How to Be Brave(22)

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

“Have a really great Thanksgiving.” He turns around and heads toward the door, and I’m no longer a shaking leaf. I’m a frozen mass of stone. What did I just do?

Liss runs up behind me and practically slams me into the locker. “What did you just do? Tell me you just did number thirteen.”

“I think I just did number thirteen,” I respond, shaking myself out of my catatonic state.

“So…?” she says with bated breath.

“Not this weekend. Not next weekend. He’s out of town. But in the future, I think,” I say. “Definitely, most likely, most probably, sometime in the near distant future.…”

“Number thirteen! Number thirteen!” Liss is dancing and screaming this as we make our way toward the door.

I try to shush her, but it’s no use. She should have been the one to try out for cheerleading. The girl sure can be enthusiastic when she really wants to be.

I, too, am proud of myself.

I did something other than eat a brownie laced with hallucinogenic substances.

I asked out Daniel Antell.

And he almost said yes.

*

This is what it was like:

My mother,

my father,

their electric laughter,

another time,

another life.


She saw everything inside his eyes.

Theirs was a simple love story

like all the others that have been written.

That electric something caught them, energy through every cell, a swelling pulse, a heavy throb, burrowed inside the thick muscles of the human heart.


I think I understand.


He sits now with a TV that is on, always on,

his thumb on the arrow, the volume turned up,

but it can’t drown out the echoes of her laughter—

it doesn’t fill the room enough to make it silent inside his head.





6

After school, Liss and Evelyn come with me down to my dad’s restaurant. It’s a Friday night, but it’s slow and so he lets us mess around behind the counter, and we make a ginormous ice-cream sundae: three scoops of chocolate, two scoops of strawberry, one each of vanilla and butter pecan, hot fudge, caramel sauce, extra whipped cream, extra peanuts, and five cherries (one for me, one for Evelyn, and three for Liss), all piled into an extra-large ceramic bowl that’s usually reserved for family-sized salads.

We all cozy up in the front booth. “So Georgia Askeridis asked out Daniel Antell,” Evelyn says, taking a big bite of strawberry. “She finally went for it.”

“You should have seen her, Evelyn.” Liss scoops up a glob of whipped cream. “She was suave. All cute and giggly, tilting her head, and being all flirty. It was like she’d done it a thousand times.”

“I was not.” I shake my head and take a bite of the sundae. The girl exaggerates. “And, not so loud. My dad’s right there.”

He’s only six feet away at the cash register. The last thing I need is for him to hear us. We’ve never had a direct conversation about it, but I can bet with 100 percent certainty that he would not approve of me even thinking about guys, let alone asking them out. I overheard my mom and dad talking one night down the hall after he became very upset over my obsession with Robert Pattinson in the sixth grade. “What will people say, all this obsessing over a grown man? She’s only eleven years old!”

I didn’t know what people he was talking about. I didn’t know who was watching or even caring about what I did or who I had a crush on. But my mom ignored that part of it: “John, what are you going to do when she actually starts to want to date? Are you going to send her to the convent in the village?” I couldn’t hear his response, but I could pretty much guess what it was. A solid yes.

“You were, too.” Liss crinkles her nose at me. “You were great.”

“So, like, now what?” Evelyn asks, her mouth full of caramel sauce. “Did you set a date for after Thanksgiving or what? What’s the plan?”

I shake my head and scrape up some hot fudge. “I have absolutely no idea. I mean, do I wait to ask him again, or do I wait for him to ask me? We didn’t really figure out what would happen when or where. It was more of like a sure, maybe, we’ll see.”

“Well, if I had waited for Gregg to ask me out”—Liss throws a cherry into her mouth—“I’d be single and go-karting right now.”

“I think I’ll wait. I mean, maybe he was just being nice?”

“Come on, Georgia,” Liss says. “Stop that.”

“Seriously, though,” I say. “Isn’t there a fine line between being brave and being a stalker?”

“She’s got a point,” Evelyn says.

“How’s it going with Gregg?” I ask, changing the subject because I’m getting sick of hearing about me, myself, and I. “It’s been, what, three months already?”

“That’s a record for me, isn’t it?” Liss smiles. “It’s going so well. Like really well. He’s just the sweetest guy. Really.” The girl is smitten.

“So, dirty details?” Evelyn’s obsessed with all things scandalous. At first it was kind of fun, but it’s starting to get old fast.