PHOTO: Laura Kranz

 

“What are you doing after rehearsal?” 

I ask, then jam my tongue between my teeth. She doesn’t study her Docs or check her smirking bando friends. She doesn’t smile or frown. She watches my eyes. I’m staring into two of those blue runway lights. She’s stopped on the first step of the music room so she has to tilt her head down. Not how I planned it. One sarcastic comment would cover my butt, free her to laugh off my question, and guarantee I’d never ask again. I bite my tongue harder.

“Guinevere, come on!”

“Go ahead, I’ll be a minute,” she tells Mandy and Therese without looking up. I’m ignoring the audience. Trying to. Their giggles make the waiting torture instead of terror. Everyone else has gone. I feel them hesitate.

Why won’t they leave?

Finally, she says, “We’re done at six o’clock, so I’m just going home to have dinner with my family,” like she’s answering a rhetorical question. I picture a mahogany table with green cloth napkins, crystal and china, my cousins’ house on holidays back when we still visited them. My face burns as if from flames jumping out of my collar. I could still quit this conversation and walk away, singed but intact.

“What are you up to after that?”  Or I could splash on a little gasoline.

Then she smiles. Amused, but also…? The gigglers can’t see it. I loosen the grip on my tongue.

“I’m doing my homework, of course,” she says, shaking her head, making her white-blonde ponytail brush against her left cheek. But still she watches me. What else can I ask, “after homework?”  Why not just “want to go parking?”

“Oh, sure, well maybe I could call y—”

“Would you like to come over for dinner?”

I want to freeze my life here, her invitation in the air I just inhaled, before I have to consider meeting her parents or dealing with mine, before I have to form any more words with my now-bleeding tongue. I would also enjoy calling her friends over to hear me accept, but gloating might not make the impression I’m after.

“That sounds good. Sure.”  Ask her a stupid question now or risk humiliating myself? “Is it…I mean, is your family more, um…”

“Is my family more what?”

“Are they more formal?”

She smiles again, then laughs like tiny wind chimes. I can stand to have her laugh at me now. She can laugh at me all night.

“Than what? No, not really. A coat and tie will do,” she waits to see if I bite. “I’ll be home by six fifteen. We eat at six thirty. Don’t be late.”  She laughs again—why?—then goes up the stairs. Her friends have disappeared. Just as she reaches the doorway, she looks back.

“Thanks for asking, Paxton,” she says. “Don’t forget to move.”

She closes the door.

I sprint down the hall, across the gym, and through the emergency exit. No alarm sounds, of course.

“YES!” I scream at the sky.

“YES!” I shout at the cherry Thunderbird parked just outside the door. Jeff has reclined all the way back in the driver’s seat and cranked Def Leppard. He still jumps. “YES! YES! YES!”

“You’re bullshitting me,” he says as I slide in.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I pant. “She totally shredded me, but I’m wearing my happy face to spare you. She invited me for dinner!”

“No, she did not. You’re—” He jerks his monogrammed stick into first and the tires shoot gravel. “She just broke up with Chuck last week. You’re going to her house? When? Why?” he demands.

“Tonight, Buddy. Tonight. Because I asked her out,”  I say. We cut in front of a white pickup. It comes within six inches, but Jeff’s ignoring traffic, waiting for a better answer. “I have no idea why she invited me. But she did. And Chuck was three months ago.”

I pull on my seatbelt.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jeff demands.

“What?”

“You just buckled in.”

“So? If I could ground your car to protect us from lightning, I would.”  Jeff peers under his shade at the blue sky. “In fact, I better drive. No, I’ll walk. Could you pull over?”

“Jack-O, I’ll let you out now,” he says, rolling down my window and grabbing my shoulder while topping forty in the school zone.

“Hey, don’t get pulled over, I can’t be calling her from the courthouse.”  My voice may have registered the slightest note of sincerity. Or panic.

Jeff clenches his teeth at me, his version of a smile.

“You sonofabitch. She really asked you over, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, Man, she did. Thanks for waiting.”

“You kidding? That banshee scream alone was worth every second.”

The bass line of “Photograph,” Jeff’s favorite song, thuds against the windows. He turns it up the last notch, which he has labeled “11.”

*

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