Biggie

by Derek E. Sullivan

  “I was surprised you were up.” That’s what my head came up with. I’m an academic genius, and what my wonderful and well-disciplined brain told my lips to say is I was surprised you were up. Wow! I hope she walks out the door.

  “What?” She turns and looks at me confused. Annabelle must have come in here a hundred times and never heard a word of small talk, so I don’t blame her for wondering what the hell is going on today.

  “You accepted my follow request at three in the morning,” I say. “I guess I thought you would be asleep.”

  She leans back against the glass, placing enough pressure to open the door a sliver. “I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t sleep. That’s why I wasn’t in school.”

  “Well, thanks for approving me,” I say.

  Just when I think she’s going to walk out and head off to work, she steps forward.

  Stand up straight and look her in the eye. She wants to talk. We’ve practiced this.

  “Does your house really have an indoor baseball field?” she asks.

  Oh. She wants to chat about Mom’s house. I release a breath of both relief and disappointment. “Well, it’s really just a baseball diamond under a tall roof. You only have to hit the ball one hundred twenty feet to reach the wall.”

  “Wow, that’s cool,” she says. “Can I get a tour?”

  “What?”

  “My aunt is teaching me all about the family business and she wants me to write some practice listings and you live in the most interesting house in town.”

  “It’s not that interesting,” I say.

  “Whatever, it must be the only house in Iowa with its own indoor baseball field.”

  “I guess.”

  “I would love to see your house, get a tour,” she says, still waiting for an answer.

  I’m in the middle of the best conversation I’ve ever had. Not only am I talking to her, but she wants to hang out. What do I do? Do I quit while I’m ahead and invite her over for a tour or do I push it? Should I see if she’ll agree to something else? Heck, I might have adult-onset diabetes at age seventeen, so I’m due for some good luck. Maybe, but I chicken out and say, “Sure, come over anytime.”

  “Cool. Thanks, Biggie.”

  She heads for the door and I close my eyes, open my mouth, press the heels of my hands to the counter, clear my head, and speak. “How about Friday and we get some food first?”

  I’m not going to lie. Annabelle’s face turns pale and her freckles disappear. I wait and wonder if she’s going to yell “Gross.” Time ticks away, while Annabelle stares at my wide-open mouth and eyes. My hands clasp together, expanding veins and arteries to the point where they almost break through my skin.

  “I’m not going on a date with you,” she says, something I figured out a few seconds back. “I just wanted to see the indoor baseball field.”

  “No, no, no,” I say. “I just have a gift certificate for two to McKellen’s and I don’t want to be a loser and take my mom. That’s all. Not a date. I won’t tell anyone, I swear. I saw you with Mike. Remember?”

  I’m relying on my email surveillance. I know she loves McKellen’s but getting caught with me would be a disaster to her reputation.

  She stands there, one hand holding open the glass door. “Well, Mike’s a cheating asshole,” she says, “so I’m not with him. But just because we broke up doesn’t mean I’m going out with you. I don’t even know you that well.”

  I nod violently. The excitement of her breakup with Mike only makes my blood race faster through my diabetes-filled body.

  “Pick me up from Molly’s at five on Saturday,” she says.

  “What?” I say, “So you’ll go to McKellen’s?”

  “It’s not a date,” she says. “I just like the popovers. Don’t tell anyone about this, you got it?”

  “I don’t talk,” I remind her.

  “And I swear if you tweet that we’re going out or that you’re my boyfriend, I’ll never talk to you again.”

  Chapter 13

  Small-Town Hicks

  I have spent the last four years getting ready for this night. I must have read a hundred Annabelle emails and written twenty pages of notes and time lines in my green binder. I know some people would call me a stalker or a voyeur, but without that information, I have no shot with a girl like Annabelle.

  Yesterday, before I mentioned the certificates, she gave me a look that screamed, “You’re a weirdo,” but by releasing a little bit of the intel I have gathered over the years, I’m two minutes from picking her up for a date. Okay, she doesn’t think it’s a date, but I put together an online survey with some of my Reddit buddies and forty-five of the sixty-seven people I explained the situation to say it’s a date. So, I say it’s a date.

  As I park at Molly’s in my newly washed Chevy Silverado, I hope that Annabelle changes after work. I’m sure she looks cute in the navy-and-tan work outfit, but I would love her to put on something tight and short. I want to see her legs and cleavage. She has amazing legs that I can’t wait to touch.

  She bolts out of the side employee door, wearing a bulky red Iowa State T-shirt and jeans. Better than the uniform, but nothing like Mike got.

  Annabelle opens the door and climbs in the cab. “Nice truck,” she says. “My uncle has a truck like this.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I don’t say I bought it to impress girls, but I did after reading last year about her love of Silverado trucks.

  If I can be honest, I have never been to McKellen’s and there are no gift certificates. I meant to buy some online but kept forgetting. Hopefully Annabelle will forget that too.

  Before today, I had no idea how to get there. Thank you, Google Maps. As we hit the interstate, I turn up Def Leppard’s “Let’s Get Rocked.”

  “I dig this song,” I say. In reality the song is all right, but not as good as Leppard’s early stuff. But I know that Annabelle loves the song. Her cousin just saw Def Leppard in Germany, and they were talking about when they used to do a dance number to it as kids. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only kid at Finch that loves eighties stuff.”

  Annabelle gives me a weird look. She tilts her head like a confused dog. “How would you know?” she asks. “You never ask what anyone likes.”

  The freshly trimmed hair on my head starts to itch, my fingers tingle, and my lips dry.

  “I hear things, see things,” I say. “When you’re not talking all the time, all your senses are heightened, kind of like a blind person hears and smells really well.”

  I peek at myself in the rearview mirror. I look clean-cut with just the right amount of chaos.

  I sneak a glance at her. Annabelle doesn’t seem interested in talking about music or even my lack of chitchat at Finch. She’s gazing out the window as we pass combines harvesting October corn. After only ten minutes, Annabelle’s bored.

  The restaurant is dark, which bums me out because I can barely see Annabelle’s green eyes. For some reason, elevator music plays overhead. The table has a small lit candle and a white tablecloth. The waitress brings us a basket of bread and butter. I’m not a big fan of bread and butter, which keeps me from embarrassing myself in front of Annabelle. I can be a messy eater when I’m hungry, and right now I’m starving after a day of skipped meals. I know a person can’t lose twenty pounds by not eating one breakfast and one lunch, but I figure a day of fasting can’t hurt.

  Neither of us says anything, which is nice. I know it’s weird to be on a date, especially a dinner date, where no one talks, but I feel comfortable in silence. If only I could do something about the clang of dishes and glasses or the small talk from surrounding tables about traffic, cold bread, and lack of water. Those noises start to bug me and I notice Annabelle holding in a yawn. I need to do something out of the ordinary and shake things up.

  “So,” I say, “do you come here often?”

/>   Do you come here often? That’s out of the ordinary. Am I in a singles bar? What’s wrong with me? I’m super intelligent and I’ve planned for this night for years. Why can’t I just be cool?

  “Used to,” she answers. “My family used to come here a lot when I was younger, but then my two older brothers went to college, so we stopped coming. I guess my parents think it’s too nice of a place for just the three of us to go.”

  “How many brothers do you have?”

  “Just the two older ones,” she says. “I’m the baby.”

  “I’m the oldest,” I say. “My mom had me when she was in high school.”

  “Yeah, I know the story,” she says.

  “What story?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asks. “It’s not every year that the star volleyball player and the star quarterback have a kid together. My mom still talks about how your mom got pregnant and cost the volleyball team a chance at a state title.”

  “I’m sure my mom’s sorry,” I say.

  “Oh, it’s not that big of deal,” she backpedals. “Just letting you know that”—she searches for the words to finish the sentence—“I know some stuff about you.”

  “I like your pictures on Twitter,” I change the subject. “They’re fun.”

  I expect her to say thank you or that’s nice of you, but instead, she asks, “Who are your friends?”

  I sit there silently. Is she going to make fun of me right here in the middle of this steakhouse for not having friends? I should’ve just kept my mouth shut. This date is turning into a Monday morning at Finch High School.

  “We go to a really small school,” she continues, “and everyone has a friend or two or three or ten. I mean, when you go to a school this small, it’s hard not to have a bunch of friends. But I used to think you didn’t have any, which is fine, if that’s what you want. If you want to live like a hermit or something, that’s your God-given right, I guess.”

  I’m not a hermit. A hermit by definition is some old guy with a gray beard living in the mountains. I just don’t like talking in school. Those are two completely different things.

  “But,” she continues, “then you asked me to follow you on Twitter and I looked at your feed and you have like four hundred followers—twice as many as I do. So apparently, you like people, just none of us.”

  Does she think I don’t want friends? I’m not some weirdo. I don’t hate people or live in a shack on some mountain. I just don’t say a lot or care for the jocks who go to our school.

  She stops and stares and waits. The ball’s in my court. How do I respond to her accusations? Do I just tell her I’m not a hermit? Do I tell her that I like people online a lot more than the people I go to school with? I don’t know. So, for lack of a better option, I go with the truth.

  “Kids at our school are mean,” I say. “It’s seems like every time someone opens his mouth, someone else rips on him. Everyone just makes fun of everyone else all the time. If you say the wrong word or stutter or slip or make a weird noise, someone is always there to make fun of you or laugh at you. I don’t put myself out there. I don’t say anything. And then I don’t get made fun of or laughed at. Those people on Twitter, they just wanna talk. They want someone to listen to them. And they don’t make fun of me. They’re not mean.”

  Calm comes over my body. Saying all that out loud feels very therapeutic and cleansing. The words didn’t sound dumb out loud. It all made sense.

  “Do you think I’m mean?” she asks. “I like to joke around, but I don’t think I’m mean. I don’t think most people at school are mean.”

  I know Annabelle’s a nice person, but not from how she acts at school. She’s a big smart-ass at Finch, just like everyone else. I know the real Annabelle. She’s so nice to her cousin in her emails and she always has nice things to say about people when she writes about them, but I can’t bring up the emails for obvious reasons. “You seem nice,” I say. “You’ve always been nice to me.”

  “Well, I just think you shouldn’t judge people,” she says. “You shouldn’t think you’re better than us.”

  “I don’t think I’m better than everyone,” I say honestly.

  “You so do. You’ve always thought you’re too good for us,” she says. “You look down on us. You’re the smartest kid in school, living in the biggest house in the county, and we’re all just a bunch of small-town hicks.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” I say. “I just sit in the back of the room. How does that make me stuck up?”

  “I’m not saying it’s true, but you never talk to anyone,” she says. “You ignore everyone like you hate them. When I come into the store, you never say hi or anything. Would it kill you to just once say, ‘Hi, Anna.’ What am I supposed to think? I’ve wanted to ask you to give me a tour for months and months, but every time I try to talk to you, you just give me a mean look, just like you do to everybody.”

  Thankfully the waitress brings our food, which forces Annabelle to stop berating me. Although my eyes are closed and my neck is stiff, I can feel the eyes from surrounding tables looking at us.

  “Forget I brought it up,” she says. “Let’s just eat.”

  Maybe it’s the lack of food in my stomach, but this rib eye tastes like candy. I shove small squares of medium-well meat into my mouth like jelly beans. Once the steak disappears, I scoop up garlic mashed potatoes. My tongue struggles to keep up with the constant flipping of warm potatoes into my mouth.

  The steakhouse doesn’t have Mountain Dew, so instead I slurp down Mello Yello in the time it takes Annabelle to eat one forkful of her chicken salad. Chewing vegetables, she looks at me like I’m a bear at the zoo that just ripped apart and swallowed a fish. I can tell she’s dying to say something about the way I engulfed the twenty-dollar dinner, so I speak first. “I’m joining the baseball team.”

  She swallows a crouton covered with French dressing. “About time.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “I mean, Biggie, you live at a baseball field. You really should play baseball, right?”

  “Yeah, I probably should.”

  Chapter 14

  Mr. Crawford

  For the past hour, I’ve listened to Annabelle talk. She told me about the teachers she likes and the teachers she hates. She complimented my truck. She even admitted to stealing a stop sign off West Valley Drive. I’ve said nothing. As Mom gave her an eighty-minute tour of our house, I thought of my next move.

  I don’t want her to go home. I want to spend the rest of the night with her. Ask her to go for a drive in the country, off the congested roads between Finch and Cedar Rapids.

  As we reach Molly’s, I go for it.

  “Let’s hang out more,” I say. “I mean, I want to be nicer to you. I want to hang out some more.”

  It sounded horrible. Really, really horrible. The suggestion is nothing like what I practiced in my head, something about moonlight, blah, blah, blah. Okay, maybe what I wanted to say was awful too.

  “Um,” she mumbles, which instantly tears my heart in two. “I told Michelle that I would be at Killer’s party by ten. I’m already late.”

  “Oh, okay. I just thought I would ask,” I say.

  “You can come with,” she offers.

  “To Killer’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think he likes me,” I say.

  “Why would you think that?” Her face scrunches together as if she’s smelling something vile.

  “I don’t know, but I know he doesn’t want me at a party.”

  She straightens her face and says, “All right. See you at school.” And she jumps out of my truck. As she walks away, every part of me wants to roll down the window and accept her offer.

  Does Killer like me? No, not really. But I know the reason I’m not going isn’t because it’s at his house. It’s because I
don’t want to go. I want to go to my bedroom and get on my computer. And although I know passing on a real party with real conversations for an online one is dumb, especially considering who invited me, I can’t bring myself to lower the window.

  I wake up exhausted. I have no idea how much sleep I got, but it wasn’t a full night. As I sit up, I wonder if Annabelle emailed her cousin about our date. If she has, that’s a sign that she feels it’s a date, a real date. After screwing up last night, maybe I’ll get a second chance.

  I type in her password annarocks and wait. There it is: Re: Saw the indoor baseball field. She must have sent an email from her phone, and her cousin has already responded. There must be big news inside of it. She must have had a good time. I click on the email:

  Hey Cuz.

  Went out with kid from the gas station. His parents have an amazing house on the edge of town with an indoor baseball field. His mom’s really cool. She has tons of nice stuff. She even joked that if I’m an agent and they want to move, I could sell the house. Oh and he’s a Def Leppard fan like you!

  Well, I’m going to bed. This weekend call me!!! Mr. Crawford has gotten worse. He won’t take his gross eyes off me. I don’t know what to do, should I say something? Call me!!!

  Anna

  Her cousin replies:

  I can’t call you until tonight, so it may be early morning Iowa time, so stick by your phone. Can you sit in the back of the room? I don’t know.

  Cool about the Leppard fan, my kind of guy! That house sounds amazing. You’re going to be a kick-ass agent someday.

  Mr. Crawford, a twenty-something math teacher at Finch, must be staring at her boobs or something. I’ve never had him, but I’ve seen him flirt with girls in the hall. Never Annabelle, but I’m not surprised to read the email. The idea of Annabelle being nervous and uncomfortable pisses me off. I need to solve this problem. But how? I can’t tell her that I read her emails. I will need to be sly, bring the topic up under the radar. She should come into the store on Monday night, so I have two days to figure this out.