Snark and Stage Fright (18 page)

“You should kiss him,” Leila advised as she grabbed a purple marker while two of the boys made gagging noises.

“He’s just … a friend,” I told them as I settled them in their chairs.

I just had to accept that myself, apparently.

***

Bright and early the next morning, after showing my ID, I sat down in the cafeteria. Soon Dave plunked down next to me and handed me a whole set of Number 2 pencils and a sharpener wrapped with a red ribbon.

“A little good luck present,” he said. “Not that you’ll need it.”

“Thank you. I think I can use all the luck I can get!”

As the proctor began passing out the exam forms, Dave switched off his phone and said, “You’re gonna do great,” then added a moment later, “We should celebrate tonight.”

“You’re assuming there will be something to celebrate,” I whispered.

“You were starting to get the hang of it. Plus you’re a better guesser now. So I’ll pick you up around six?” He smiled at me and put his hand over mine for just a second.

I nodded and then spent the first fifteen minutes of the exam wondering what I had just agreed to, exactly. Dave had never put his hand on top of mine before.

I could hardly concentrate at first, but I made it through the exam, and even though he finished earlier than I did, Dave waited on the steps of the school to see how I had done.

“You looked like you were answering those math questions at a respectable speed,” he said as we walked to his car in the parking lot.

“Yeah, thanks to you! Last year I spent the whole time allotted for the math portion curled up in a ball under the table.”

He laughed and offered me a ride home, but I wanted to walk so I could text Tori about tonight.

I hit her number in contacts before he had left the parking lot and texted:

@GeeBee: I think I have a date tonight.

@TorBarr: So glad you and M finally got over it! Yea! :) :) :)

@GeeBee: Not with Michael. With Dave.

@TorBarr: Dave?

@GeeBee: You know. Punk Rock Dave. Alternative paper Dave. My FRIEND Dave. At least I think it’s a date.

@TorBarr: Do you want it to be?

@GeeBee: I guess I should want it to be . . .

@TorBarr: Go have fun. GTG. Trey’s on his way. <3.

Tori’s question stuck with me all afternoon as I read some poetry for English class and thought about what to wear that night. Did I want this to be a date? As I sifted through all of the shirts in my closet, I realized that since breaking up with Michael, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of going out with someone else. I liked Dave. He was smart and thoughtful, but dating someone else seemed unnatural somehow, like deciding I was going to ditch dry land and go live under the sea. By the time I decided on a three-quarter-sleeve red shirt, I still hadn’t decided, and still hadn’t even when I opened the door to Dave, who wore a checked short-sleeve shirt and his usual obscure punk band’s T-shirt and had his hair gelled into the barest hint of spikes. It was such a shock I almost laughed. He looked conservative enough to have fit in at one of Leigh’s church picnics.

“Look at you! So presentable!” I cried, and he actually blushed a bit. I assured him, “You look great.”

I suddenly felt so awkward and nervous and could tell that he did, too. We didn’t talk much in the car as we drove up to Ashworth, where there are lots of fun places besides the club the Pigs had played at. We tried on clothing at a vintage place and I tried to convince him to buy a long purple coat and fuzzy pink fedora that made him look like a pimp in a bad 70s movie, but he wisely refused. Then we read the menus on the windows at all the restaurants from places I didn’t even know had their own cuisines. I was intrigued by the idea of Tibetan food, but Dave really wanted to take me to a pizza place that has vegan pies. He ate without complaint or ridicule, even though vegan cheese doesn’t exactly melt so it can look kind of unappetizingly lumpy. But then, Dave was a good sport, always.

Over dinner, he asked me what had happened to Cassie on the away game bus last night.

“Nothing. I think she might be disappointed, though, not to need a whole squad of school superheroes protecting her.”

“So none of the guys tried anything?” He chuckled as he started in on his third slice.

“Nope. Some of the guys actually sat the whole time with their hands folded. Some even wore bow ties, ya know, to prove they’re gentlemen. But most of them just ignored the girls, I think—which the girls have mixed feelings about, I am sorry to say.”

He nodded and wiped some sauce off his chin, saying, “Well, you did the right thing by calling them out.”

“Ah, but Michael’s the one who saved the day for reals. He made more heroes this week than Marvel comics.”

Dave laughed and sipped his Coke, declaring, “If you were a superhero, you’d be the Vegan Avenger, and you’d p0wn villains by throwing flaming blocks of tofu.”

“Ha! Thanks.” I stirred my soda with my straw and added, “And thanks for all the math help. You deserve to be canonized or something for that. Saint David of the Logarithms or something. Your superpower is patience.”

“I told you, it was my pleasure.”

We finished up and walked around Ashworth, stopping in used bookstores and an old-fashioned actual vinyl record store, where we combed through the bins and he pointed out bands I needed to hear and I pointed out that I had no turntable and he explained in detail why vinyl is superior to sound while I kept uncovering Toots and the Maytalls and Yellowman records and thinking of Michael and his incongruous love of reggae. I wondered what he and Diana were doing at the moment, but pushed that thought out of my head and asked instead, “So is punk British or American?”

Dave’s whole face lit up. He was still explaining punk’s roots in the Velvet Underground on the drive back to Longbourne and he took so much obvious pleasure in the subject I felt guilty for tuning him out a little. His forehead would scrunch up over his glasses as he fought for the precise words to capture a band’s sound or its importance. While I admired his passion and attention to detail, it also reminded me of my dad when he gets going on Charles Dickens and his continued importance to literature and the human race, in general. And as I thought about my dad and his favorite writers, I thought of Forrest Ritter, and then Cape Cod, and then Michael again. As Dave beat time on the steering wheel and explained why so many American punk bands had gotten their start in England, it got harder and harder not to think about Michael.

I interrupted again to say as we pulled into town, “Thank you for taking me to Ashworth. I never get up there, except for a Pigs show, and it’s so much more interesting than Longbourne.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And Longbourne doesn’t want to be interesting. It wants to be respectable and picturesque.”

As he walked me to the front porch, I declared, “Longbourne is that old great aunt at the family reunion no one wants to talk to,” and he laughed.

But when we reached the front door, he stopped laughing and we hesitated for a moment, as we were both hyperaware of what was about to happen. We stood long enough for me to really look at him and notice for the first time that his eyes are a really unusual color, a sort of green, sort of brown, sort of gold, almost, and I noticed again the faint string of freckles across his long straight nose and thought he was cuter than I had ever really noticed before. But when he leaned in, his face closer to mine than it had ever been, I felt my heart clutch up with anxiety, not anticipation, and thought,
Oh. He’s going to kiss me
. Not, as I had in that split second just before the first time Michael and I had smooched,
Oh! He’s going to kiss me! Oh my God oh my God oh my God!

Dave kissed me, and I kissed him back. I said “good night” and he said “good night.” And then he turned away and walked to the car, waved, and got in. I was glad he hadn’t lingered, as awkward as it had been to see him scamper away like a nervous squirrel.

And as I got ready for bed, I kept remembering kissing Michael, and how amazing that had felt. I don’t know why one person’s kisses would be so much better than another’s. There can’t be much difference in technique, really. I mean, it’s not like Dave was slobbery like a dog, or like he bit me or rammed his tongue at me like Forrest Ritter had. It must be about how you feel about the person kissing you that makes the difference. And I guess I just didn’t feel that way about Dave, even if I should have. It was a nice kiss, but that’s exactly what it was. Nice. Pleasant. Nothing more.

I climbed into bed with my cat Teeny curled against the backs of my knees. I started crying, quietly, as I realized that the next day I was supposed to go to Michael’s to work on the project, and I would have to act like every single cell in my body didn’t want to rip him from his chair and kiss him senseless.

15 
If I’d Had a Molotov Cocktail Handy…

The next morning, I got up early and was seated at the breakfast table with the laptop when Cassie came in, yawning and swishing her ponytail. She yanked open the fridge door and stood there for a long time looking at its contents, like the tastiest thing in the world would reveal itself through the sheer force of her looking. I just went back to my Google search of women and the Russian Revolution so I would have some idea what I was doing before I went over to Michael’s house. Despite our own full-scale Civil War re-enactment in the hallway days before and despite the fact that I gritted my teeth so hard I thought they’d be ground to stubs every time I saw him with Diana, we still had to work together.

Cassie took the seat across from me, eventually, with a peach in her hand and said, “Thank you for making me tell you about the whole away-game thing, about what some of the football players were doing to us. Michael’s letter really helped. Nobody tried
any
thing Friday. So you should tell him thank you from me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” I asked, and I swear I didn’t mean to sound as crabby as I did.

She bit into her peach and made a slurping noise. “How was your date last night?” she asked.

“Okay, I guess.” I was trying to keep my eyes on the screen in front of me, but I could see that she had on her slyest smile.

“Just okay,” she repeated. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and informed me, “That’s because you still want Michael.” I looked at her and my eyes must have spoken my sadness in a way my mouth wasn’t, because she said in the gentlest voice I have ever heard her use, “You need to tell him.”

I whispered through the lump in my throat, “I did. About a month ago.” I didn’t want to remember that conversation we had outside Cameron’s party in too much detail because each time I did I felt like I was imploding, like one of those buildings that’s demolished by crumbling in on itself. “Besides, he’s with Diana DeBourgh now.”

Cassie nodded sadly and said, “She’s pretty.”

I got up and grabbed a blue sweater that Tori had left behind and my bag of books and notes to tote on my bike over to Michael’s house.

“Sucks to be me, right?” I said, and she was still nodding when I walked outside.

When Michael’s mom opened the door, she gave me a hug that I managed not to cry through before she ushered me into the kitchen where Michael was sitting with his laptop at the big butcher-block island. I was glad that we’d be working in here; I don’t think I could have handled having to sit on his bed in his room without copious weeping. I’d remember another room, another bed, too clearly, and how I could not have blown our relationship up more effectively if I’d had an incendiary device.

“Hey, George,” Michael said, looking up from something he was writing on a yellow legal tablet. He offered me a cup of tea, my cooler weather beverage of choice, and the fact that he knew this made my heart wobble in my chest a little.

I watched him put the copper kettle on the burner and thought of the term “lovelorn”; I decided it should be “loveworn” instead because I suddenly felt so worn out, so utterly exhausted, by my missing him despite his remaining such a presence in my life that I wanted to crawl home to my bed. He wore a light red sweater that gave his skin a little flush, and even from my perch at the island, I could smell that he had just washed his hair. In fact, a few damp tendrils curled themselves into arabesques at the back of his neck. I wanted to touch them.

“A little sugar, right?” he asked. “But we have no almond or soy milk.”

“That’s okay. Can I sneak a splash of regular milk?”

His eyes grew round in mock alarm. “Really? Didn’t you call milk ‘cow mucus’ once?”

“Okay, forget it. I’ll take my tea black,” I grumbled, embarrassed, as I pulled my laptop from my bag and set it on the counter.

He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Georgie, if you want milk, I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

I fluttered at the sound of his nickname for me, which I’d lived without for over a month now and still missed every single day.

“No, you’re right. I said it,” I admitted. “I’ll take it black.”

He shrugged and handed me a mug that looked like someone had made it—someone talented, like his mom, not a kid for a school art project. It was thick and blue with a lot of lighter blue and white swirls dancing around it, kind of Greek in design.

Figuring there was no point in prolonging the agony of being physically so close yet continents apart emotionally, I asked, “Soooo … you’re working on Alexander Kerensky for the project?” as I blew across the top of my mug. “He was the moderate, right?”

“Right. The one who did
not
get an ice pick in the head in Mexico after hanging out with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. That was Trotsky.”

“Trotsky was a moderate?” Wow. I was even further behind in my research than I’d feared.

“To the Leninists, yeah.”

I nodded as if the fact had momentarily slipped my mind and opened up my laptop to which Cassie had affixed a “Go LHS Minutemen!” sticker that I couldn’t peel off. We sat across from each other with our laptops back to back and clicked away pretty companionably for a while, sharing websites that looked promising, including the surprising existence of one called “www.bolshevik.org.”