by Jody Gehrman
“Double latte, lots of foam.”
“To go?” As soon as I said it, I desperately wanted to take it back.
He looked around. “Is there some other option?”
“No.” My blush-o-meter skyrocketed.
“To go, then.”
“No problem.” I set to work on his drink, shooting Amber Get over there looks the whole time.
She finally managed to trudge across our microscopic workspace to the window. “Hi.”
Her approach was so soundless and her greeting so loud that Mr. Sands, absorbed in his rearview mirror, actually flinched when she spoke. “Oh, hi!”
“Hi,” she repeated, as tonelessly as before.
“So, you still want to hang out this afternoon?”
A moment passed as I put a lid on his latte and held my breath, afraid to turn around.
“Yeah. Definitely. You?”
“Of course.” He lowered his voice to a confiding tone. “I’m kind of starved for conversation these days, myself. I’m looking forward to it.”
I waited for Amber—usually so adroit at flirtation—to fill the awkward silence with a pithy comeback. I thought maybe she was timing it carefully, like Mae West waiting a beat before she delivers her throaty invitation. Nope. Amber just stood there, blushing! I’ve never seen Amber blush. It was unnatural. Finally she said, “Yeah, well, me too.”
“Here’s your latte,” I said, sweeping in with his drink.
“Oh, great. Thanks.” He fished in his pockets for money, came out with a crumpled fiver. I took it from him and rang him up while Amber shuffled away into the shadows.
“That’s three twenty-five,” I said. “Here’s your change.”
“Keep it,” he murmured absently.
“Thanks, Mr. Sands!” I was all gee-whiz innocence. This guy has a talent for bringing out the socially retarded in all of us, apparently.
“You’re welcome. See you later on, Amber.” Then he put the MG into gear and cruised slowly away, searching his rearview mirror the whole time.
I turned to Amber. “What was that?”
Her cat eyes flashed.
“Don’t look at me like that! I’ve just never seen you so tongue-tied.”
She let out her breath like she’d been underwater for way too long. “I suck.”
“No, no, no. Let’s not be negative. Maybe less is more. He’s probably deeply intrigued by your mysterious, taciturn ways.”
“Taciturn?”
“SAT word. Sorry.”
“Shit. Now that he thinks I’m smart, I’m terrified to open my mouth.”
“You’ll get over that. You just got shy. I know it never happens to you, but most of us get like that at least once a week.” I turned to the espresso machine and started whipping up a couple comfort beverages: mocha for me, latte for her. “Oh my God, I never thought of this before, but you’re the same drink.”
“What?” She looked at me like I was insane.
“You’re both into lattes! That would be a really interesting way to gauge compatibility. You know, like astrology, Betty style. Ben likes milk shakes, though. What’s that mean?” I tried to remember what Sophie had ordered when she stopped by in her shiny birthday Mercedes. Then I pictured her in a fetching little parka, prancing through the snow, and I felt sick.
“I can’t do this!” Amber started banging her head gently against the wall. “Why am I cursed? I’m in love with someone I can’t talk to.”
“Don’t do that. Brain damage isn’t going to help your cause.”
“Geena!” She seized my arm so suddenly I almost spilled the shot I was pouring. “You have to help me! I can’t do this alone.”
“What do you want me to do? Hide under the table and feed you lines?”
She considered this a moment. “You think that’d work?”
“No. Okay? No, I don’t. Are you insane?”
“G, please.” Her green eyes were moist now. “Just this one time?”
I sighed, stirring an extra squirt of chocolate into my mocha. “You promise, if I help you out this once—and I’m not saying it’ll work—you won’t expect it next time? Because this could get old pretty quick.”
“All I need is a little backup—until we get to know each other. Then I can relax and be myself. I mean, I’m not stupid, right?” Her expression begged for reassurance. “Once he gets to know me, he’ll see that. Won’t he?”
“Of course.” I handed over her latte. I didn’t want to get more involved in this whole fiasco, but I didn’t want to let her down either. Maybe she’s right, I told myself. If I just get her through this first date, she’ll shed her insecurities and be fine. She might not even be so crazy about him after this—they have nothing in common, after all—and then we can just drop the whole thing.
“Please?” she whispered.
“All right,” I told her, “listen up. Here’s what we’re going to do . . .”
Eight hours later, I found myself sitting at La Plaza Cafe in dark glasses and Amber’s itchy, humiliating wig. My cell phone sat in my lap, ready for action.
About four feet away, at the next table, Amber and Mr. Sands were just sitting down, steaming lattes in hand. Luckily Mr. Sands took a seat with his back to me, and Amber positioned herself so I could see her face. She looked like she wanted to heave. Well, it was a first date; anyone would be a little on edge.
I thought of all the bad press MySpace gets—a pedophile’s buffet and all that. Ha! Sometimes underage girls are the predators, not the prey.
“So, Amber, you’re from Sonoma, right?”
Good, starting with very easy questions. I could hear Mr. Sands clearly, even though the place was pretty crowded. Luckily, there was no one I really knew in there; I recognized a couple freshmen girls sucking down milk shakes toward the back, but I couldn’t tell you their names, and they didn’t even look at me. Mostly it was populated by weekend tourists—middle-aged, paunchy wine people with expensive clothes and sour faces.
“Yeah,” Amber said.
“So, what do you think of Sonoma?”
“I like it. It’s kind of boring, but it’s okay.”
He nodded. “I know. I’m climbing the walls. How did you like Providence?”
I held my breath. Would she guess that’s where Brown is? “It’s . . . nice.”
That’s right, I urged inside my head. Vague is good. Keep it vague. Meanwhile I sent a text as fast as I possibly could: Prvdnc=cld, est cst, brwn.
She glanced at her lap, then looked up quickly. “It’s Brown. I mean, it’s cold.”
I cringed. This wasn’t going well. If I couldn’t feed her lines about the weather, how would I fare when we hit Kerouac’s original scroll versus the edited manuscript? What if he started talking existentialism or Dadaists or—oh, God. This plan had holes you could drive a truck through.
Just then my phone chirped and Mr. Sands turned his head slightly, but didn’t actually look at me. I studied the screen; it was a text from Ben. Miss you. What’s up?
Argh! Quickly I replied: Busy now, talk later.
I heard Mr. Sands chuckle. “Yeah, well, the East Coast tends to be that way—cold, I mean. What about Brown? You were a lit major, right? Did you like your classes? Are you going back?”
She nodded and chewed her bottom lip. Surely she could improvise with this one. “Oh, yeah. I liked it. There were so many great teachers and . . .” Her face clouded over momentarily, as if she’d lost her train of thought, but then she blurted out, “Smart people.”
Okay, okay. Not great, but not tragic. My fingers hovered at the ready, waiting for a more specific question. It was like some sort of twisted tag-team game show. I started to sweat under the hideous wig.
“I went to Berkeley for grad school, but I thought about Brown,” he said. “I hear they have a good lit program. What’s your area of interest?”
“Area of interest?” she echoed.
“Yeah—I mean, what sort of stuff do you like to read?”
I decided to bank on my “opposites attract” theory. Bronte, I texted her.
“Bront,” she said.
“Bront?” he repeated.
Bront-ay, I wrote.
“I mean, Brontaaay.” She drew out the second syllable so it sounded, if possible, even more ridiculous than Bront.
I wanted to slink under the table, but I was too busy texting. U lk Emily bst.
“Which one?” he asked, and I wanted to punch the air. Finally, I’d predicted one of his questions and gotten there first.
“Emily.”
“Aha. So you like that gothic stuff, huh? Ghosts and moors and all that?”
She laughed coquettishly. “I guess.”
Okay, this was better. They were teasing each other, at least. A tiny ray of hope. Ask abt JK, I wrote. It was risky, but I figured she couldn’t keep glancing down at her lap every five seconds or he’d get suspicious. We had to get him talking, and I knew nothing would get him on a roll like good ol’ Jack.
“Are you just kidding?” she asked.
Jack Kerouac! I wrote, my fingers jabbing at the phone violently.
She glanced down again, her expression slightly panicked. Then she slapped on a smile and said, “I mean, you weren’t kidding when you said you really like Jack Kerouac, were you? You . . . love his books, don’t you?”
Mr. Sands leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, God, don’t get me started.”
Please, I begged, get started. Get started and keep going; my thumbs are cramping.
And then, as if the gods of carpal tunnel heard my prayer, he started talking Kerouac. He got all wrapped up in it, just like he does in class. Amber only had to nod, and smile, and giggle on occasion. He required nothing more. Slowly, she relaxed, and even seemed to be having fun. She was his willing audience, his fascinated pupil, and under her adoring gaze he became more eloquent, more passionate than ever.
He’d been going for like twenty minutes without a pause. I figured I’d done my duty and could now skedaddle. Sure, it was fun sitting that close to Mr. Sands, staring at the back of his head, his perfect neck, the outline of his shoulder blades beneath his threadbare T-shirt, but after a while I got bored. I’d already heard all of this stuff in class more than once—about how Kerouac supposedly holed up in some Manhattan apartment for three weeks and wrote On the Road as a long, single-spaced paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper, blah, blah, blah. I signaled to Amber that I was leaving, tucked my cell phone into my pocket, and headed for the door.
“But you already know all this, right? I mean, you named your cat after the main character. What do you like about his work?”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Oh, I think he’s . . . a-amazing,” Amber stammered. Even from across the room, I could sense her confidence evaporating. “He’s so . . . smart.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Sands enthused. “God, it’s great to meet a girl who gets this. Most of the women in my graduate program hated Kerouac. They thought he was an overrated, self-absorbed misogynist.”
Whew, I thought. Close call.
“Why do you think so many women just don’t get him?”
Damn, another question. Could she sidestep it?
“I don’t know.” Amber paused. I turned around and saw her face going white. “Maybe because women aren’t really as into . . . cars? I mean, I like cars. A lot. I like . . . driving around.”
That was it. We were doomed.
On impulse I ripped off my wig, stuffed it the best I could into the pocket of my hoodie, and strolled over to their table. “Hi, Amber! Oh, wow, Mr. Sands. How’s it going? Fueling up on more caffeine, huh? Feeling twitchy yet?”
Mr. Sands looked momentarily put out, like he didn’t particularly want to run into one of his “yabie” students right then. Oh, yeah? I wanted to say. Well, for your information, you’re having coffee with my brainchild. I invented this Brontë-loving redhead.
“How’s it going, Geena?” He offered a small, tight smile, then his eyes moved to my sweatshirt and he looked disgusted. “What’s that?”
I glanced down and saw several tufts of wig hair spilling out of my pocket. I tried to stuff them out of sight. “Pet hamster. So annoying.” Random! “Hey, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Amber, did you drive here?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Could I get a ride? My friend ditched me and I’ve got to get home prontissimo or my mom’s going to kill me.” It was the best I could offer on the spur of the moment.
“Oh. Um . . .” She glanced at Mr. Sands, who didn’t look happy. “I guess I could.”
Yeah, you’d better, unless you want to wax poetic about how you’ve unraveled the mysteries of Kerouac because you “like cars.”
When we got out to the street, she looked at me. “That didn’t go too well, huh?”
I shook my head. “You think he could tell you were texting?”
“Don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Let’s not try this stunt again, okay? Totally stressful. Plus that wig itches!”
She giggled. “‘Pet hamster’! What was that?”
I couldn’t help laughing too. “I panicked!”
I’m a little worried about where all this is headed. Amber shows no signs of backing off, despite the obvious fact that they would make a hopeless couple. Somehow, she doesn’t seem to get that. It’s like, who cares that they can’t have a conversation? She’s still “in love” with him, whatever that means.
What would it be like if Mr. Sands and I could just talk? What if we could order coffee, sit down, and have a real conversation—not as student and teacher, but as equals? I’d love to tell him why women don’t get Kerouac. (Hello? Maybe because Kerouac’s female characters are about as three-dimensional as paper dolls?) Mr. Sands’s and Amber’s differences go way beyond the usual Mars versus Venus; they’re not even orbiting the same sun. The only real compatibility here is between my mind and his.
Not that I care about that, really. I mean, I have a boyfriend. Of course, he’s secretly in love with a beautiful beeatch who’s determined to come between us. Also, he seems more interested in my boobs lately than my mind. Still, he’s my boyfriend, and Mr. Sands is my English teacher.
Must remember that.
Monday, January 26
9:20 P.M.
Amber came over today after school. The first thing she did was check her MySpace page, naturally. Mr. Sands had already messaged her again. We read it together as she squeezed my fingers, breathing so hard I feared she’d hyperventilate.
Hey Amber! Had fun yesterday spending time with you. Too bad we got interrupted, I really enjoyed our conversation. Want to meet up again some day this week?
Amber went into such a state after reading this, I thought I’d have to restrain her. She started swiveling her hips like a demented go-go dancer, singing this Propeller Head song we always listen to at work. “He’s got a nice body. He’s wearing velvet pants. He’s got a nice body. He’s wearing velvet pants.”
“He’s got a comma splice in there,” I grumbled.
She stopped and looked at me. “What?”
“The guy’s an English teacher! He should know better.”
“What crawled up your butt and died?”
“I’m just saying—grammar matters.”
She raised an eyebrow and stared me down until I had no choice but to look at her. “You’re mad,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m not mad.” Okay, she was sort of right; I wasn’t happy. But the compost pile of feelings inside me couldn’t be described as simply “mad.”
A part of me felt smug. My plan had worked. We’d fobbed her off as an Ivy League sophisticate, and that was all my doing. And mixed in with my smugness lurked this tiny sprout that was more swoon than I-told-you-so. After all, Mr. Sands isn’t just asking Amber out on a second date. He’s interested in Amber’s body and my mind, which is flattering—at least, uh, half flattering.
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nbsp; But the thing that makes me grumpy is I do all the work and she gets all the credit. Mr. Sands sees me as this annoying “interruption,” while she gets to be Sex Goddess avec Mega-Brain.
“Okay, fine. Don’t tell me. What do we write back?” Amber hopped onto my bed and continued her manic go-go routine up there, singing that ridiculously repetitive song again. “He’s got a nice body. He’s wearing velvet pants.”
My cell rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Ben. I just couldn’t deal right then, so I turned it off. The situation with Mr. Sands required my full attention. I had to disentangle myself before it got even more complicated.
I looked at Amber. “Maybe you should take it from here.”
She froze. “What do you mean?”
“I just feel sort of weird, writing him for you.”
“You don’t have to write him for me.” She sounded insulted. “Just help me out, like you did before.”
Ha! Just help me out?! Who was she kidding?
“Okay, let’s do it this way: You write it, then I’ll take a look. Like an editor.”
Her expression told me this wasn’t what she had in mind, but by then her pride had kicked in. “Fine.”
She settled down at the computer, and after a while her fingers started tapping at the keyboard. I dug out some history homework and tried to lose myself in a chapter on JFK, but I found Amber a little distracting. She kept trying different positions as she sat at my desk chair—straddling it backward, perching on it in a sort of squat, hugging her knees. Every two minutes or so she’d let out a gusty sigh. Finally I closed my book and peered over her shoulder.
“How’s it going?”
She shook her head. “I suck at this, G.”
I looked at the screen.
Hi Rex! How are you! I am fine! I would luv another meating with you!!!
“Okay,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “That’s a good start.”
She looked up at me, cringing. “Can you fix it?”
I really couldn’t resist. Amber needed me. Also, I detest bad punctuation. Excessive exclamation marks are particularly revolting, like a squad of crazed cheerleaders infusing every sentiment with mad perkiness.