How They Met, and Other Stories(6)
Author: David Levithan

“Tomorrowish?” Justin asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Tomorrowish.”

Arabella looked satisfied, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from what she’d just done or what I’d just done.

On the way out, she gave me a hint.

“You’re going to call him, right?” she asked.

And I said, yes, I was going to call him.

When we got to the first block, she took my hand. And for the rest of the afternoon, she rarely let go.

That night, Aunt Celia got a call from Elise. Aunt Celia’s side of the conversation went something like this:

“Hello, Elise…. Oh, it was fine…. Yes?…No! Already?…I see…. Yes, he’s right here…. That’s really amazing, isn’t it?…No, I’m sure he won’t…. I’ll make sure he does…. No, thank you, Elise. Talk later!”

Aunt Celia hung up, then shocked the heavens out of me by saying, “I hear you’re going on a date tomorrow.”

I still hadn’t called Justin—I figured waiting until eight was a good idea, for some arbitrary reason—but I figured that since it was going to happen, I could tell her, yes, I had a date tomorrow.

“You know,” Aunt Celia said, “Elise told me that Arabella was good, but I had no idea she was that good. Three days!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re the fourth of Arabella’s minders to have been set up by her. It’s remarkable, really. Maybe I should start taking care of her!”

“She didn’t set us up,” I said—but immediately I started to wonder. I mean, I was sure I’d had something to do with it. But maybe not everything….

“You’re not to quit on Elise, do you understand?” Aunt Celia continued. “The last girl, Astrid, did that. And that other girl—the one who ended up in India with her girlfriend. Poor Elise—she loses sitters faster than I lose umbrellas.”

“I won’t leave her,” I promised.

“And you won’t run off to India?”

“Just Starbucks.”

Aunt Celia grimaced. “Starbucks is so crowded,” she judged.

“But you do what you want.” She gestured toward the take-out menus and told me to order what I wanted for dinner. “I won’t be back too late,” she told me. “Nor too early, for that matter.”

I waited until she was gone before I took out my phone…and the green H&M wallet. I imagined myself filling it with lucky pennies and love notes and photobooth strips of Justin and me in playful poses.

“You’re such a goofball,” I said to myself.

I discarded the notion of waiting until eight and dialed his number. I already had my first line ready.

“You’ll never believe this,” I’d say. Then I’d tell him the whole story.

Except for the wallet. I wouldn’t tell him about the wallet.

I’d save that for an anniversary.

MISS LUCY HAD A STEAMBOAT

The minute I saw Ashley, I thought, Oh shit. Trouble.

You have to understand: I grew up in a house where my mother told me on an almost daily basis that until I got married, my pu**y was for peeing. In her world, all lesbians talked like Hillary Clinton and looked like Bill, and that included Rosie O’Donnell especially. My mother didn’t know any lesbians personally, and she didn’t want to know any, either. She was so oblivious that she stayed up nights worrying that I was going to get myself pregnant. There was no way to tell her the only way that was going to happen was if God himself knocked me up.

Luckily, I’d learned that the best defense against such hole-headed thinking was to find everything funny. Like the fact that all the sports teams in our school—even the girls’ teams—were called the Minutemen. All you had to do was pronounce the first part of that word “my-newt” and it was funny, like suddenly our football team had Tiny Dicks written on their jerseys. Or the fact that in the past calendar year, my mother had hit so many mailboxes, deer, and side mirrors that her license had been suspended. I chose to think she did it on purpose, just so I’d have to drive her around and hear her advice on boys, school, and how bad my hair looked. Hysterical. And, best of all for a quick laugh, there was Lily White—that was her name, swear to God—who certainly enjoyed kissing me in secret. But then when I brought up the idea of, hey, maybe doing it outside of her house, she shut down the whole thing and said to me, “None of this happened.”

Well, I knew a punch line when I saw one. So the next day at lunch, when no one was looking, I spilled her Diet Coke all over her fancy shirt and said, “None of this happened.” And the next day, my bumper just happened to ram into the side of her daddygirl Cadillac. I left her a note: None of this happened. And it didn’t happen the next day, either.

I, for one, was amused.

It was hard for me not to feel a little stupid about Lily White. Not because it ended or that it had gone on for three months, but because I’d started it in the first place. Lily was the popularity equivalent of a B-minus student—never the brightest bulb in the room, but still lit. She never laughed at a joke until she saw other people laughing at it, too. Even when we were kissing, she never seemed to admit that we were kissing—it was like I was saying something she couldn’t hear, and she was just nodding along to be polite. The first time we got together, it had less to do with romance and more to do with Miller Lite. It took just two cans for her to turn playful. We kissed; it was nice. And for three months we pretty much stuck to that. The kissing was hot, but Lily was pretty insistent about not letting the fire spread. Every time I tried to take her clothes off, she suddenly had somewhere else to be. Every time I felt her up, she acted like my hands were cold. And every time I tried to go near her pu**y, it jumped away.

I could lie and say I swore I was through with girls, but really I figured I needed to find someone better than Lily White. When Ashley Cooper came to town, I was primed.

She made one hell of an entrance.

She was ten minutes late to homeroom, because in her old school homeroom was at 8 and in our school it was at 7:50. Nobody’d told us there was going to be a new girl; they never do.

What I’m saying is: I wasn’t expecting her. Then suddenly there was this girl in front of our class, trying to explain to Mr. Partridge who she was, only Mr. Partridge hadn’t heard a complete sentence since he was eighty, which was a long time ago. He was telling her she was late, and that he was going to mark her down for being late. She made the mistake of asking him if he even knew who she was, and he shot her a look like she’d just told him that World War II was over. Then he shook his head and said, “Sit down, Antonia.”