Miss Taken (6 page)

“He did?”

Ohmygosh, she was such a pushover.

“Yeah.” I smiled. “He’s a really great
teacher, and a really nice guy too. His wife died a few years back,
you know.”

“I remember. It’s nice to hear he enjoys
healthy cooking.” I could see the gears working in her head. Then,
“Why are you just telling me now?”

Ha. I was prepared for this. “Oh, because I
made one and brought some in today. But he remembered the time I
made it in your class and he was so happy to have some more. I just
wanted to pass along his compliments.” Okay, a slight fib.
Hopefully, they won’t get together to compare the minor details of
the story.

Mrs. Rochel was still smiling. I worried her
face might crack. “Well, thank you for stopping by, Jane. That was
very nice of you to take the time just to tell me that.”

Never once the entire semester had she ever
addressed me as ‘Jane.’

“He has lunch sixth period.” I threw it out
there.

I could see the gears working again. She
nodded slightly. “Don’t you have a class to get to?”

I worried I had been too obvious by telling
her when M. Waddell had lunch, but nothing ventured, nothing
gained.

It was a good thing that I had my little
project with Mrs. Rochel and M. Waddell to focus on, because
otherwise I would have spent far too much time thinking about Kyle.
As it was, I was making too many unfavorable comparisons between
him and Ned. Even when I wasn’t in class with the boy five times a
day, I seemed to run into him everywhere else. This did not help my
decision to not be interested in him, nor did Ned’s continuing to
be grounded, which he was again this weekend.

Fortunately Friday was C day. We managed a
fabulous makeout session and even squeezed in a little math (I
insisted) to help me get through the long, lonely weekend
ahead.

Strange but true scientific fact: Fireflies
use their light to attract a mate. Some species of female fireflies
have learned to imitate the mating patterns of other types of
fireflies. They flash a welcome and then eat the poor fool who fell
for it.

Many behaviors are successful across
different species.

Hannah and I meet up for tutoring most
Saturdays. We had settled on the neutral zone of the library.
Hannah didn’t want to come to my house and risk running into my
brother following a slightly humiliating incident at a school
dance. (Okay, so I had had a hand in that as well, but we’d been
able to move on.) She was adamant that I not come to hers. Of
course this made me extra curious to see the place, but she stood
firm.

We talked radical roots for a little while
when Hannah veered abruptly to, “So Kyle’s pretty cute, huh?”

Although it wasn’t a total non-sequitur with
his flaming orange hair, I was not pleased with her for bringing
him up. I hadn’t thought of Kyle for the last ten minutes at least.
“Hm?”

“Oh, come on,” said Hannah, with an
unsettling glint coming into her eye. “He’s, like, totally into
you.”

A warmish glow spread across my mid-torso
from liver to pancreas. Give away nothing. “What are you talking
about?” I mumbled to the tabletop.

“Please. He’s crazy about you.”

I had to scoff to cover my utter delight.
Hearing such an assertion from a master of the dating world was
hard to resist. “What makes you think that?”

Hannah showed her teeth in the way that used
to frighten me but I now know is just her smile. “I can tell. Trust
me. He’s way cuter than...lots of boys. You’re lucky, Jane. Guys
like you just for being who you are.” Hannah said this last bit a
little wistfully as she fluffed her perfectly highlighted golden
hair that just about every male on the planet was willing to do
anything to be allowed to touch and almost every other female on
the planet would be willing to kill for.

It would have been easy to be insulted by her
insinuations. That I wasn’t pretty enough to deserve all this
attention. And that Kyle was cuter than Ned. But flattery works on
a weak mind and I was just hormonal enough to want all the
attention from boys that I could get.

“You should totally go for him.”

“I’m with Ned!” I protested, loudly enough to
get a few dirty looks from the surrounding tables.

Hannah shrugged. “Trust me, nothing makes
guys hotter for you than keeping them guessing. Treat ‘em like crap
and they’ll be crawling all over you.”

Although what she was recommending went
against Robin Jane’s code of honor, advice from the dating guru was
not to be lightly thrown away.

Then a little alarm bell went off inside my
head. “If he’s so cute, why aren’t you going for him?”

“Oh, much too young. And the freckles,”
Hannah shook her head. “Not my type. But he’s cute enough
for...he’s cute. Plus, he’s really into you. Go for it. You only
live once.”

Once again, the implied insults could have
prickled. He wasn’t handsome enough for Hannah but he was good
enough for me. But when we got down to brass tacks, what she was
saying was perfectly, if painfully, true.

I was smart enough to know not to commit to
anything. “Well, we’ll see,” I said to end the conversation. “But I
don’t want to mess up anything with Ned. Now when you have an
equation that looks like this, you have to work backwards...”

I don’t know if it was the equation or Ned
that caused Hannah to snort. I did not ask. I really didn’t want to
mess things up with him. After all, the devil you know is better
than the one you don’t.

No, no, no. Ned is not a devil. He’s a really
sweet guy and we get along great...most of the time. And we have
lots of fun together...except that we rarely get to see each other
outside school. And his mom is a fashion designer whom I want to
hire me for a job.

Oh, dear. Perhaps I do need to clarify my
intentions toward Ned.

Hannah’s dad gave me a lift since my parents
were off at some social event at the university where my dad is the
physics department chair. It turns out department chairs have to
attend a lot of social functions, which Dad says he did not bargain
for when he took the job. It’s a good thing he has my mom to help
him get through, although she uses them to shamelessly promote her
own causes.

I walked up the steps and there sat Diana on
my front porch. She was trying to make it look like she was having
a good time, but it wasn’t working. Perhaps this was because it was
cold enough to see her breath practically forming a frost mustache
on her face. And even with that hideously ugly faux
dead-animal-looking coat, I was sure she could feel the cold of the
metal bench through it and her amply padded bottom.

However, I was feeling magnanimous toward all
the world after Hannah’s pep talk regarding Kyle.

“Hey, Di,” I said, exuding chumminess,
“What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing,” she replied. “Just, you know,
hanging out.”

I waited to see if she was going to elaborate
as to why she would choose to walk two miles in frigid weather to
sit by herself on a metal bench on my front porch. No explanation
was offered.

“Have you been waiting long?”

A funny little noise came out of Diana’s
throat. “Umm, no. Not too long.”

“Are you, by chance, waiting for Trey?” Diana
is totally in love with my brother, which is all my fault and
related to the same incident at the dance where Hannah’s
humiliation took place. I had asked Trey to do Diana a favor by
dancing with her (and dysing Hannah) at the winter formal, and now
she thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread. I tried to break
it to her afterwards, but then Trey went and accepted to go seedpod
hunting with her - twice - so now she won’t see reason.

Diana pressed her lips together, perhaps to
keep that odd noise from escaping again. “No, not really.”

I didn’t think I could withstand a forced
march to collect native plants. “Come on. Let’s go up to my
room.”

“Okay,” Diana agreed with alacrity.

As soon as I shut the door behind us, Diana
started to cry.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry,” Diana sobbed. “I
can’t believe I’m crying about this, but I thought....” Anguish
obliterated Diana’s thoughts.

“Hey.” A hug seemed to be called for. We
hadn’t been friends for that long. I gave her a few tentative
back-pats. “It’s okay. Tell me what happened.”

“It’s just, I know I told him this Saturday,
but when I got here, he was totally surprised, and he said he was
busy and then he left, ohohOH...” Diana went off on another crying
jag.

“Trey stood you up?” I snapped. Although the
truth needed to come out, I was indignant on her behalf.

“Well, he said we never agreed, but we did! I
remember clearly telling him as we passed each other in the hall
between seventh and eighth period that I would be over this
Saturday at one, and I was sure I saw him nod that he heard me...”
Diana paused as if to replay the scene.

Oh, boy. I could just picture it: Diana sees
Trey walking down the hall. He nods hello to her, oblivious to the
fact that she is speaking to him because he is too busy replaying
layup shots inside his head. Either that or Diana’s question got
distorted as it bounced around inside his hollow cranium.

“Diana...maybe next time you should call
first, you know, to double check?”

Her error finally seemed to sink in. Robin
Jane averts a crisis in the world of love. Look out Hannah, Jane
knows a thing or two about relationships herself. Maybe I should
rethink my moniker.

Venus Jane doesn’t really roll off the tongue
though.

Diana was still set on the nature hike. I
wasn’t interested in freezing my butt off to collect a few seeds,
so she went on her own. I went down to the basement so I could
relax on the laundry pile and think about everything that had
happened this week.

The only really new item was Kyle. From him
stemmed everything else. He was like one of those tree graphs. The
contact lenses that I had begged and pleaded for for two years had
caused exactly no commotion. They were just a freestanding,
unconnected dot on the board. But a freckle-faced boy has made all
kinds of things happen and a million new things to think about.

To begin with, Kyle was the only one who had
had anything nice to say about my contacts. So there’s even a line
connecting them to him. He was the one who coined the phrase, Your
eyes look like the Caribbean sea, or if he didn’t coin it, he said
it in a way that sounded original and not cheesy at all. To own the
truth, his compliment gave me a shot of confidence, and that
doesn’t even include the frissons of excitement I feel every time
we share a joke or brush up against each other, even though it is
totally unintentional and not at all flirty, at least not on my
side.

It was due to Kyle’s perceptive nose that my
plan to help M. Waddell got underway. To be sure, he has caused a
fair amount of tension with Ned and Diana. Hannah’s advice has
given me some things to think about, but it all comes back to Kyle.
So there is Kyle at the center of my graph with all these other
things popping off him.

Hm.

When I put it that way, the center of my
graph is probably not where he belongs.

A makeout session with Ned was needed to put
things back in their proper order.

I phoned Ned to see if he could get himself
ungrounded, even for a half an hour. My heart still pounds every
time I call over there. I’m terrified of having to talk to his
bigshot father.

Fortunately Ned picked up, but he didn’t
sound too positive on the idea of getting out of the house. His dad
had him cleaning the basement. That actually sounded kind of
hysterical to me since they have a cleaning lady.

Ned didn’t find it quite as entertaining so I
had to cut short my snorts of laughter.

“He’s just doing it to make me miserable, the
bastard.”

“Well, do your best. I promise, it’ll be
worthwhile,” I tried to put a lot of innuendo into it by making my
voice throaty.

“Are you coming down with a cold?”

Disgruntled that he never gets things the way
I mean them, I told him no and hung up.

I bet Kyle isn’t cleaning out his basement
today.

Jeepers, I really need to redraw my
graph.

Time passed so slowly that afternoon, I
almost wished I had gone with Diana just to have something to do.
Finally around three, even the laundry pile was starting to get
uncomfortable. I wrapped up and left a note that I was going to the
reservoir. I didn’t think Diana would still be there, but it would
do as well as any other destination.

Walking around the deserted paths through the
woods, I relived the enchanted evening when Ned brought me here
after the winter formal, and occasionally casting half an eye on
dried stalks of milkweed.

I wasn’t tired of walking but at four o’clock
it was starting to get dark already which was making the
temperature drop. Turning my boots toward home, I wished Ned would
magically show up with his warm car and whisk me away somewhere for
a fabulous gourmet picnic. Exercise in cold air gives a body an
appetite.

Some clouds moved in and the woods were
rapidly growing darker. The crunching of my feet on the frozen
ground was making a terrific racket. I couldn’t hear anything, but
a little piloerection on the back of my neck told me there was
someone nearby. I stopped walking. I could definitely hear the
sound of feet that did not belong to a squirrel or deer. It spooked
me. I walked faster.

Strange but true scientific fact: Hormones
released during the “fight or flight” response cause pupils to
dilate, increases respiration and makes you want to pee.

When I could see the edge of the woods, I ran
flat out. My head was down and so I did not see the body until I
collided with it. I am very embarrassed to admit that I
screamed.