Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (9 page)

Linda looked back and forth between us. “Am I missing something?”

“It’s from
Better Off Dead
,” Dallas and I said at the same time. He looked at me and grinned as I studied his rapidly disappearing pile of snap peas. “John Cusack?” Dallas asked Linda and Jane, who looked at each other and shrugged.

“I love 80s movies,” Dallas continued.

“Me too!” I tried to contain the excitement in my voice. “Have you seen
Just One of the Guys?
”

“Of course!” Dallas practically shouted. “That’s my favorite!”

Jane nudged Linda and the two of them got up, presumably to get more food, leaving me alone with Dallas. My biggest fear, that Dallas and I wouldn’t have anything to talk about without Jane and Linda, was put to rest as we discussed the in’s and out’s of our favorite movies. Dallas’s arms waved around just as much as usual, but I could feel myself becoming more animated, leaning in closer to Dallas. We’d exhausted most of the earlier movies of the decade when Jane and Linda returned, and by that time I’d changed my car/movie fantasy to include a showing of
Say Anything
at a drive-in with some good-natured groping and a good-night kiss.

My mind still wandered as we put our trays away. I was shoving mine onto the conveyor belt when Dallas suddenly turned to me. “Are the LaVernie-nator four going to be go out to eat with Mr. and Mrs. Tammy?”

My mind frantically searched for his meaning. Was he asking if my parents would take him out to dinner along with Jane and Linda? “Uh, sure,” I replied cautiously.

“Cool,” he said, sauntering out of the cafeteria. “Let me know when. Gotta go to Volleyball.”

Jane grinned. “I think you have another dinner date.”

“Yeah, with you, Linda, and my parents and sister,” I told her as we walked out into the sunshine.

“Want us all to suddenly come down with the stomach flu?”

“No,” I replied quickly.

“Well I guess then it’s all of our dinner dates,” Linda said cheerfully.

I spent the next week in nervous anticipation. I was scared at what my parents would think of Dallas after I’d talked so much about him over the phone. Not to mention how Corrie would react to him. I had gotten so used to her bogarting my high school friends that I was highly protective of my life at college. For the majority of our childhood, Corrie and I lived separate lives. We were probably the un-twinliest twins in the whole state of Michigan. Corrie was the pretty, vivacious one, while I made myself the smart one who would often be found with her nose buried in a book. Our neighbor Kellen was once the same way. We bonded over being Star Wars junkies in the 5th grade and would trade science fiction books back and forth. Corrie usually ignored him whenever he was over or else she’d make fun of him, saying things like, “You have so many gaps in your teeth it looks like your tongue’s in jail,” or ask “Where’d you get your teeth, the Gap?” Kellen had never seemed to mind.

She mostly ignored the both of us in junior high and the beginning of high school. When we were freshmen, Corrie would date seniors, causing friction between her and my parents whenever she’d go on dates with guys who had their driver’s licenses. Until we got to be juniors and most of those boys had graduated. I was always too nervous to outright tell Kellen how great I thought he was, even before he got his braces off and got contacts. Right around that time, Corrie began to notice Kellen. It was March of our junior year when Corrie declared that Kellen was cute. It was one of the only things we’d ever agreed on. After they started dating, I willingly withdrew from Kellen’s friendship. It got too confusing when Corrie started hanging out with our gang of friends. A month after I cut off contact with Kellen I found a box in my room with my name on it. Inside was all of the Star Wars books I had ever lent him. He must have dropped them off before going to Corrie’s room.

I was doodling Hoops McCann style in Calculus and realizing just how closely the rest of my Eckhart peers resembled the not-so-cute-and-fuzzy bunny-nemeses from
One Crazy Summer
when my normally oblivious professor called me out.

“Are
you
wish me?” he asked, pointing his finger directly at me.

My pen flew out of my hand. “Yep. Yes, sir. Just, ah taking notes on…”

“F of x,” the guy in the next row whispered as he handed my pen back to me.

“F of x,” I repeated. My Calc professor nodded and then turned back to the board to continue his diatribe on derivatives.

“Thanks,” I told the guy who rescued my pen. He eyed me up and down and it took me a second to realize the shorn boy in front of me was Glossy Hair from the first day.

He nodded and turned back around. I spent the rest of the class alternating between staring at the strange curves and f(x)’s on the board and the freckles on the back of Still-Glossy-but-much-Shorter-Hair’s neck.

“Is that Dallas?” Corrie asked, obviously unimpressed as Dallas made his way to my parent’s van on the night of the dinner. I could see her insult wheel spinning, but my parents must have cautioned her to be on her best behavior because she didn’t say anything more.

“Yep,” Jane replied, opening the door for him.

“Hey guys!” Dallas said.

“You’re sitting in the back next to Tammy and Corrie,” Jane told him.

Dad frowned at him in the rearview mirror as Dallas’s gangly legs maneuvered their way into the back seat. Dallas wore another giant button-down shirt and I could detect a hint of soap.

He was on his best behavior at dinner and talked freely to my parents about being a writing major. We ordered family style, and Dallas was careful not to take too much food to begin with. I could barely eat, so there were plenty of leftovers for Dallas to load up on.

I think that acting semi-normal for my parents finally got the best of Dallas, for as soon as my dad excused himself to go the restroom, Dallas grabbed a discarded crab shell and started maneuvering it across the table. “Under the sea!” he sang in his best Jamaican accent.

“What are you doing?” Corrie demanded.

“Just look at the world around you! Right here on the ocean floor!”
He held the crab up and made it wave a claw at Corrie.

“He’s weird,” Corrie said, turning to me as our dad came back. “Just like you,” she said under her breath. I looked at her and stuck my tongue out.

“Should we get dessert?” my mom asked the table, ignoring the tension between Corrie and I.

“Sure. It’s not every day you get to go out to dinner. Am I right?” Dad asked, casting his eyes around at the starving college students.

“Yes sir!” Dallas said brightly as he put the crab carcass back into the bucket. I’d never seen Dallas eat more than one type of food from the cafeteria, but he’d had sampling of all the dishes at the table and ordered a cherry pie, the same as my dad. The rest of us ordered vanilla ice cream.

When the dessert was delivered, my ever-demanding sister spooned some of Dad’s cherries on her ice cream.

Dallas looked up at me from across the table. “Tammy, do you want some cherries for yours?”

I could feel my face heat up as my friends and family watched him spoon some cherries into my bowl. I could tell by the pained look on Jane’s face that she had some sort of pun on popping cherries in her head, but she was too polite to say it in front of my parents.

My sister had no such qualms. She suddenly turned to me. “Dallas looks like a horse,” she said, attempting to lower her voice, but not quite getting there.

My spoon dropped with a clatter into my empty bowl (cherries on ice cream is
really
good, nervous stomach or not). I looked up to see Jane staring at me. “Did you hear that?” I asked her.

She shook her head no.

“Did you?” I asked Dallas.

He had the usual look of confusion on his long face. “What?”

Phew
. I gave my twin sister a dirty look as she resumed her ice cream eating. She didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. But I guess at least I didn’t have to worry about her suddenly getting a crush on Dallas and ruining that friendship too.

My parents dropped us back off on campus. I had declined joining them in their hotel as I was still seething at Corrie, who thankfully had a phone date with Kellen that night. I guess the two of them were still inseparable. The same couldn’t be said about us; after being apart for two months, and then being together for two hours at most, I found myself eager to be split from my sister again.

Jane, Linda, and I headed toward our usual picnic table, but Dallas gave us all a quick wave and headed back across the quad toward Delta. I was about to whine to my friends on how a dinner-with-parents should at least merit a small amount of conversation with said daughter afterwards, but as soon as Dallas was out of earshot, Jane burst into laughter. “A horse! That’s exactly it! That’s what we’ll call him!”

“You heard her?”

“Of course I did. Your sister’s loud,” she said with a tone of admiration. “Dallas probably heard her too.”

I just shook my head. I had been afraid of Jane and Corrie getting along. After all, they shared the same sick sense of humor. I was glad Corrie was otherwise occupied tonight and would be retreating thousands of miles away again soon.

“C’mon, Tammy, you have to admit that Dallas’s face is
really
long.”

I conceded; Dallas did have an exceptionally elongated visage. “Well then, he’s a very good-looking horse.”

“At least in your opinion,” my normally reticent roommate countered.

From then on, the poor thing was dubbed “Horseboy,” or simply “the Horse.”

Chapter 7: The LaVernie-Nator Four

I
stayed the weekend with my parents in their hotel room on the beach. The beautiful view barely made up for the prospect of living in tight quarters with my twin and sleeping on a cot while she got a queen bed to herself. At least she had the prudence to take my dad’s cell phone out of the room when Kellen called it. Still, it was a relief to get off campus and live in the “real world,” and eat non-cafeteria food, if only for a few days.

I also managed to focus on non-Eckhart related things—such as hearing about my brothers latest antics and how Dad’s medical practice was going—but as soon as I got back to campus Sunday night, I inquired about Dallas. He was supposed to call to discuss the details of putting LaVerne’s bike on the roof but neither Jane nor Linda had heard from him.

He finally he called my room the next Friday, a week after he said he would call. Through speakerphone, we settled for doing the prank the following night, when most people would be out getting drunk. “Aren’t you one of those people?” Jane asked Dallas when he finally arrived at our dorm Saturday evening.

“Yeah. I’ll probably end up going out later,” he replied, missing the sarcastic cue in Jane’s voice. “There’s a party over at Kennedy.” The Kennedy boys, the only all male dorm on campus, were Eckhart’s closest thing to a fraternity.

Jane rolled her eyes at me. She must have also taken note of the fact that Dallas didn’t invite either of us to the Kennedy Party.

I followed Jane and Dallas up Gandhi’s outside stairs. We paused at the landing, eyes raised to the roof, trying to get an idea of exactly how we were going to get LaVerne’s bike up there.

“I say we put it up on Gershwin’s roof,” Dallas said.

“Why?” I asked.

“So we don’t incriminate ourselves. Who else knows you guys hang out on top of Gandhi?”

“Probably everyone by now,” Jane said, referencing the fact that her roommate Pam caught us on our way up there the other night.

“Exactly. So if we put it on Gershwin, they won’t immediately implicate you guys.”

“Who says they’re going to implicate us at all?” Jane inquired.

“And aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked. “How do we get onto Gershwin’s roof? We can only get up on Gandhi because they leave the storage door unlocked. I’m sure Gershwin’s is locked up tight.”

Dallas looked up at the space between the two dorms, nodding to himself. “I think I can jump it.”

“Are you crazy?”

Jane backed up next to Dallas, one hand above her lip. “He’s right. It’s not that far.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s your life.”

Dallas leaned over the banister to look at the deserted complex below us. “Not much goes on around here, huh?”

“That’s why they call it ‘Alpha Lame,’” I replied.

“Well, it’s better for us anyway. Are you sure none of your dormmates are around?”

“They all went out for ice cream. Or else they’re locked in their rooms studying. On a Saturday night.”
Maybe because no one invites them to parties
, I added to myself.

“Right.” Dallas headed up the rest of the stairs and then waited for Jane to punch in the code and open the door. He strode purposefully into the dorm, but waited again for us to show him how to get up to the attic.

“This is so great!” Dallas exclaimed as soon as we were on the roof. “How are you not up here every night?”

“We practically are,” I told him.
Too bad you’re always at Volleyball.

Jane and Dallas argued over the best route to take with the bike to Gershwin while my head space grew more and more bitter. Who was I kidding? I was not a prankster. We were probably going to get caught and get kicked out of school. I had originally agreed to do this because I wanted to pretend that Dallas was resolved to defend me against good ole’ Vernie. But it became clear his main motivation was that he liked to play pranks on people. And Jane too, I thought, looking over at her animated face. She was determined not to fall into her old habits from high school, which—from what I had gleaned from the rare times she talked about herself—seemed to be similar to what Dallas would probably be doing later with the Kennedy boys. So she hung out with teetotaling Linda and me. I wasn’t necessarily a non-party goer by choice. It was just that no one had ever asked me to go, except for maybe Eric that first night, but I was too lame to say yes. If I ever did find someone to marry—although I’d probably have to find someone to kiss first—and had kids, what would I tell them about my college years? That I spent most weekends in watching
Ghostbusters
and
Dazed and Confused
while their Aunt Corrie and Uncle Kellen went out on amazing adventures?