Kick Me (21 page)

“Where’s Cathy?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I think she went to the bathroom or something.”

“I wonder if she’s talking to Dan,” said Tom. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

I hadn’t even considered this possibility and quickly grew concerned. But my concern immediately turned into a hope that she
was
talking to him. In fact, part of me really wanted them to be professing their love and agreeing to get back together. I wasn’t enjoying this date with Cathy very much, and any excuse to get to leave the dance and go home to watch
The Six Million Dollar Man
and drink root beer was a welcome thought.

I concocted a plan in which I would walk outside and discover Cathy and Dan making out and then play the sad, jilted cuckold as I walked home through the rain in my dress clothes while sad music played on the sound track. Looking forward to my new role as the Misunderstood Romantic, I headed out of the cafetorium to find Cathy. However, as I entered the trophy case–lined front lobby of our school, her friend Sandy ran up to me.

“Paul, Cathy’s in the bathroom and she’s really sick. She’s throwing up and everything.”

“What?” I asked, my mind reeling with horrific images of Cathy on her hands and knees in her dress heaving into a school toilet. “Does she have the flu?”

“No, it’s because of the beer. I think it made her sick,” Sandy said, looking upset.

I immediately lost sympathy for Cathy and my feelings of ambivalence about our date now turned into indignation. This is what she gets for downing a beer two minutes into our date, I thought to myself. If the idea of spending an evening with a nice guy like me was so hard to face that she had to turn to booze for moral support, then she can just heave all night for all I care. But, being a kid who was brought up to never make others feel bad about themselves, I forced a concerned look onto my face and said, “Oh, man, I hope she’s okay.”

“She’s really upset,” Sandy said with a look that showed she was worried I was going to be mad at Cathy. “She’s crying and everything. She said she didn’t want to ruin your evening.”

Too late, I thought. When an outing to a dance sees one half of the couple hearing that the other half of the couple is puking up beer into a toilet a mere thirty minutes into the date, then I’d say the evening is about as far down the road to ruin as it can get. Unfortunately, hearing that Cathy was crying made it hard for me to act angry. I once again slipped into the role of the Concerned Guy.

“Oh, she shouldn’t worry about that,” I said kindly. “I just hope she’s okay.”

“She’s fine. We got her cleaned up after she stopped barfing about five minutes ago. I’ll see if she’s ready to come out.” And with this, Sandy disappeared into the bathroom.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The idea that Cathy had been vomiting put the final nail in the coffin of my make-out fantasies. The mere mention that she had to be “cleaned up” made me wish she would simply stay in the bathroom all night, since the thought of seeing Cathy with puke stains on her already less-than-enticing dress was making my stomach sore. Before I could formulate any sort of a plan, the bathroom door opened and a contrite-looking Cathy emerged. There were no stains on her dress, but her makeup had taken a hit. The blush on her cheeks had clearly been wiped clean and reapplied with even less competence than her mother had demonstrated. Her eye shadow had been repaired simply by doubling its already heavy dosage. But it was her mascara that had borne the brunt of her emotional and gastrointestinal outburst. The black from her eyelashes had run and commingled with her liner, giving her eyes a Norma Desmond–meets–Alice Cooper effect. She walked over to me, her eyes cast down at the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Paul,” she said, looking like she might cry. “I understand if you don’t want to talk to me.”

What was I going to say? I really
didn’t
want to talk to her, simply because I was terrified that I might smell the vomit on her breath. Her large mouth, which I had found so sexy in the past, had now become the focal point of my angst. I knew that vomit had come out of it very recently, and I couldn’t be sure that bits of it weren’t still floating around in there. I knew from the few horrible times I had vomited in my life, that the taste had stayed with me for hours. Therefore, no matter how sad and coy Cathy was going to act, she was one thing and one thing only in my mind: a person who had just puked.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, shifting my weight back a bit.

“I feel terrible,” she said, stepping forward in order to get close to me. “I’ve completely ruined the evening.”

I shifted my weight away from her again, inching my foot back discreetly. “No, it’s not ruined. You just probably shouldn’t have drank all that beer in the car.”

She sighed heavily. I held my breath, afraid of what I might smell. “You’re right. God, it was so stupid. You don’t even drink, I can tell.” She looked into my eyes as if I were some sort of wise man. Clearly the girl was a mess. All I could do was stare at her mouth and wonder just how many times she had thrown up and whether her hands had gripped the sides of the toilet bowl as she did.

“As long as you’re okay, that’s all that matters,” I said with a forgiving smile, stepping back and putting my hands on my hips, as if I were her father. She sighed in relief to Sandy, then gave me a look that said she now thought I was a great guy and a potential boyfriend. “Slow Dancin’ “ came on inside the cafetorium. She looked toward the music, then gave me one of her now-familiar shy looks.

“Do you want to dance?” she asked, doe-eyed.

Good God, no, I thought. “Okay,” I said.

She took my hand, gave me a romantic smile, and led me into the dance. Her friend Sandy gave me a grateful smile that showed she was happy that I didn’t care about what had just happened in the bathroom. I smiled back, trying to figure out exactly how I could get the hell out of the rest of this date.

Cathy and I got onto the dance floor. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me close, in the standard death-grip slow-dance position that we as teenagers in the late 1970s were required to perform. Gone were the one-hand-on-waist-the-other-hand-up-and-out-to-the-side days of our parents. I had danced with my mother and aunts for years in this old-fashioned way and had dreamed about the time when I would finally get to put both my arms around a girl and pull her close, her arms around my neck, our foreheads touching, staring deeply into each other’s eyes, moments away from a kiss neither one of us could stop. Now, Cathy’s arms were around my neck, her face was inches from mine, and all I wanted to do was run. I gingerly put my hands on her waist and held her lightly, tilting my head back a bit, pretending to survey the room as I moved my nose out of breathing range.

“Wow, there sure are a lot of people here,” I said in as nonromantic a tone as I could muster.

“I wish there weren’t,” she said quietly. “I wish it was just you and me.”

I had lain awake at night for years dreaming of having a girl say something like that to me. I looked into Cathy’s eyes. She smiled coyly and exhaled. I smelled a trace of vomit on her breath. I felt like I was going to faint.

“Oh, yeah, well, too bad it’s not.” I delivered the line much like a clerk in a complaint department would tell a customer that he understood her grievance but there was nothing he could do about it.

Cathy looked into my eyes and moved her head forward, getting very close to my face. I held my breath. “I’m so glad you asked me to the dance,” she said sweetly.

“I’m glad you came with me,” I said, contorting my neck into a question-mark shape in order to put the maximum distance possible between her mouth and my nose.

“We’re going to have a great time.” Cathy’s smile started to transform into the flat-faced expression that people get just before they kiss someone. She moved her face toward mine. My neck had put my head as far back as it could go without dislodging it from the top of my spine. As Cathy moved her mouth toward mine, eyes closing to commence the kiss, I moved my head to the side and forward, effectively dodging her face and parking my ear next to hers. It was such a bold move that I didn’t know if she was going to get mad and push me away or if she’d just assume I didn’t know she wanted to kiss me and figure I was simply going into the heads-together slow-dance position. Cathy leaned her head against my cheek and sigh contentedly. All I could think of was how happy I was that her face was now behind me.

The dance went by slowly. I started pawning Cathy off on other guys she knew. I worried that she would figure out I was trying to get rid of her, but my nice-guy act was going so well that I had Cathy fooled into thinking I was being selfless.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she would ask me before going onto the dance floor with any number of football players.

“No, no, you two should dance,” I’d reply, as if I were her grandmother who was just happy to be sitting and watching the young people enjoy themselves. I hung around with the few guys I knew at the dance. None of my core group of fellow nerds had bothered to attend, knowing as I did that school dances were not the place where any of us felt at all comfortable. Coffee shops, movie theaters, and our bedrooms were our turf, and we never had to defend those places from cool guys.

As the dance ended, I wondered if Cathy and Sandy would forget that we were all supposed to go out to dinner. It was a tradition, I had been told, to go to the dance, then to take your date out for a nice meal in a fancy restaurant. When I say “fancy,” I mean, of course, one of the several medieval-themed restaurants peppered between the fast-food chains and twenty-four-hour family restaurants that accounted for most of the eating-out experiences available to us noncoast dwellers. Within most small Midwestern communities, there is an equation that anything having to do with a king is somehow symbolic of the highest-quality meal a person can enjoy. Restaurants with names like Ye Olde King’s Table and His Majesty’s Court were the places where you took dates, celebrated birthdays, or proposed. I had made the four of us a reservation at The King’s Inn, a huge dark-wood restaurant that incongruously had a statue of a giant ten-foot-high steer out in front. Much like a lobster tank in a seafood establishment, I guess the sight of a beefy heifer standing out in front of a restaurant was supposed to be the lure that would prove too tempting for any hungry driver to pass up. But tonight, with the image of the vomiting Cathy lodged in my head, driving past The King’s Inn and heading home was my one and only wish.

Cathy, Sandy, Walter and I walked out of the dance toward Walter’s car. Other dance attendees were loudly burning rubber with their cars, doing doughnuts and making the parking lot sound like a drag-racing strip. After Walter finished hooting and yelling “Burn it fuckin’ out, baby!” to a souped-up Dodge Dart that was wearing out its back tires by gunning the engine with the brakes on and sending a huge cloud of black smoke into the atmosphere, I yawned and tested the waters.

“Man, I’m tired,” I said, stretching my arms above my head in the most unsubtle portrayal of a sleepy guy ever attempted.

“Tired?” said Walter to me, as if the next thing out of his mouth was going to be an accusation of homosexuality. “I’m
starving.
”

“Me too,” said Cathy. “I’ve been thinking about a steak all night.”

“Yeah, you must be hungry,” said Sandy with a smirk. She then did an imitation of Cathy barfing. Cathy opened her mouth wide in shock, then punched Sandy on the arm.

“God, Sandy, shut up,” she said, motioning toward me with her eyes, as if Sandy were reminding me of something I could possibly have forgotten.

They were hungry. Cathy wanted a steak. This evening was not going to end.

At dinner, in the dimly lit restaurant, Cathy ordered a large steak complete with onion rings and a baked potato with sour cream and chives. As if the idea of her having thrown up was not enough of a libido killer, watching her pound down this costly combination of bad breath–inducing foods was enough to send me to a monastery. As we ate, I could do little but look at her mouth, knowing that I was going to be expected to kiss that mouth good night in a very short time. Throughout dinner, Cathy and Sandy talked and laughed as Walter made “they’re crazy” looks at me. I smiled and nodded and laughed along with them as I pretended to be enjoying myself. But all I could think of was getting back to the safety of my house and my much more familiar geek life. It was only after Cathy had ordered a piece of ricotta cheesecake that I was able to herd them out of the place.

As we left the restaurant, I made quite a show of taking some of the breath-freshening after-dinner mints out of the bowl next to the register, the same type of mints that news programs have since shown to be covered with urine from customers going to the bathroom, not washing their hands, and then using their piss-soaked fingers to grope around in the mint bowl. Fortunately, I did not know this fun fact back then and saw these mints as the only line of defense between me and Cathy’s barf-steak-onion-ring-and-cheesecake-tainted mouth.

“Anybody want a mint?” I asked casually.

“No thanks,” said Cathy. “I don’t eat candy.”

No, just everything else, I thought.

As we drove along in Walter’s car, Sandy turned to Cathy and me in the backseat and said, “Hey, you guys, let’s go park out at the beach.” Panic flashed through my brain as I realized this evening was supposed to continue and that its continuation would consist of nothing but going face to face with Cathy. It was officially Make-Out Time.

“Oh, man, I’ve gotta get home,” I said, abandoning any attempts to try to sound remotely cool.

“Really? It’s only 11:25,” said Cathy, looking at her watch. “I don’t have to be home until midnight.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound disappointed, “but my dad said I have to be home by 11:30. He’s weird about stuff like that.”

I saw Walter and Sandy exchange a look in the front seat that indicated whatever nerdy things they had been thinking about me throughout the evening were now confirmed. And at this point, I didn’t care. I just wanted out of that car.