A natural smile decorated my friend’s face, contrasting starkly with the strict look she was giving me with her eyes as I changed the song to “Victory”, something a little more pleasant and fun. Satisfied that I wouldn’t continue on my train of thought, Ellie smiled to Joey, “So, if we’re ready to get going, then?”
Already singing along with me as I began to jam to the song, Joey nodded and pulled out of his parking spot, ushering us off toward act two of my first real date.
Chapter Nine
As the four of us hurriedly darted into Globe from the parking lot to escape the frigid cold outside, I was greeted not only by the warmth, but also by a barrage of stares from the people loitering about in the lobby. Since the mall had a curfew on weekends and movies weren’t good for chatting, Globe was a relatively popular place for kids our age to spend their weekend nights. Plenty of them were peppered throughout the lobby, and they definitely noticed us. I’d always been cautious to avoid the eyes of people I could infer were probably judging me, and being out with Joey was definitely beginning to garner some attention I somehow hadn’t expected.
While Ellie and Josh began to bicker about how Josh didn’t want to pay for her entrance, Joey noticed me looking down at my feet, and wrapped an arm casually around my lower back. I had explained my guarded approach to life over dinner, and I think he picked up that I was growing a bit uncomfortable. “You have to learn to take life with a grain of salt,” he told me, his voice soothing as I relaxed into him a bit. “Nobody’s opinion about you and the things that you do should matter.”
With a skeptical grin, I looked back up to him. “Life isn’t a movie, Joey; you can’t just shut these things off with a little pep talk and good intentions. But of course you feel that way – people like you. They just think I’m sort of weird.”
“Of course you’re weird,” he replied with a straight face, sinking my stomach a bit. The fear of him walking away was only momentary, though, since he grinned, not leaving me hanging for too long. “You’re the weirdest girl I’ve met in a while, but that’s why I like you.” He took note of the little sigh of relief I tried to suppress, feeling me relax in his arms, and he softened his expression. “You should never mistake being colorful for something to be ashamed of, Ash.” Nobody called me by that nickname, but he’d begun over dinner and I didn’t want to correct him, almost enjoying the sound of it. “You know how they say it’s stripes with stripes, spots with spots? I think you and I are different. I think we’re more like stars, and after my job and my parents’ restaurant has bunched me in with a hundred stripes and spots, it’s been a treat to hang out with a star.”
Truth be told, Joey was not at all the person I would have paired myself with of my own volition without having gotten to know him. If someone told me what he was all about before I left my house for that date, I’d have laughed it off, because that isn’t what popularity does to a person. All my life, I’d seen what people with a social standing worth talking about were like, experienced firsthand how cruel they knew how to be, but he broke every mold I’d shoved him into before he showed up. All at once, I felt like a big jerk for assuming things about him without getting to know him, like I so often whined about people doing to me, but instead of swallowing my words, I settled for offering him a silent, soft smile in return.
After he paid our way into Globe, refusing to let me spend any of my own money that evening between dinner and our entertainment despite my protestations that I could pay for myself, we met back up with our friends. Before Josh could finish his grievance that we had taken too long in line, Ellie spoke up over him, trying her best not to outwardly look annoyed with how petty he was being. “What do you guys want to do first?” There was an hour wait until our group could get into a round of laser tag, so we had some time to kill either skating or playing in the arcade.
“Well, games are for babies, so I’m going skating,” Josh announced, crossing his arms over his t-shirt with a palpable attitude over nothing in particular.
He stalked off toward the skating rink, and the three of us exchanged awkward glances before we headed off to follow him. The guys volunteered to get our skates, and Ellie and I took on the task of filing the group’s actual shoes away into small cubbies along the outer edge of the rink. “So,” my best friend began to dig into me immediately once our dates were out of earshot, “how do you like Joey so far? You guys seem to be hitting it off really well. You’d think you knew each other for years, the way you’re chatting and laughing.”
I pondered just how much I should tell her, in the infant stages of whatever there was between the two of us. Saying too much might jinx it or make me sound clingy, but not saying enough might make me sound disinterested. Opting for simplicity, I told her, “He’s not what I expected him to be, and I mean that in a really good way. I like him.”
I caught myself before I could elaborate further, wanting to sort out my feelings by myself when I had time to think, to digest them without Ellie’s not-always-helpful help on the matter. She was satisfied with what I’d reported to her, though, and smiled at me. “Call me Cupid and thank me later, but for now, your boy’s on his way back with some glow-in-the-dark skates for you.”
Neither of us were exactly impressed with how Josh was acting, so Joey and I left Ellie to deal with her man-child of a boyfriend and got rolling out on the skating rink beside one another. We got to the floor just as the DJ announced that he’d be playing some classic dance songs to try to get people to dance and skate at the same time. Sure, it probably wasn’t going to end too well, grace not necessarily being my strongest asset, but Joey and I looked at each other with silent delight in our faces.
It was admittedly a little difficult to focus on singing loudly with words we didn’t entirely understand and trying not to botch our dance moves during the Macarena, all while staying moving and upright on our feet, but I was having a blast. It was a pleasant sort of startling to see the side of me that Joey was bringing out that night, just how deeply into my core he had dug to find this lighthearted and lively version of myself that I wasn’t convinced existed anymore. After a move we failed at miserably, as we crashed to the floor in a gaggle of limbs and howled with laughter at our own antics, I realized that, as foreign as this girl was to me, I could get used to her. She was bright and airy and fun, and I was enjoying her presence as she enjoyed Joey’s. He was all but forcing me out of my shell to live the life I’d always dreamed of, and part of me already kind of liked him just for that.
I think my favorite part, though, was the troupe of kids from my school that were there that night, the small herd of them from my Art class. They understood what a shift in the accepted social balance it was for the two of us to be having a good time together, seeing us as a prince and a peasant instead of just two kids getting to know each other and being silly. None of them said anything to either of us, but suddenly, I had even less of a reason to look forward to Monday.
They wouldn’t say anything to me while he was around – I knew that they would be far too cowardly to do anything when someone could oppose them – but come Monday, my human shield wouldn’t be there to protect me. With me going to school in Marmara and him over in Corsica, I’d be on my own, and they’d be free to put me right back under their microscope. I tried my best not to let the weight of knowing the horrible kinds of people he associated with bog me down, pledging to myself that I would enjoy my time in his light until I absolutely had to retreat back to my shadows.
After our third or fourth raucous tumble, an employee came to tell us that we were being obnoxious and needed to leave the skating rink until we could calm down. Giving it one last hurrah, we screamed every single word of the song that was playing while we removed our skates and headed laughing into the arcade.
Ellie and Josh met back up with us in the middle of one of the step-based dancing games while we were on our last round, deeply involved in a fierce competition. He beat me by a small margin, but gave me a somewhat sw
eaty hug in a show of peace before leading the way for our group to the meeting area outside the laser tag arena.
As we inched forward in line to sign ourselves into the game, he asked, “What’s your name going to be? If you just go by Ashley,” he hitched a thumb toward the exit, “I like you, but that’s really lame and I’m leaving.”
“No, laser tag is serious business, so my codename has to be really good.” I shook my head, trying to rack my brain for something that might get a chuckle out of him. “I just don’t know what to be.”
Joey smirked, moving forward a bit more as a group of girls moved away from the desk, their sign-ins all set. “I’ve been Magnaccia since I found out what it meant when I was eight years old.” He took note of my confusion, and was happy to explain. “It means, ‘pimp’ in Italian, and I thought that was hilarious as a child.”
I laughed at his juvenile train of thought and looked him in the eye. “So give me an Italian codename, too, and we’ll be in this game together, just you and me. You know, Bonnie and Clyde, all or nothing, do or die.”
It took him until we got to the desk to come up with something for me. “Hey, Joey,” the guy behind the desk greeted, smiling at my date. “What are your names going to be for the game?”
“Well, I’m going to be Magnaccia, and she’s going to be Stellina,” he told the employee, spelling the names for him when asked.
As we made our way toward Ellie and Josh, I had to ask about it. “So, before I parade around this arena under the name of Stellina, care to tell me what it means?” I nudged him playfully, grinning at him. “Given the translation of yours, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared.”
Suddenly, he was bashful, cheeks flushing with red. “I should have thought of this before; you’re going to think it’s kind of creepy,” he prefaced, made nervous by my request for clarification. When I didn’t say anything else, he sighed, defeated. “It refers to what I said earlier in the lobby. ’Stellina’ means ‘little star’.”
Fluttering ignited in the pit of my stomach, and I smiled silently at him for a moment before Ellie’s crude summoning tore me away. “Hey, Bonnie and Clyde,” she called, poking fun at what I didn’t know she’d heard me tell Joey, motioning toward the crowd flooding into the prep area. “The game’s about to start.”
Globe fashioned explaining their rules into something of a call and repeat battle cry, where the employee telling you how the game worked read from a giant board of rules posted on the wall and all the players had to yell them back at her. Those rules, meant to be “I will not” statements about adhering to protocol, were nothing short of a disaster for Joey and I. Instead of promising to play nice, we were honest with the girl about what was about to happen when we yelled back at her. “I might cover my sensors to give myself an advantage.” “I cannot guarantee that I will not run in the playing field.” “I will almost certainly curse and scream.” The girl in charge of setting things up regarded us with a warning glance, but we were almost too busy laughing at ourselves to notice.
When we were let into the arena for the game after suiting up, I stood back by the door to scan the area for a vantage point for the two of us. When I heard Joey call for me to follow him, though, his voice was trailing off, and since it was dark, I couldn’t see where he’d gone. The buzzer telling us that our game had begun sounded, and my date was nowhere to be seen.
I must have spent about half the game with my back against the wall in the vantage point I’d found on the second story, trying my best to shoot without getting shot too much in return, and trying even harder than that to find Joey in the crowd. I scanned every name as it came up on the back of my laser gun, blindly shooting at every person I saw. Finally, after a host of stupid nicknames, I felt relief wash over me when the little screen read, “You shot Magnaccia! +100 points!” When he realized it was me, Joey cried out for me to stay where I was so that he could come up and rejoin me.
Thus, I waited, holding down my relative goldmine of a position until my gun buzzed with the melancholic sound of defeat. The screen displayed, “Shot by Magnaccia, left shoulder sensor! –50 points!” I whirled around, coming face to face with him laughing somewhat maniacally. I cried out, “I thought we were a team, Clyde!”
“It’s payback, Bonnie,” he replied in a cheeky tone of voice, pressing himself against the wall beside me to narrowly avoid the laser that wavered momentarily on the sensor over his chest. “Now that we’re even, we can be an actual team.”
My gun buzzed once again to let me know that my procedural five-second penalty for being shot was over and that my weapon had reactivated. With a devious smile, I turned to him and shot him in the shoulder, saying over the sound his gun made, “Teams do not worry about being even.”
He looked at me in complete disbelief for a couple of seconds – five, specifically, the length of his deactivation – and his mouth curled into a smirk when he was back in the game. I knew what was coming before he even said anything. “I will give you a three-second running start.”
So, screaming and laughing, I fled, the sound of his snickering echoing through the corridors as he chased me down, beginning our one-on-one, all-out war.
When everyone’s guns chimed again to signal the end of the game, Joey stepped from around a corner, hands up in surrender. “The battle is over, comrade,” he called, extending a hand to me, his brows furrowed. “Let there be peace.” I shook his hand with a serious façade to match his, which gave way to more laughter as he wrapped an arm around my waist and led me into the lobby of the laser tag area to receive our scores. For the record, I beat him by three shots.
When our group reached the parking lot, satisfied with having done a bit of everything before Globe closed in about a half hour, we piled back into Joey’s SUV once again, sticking him outside with the task of brushing off the snow that’d fallen onto the car while we were inside having fun. Once he climbed back in, he announced the order in which he’d be dropping us off at our houses, and though it was entirely out of his way, he scheduled me for last. Ellie stayed silent, but offered me a knowing smile.
The drive back through town was full of the same silly antics as when we were at Globe, singing along to a mix of upbeat radio songs. The carefree nature of the ride made it pass that much quicker, and before I knew it, we were without company, parked along the curb outside of my house.
Staying true to the night’s chivalry, Joey walked me up to the door, trekking through the snow in silence until I opted to break it. It was bizarre – we’d talked all night without problem, but now that it was time to say goodbye, it was like we were strangers once again. “I had a really good time with you tonight,” I told him. “I’m glad you came.”
“I’m not the type to go on blind dates, really. This was actually my first one,” he smirked. “But, I had no plans and no reason to say no when Josh and Ellie asked. I’m glad I didn’t miss out on someone like you, Ash.”
Despite the chill whipping around us with the snow, my cheeks warmed. “Well, thanks for not being like everyone else. You’re refreshing.”
A heartwarming smile crept across his face. “I could say the same thing, and that’s why I’d love to see you again,” he announced brazenly before realizing how forward he was being, fumbling a bit afterwards. “And, like, if you have other stuff to do, I get it. If this was a one-time thing, that’s okay, but I just want to put it out there, and you can, uh, decide, or something... God damn it, I suck at this.” He winced at himself and his nerves, and gingerly reached out to take my hands as I giggled like a schoolgirl.
His big, brown eyes were soft, almost pleading. All night, he had been so confident, his personality so large and bright that he lit up the room, but standing before me, asking to see me again, he was shy and clearly a bit nervous. Something about it set a whole new bunch of butterflies loose in my belly. “I mean,” I began, testing the waters, “we told Yosuke we’d all hang out with him at some point, and I assume he’s expecting bo
th of us to be there.”
“Yeah, but I don’t mean with other people,” he said quickly, almost cutting me off. “Group dates are a good way to break the ice, but now that ours is sufficiently broken, I’d like to spend time with you. Being with everyone again does sound fun, but would you maybe want to do something else, too, just the two of us?”
I answered before the other girl raging inside of me, unused to the affection and dying for the solace of her bedroom, could stop the girl that I was that night. “I’d love to. I can put my number in your phone, and you can call or text me during the week to set something up.” He reached into his pocket for the device he’d neglected throughout the night, which I’d appreciated. “And you’re free to skip that weird three-day rule and hit me up as soon as you want to.”
Unlocking the touch screen of his phone, it announced that he had a whole host of text messages waiting in his inbox. Trying my best not to pry, not entirely positive that I wanted to see what some of them surely had to say, I navigated my way to his contacts list, quickly adding myself in there as Stellina, and returned his phone with a grin. He shoved it into his pocket, letting the silence hang between us again. “So,” he took the first step for us, “I guess this is goodbye, then.”
I bit my lip nervously. “I guess so.”
He looked me in the eye for a moment, clearly unsure of what to do, and I had to take a second to decide what I wanted. I didn’t think I was quite ready to kiss him just yet, to have my first kiss be so cliché as to use it to punctuate my first real date, so I tucked myself into him in a tight embrace, kissing his stubbly cheek as I pulled away.
Joey winked at me as he stepped off the porch. “Good night, Stellina.”
Before I could twist the doorknob, my front door flew open, and Mum’s panicked voice greeted me instead of the calm silence I had naively expected. “Roger, please,” she begged urgently, her tone dry and ragged already. On her face and arms were forming contusions, and her teary, bloodshot eyes were islands in a sea of bluish-purple bruises.
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