“You want me to just walk into her bedroom?” I said, genuinely shocked.
“Well, like I said, knock first. This ain’t the goddamn Stone Ages.”
I stared at Mr. Robertson. Slowly, I closed my sweaty palms into determined fists, and I nodded. I marched up the stairs, across the hallway, and up to Tegan’s door. And then I knocked.
I didn’t have to wait long for Tegan’s response—maybe a half millisecond. “FUCK OFF.”
I opened Tegan’s door and closed it behind me. I was swallowed in the dim neon glow of lava lamps.
Tegan’s room was decorated in the intellectuals and poets of the hip-hop scene—Saul Williams, Illogic, Aesop Rock, even that asshole genius Sage Francis. Her desk was cluttered in sheets of scribbled paper, and her nearby trash can was overflowing in crumpled-up paper balls. I could only guess what she was writing. Her own lyrical prose, maybe? Whatever it was, she seemed determined to write it.
My gaze shifted to Tegan’s bed. Her body was curled up tight, completely submerged beneath the blankets. The blanket lump was trembling.
She was crying.
“Tegan?” I said, timidly.
The blanket lump froze. The sobbing stopped. And then her blanket flew off, and she bolted upright. Her mascara was an inky mess at the corners of her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from glaring the hell out of me.
“Jesus, Cliff!” she said. “What the hell are you doing in my room? Get out!”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the fear was rolling back into my throat, choking me.
“Look, I don’t care what you have to say, okay? I DON’T CARE!”
“When I came over to your table today, I meant to ask you on a date.”
And just like that, the Tegan-storm dissipated. She stared at me for a long, hard moment.
“What?” she said.
The silence that followed was pervasive. The silence needed to be stopped.
“Can I just say everything that’s on my brain right now?” I said. “Like, one hundred percent honesty? All judgments on hold? No questions, comments, or concerns until I’m done?”
Tegan continued to stare, but her gaze softened—at least by Tegan-standards. She scooted to the foot of her bed. “Fine.”
I took a deep breath. “I think I like you. I think I like you a lot. And I didn’t think you liked me until Aaron said that you did, and then he was telling me that he thought you were the hottest girl at school, and at first I thought it was some kind of weird reverse psychology, and maybe it was. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he really does like you. I can’t get the possibility out of my head.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Not done. Anyways, he gave me that money to take you on a date, and so I came over to your table and, as you know, did the exact opposite of asking you on a date. But the stuff I said came from somewhere, and in some stupid, backward sort of way, it made sense to me.”
“Wait. What made sense?”
“I’m getting to that. I want to date you, Tegan. I really do. But at the same time, Aaron is like my best—and only—friend in the world. I feel like my life suddenly has meaning ever since that asshole stumbled into it. And as much as I want to date you—and maybe do more than just date you—well, if I’m being completely honest, I feel like you deserve someone better than me. Aaron, on the other hand…well, he’s Aaron Zimmerman! And I mean this from the very deepest chamber of my beating heart when I say that Aaron could be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I exhaled climactically, indicating the finale of my rant. “Okay, I’m done. You can talk now.”
“Hundred percent honesty?” said Tegan.
“Yes,” I said.
“No questions, comments, concerns or shit till I’m done?”
“Yes?” I said, a little more hesitantly.
Tegan stood up from her bed, grabbed me by the shirt collar, and pulled me down—simultaneously raising herself on her toes. We met halfway, and she kissed me. She kissed the hell out of me. I breathed her in, and she didn’t smell like McDonald’s this time. She smelled like spring and summer and autumn and winter having a seasonal orgy on my olfactory receptors.
Our lips parted, only inches away.
Our animal instincts and hormones assessed the height situation, and we compensated. Tegan leaped onto me, and I caught her by the thighs, and we tangled into each other. Our lips melded together—kissing like we were drowning, and the only way we could breathe was through each other’s mouths.
I lost my balance and fell backward—fortunately, onto her bed. We laughed, and she rolled off of me, but not too far. She was still touching my side. Our fingers brushed, and her index finger interlocked with mine.
“So…” I said, breathless. “I guess that’s a ‘no’ on the Aaron idea?”
Tegan’s smile was an infinite curve, pushing two infinite dimples into her cheeks. “Well…it ain’t exactly a secret that I have a thing for that big, curvy ass o’ yours.”
This made me laugh.
“What about you?” she said, jabbing me with her finger. “What does the Neanderthal want?”
“Well, now I’m feeling really selfish and I want you all to myself.”
“Hmm,” said Tegan. Her smile’s infinitude increased to impossible proportions. “I don’t think I would be terribly opposed to that.”
The next morning, I woke up to something buzzing outside my bedroom window.
I glanced at my alarm clock, which wasn’t set to go off for another four minutes. Normally, I would have loathed those four minutes. Waking up for school was generally ranked among my least favorite things to do—right up there with going to school and doing schoolwork. However, I wanted to go to school for two reasons:
1. Tegan.
2. Telling Aaron about Tegan.
Oh man, did I need to tell Aaron about Tegan.
The thing outside my window kept buzzing and vibrating and rattling against the window. What the hell was that thing?
I lurched out of bed and shuffled over to the window, rubbing and blinking the sleep out of my eyes. And then I glanced outside.
It was a cell phone. There was a fucking cell phone—a basic, archaic flip phone—sitting on the outside ledge of my windowsill. It continued to vibrate against the window, gradually sliding across, as if begging to be let inside.
I opened the window and glanced at the name of the caller:
Aaron Zimmerman
I flipped the phone open. “Aaron, why the hell am I talking to you through a cell phone that I found outside my window?”
“Because,” said Aaron, “you are now the proud owner of a no-contract, cheap-ass cell phone which I am currently paying for with my college fund. My parents don’t know that yet. But let me put an added emphasis on the cheap-ass nature of this cell phone. Like, I’m pretty sure AT&T is giving me money to take this piece of shit off their hands.”
“You bought me a phone?”
“Um, yeah. How are we supposed to do the will of God and bring balance to the Force and shit if you don’t have a cell phone? Teamwork is all about communication, and communication is all about teamwork.”
I had no response to that.
“I stole that last line from Coach Slater,” said Aaron. “He said that before every game. I hated it. I don’t know why I said it.” In a detached, commentary tone, he added, “That awkward moment when you realize you’ve been brainwashed.”
“Wow,” I said. This was a genuine sort of wow, not the sarcastic wow that I used liberally to elucidate the stupidity of mankind. I was completely, utterly, majestically wowed. “Um…thanks.”
“Don’t thank me just yet,” said Aaron, “because the best part is yet to come!”
“Oh no.”
“Tomorrow, Friday night, you are cordially invited to my house for a—Wait for it. Waaaaait for it.—A SLUMBER PARTY!”
I blinked, slowly trying to wrap my brain around this.
“Are we going to watch rom-coms and paint each other�
��s nails?” I asked.
Aaron laughed. “Okay, maybe slumber party is the wrong term. But I figure we’ve been trying so hard with the List, and failing so epically, we need a night to regroup. I still wanna talk about the List, but we’re going to have fun tomorrow. That’s why I currently have Quentin Tarantino’s entire filmography on Blu-ray, we’re gonna order a large stuffed-crust pizza of your choice because I will only eat the stuffed crust, and we will stuff Twinkies with Reddi-wip, deep-fry them, and binge on the greasy little bastards, because tomorrow will not be a success if we finish watching The Hateful Eight before dying of cardiac arrest.”
“Aaron, if I wasn’t so completely in love with Tegan right now, I would marry your ass.”
“Okay, no bullshit—what happened?” said Aaron. “You talked to her for, like, one second, and she stormed off! And then you disappeared from school before I could give you a ride. Like, seriously, this is why you need a cell phone!”
“I may or may not have kissed Tegan Robertson,” I said. “On the lips.”
“What?”
“It was big and fat and sloppy and amazing.”
“Shit. I’m picking you up, and you better tell me the whole story in the car.”
“CliffsNotes version in the car, Peter Jackson Extended Edition during our slumber party.” I cringed just saying slumber party out loud. “Um, can we please call it something other than a slumber party?”
“How about Testosterone-Filled Man Party of Supreme Mantacularness?”
“Yeah, never mind. It’s a slumber party.”
Contrary to plan, I managed to give Aaron a rather sprawling, epic, Peter Jackson–ish retelling of last night. Aaron was pretty good about keeping his eyes on the road, but they got bigger with each detail.
“Son of a bitch,” said Aaron. “Cliff, you are a hero to mankind.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“And I am so jealous of that kiss. Like, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m a little bit horny right now.”
“Dude. You do know that you can have any girl at school, right? Any girl! I bet you could drop down on one knee and propose to the first girl you see, and she would say yes. You wouldn’t even need a ring. You could have a Ring Pop, or an onion ring or, like, ringworm even. She would still say yes.”
Aaron didn’t say anything. In fact, his smile faded a little bit.
I shot him a slanted glance. “What?”
Aaron forced his smile back into place. “Nothing. I’m just happy for you.”
Not that I’m an expert on happiness or anything—my experience has usually been associated with the other thing—but this was definitely not nothing.
But I wasn’t a nosy bastard. I let it go.
And then I started having a mild panic attack. About Tegan. About what a boy and a girl do the day after they’ve kissed. Were we boyfriend/girlfriend now? Was I supposed to just walk right up, say, Hey, beautiful, and kiss her right on the lips again for the whole world to see? Put my arm around her like I owned the place?
Aaron parked, we exited, and started the long walk along the chain-link fence to the entrance of the HVHS school grounds.
Frankie, Tegan, and the gang were at their corner, right between us.
“Help me,” I said.
“Huh?” said Aaron.
“What do I say to her?”
“Who?”
“Tegan!”
“I dunno. Whatever you want to say to her. Whatever comes naturally. You guys obviously had a connection yesterday. I seriously doubt that all just disappeared overnight. Follow your instinct.”
“Right now, my instinct is telling me to run away.”
“If you even try that, I will follow you with my car and I will hit you. And I will keep hitting you with my car until you talk to your girlfriend.”
“But is she my girlfriend? We never really had that talk. We just kissed. Aaron, I don’t know how this works. You know girls. Tell me something useful.”
“Be yourself?”
“That’s the sort of bullshit advice they give on the Disney Channel!”
It wasn’t until now that I realized how hard my heart was beating, like a V-12 engine, hammering blood through my veins like the shit was nitrous oxide. I was breathing so frantically, the oxygen only seemed to be making it halfway to my lungs, never quite getting there. I felt dizzy.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I think I’m hyperventilating. I need a paper bag. I can’t breathe.”
The chain-link fence rattled behind me. First, I noticed that Aaron wasn’t walking beside me anymore. Then I saw him scaling the fence like he was a spider monkey or Spider-Man or just a regular old spider. He dropped down on the other side and grinned at me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m helping you out,” said Aaron. “It’s always easier to talk to a girl when you don’t have a third wheel cramping your style.”
“Third wheel? She’s with her brother and their two drug-dealing friends! This is already a five-wheeler!”
Aaron winked—like he was some sort of friend and not the biggest traitor in the history of friendkind. And then he walked away.
“Aaron!” I said. “Dammit, Aaron. Get back here!”
Aaron entered the glass double doors of HVHS and abandoned me to the cold, harsh world of girls and talking to them.
I approached the corner until I was standing a good, safe conversational distance away from Tegan. She was laughing at something Carlos said. And then she noticed me. My mouth opened, like I might actually have something more thought-provoking to say than Phluuughflamphbloooeeeaarrrghhh, which was all that was really coming to my brain at the moment.
And then Tegan said the most Tegan thing she could possibly say.
“Heya, Neanderthaaaaaaal. Ow ow! Mmm, I like me a slice of that caveman ass. That hunka juicy man meat.”
Some things never changed. And that was hardly a bad thing.
I couldn’t help laughing as she stroked her invisible goatee, leaned to the side, and proceeded to scope out “that caveman ass” in the most conspicuous way possible.
“Why you always playing hard to get, baby?” said Tegan. “You wearin’ them panties Mama likes? You wearin’ that Neander-thong?”
So much for playing it cool. I was laughing so hard, I was practically hyperventilating.
And then Tegan’s eyes lit up and she smiled that infinite smile with those two dimples that were irrationally sexy.
I didn’t have a chance to say Phluuughflamphbloooeeeaarrrghhh or any variation of it, thank God, because Tegan gave me a hug cleverly disguised as a flying jump attack. Her arms wrapped around me, and her legs wrapped around me, and I didn’t have time to catch her anywhere but by her butt, and she didn’t seem to mind that at all.
“Hey,” she said with her face inches from mine.
“Hey,” I said back.
I didn’t realize how much I was smiling until I kissed her. I, Clifford Hubbard, kissed her!
It was the only thing I could do. The universe demanded it.
Maybe Aaron knew what he was talking about after all.
It wasn’t that the List wasn’t as important to me anymore. It was. It was my purpose. My lifeline. I may not have fully understood the List, but what it lacked in comprehensibility, it made up for in the simple fact that it felt right.
But suddenly, my life purpose was being distracted by my hormones.
I didn’t have any classes with Tegan. This resulted in my introduction to a form of torture I didn’t even know existed. When the lunch bell finally rang, I had a weird thought:
Whom would I sit with?
I was funneling with the student cattle into the lunch room, and by some weird chance, I happened to spot Tegan and Aaron simultaneously—Tegan standing by the wall with Frankie, Jed, and Carlos—and Aaron sitting by himself in the spot that used to be equipped with an invisible quarantine force field.
Okay, here were the facts as I knew them:<
br />
1. I had to sit with Tegan, otherwise I was just inviting awkwardness into whatever it was that we had going on. Also, I would die because I already appeared to be experiencing a severe case of Tegan withdrawal.
2. I would be the Supreme Overlord of Assbutts if I didn’t sit with Aaron. I mean, he was kind of the reason Tegan and I even had a thing to begin with.
And then Tegan saw me. And her face lit up all over again, and then she pointed at Aaron, which was weird, until I realized that she wasn’t, in fact, pointing at Aaron, but rather she was pointing to the extra lunch tray at his table, kitty-corner from him, right next to where I always sat. And then Aaron saw me, and he proceeded to give me the most obvious wink in the universe.
Here was the thing. Even though Tegan was sitting with us, small talk didn’t even exist in the Aaron Universe.
“So I’m sure Cliff already told you that I saw God,” said Aaron, “and that he gave us a List of things to do to make Happy Valley High School a better place.”
I was eating a taco. This was only a pertinent detail because I immediately proceeded to choke on said taco.
Tegan stopped chewing. She swallowed awkwardly. And then she nodded—slowly, like she was still considering her answer. “Yeah, I mighta heard something ’bout that.”
Well, shit on a stick.
“The whole school’s kinda talking about it,” said Tegan as an afterthought.
Shit. On. A. Stick.
Aaron didn’t seem fazed. He didn’t even blink.
“Good,” he said.
“I don’t know if good is the word I’d use,” said Tegan.
“What word would you use?”
“Um. Crunk, maybe?”
“Oh, c’mon. You don’t believe in God?”
“I mean…I don’t not believe in God. If Tupac can come back to life, I’m sure Jesus can too.”
“Wait, what?” I said. “Tupac is dead, isn’t he?”
“Oh nuh-uh,” said Tegan. She shook her head and shot me a deadly serious look. “Tupac is alive. Trust me.”
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 11