The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) (2 page)

“Crap, she’s coming over here,” Gordon said, sitting up straighter.

“I know. Just act cool,” I quickly replied.

“Hey guys,” Jeannie said with a smile. “What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I replied with a shrug.

She sat down beside me, while one of the girls from seventh grade sat next to Gordon. I was pretty sure he must be wetting his pants by then.

The other three girls stood in front of us, chewing gum and blowing bubbles.

“Jack,” Jeannie said, nudging me smoothly. “I wonder if you could do a favor for us.”

I looked up at the three girls who stood before me and had no idea what to expect. “Sure. What is it?”

Jeannie leaned forward to look at her friend—the one sitting on the bench next to Gordon. “Go ahead, give it to him,” she said.

The other girl handed me a letter in a sealed envelope. I took hold of it and turned it over. There was nothing written on it.

“This is Millicent,” Jeannie said. “She just moved here from Arizona.”

Gordon and I both turned to her. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she said, blushing.

I turned back to Jeannie. “What’s this for?”

Jeannie leaned closer and whispered in my ear, as if she were about to tell me an important secret. “Millicent has a thing for your brother. Will you give him that letter?”

Ah
. So it wasn’t really
me
she had come to see. As always, it was Aaron they were after.

I turned on the bench to glance over my shoulder to where my brother was kicking a soccer ball around on the field with the other grade nine boys.

“Sure,” I replied as I slid it into the backpack at my feet. “I’ll give it to him tonight.”

The three girls in front of us giggled and whispered to each other excitedly, then urged Millicent up off the bench and dragged her off to giggle some more on the other side of the court.

Jeannie sat for a moment, watching them. I didn’t know what to say. I had a lump of disappointment in my gut the size of a watermelon.

Then she stood up.

“For the record,” she said, sliding her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, “Millicent’s the one who likes your brother. Not me.”

I had to squint to look up at her because the blinding sun was directly behind her head. “That’s cool,” I replied.

She hesitated. “I’ll see you later, Jack.”

With my stomach doing flip flops, I watched her walk away and rejoin her friends.

“Did you hear what she just said?” Gordon asked. “She practically came right out and said that she likes you.”

“No, she didn’t,” I replied, trying to act as if it didn’t matter, while my insides were on fire, because I thought maybe…just maybe…it might be true.

“Yeah, she
did,
” Gordon argued.

Just then, Jeannie glanced back at me again, and smiled.

Oh, man
. I was a goner. “Do you really think—?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gordon replied. “You should ask her out.”

“I don’t know. What if she says no?”

“She won’t. She really likes you. Can’t you tell?”

Still not ready to believe it and risk rejection by asking out the prettiest girl in the school, I decided to play it cool and wait for more confirmation, in some form or another.

When the bell rang and we all crowded around the doors to go back inside, I received that confirmation. Jeannie nudged her way closer and passed me a note.

I immediately unfolded it. As I read it, I found it difficult to keep my balance going up the steps. It said:
Walk home with me after school?

All I could do was stop and turn to her. Feeling completely lost in those bewitching blue eyes, I said, “I’ll meet you outside when the bell rings.”

“Great.” She smiled, went inside, and disappeared down the hall.

I don’t remember a single thing any of my teachers taught me that afternoon because I was lovesick the rest of the day.

Chapter Four

Thank God Aaron and I were no longer confined to the same bedroom. We’d always fought constantly, even as preschoolers, so Mom and Dad eventually separated us and converted the attic into a bedroom for Aaron. Besides being away from me, he preferred it because he could play his music loud and no one would say a word, while Mom was always yelling at me to turn down the volume.

It wasn’t often that I ventured up those creaky wooden steps to Aaron’s domain. He was surprised to see me after supper that night, with an envelope in my hand.

I didn’t enjoy giving it to him. Part of me just wanted to burn it, because the last thing I wanted was to hand him something that would make him even more conceited than he already was—because girls always fell for him and he knew it. I hated to watch it happen, but at least in this case, it wasn’t Jeannie who had asked me to deliver a love letter. It was that other girl.

Aaron was seated at his desk doing homework. When he saw me appear at the top of the stairs, he turned in his chair and set down his pencil. “Hey,” he said, no doubt surprised to see me.

I flicked the envelope through the air like a paper airplane, because I absolutely refused to deliver it to his desk like a servant. “This is from a girl in seventh grade,” I said. “She asked me to give it to you.”

I didn’t wait for Aaron to open and read it. I just turned around and descended the stairs, went back to my own room and spent the rest of the night dreaming about Jeannie Morrison—and wondering if she might want to walk home with me again the following day.

o0o

My prayers were answered. Jeannie let me walk her home the next day, and every other day that week. Gordon kept asking when I was going to kiss her, but I couldn’t imagine how or when I could attempt something like that, having never kissed a girl before.

By the time Friday rolled around, I didn’t know how I would survive the entire weekend without seeing her, so I wrestled up the courage to ask if she’d like to go to a movie with me on Saturday night. It was the first time I’d ever asked a girl out on a real date, and I found myself wishing that I’d cleared it with my parents first, to make sure they would let me go, and to ask if they’d drive us.

But my lack of planning didn’t matter in the end, because Jeannie made a face. “I wish I could,” she said apologetically, “but I’m going to Mark Hennigar’s party. Are you going?”

Struggling to scrape my dignity off the sidewalk, I shrugged indifferently. “I’m not invited.”

Her face lit up and she spoke with enthusiasm. “I’m inviting you right now. You should come!”

I felt awkward about it because Mark Hennigar was in the eighth grade. He was into sports like hockey and football. I didn’t know him at all and I suspected there wouldn’t be too many friends of mine at the party.

“You could bring Gordon,” Jeannie said. “Mark won’t mind. I’ll tell him you’re both coming with me.”

Still feeling weird about it, I said, “What about your friends…Kimmy and Natalie and that new girl?”

“They’re all coming, too,” Jeannie said. “See? Everyone’s going to be there.”

We started walking again, but I still felt unsure. “I don’t know.”

“Please, Jack? It won’t be the same if you aren’t there. I won’t have any fun.”

Then it happened. She touched my arm, gave it a squeeze, and it sent an electric jolt of exhilaration through my whole body.

“Come on,” she said, bumping me with her shoulder. “Say you’ll come. I really want to slow dance with you.”

Slow dance?

And that was that. My heart was on the ground. I was in a daze.

“Okay,” I heard myself saying. “What time are you going?”

“Kimmy’s parents are dropping us off at eight.” She began to back away as she strolled into her driveway, clutching her books to her chest in the most charming way imaginable. “So I’ll see you tomorrow night?” she said hopefully with a delicate raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, I’ll see you then.”

“Awesome.”

I turned to walk up the hill to my house at the top of the street, resisting the urge to take off in a run, because I wasn’t sure if she might still be watching me through her front window. As always, I wanted to play it cool.

o0o

“You should totally kiss her tonight,” Gordon said as we walked through the dark neighborhood toward Mark Hennigar’s house, a few blocks away from where I lived.

“I don’t want to rush it,” I said. “If it happens, it happens.”

“Don’t be a chicken. My mom always says that you don’t get anywhere in life by waiting for stuff to happen. You have to go out there and grab what you want.”

I shook my head at the ground. “I doubt she was talking about me kissing Jeannie Morrison for the first time. I’m definitely not going to ‘grab’ her.”

Gordon continued to try and persuade me. “Mom was talking about
everything
. Besides, if you don’t kiss Jeannie, she’ll think you’re not interested. And remember, she’s in the eighth grade. She’s used to older guys who know what they’re doing. She’s going to expect more from you than a peck on the cheek.”

I doubted most of the guys in the eighth grade knew what they were doing any more than I did, but Gordon did have a point. I didn’t want Jeannie to think I wasn’t interested, but I had no idea how to get further than a peck on the cheek. It made my stomach roll with nervous knots.

When we rang the doorbell, Mark’s dad greeted us at the door, told us to keep our shoes on, and sent us downstairs to the rec room—a wide open space, completely dark except for a few strings of colored Christmas lights draped from the ceiling. A long table with a plastic checkered tablecloth stood against the wall with bowls full of chips and cheese sticks. Beneath it, there was a cooler on the floor, filled with ice and canned pop. Bon Jovi’s
Wanted Dead or Alive
was blasting from a stereo in the corner, and though it was precisely 8:00 p.m., we realized we were early. There were only three girls in the room, seated on the brown sofa. We had no idea who they were, and we were too shy to go and talk to them.

“Let’s get something to drink,” Gordon said as we moved across the room to the snack table. We busied ourselves with cheese sticks and cola, and looked up uneasily when Mark Hennigar came bounding heavily down the stairs with about six guys.

To our immense relief, he gave us a nod and said, “Hey guys,” before he leaped onto the sofa next to the girls and made them laugh and squeal.

The other guys went to change the music, and I felt about as comfortable as a zebra in a raincoat.

Then the doorbell rang. I heard the sound of laughter and conversation upstairs. About thirty seconds later, the basement was full of kids—but still, we didn’t know anyone very well.

I never felt so uncomfortable in my life. I just wanted to sink through the floor and crawl home. Gordon looked pale and fidgety.

Then the doorbell rang again.

I watched the stairs expectantly.

My heart dropped.

There she was.
At last.

Jeannie and her friends came hurrying down. She paused on the bottom step, scanned the dimly lit room for a moment, and found me. Our eyes met and her face lit up with a smile. She waved at me, and suddenly I had no desire to leave the party. Somehow I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be.

Looking back on it now, I recognize how true that sentiment was—even though the night turned out to be as disastrous as any night can be when you’re thirteen years old, and head over heels in love with the prettiest girl in school.

Chapter Five

Shortly before 10:00 p.m., a bunch of kids went outside to sit on white plastic lawn chairs arranged in a circle on the grass, even though it was the middle of October and too cold to be sitting outside without a jacket.

The cold didn’t bother
me
of course. How could it, when I was feeling on top of the world—because five minutes earlier, Jeannie and I had slow danced in the dark, and I was brave enough to kiss her—to make out with her, actually—to the tune of Lionel Richie’s
Hello
.

Afterward, Gordon questioned me insistently about what it was like, but I didn’t want to talk about the particulars. It was private, between me and Jeannie. She and I were an item now, and I was already planning when and how I would ask her to junior prom, which was still an entire school year away.

Gordon and I sat down on a couple of chairs under the deck because we didn’t know anyone on the grass. I checked my watch. My parents expected us home by 11:00, and it was almost 10:30.

Then the most unexpected thing happened. That new girl, Millicent, spotted us and approached, stomping up the grass as if she were on a mission. Gordon sucked in a breath, and I wondered if he might have a thing for her, because she was kind of cute. Not beautiful like Jeannie, but there was something awkward and nerdy about her, which Gordon probably found attractive.

“Hi Jack,” she said, standing in front of us.

“Hi Millicent,” I replied.

She shifted uneasily and looked around. “Are you having fun?”

“Yeah, it’s an okay party,” I replied, even though on the inside, I was bouncing up and down on a mental pogo stick.