by Anna Cackler
“There,” he said, then read: “’If you’re not sure if someone’s mad at you, just throw a rock at them. Then you’ll know.’”
“Who said that?” I asked, grinning.
“I did, stupid.” He flashed his gleaming smile at me as the warning bell rang out over the cafeteria. “Hey, by the way, we never did get around to watching The Meaning of Life. You free tomorrow night?”
Oh great. Shannon and Margo had to be loving this. Even Finn was watching me curiously. “S-sure,” I said. “After school?”
“Tomorrow after supper,” he said. “I told my step mom I’d catch up on some chores before I did anything else.”
“Sure.” I tried to smile, but I’m not sure I pulled it off very well.
The day passed uneventfully, and so did the next. Ethan was still acting the same as usual. He didn’t even sit with us at lunch on Tuesday. He sat with the basketball team, which he had fit right in with after the first week of school, and didn’t even glance in my direction the entire time. After school we sat at the picnic tables and wrestled a few word problems into submission, but he didn’t even mention our plans once except to confirm that I was going to show. He was just casual, easy-going Ethan. Same old, same old.
Shouldn’t something have changed when he asked me out?
“Are you seriously thinking about dating Cavanaugh?” Finn asked me suddenly before Lit class on Tuesday.
“That’s not your business,” I said, my heart thumping.
“Since when?”
“Since forever.”
He smirked. “Just because there was never anything for me to butt into doesn’t mean it’s not my business to do so whenever I please.”
“Shut up.”
Ms. Walsh was at the marker board, copying out the quote for the day. I fished around for a pencil so I could copy it down, but couldn’t find one.
“Not until you answer my question. Are you thinking about dating him?”
“Maybe. What do you care? Loan me a pen.”
He tossed his pen across the table toward me and produced a new one for himself. “Just curious. Shannon couldn’t shut up about the whole mess last night and I just wanted the inside scoop.”
I stuck the end of his pen in my mouth absently and looked up. “What was she saying?”
I never got my answer. Ms. Walsh cleared her throat and began class before Finn could even open his mouth. “Okay class. I want to begin by reminding you that your essays are due on Thursday. Don’t forget. Today we’re going to look at the similarities between T. S. Elliot and Langston Hughes. Then next week we’re going to move on to the short story. No more poetry!” This announcement was received with shouts of relief.
After class, Finn and I trudged out toward the parking lot. “Emily Bates! You wait up for me!” We both turned to see Shannon sprinting towards us, her flaming hair streaming out behind her.
“What.”
“I am going home with you today,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you have a date tonight, and you are going to be properly prepared for it. That’s why.”
Finn laughed, obviously mocking me, but I scowled. “Oh come on, Shannon! Don’t you have better things to do than meddle in other people’s love lives? Why haven’t you had a date yet this semester? This must be some kind of record.”
“Because as of right now, I am determined to get my friends a little action.”
“No. You can mess with Finn all you like, but you’re not getting your claws into me.”
“But-”
“But nothing! It isn’t really even a date! We’re going to watch a movie in his living room with his parents probably in the same room. You need to lighten up.”
“Come on, Shannon,” Finn said, taking his sister by the arm when he saw that she wasn’t ready to give up. “Just let sleeping dogs lie, all right?”
She let him drag her off in the direction of their house. “You call me after you get home!” she called.
“Get a life!”
Ethan called over at my place around seven, just as Aaron and I were finishing up the dishes. “You ready?” he asked.
“Yeah, just give me a few minutes to finish up a couple of things.”
“Cool. You remember how to get to my house? Or do I need to come pick you up?”
“No, no. I remember. I’ll be over in a few.”
“Okay.”
I hung up the phone with a shaking hand.
“Who was that?” Mom asked, leaning against the counter.
“Nobody.”
“It’s hardly ‘nobody’ if you’re going to ‘be over in a few’.”
“Oooh! Emily’s got a date!” Aaron taunted. “Finally! I thought you were going to be thirty before someone finally took pity on you.”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, do shut up, son,” Mom said. “Just for that you can finish the kitchen alone.”
“Fine. Em’s already done all the work anyway.”
“Thanks Mom!” I called, darting towards the front door.
“Hold on!” she called after me. “I still want to know where you’re going and when you’ll be back. You know the rules.”
“I’m going to Ethan’s place, and I don’t know. Now can I go?”
“Ha!” Aaron barked. “It’s not even a date! You study with him every day after school. You’re going to have a study group, aren’t you?”
“You’re such a jerk, Aaron!” I wrenched open the front door, terrified that he was right. What was I thinking? How could I set myself up for what would turn out to be, as my moronic older brother had so succinctly put it, nothing more than a study group?
“Home by ten, you hear?” Mom called after me.
I waved a hasty response and dashed across the gravel drive to Oscar.
The entire ten minute drive to Ethan’s house was spent in agony. My gut was twisting itself into a giant soft pretzel, and no matter how many times I checked my hair in the mirror or yelled out loud at myself to calm down, it didn’t straighten itself back out. It only got worse when Ethan answered the door with his usual charming smile.
“Hey, you did remember.”
“I told you I did.” My hands were jammed into my back pockets in an attempt to keep them from fidgeting with anything. I had been to Ethan’s house a couple of times before to study. Both times, though, Shannon or Margo had been with me. Tonight felt very different than those other nights. Tonight I felt like the spotlight was directly on me. At least I wasn’t giggling like an idiot the way I usually did when I was anxious about something.
“Are your parents here?” I asked, noting how quiet the big house really was when I stepped inside. I had met Dr. Cavanaugh and his wife once before. He seemed friendly enough, but he really didn’t have much to say to me at all. He, like his son, was that weird shade of brown that was difficult to place as a race, so I still had no clue where Ethan’s family came from. And I still hadn’t had the nerve to ask.
“Naw,” he shrugged. “They went to see a movie. Nancy had to practically drag Dad out of the house.”
“Oh.” Suddenly my stomach rolled over even harder. I grasped around for something to say to distract myself from the fact that Ethan’s perfect brown eyes were drilling into my face. “So, ah. What’s the plan?”
It was like I’d stuck him with a pin. “Oh, right.” He disappeared into the kitchen. After just a couple of seconds he reappeared with a large bowl of popcorn and an armful of soda cans. “The plan is popcorn, soda, and a riotously hilarious movie.”
I stared at him, not sure of what sort of response he was looking for. His smile began to fade. He gestured towards the couch with the popcorn bowl when I didn’t move. “May I escort you to the sofa?” he asked.
I laughed at his quizzical expression, and his face melted into the usual grin.
“That’s not necessary, thanks.”
He dropped off the snacks on the coffee table and went over to the media system und
er the large flat panel TV that hung over the red brick fireplace. After a few minutes of fiddling with it, he joined me on the couch juggling three different remote controls. “There,” he muttered to himself, pressing a button on one remote. The TV clicked on. “And there,” he pressed three buttons on another remote. There was more clicking coming from the surround sound, but nothing spectacular happened. “And there.”
He settled into the couch next to me. I had elected to sit on the far right side of the couch, a fairly neutral position, but Ethan sprawled out in the very middle. He was far closer to me than I had expected, which gave me license to hope that maybe Aaron had been mistaken about the innocence of our night.
After all, his parents weren’t even home.
“That was the most complicated thing I’ve ever witnessed,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said as the main screen popped up, He pointed the third remote at the TV and hit play. “I’ve been trying to convince Dad to get one of those huge universal remotes, but they cost like seventy bucks and he doesn’t think it’s worth it.”
“It’s not.”
He shrugged and picked up the popcorn bowl. “Popcorn?”
I smiled and took a handful, though I wasn’t hungry at all. Mom had been experimenting in the kitchen to celebrate two whole nausea-free days and had come up with an amazing twist on Chicken Kiev. All three of us had eaten almost enough to feed five people.
I can’t say that I really paid much attention to the movie at all. I remember there was a professor demonstrating sex to a class of impassive college students and a very fat man exploded all over the other guests at a fancy restaurant. None of it really left much of an impression on me. Ethan would burst out laughing and look over at me fairly frequently, obviously checking to see if I was laughing, too. Of course I did, if only to let him think I was enjoying his movie.
Every so often Ethan or I shifted our weight or changed positions, and each time we managed to inch a little closer to each other. By the time the fat man exploded, our thighs were touching. He had his arm resting on the back of the couch behind me, and even though it wasn’t anywhere close to my shoulders, I still felt the electricity flowing from his arm to the back of my neck.
It was extremely difficult to keep from fidgeting with my cast, which was itching more and more with every second that I tried not to think about it. In the end I just jammed it under my right arm and tried to pay attention to the movie.
Far sooner than I would have liked, the movie was over and Ethan was removing his arm from the back of the couch. He took the empty bowl and soda cans to the kitchen. “So,” he called from the next room. “What did you think?”
I didn’t get it. “It was funny!”
“I told you.” He returned to the living room and plopped back down into the center of the sofa, a good foot and half between us now.
You sure did. “Yeah.”
“So which skit did you like the best?”
There were skits? “The exploding man was really gross.”
He laughed and got up to turn off the equipment. “I know. That’s my favorite one too. I told you you’d like it.”
“I know you did.” I watched his face carefully as he worked, and continued to do so without thinking about it when he returned to the couch.
“What?” he asked when he saw that I was staring.
“Nothing,” I replied, but still could not look away.
“Well it’s got to be something.”
“No, I’m just trying to figure out what you are.”
“What I am?” His voice rose a few decibels. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No, what you are racially.” I blushed. “I guess I could have put that better.”
But he was suddenly laughing so hard that the entire couch was shaking.
“It’s not that funny!” I cried.
“No, no! It’s just that I was expecting you to say something completely different.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, still smiling broadly. “I don’t know. But when someone questions what you are, then it carries some pretty negative connotations.
“So?”
“So what?”
“So what race are you? I’ve been trying to figure it out for two months.”
“And what have you come up with?”
“I dunno. Middle Eastern? Partly?”
He laughed. “Close, but no. My dad’s half Indian half Texan, and my Mom’s pure Hispanic.”
“Oh,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that Texan was a race.”
“Clearly you’ve never been to Texas.”
“Yeah.” I laughed. Suddenly a hollow chiming sound echoed down the dark hall into the living room. I jumped. It was the grandfather clock. “Oh crap, what time is it?”
“Ah, ten. Why?”
“I’ve gotta go.” I got up and started gathering up my shoes and my bag.
“Oh.”
Did I imagine the disappointment in his voice? I hesitated at the front door and turned back, a tentative smile on my face. I still wasn’t sure that this had been a date, but I wasn’t going to leave without giving him the opportunity to make it one.
“Come to school early in the morning,” he said.
My face fell a little. “What?”
“Come early. I’ll bring doughnuts and we’ll finish tonight’s calculus.”
“Oh. All right.” I grinned. More plans. They were completely innocent, but they were plans all the same. I stepped through the door, and he leaned out after me. “See you in the morning.”
“See ya.” He flashed that winning smile once more just for me, then closed the door.
Six
I wasn’t sure how early Ethan expected me to drag myself out of bed the next morning, but judging by the fact that we usually spent a little more than half an hour studying, I decided that 7:15 would be a good guesstimate.
It was the earliest I had ever gotten up just to go to school, but I was wide awake as I pulled into the almost completely empty student parking lot. The only other vehicle there was Ethan’s red truck parked in the very front.
“Hey!” he said when I walked up to the breakfast table, all smiles. “Doughnut?”
My mouth dropped open in shock when I saw the huge box of doughnuts on the table next to him. “How many did you bring?”
“Three dozen,” he said. “After the five of us get through with them, I’ll give the rest to the guys on the team.”
“Oh. That makes sense, I guess.”
“You guess?”
I frowned and sat down and carefully removed one sticky doughnut from the box with two fingers. “You shouldn’t analyze every word I say, you know.”
“And why not?” he was leaning forward, a sly look in his eye.
I leaned in to match his pose. “Because you might learn something that you don’t want to know.”
He laughed. “Yeah right, Em. Get over yourself.”
The assignment wasn’t a hard one, but I let him think that I was still having trouble with it so that he would lean in and make corrections on my paper. I felt a little stupid flirting with him, but it all just seemed to happen by itself. And it seemed to work pretty well, too. We both lost track of time and before we knew it, people began to file in through the double doors.
“What are you two doing here so early?”
We both looked up to find Shannon and Finn looking at us from across the table.
“We are doing calculus, as usual,” Ethan said. He nudged the doughnut box in their direction. “Breakfast?”
“Yeah!” Shannon sat aside her stale-looking biscuit and gravy bowl and dove into the sweet confections.
“Thanks, man,” Finn said, choosing one for himself as well. “And for the lady.” He produced a perfect sour green apple from his bag and placed it on the table in front of me, then pulled out a John Grisham novel to vanish behind.
“Thank you.” I took the apple and bit into it appreciatively. Its tart f
lavor was a high contrast to the doughnuts, but I really preferred it to the overly glazed alternative.
“Emily, you and Margo are coming over to my place tonight,” Shannon said as she flipped through a notebook. She found the page she was looking for and began scribbling something on it.
“We are?” I asked.
“Yes, you are. We have plans to discuss.”
“What plans?”
She took a deep breath and looked me squarely in the eye. “Dad is going out of town next weekend on some conference or another, so Finnegan and I are hosting a little get-together.”
My right eyebrow shot up. “A get-together?”
“We are?” Finn asked. He shifted his weight and put down his book. This was clearly the first he’d heard of any get-together.
“Yes we are,” Shannon said. “And you and Margo are going to help–ahem–arrange a few things.” She cleared her throat daintily in just the right place to make me severely concerned.
“What sort of get-together are you planning, Shannon?”
“Well, you might call it a party.”
Finn groaned, his worst fears realized. “Aw, come on! Are you kidding?”
“All right!” Ethan said. “I was wondering if you Arkansans knew how to let loose once in a while.”
“What’s going on?” Margo had just slid into a seat beside Shannon. Ethan flashed his wide grin at her and I frowned. He didn’t notice.
“Shannon and Finn are having a party next weekend,” I said.
“Oh, fun!”
“Correction: Shannon is having a party,” Finn said, opening his book again.
“And you and Emily are coming over tonight to help orchestrate it,” Shannon said.
“All right. Cool.” She grinned, making her soft, round face just a little wider. She was such a cute girl, like a sweet old lady or something. I couldn’t picture Margo letting lose at a party.
“Please don’t drag me into this,” I begged Shannon.