes in the ice cooler,” Dante said.

I sent him a “Gabby will freak out” look, but he ignored me and followed them into the kitchen. Maybe to keep them from going through our cupboards. None of them came out again, so I assumed they either were in there eating or had passed out.

Emily and Isabella kept throwing looks in the direction of the kitchen, as though they wanted to go in after Dante. I decided to do Charity a favor. While I changed out CDs in the stereo, I called Brandon and Stephen over to me. “See those two girls sitting on the couch? They're really impressed with upperclassmen. You should go talk to them.”

Brandon glanced at the girls, then back at me. “I thought Dante liked one of them.”

I shook my head. “No, he likes someone else. In fact, it's a little awkward for him to have those two tagging around after him all night.”

Stephen smiled lazily. “I think we could help him out then.”

Brandon let his gaze rest on them, appraising them with a satisfied nod. “Maybe they'd like to catch a late movie. You know, as a favor to Dante.”

The two went over and sat by the girls, and I started a new CD playing. By the time the first song ended, the four of them headed out the door. I hoped Dante wouldn't notice, and if he did notice, that he wouldn't be too mad at me.

I walked toward the family room so I could talk to Charity, but before I made it there, three freshman guys cornered me. I may have been stuck there indefinitely, listening to their opinions on Final Fantasy, but after a few minutes Daphne emerged from the family room and came over to rescue me. She smiled at the guys, said, “Excuse me, I need Giovanna for a minute—you know, for girl stuff,” and plucked me from their midst.