I couldn’t help smiling at the gesture. He nodded toward them with that same “Go on,” cock of his head and when I swept them into my hand, I noticed the last thing he had written.
Make it up to you? I can get you front row seats.
My mouth, already full of red Skittles, dropped open. I only closed it again to keep all the candy from falling onto the floor. I think my eyes held the question—are you serious?—when I turned to him, because he smiled and dropped me a wink.
Glancing back at Woodall, Dale grabbed the pencil, daring to scribble again on the table.
#?
For a minute I felt faint again. There was a buzzing in my ears.
Instead of risking the table again, I grabbed my purse, digging through and finding a red pen. I reached over and took his hand, feeling calluses on his fingers as I turned it over, the touch of our hands making my body sing, so I could write on the back of it: Sara 263-3231
When I drew a fat, red heart around it, he smiled.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hey, thanks for the ride.” Dale looked at me over the red-and-Bondo-colored hood of my Dodge Dart in the late afternoon sunshine. In the light, his dark hair was a thick, blue-black—not unlike a certain rock star—and it made my heart skip in just the same way. The flash of his smile showed that dimple again, like a secret wink. “I’m sorry I got your notebook thrown out.”
“Forget it.” I opened the driver’s side door, tossing my notebook and purse in the back seat. “You got it back, that’s all that matters.”
We’d spent half an hour after class spraying the tables with Windex and wiping them down with paper towel. I was worried about Aimee. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot—I was her ride home. Dale offered to skip out and find her, risking Woodall’s wrath, but I wouldn’t let him. If I turned up missing, I knew she would catch a ride with Carrie and Wendy, if she didn’t make the city bus. I’d just have to hear about it later.
Woodall gave us both an extra assignment for good measure but had been thankfully been called to the office over the P.A. before he could finish his lecture, and that’s when we grabbed my notebook, leaving the Windex and paper towels on his desk, and took off, practically running through the empty hallways and breaking out of the back doors like two prisoners escaping a maximum security prison.
“Free at last!” Dale shouted, pumping his fist in the air, making me laugh as we made our way across the practically empty parking lot toward my beat-up car.
“So where to?” I asked as Dale got in and immediately went for the radio.
“Kensington Gardens.”
“What?” I turned to him, stunned. The coincidences just kept on coming!
“The apartment complex. Over on Wisteria.”
“Yeah, I know. I live there.” I pulled out of the nearly empty parking lot and turned right, heading toward home.
“I know.” Dale settled on the classic rock station, beginning to flip through the cassettes I had tucked into the console. “You laid out a lot this summer at the pool. Black and white bikini?”
“Oh.” I blushed. Our apartment complex had a pool and Aimee and I had spent a lot of our summer spreading ourselves with her “homemade goop”—a mixture of coconut and baby oil and God only knew what else—and working on our tans while we ran the batteries out on her boom box listening to Tyler Vincent. “Yeah, that was me.”
“And that was your friend, Aimee, with you?” Dale assumed. I just nodded. He was listing my cassettes under his breath as he looked through them. “U2. Duran Duran. Madonna. Rick Springfield. And of course, Tyler Vincent. Do you listen to anything that isn’t Top 40?”
“What’s wrong with Top 40?” I protested, feeling defensive about my music choices. “I never saw you at the pool.”
“I had a busy summer.” He opened the glove compartment, finding more cassettes inside, starting to flip through those too. “No time to swim.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting my band up to snuff.”
“Your band?” Did the similarities to Tyler Vincent never end? “What sort of band?”
“You like the Dead Kennedys?” He glanced down at his shirt, pointing. “The Cure? INXS?”
“Ummm…” I shrugged. I’d heard of them, but that was about it.
“Oh that’s right, you like Tyler Vincent.” He was teasing me, grinning, and I told myself to take it lightly, not to overreact, but I hated it when people made fun of Tyler Vincent.