So I walked up the aisle and through the bright lobby by myself, rejected from holding Parker’s hand, wishing I were holding Adam’s. It occurred to me that this sort of teen intrigue was exactly what I’d always dreamed about as a tomboy tween paging longingly through fashion magazines that might as well have been written in Russian, as much as I understood about hobo bags and ankle boots.
“Vader!” called the movie worker standing in the doorway of the stairs up to the projection booth. “You didn’t beat the shit out of him. You owe me your admission fee.”
“I was in there for two minutes,” Adam said through his teeth.
“That wasn’t the agreement,” said the movie worker.
I truly hoped the movie worker would get a clue and shut up soon. Adam seemed to grow taller and broader every second, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to sock Parker right there, if that was the deal Adam had arranged with the movie worker, and then to sock the movie worker for good measure.
“How long is the movie?” McGillicuddy snapped.
“An hour and forty-five minutes.”
“Then he owes you seventeen cents,” McGillicuddy concluded, ever the engineering major, even when he was completely off his rocker. “Lori, give him seventeen cents.”
“There were two of you in there,” the movie worker protested. “That’s…” He took way too long to add seventeen and seventeen.
“irty-four,” I helped him out. “But Parker and I paid full price, and we were only in there for…” I pulled out the new cell phone my dad insisted I spend my birthday money on before I went on a date anywhere with anybody. I glanced at the time. “Fifteen minutes. So you actually owe us…”
“Fifteen dollars and nine cents.”
I started to grin at McGillicuddy for this brilliant bit of figuring. Then I realized the voice hadn’t come from McGillicuddy. It had come from Parker.
My astonishment at bad boy Parker letting loose with this nerd-bomb was exceeded only by Adam suddenly shouting, “LET’S GO!”
e four of us walked all the way across the parking lot. When we got close to my dad’s car, I saw that Adam had parked right in front of it. He’d pulled up so close that the bumpers were within a millimeter of touching, because Adam was like that.
I turned to McGillicuddy and said, “I need to talk to Adam alone.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“e alternative is for Adam to get in a fistfight with Parker here in the parking lot. at is assault. You will have aided and abetted him by coming into the movie theater and dragging Parker out of there. How is that going to look on your job application to NASA?”
“Well…”
“Didn’t you say Adam and I could talk as long as you didn’t see it?”
He gestured to Adam’s truck, looking ill. “Go ahead.” He said something to Parker and folded his arms while Parker climbed into the front seat of my dad’s car. en my brother slid onto the hood of Adam’s truck with his feet on the bumper and stared Parker down. My brother had never acted like this before, except when we were kids playing war and the boys next door made him be the evil German.
I turned to Adam. “Get in,” I said as forcefully as I could. I climbed through the unlocked door of his truck, into the driver’s seat. I’d been in the driver’s seat all night, and it made me feel more in control of my little teenage life careening down the toilet. I wasn’t ready to give up that control now—especially in the face of Adam’s anger. I cranked the engine with the keys he’d left in the ignition and hit the buttons to close the windows. Bad enough that everyone in this town between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one could see us have this argument. I didn’t want them to hear it, too.
Adam rounded the truck and slid into the passenger side. Except for our positions on the seat being reversed, we’d sat exactly like this lots of times a couple of weeks ago, when we were only pretending to like each other. I wanted to do that with Adam again. I was trying to get us back there, and he’d sabotaged me half an hour in!
e second he closed the door behind him, I hollered, “What part of ‘I’m pretending to go out with someone worse so my dad will let me date you’ don’t you understand?”
He swung his head around at me, pinning me against the seat with his light blue eyes full of anger. “The part where Parker Buchanan puts his hand up your skirt.” I laughed because it was funny. It was something you would hear about a slutty girl in ninth grade or a popular girl in eleventh. I was neither.
Then I stopped laughing. Adam obviously believed this had happened. Where in God’s name had he gotten this idea?
I leaned forward and said carefully, “Adam. You saw Parker and me when you so rudely interrupted our fake date just now. He did not have his hand up my skirt. And you did not give us a lot of warning that you were coming, so I would not have had time to remove his hand from my nether region. Honestly!” I blushed at the very idea of doing this in a movie theater.
“Not in the theater. In the lobby.” Adam’s words were still closed and angry, but the fire in his eyes had cooled a few degrees. Possibly he was realizing that he was—gasp
—wrong.
“Parker did not have his hand up my skirt in the lobby,” I said patiently. “at makes no sense. Even ho’s do not let boys put hands up their skirts in the lobby when they have a whole dark theater at their disposal. Who told you that?”
He looked out over the parking lot, then gestured toward a group of three football players weaving among the cars. One of them stopped, put his hand over the top of the beer can he was holding, shook it up, and spewed it all over the hood of an outsized Lincoln Continental.
“Reginald Evans,” Adam said.
We both watched Reggie hightail it across the parking lot, away from the driver of the Lincoln, dodging cars like they were defensive tackles. I saw why he was the star running back on our high school team.
He was not, however, somebody I would trust for personal information about my friends. I said, “Reginald Evans can’t read. I was in Spanish with him last year.”
“Well, maybe he just can’t read Spanish.” Adam tracked Reggie’s path until he was looking at me again. “Miniskirt or what?” He did not sound appreciative as he said this. He sounded bitter.
“Or what?” I exclaimed. “In case you missed this when I explained it very carefully last night, I am pretending to be on a date with Parker, and I am dressed accordingly.”
“Oh, yeah? You never wore a miniskirt when you went out on a date with me.”
“I never went out on a date with you!”
“What do you call last Saturday night? You wore flipflops and my jean cutoffs.”
I huffed out my exasperation. “I call that hanging out all day at the festival on the lake, then spray painting our names on the bridge. Miniskirts are not appropriate attire for crawling around public structures. Somebody could look up my skirt and see my sexy panties.”
“If you tell me you are wearing sexy panties right now, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” I wasn’t challenging him. I was reminding him that his anger did not match anything he was actually going to do, and his own mouth was his biggest enemy.
He glared at me for a few seconds as my words sank in. en he sat back against the seat, let out a huge sigh, and fished in his pocket. He brought out his lighter and flicked it, watching the flame. “You didn’t even wear a miniskirt for that couple of weeks when you were pretending to date me.”
“That’s because you were taking me mud riding!” I pointed out. “Besides, I did wear a miniskirt for the first Vader party of the year.” It was even the same miniskirt I was wearing now, the only one I owned. It was my go-to outfit for intrigue.