Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (7 page)

“Who should we prank?” Jane asked. She had found a copy of the campus directory and was flipping through it.

“Hey, do you guys know the giant girl that lives in your dorm? The girl whose arms are bigger than my leg?”

“LaVerne,” the three of us said at once.

“Yeah, her. Last week she came up to me and asked me why my roommate was a son of a bitch.”

I glared at Jane as she looked over in my direction. She looked guilty. “My roommate has a giant mouth,” she said to no one in particular.

“What’s your roommate’s name?” Dallas asked, grabbing the directory from Jane.

“Pam.”

Dallas paused in his flipping. He looked over at Linda with confusion. “But I thought...”

“What’s her last name?” I asked, moving to stand beside Dallas.

“We can’t prank call her. She’s probably taking a nap with earplugs in and won’t answer the phone. Let’s just do it to LaVerne,” Jane said.

Dallas tossed me the directory and went to grab the portable phone. I dictated the phone number of our old room to Dallas, who dialed it. He went over to the speaker and held the phone up to it. Jane clicked at the computer.

Princess Leia’s voice rang out, calling LaVerne a “scruffy-looking nerfherder.” I giggled as Dallas quickly hit the End Call button and Jane glared at me.

“Tammy, you can’t laugh,” Dallas admonished me. “It gives you away.”

“You do sort of have an unmistakable voice,” Linda told me.

“I didn’t say anything. I just laughed. It was funny.”

“Haven’t you ever prank-called anyone before?” my roommate asked, as if it were something she did every day.

I laid the directory on the nearest desk. “We should go. I have to get back and study.”

“Bye, Dallas!” we called as a chorus as we left Ibsen. He stood at the doorway and watched us walk down the path.

As soon as Linda, Jane, and I entered Gandhi, we spied ole’ Vernie waiting outside our room.

“Tammy, I know that was you.”

“What was me?”

“Don’t try that innocent act on me.”

“What innocent act?”

She gave me the evil eye and slammed her fist into other hand as I tried not to look intimidated, even though I was terrified, sure she was going to beat me up.
I hope Dallas is worth it.
Linda stood beside me, but didn’t say anything as Vernie loomed over us. Any moment I expected her to pick me up and dump me in the garbage can, which she had done to one of our dormmates a few days before when the dormmate didn’t ask LaVerne if she wanted in on ordering pizza.

Jane had ducked into my room. I thought she had sacrificed me to LaVerne’s revenge, but she came back out into the hall. “Hey, Tammy, didn’t you want to see if you left your notebook in LaVerne’s room when you moved out?”

I gave Jane a blank look. She gave me an exaggerated wink. I decided to go along with her. “Yeah. My notebook. I think it might be under Linda’s old bed.”

LaVerne dropped her arms. “Okay, whatever. C’mon,” she said in her deep voice. She turned down the hallway.

I looked over at Jane. She shrugged, and so I turned to follow LaVerne, Jane and Linda behind me. I was in awe at the strength of LaVerne’s flip-flops as she descended the steps. Her large feet, which hung halfway out of them, appeared to be the horizontal part of her continuous calf muscle, with no discernable tapering to an ankle. She apparently had no qualms about wearing tank tops; I could see the indent in her arms from her bicep. I marveled at Laverne’s overall sheer size and silently thanked Jane for the distraction from the possible beating. There was more to thank, however, for not more than a few seconds after we arrived in my old room, the phone rang again. LaVerne narrowed her eyes at the three of us and picked up her phone, holding it out away from her ear.

“Hello?”

Cartman from South Park screamed out, “Beefcake, BEEFCAKE!” from the receiver. LaVerne hung up the phone and stared at us again with her chin lowered and her mouth hanging open. I raised my eyebrows back at her and tried to hide my triumphant smirk.

“Okay, so whoever is helping you has really good timing.”

“I guess Tammy’s notebook isn’t here after all, LaVerne. We’ll see you later,” Jane said, ushering me out the door.

She didn’t say anything until we were safely ensconced inside Linda’s and my room upstairs.

“Was that Dallas?”

“Yep. You should call him, Tammy, and thank him for saving your ass.”

“Maybe later.” I tried to feign casualness, but inside my heart thumped rapidly. Dallas had saved me! He was like my knight in a shining J.crew T-shirt.

I was still reeling over Dallas saving me from my first ass-kicking and forgot to put the wooden block in the roof door that night. Linda and Jane’s heads both swiveled as the heavy door banged shut. It seemed loud enough for the entire campus to hear.

Linda hung her head as Jane said, “Oh great, Tammy. How are we going to get down now?”

How indeed? I crept over to the side. “It’s a little too far to jump, but maybe if we hang down, we could land on one of the balconies.” Each room on the upper floor had a small platform coming off of it. Students were technically forbidden to go out on these ‘balconies,’ but that didn’t stop my fellow Eckhart students from setting up beach chairs and grills on them. “Then we could knock on the window and see if we can crawl through. Is your roommate home, Jane?”

Linda glanced over the edge. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask someone to come open it, the same way we got in? The door will still be unlocked from the other side.”

“How will they know we’re up here?” I asked.

Jane pointed. “Look. There’s someone walking through the quad.”

We began to scream and wave our arms. The person came closer to the dorm and peered up at us. Though the night was dark, the figure stepped into the light from the complex. It was the Dadian. He disappeared from our view, and a few minutes later he reappeared and held the attic door open for us. He didn’t say a word, just shook his head as the three of us traipsed by him, heads lowered.

I had a quiz in my marine invertebrate class the next morning. We were supposed to memorize the classification of mollusks, but I couldn’t remember the difference between scaphopods and gastropods. I put my pencil down as my eyes wandered around the lecture room. There were a lot more empty desks now, a fact that usually filled me with pride. So they wanted to weed out the marine bio majors who weren’t dedicated? I’d already made up my mind that I wouldn’t change my major. But now as I watched my classmates filling out their quizzes, I wasn’t so sure. Eckhart had an unusual system in that each class equaled one credit, which meant a survey class was worth the same semester weight as a lab class, even though the actual time spent in class was far more for labs. This translated into the fact that the science majors like me would spend extra hours every afternoon in lab while the business majors went to the beach in their convertibles. And they weren’t cool laboratory investigations: it’s not like we got to dissect the mussels and barnacles. We just drew them and labeled their external anatomy. For three hours every afternoon.

A pair of brown trousered legs suddenly appeared before me. With his bulging, watery eyes narrowed, my professor looked even more like a cephalopod (head-foot, like squid—at least I knew those) than ever. “Are you finished Ms. Tymes?”

I nodded as I handed him my mostly blank quiz. He glanced down at it and cleared his throat before moving on.

I was still in a funk as I walked back to my dorm. Getting good grades had always come easy to me: I finished in the top 5% of my class in high school. I could have been in the running for valedictorian, or at least salutatorian, but got a B in my driver’s education class. Driver’s Ed wasn’t weighted like most of my Honors and AP classes. Neither were electives, and I was in band all four years. While I practiced marching with my flute and eventually became Drum Major, the top two students bulked up on extra academic classes and added to their GPA. But any way you looked at it, I never had to study in high school and was struggling to figure out how to do it now.

It started to rain. One of Eckhart’s selling points was it was located near the beach, on the Gulf side of Florida. The brochures, besides proclaiming its top-notch marine biology program, also advertised E-C was “the right climate for learning.” But it seemed to rain a lot in Florida. And not the kind of spotty rain to cool off a warm afternoon. Sometimes it would rain all day. A year or so later, in my continuing studies of Oceanography, I would learn my freshman year of college coincided with one of the worst El Niño’s in half a century. But that would have not been much of a consolation, with the downpour soaking through my tank-top and undershirt as I walked home from flunking a quiz.

One of my dormmates, Andrea, known mostly for being a die-hard fan of the band
No Doubt
, came running out of Gandhi. “Dance party in the rain!” she shouted.

Sue Li, known not-so-politically-correctly as Sushi, appeared beside her. I’d only ever seen Sushi on her skateboard, clad in elbow pads taking up more than half of her arms. Without her board beneath her, Sushi was barely 5-foot. The clanging songs of Gwen Stefani singing about spiderwebs filled the complex as Andrea cleared the steps to Gandhi with a running start and landed in the puddle below, soaking me even more in the process.

“You game, Tammy? You’re already wet,” Andrea asked as Sushi began to vogue.

Andrea grabbed my arms and twirled me, swing dance style. I let go and kept spinning. As I looked up, I caught sight of Linda in our dorm window. I gestured for her to join us, and a few seconds later, she appeared at the top of the stairs wearing a rain hat and boots. She left her umbrella by the door as she came down the steps. Andrea was now doing the robot, and Linda joined in the revelry. I stomped my feet and started doing the Running Man in Andrea’s giant puddle. It felt good to let loose after the day—make that the month—I’d had at Eckhart. I was ruining my sandals, and probably the rest of my clothes as well, but I didn’t care. Suddenly I realized my companions had stopped their leaping and shimmying. I spun around to see LaVerne and one of her new roommates walking up the path behind me.

“Look at this, Brooke,” LaVerne said, her voice carrying even more than usual in the space between
No Doubt
songs. “Virgins dancing in the rain.”

“And they’re
sober
,” Brooke added. They giggled together as they walked up the steps to the dorm swiftly while avoiding the puddles. Gwen began a new song and my dormmates began spinning again. Without a word, Linda and I headed back inside.

Chapter 6: Sroot the Free

“D
id you play any sports, Jane?” Dallas asked at dinner that night. It was one of the few nights we caught him in the cafeteria, despite taking an extra-long time and switching up what times we went in order to run into him. As bad as I’d been feeling about my classroom performance, it cheered me up immensely to see Dallas.

Jane’s infamous grin appeared. “If you call getting high or drunk a sport, then yeah, I did a lot of sports… what about you, Tammy?”

“Well, I almost tried out for softball my freshman year, but I had to stop because my academic team made sectionals and I was Captain,” I said. “Oh, and I swam for two years but I quit because I became, um, drum major.”

Dallas looked surprised. “Really? Like with batons and stuff? Did you have a salute?”

“Yeah.”

“Show it to me.”

“Not right now, maybe when we go back to the dorm.” My subtle ploy was to get him back to my room. So far our friendship had been limited to the occasional shared meal and making prank phone calls. With Linda and Jane attending both.

“What sports did you play?” Jane asked, eyeing Dallas up and down.

“Well, I did play basketball for one year. But mostly I spent high school unscrewing light bulbs and throwing stuffed animals at people in the hallway. Once, my friend Bill and I took out all the little screws on the power outlet covers. We did the whole school.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing much. They replaced them all by Monday morning.” He paused for a minute while Jane and I contemplated this feat.

“So I played basketball,” he continued. “To try to get some real play”—with girls, not with basketballs, I assumed. “But the only girl I ever won over was a Japanese exchange student. She kind of stalked me for a while. She went to all of my games, even the away ones, and sat in the front row. Then she’d shout ‘Sroot the free, Dallas. Sroot the free!’”

“Sroot the what?” Jane asked meanly, as I asked, “Why did she want you to shoot a tree?”

“No, free.
Sroot the free.
Like shoot the three-pointer.”

“Oh, right. Of course. Sroot the free.”

“I have to start pranking more,” I told Jane on our way back from the cafeteria, unfortunately unaccompanied by Dallas.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s what’s he’s into. I should do more—that way we can have something to talk about.”

Jane didn’t reply right away. I looked up to see my old roommate LaVerne heading toward us, holding hands with Eric. Jane and I walked on opposite edges of the sidewalk as the two passed in between us without a word.

“I’ve got an idea,” Jane finally said, pulling my arm as she veered off the pathway back to Alpha.

“Where are you going?” The only building in the direction she was headed was the Health Center. I followed her.

“Oh good they’re still open,” she said when we arrived. She yanked open the glass door and went inside.

“Can I help you?” the student receptionist asked.

Jane looked around the reception room in lieu of a reply. “Ah,” she said, walking over to the table of condoms. “No thanks. We just need a few of these.” She grabbed a handful. “You know, for protection.” She gave me a
look
, so I also grabbed a handful.

“Enjoy!” the receptionist called as we left.

“What the hell do we need those for?” I asked Jane as soon as we left the building. I didn’t have a purse or any other place to put them so I split my pile up between each hand and tried to cover them with my fist.