Rolling Dice (12 page)

“Can’t I just say I had a good time, how was his night?”

“Well, you could,” she huffs. “If you don’t want to take my advice …”

“No, I do. Um …” I look at my phone for a moment before typing in a reply—
It was good thanks ;) How was yours?
—and then I turn my phone around for Tiffany to see. Summer and Melissa lean around to look too. “How’s that?”

Tiffany smiles. “Perfect!” She pulls the cell phone out of my hand and quickly hits a couple of buttons—but she does it all so fast I only have time to stammer incoherently.

“There, sent. Don’t worry,” she laughs, seeing the worried expression on my face, “I just added some kisses and pressed send, I swear.”

I give a doubtful “Mmph” and she hands my cell phone back. I check and see she was telling the truth, though, and relax. But I start to stress out again as I wait for him to text back. It’s the longest minute or two of my life, I swear.

When he does reply, I open the text right away and the girls lean in, trying to see. “What did he say?”

I read it aloud to them. “
I had a great night too. What’re you up to?
and then there’s a smiley face and four kisses again.”

That one doesn’t seem so scary to reply to, so I just tell him I’m at the mall with the girls and ask what he’s up to. I hesitate before I do it, but I type a couple of kisses at the end and hit send. I let out a big gush of air.

“Told you so.” Tiffany gives me a big smile and leans back in her chair. “I told you he liked you, didn’t I? And who didn’t believe me?”

I laugh. “All right, all right, you were right, okay! But he could just be being polite. Or friendly. He’s a friendly kind of guy, right?”

Melissa giggles. “Madison, he
likes
you. Duh. We went through this last night.”

“Trust me on this,” Tiffany says, leaning across the table with a look that’s so open and honest I wonder how I wouldn’t trust her on this. “I’ve known Bryce for years. He definitely likes you. He doesn’t send kisses to just anyone.”

I laugh nervously, not entirely reassured.

The text conversation that follows between me and Bryce is pretty casual, so it doesn’t stress me out too much. He’s not being flirty or anything, so I don’t have to panic or look like an idiot when I ask the girls how to reply.

About ten minutes later, the food turns up, and I tell Bryce that I can’t talk for now.

His reply comes through almost immediately
—Okay, talk to you later then. Have fun shopping :) XXXXX
—and I suppress a smile, and the blush that threatens to spread over my cheeks.

Silly as it might sound, I feel kind of excited seeing the kisses at the end of Bryce’s text. It makes my heart skitter in my chest. I’ve never got texts from a guy—unless you count Dwight: his texts certainly didn’t come with Xs on the end, and I hadn’t made out with him in a closet the night before, either.

“What was Bryce saying?” Summer asks as she begins to dig into her steak and I put my cell phone away again.

“He’s cleaning his car—one of the guys threw up in it last night.”

“Oh, ew.” Melissa scrunches her nose up. “Did he say who?”

“Jay.”

“Ah. Yeah, Jay doesn’t hold his alcohol too well,” Summer says. “Especially vodka. God, he knows he can’t do that shit. I don’t even know why he bothers. I puked my guts up last time I had vodka. Haven’t touched it since.”

“Jay didn’t look that drunk when we were playing truth or dare,” I say.

“He seems relatively sober”—Tiffany shrugs—“but he’s usually totally wasted.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I’m just glad he didn’t puke in the house.”

“You were so lucky with all that,” Melissa says, pointing at Tiffany with her fork. “I mean, there were only, what, two people who threw up, and they both did it in the bathroom. Remember the last party I had?”

“Oh, yeah. God, that was awful,” Summer says. She turns to me and adds, “Some girl puked on the couch.”

“Oh, gross!” I make a face.

“Going back to the subject,” Tiffany says, “what’s going on with you and Bryce? Are you seeing each other again?”

“Other than school, you mean?”

“Duh.”

“I don’t know—he hasn’t said anything.”

“Whatever you do, don’t ask him to go somewhere. Not even to the movies,” Melissa tells me. “Play hard to get and keep him on his toes.”

“Hard to get?”

“Please tell me you know what that means, Madison,” Summer says—but she laughs a little as she says it, so it comes across as a joke.

“I know what it means,” I say, mumbling only slightly. I shift in my seat. “I just … don’t …” I clear my throat, then take a bite of pasta, chewing it slowly so as to stall. I swallow hard. “I just don’t know if that’s me, you know?”

What I mean is, I have no clue how to play hard to get—I’ll only make an idiot of myself.

Even last night, when I was kissing Bryce, I felt awkward, inexperienced. I let him lead because I didn’t really know what to do. But with this—playing hard to get so he’ll be even more interested in me—nobody’s there to guide me every little step of the way.

Sure, the girls might advise me on how to act—but I’ll only feel stupid doing it, and mess everything up. I’d much rather just be myself and hope I don’t come off as too much of
a fool.

I mean, I must’ve done something right since I met him at the beach, given that he seems to like me.

The girls must see I don’t want to talk about it anymore—or maybe they just give up when I start eating and ignoring their prompting sentences.

We get the check and leave. I go to hand it to the guy who served us and tell the others to head on out, I’ll meet them in a minute.

“You just want an excuse to talk to the cute waiter,” Summer teases, laughing.

“Why are you after the waiter? You have Bryce now to keep you warm at night,” Tiffany joins in, hugging herself and giggling.

I laugh too, and roll my eyes at them. The guy who served us
was
kind of cute, I guess. He looked like he was in college, but couldn’t have been much older than us. I didn’t think he was really anything special—but hey, what do I know?

I clear my throat slightly to get his attention. He looks over and I smile, holding out the check with our wad of crumpled bills.

“Everything okay with the meal?” he asks.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Good.” He prints a receipt, and then scribbles on the back of it before handing it over—signing it off, I assume. “Come again.”

“Uh, thanks,” I mumble. I’ve always found it awkward talking to waiters and salespeople. I only offered to handle the check because it didn’t look like the others were going to, and I don’t like to leave it on the table—a pet peeve of my dad’s I inherited.

“Flirt with the waiter?” Summer asks jokingly, elbowing me lightly in the ribs when I finally emerge from the restaurant.

“Hardly,” I reply. I realize I’m still holding the receipt. As I turn it over, I see the scribble on the back. Then I laugh.

“Anyone want his number?” I say, completely shocked. He gave me his number; I’m flattered, but at the same time I know I’m not going to call him—I’m just not interested.

“He gave you his number?” Tiffany looks at the scrawled digits, and shakes her head. “Hold on two secs.”

“What’re you doing?” Melissa asks as we watch her take out her cell phone.

“Posting on Facebook that Madison just got a cute waiter’s number.” She looks up at me with a wicked grin. “Bryce is definitely going to see it. He’ll be so jealous. This is, like, perfect. Ah, thank God for social networking. It makes the whole dating game so much more
fun.”

“He might not believe it,” I point out.
I
barely believe it. I’m still a little stunned, actually.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Melissa asks. “Besides, he’s bound to ask you out even sooner if he knows you’re in demand.”

“But I’m
not
in demand.”

“Some random waiter has just given you his phone number,” Tiffany tells me.

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Madison, chill, it’s all part of the master plan.” Melissa shoots me an encouraging smile.

“What master plan is this, exactly?”

“The master plan to get you and Bryce together, duh.”

“Oh, right, okay …” I say hesitantly. I shake my head, deciding to simply go with the flow and leave them to their “master plan.” I just doubt it’ll work.

“Was he a good kisser?” Jenna asks, grinning into the webcam. She’s so excited about me getting my first kiss. “I remember my first kiss—it was Hank Phillips, at the dance at the end of middle school. He was such a sloppy kisser, it was totally gross. I kind of avoided him after that … Never mind about me, though—tell me all the details.”

“He was a good kisser, I guess. I don’t know. It’s not like I have anyone to compare him to, is it?”

“Mm, I guess. But hey, you’ve had your first kiss! You’re getting yourself out there a little more! You’ve made friends and you have a maybe boyfriend! I wish I was down there right now so I could give you a big old hug, Mads.”

I smile wryly. “How is college? So far we’ve only talked about me.”

“And we’re not done talking about you, so don’t you dare try to change the subject! College is college, New York is New York—but, Maddie, you’re no longer the same old you! So we’re still talking about you, and if you don’t like that, tough shit.”

“What if I just hang up, huh?”

“Then I will call you back and call you back and call you back until you answer, and then we’ll keep on talking about you.”

“Oh …” Then I laugh. “Well, I don’t know how much more there is to say.”

“Has he texted you or anything since lunch?”

I shake my head. “No, not yet. But I don’t expect he’ll—”

That annoying chirping sound interrupts me. Jenna laughs. “Is that your cell? Christ, that’s spooky. Is it him? If it is, that’s even spookier. I’m like, psychic, huh? Is it him?”

One new message: Dwight
.

“It’s not Bryce …” I shake my head at the webcam. “It’s Dwight.”

“Dwight? Nerdy Dwight from your Physics class?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?” she asks, leaning into the lens of the webcam eagerly, her blue eyes wide. It’s the same look she used to get when she heard new gossip from one of her friends. “What’s he say? Tell me, tell me!”

Laughing, I load the text message and read it out. “He says,
What’s this I hear about you and a waiter?
And there’s one of those smileys with a tongue out.”

Jenna laughs. “He likes you, doesn’t he?”

“Who, Dwight?” I ask doubtfully.

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t
like
me.”

“Well, at least as a friend. He sounds so cute. Like, a really nice, sweet guy. Unless, of course, you like him as more than that?”

“No,” I say hastily. “No, we’re just friends.”

“Mm,” Jenna says, with that confidential kind of smile that tells me she’s in on my secret.

“I’m serious,” I reiterate. “He’s only a friend. I’m lucky he’s that. I told you—he was mad when he saw me hanging around with all the popular people. I mean, I get where he’s coming from, but they’re not that bad. They’re all pretty nice, actually. Well, Kyle, not so much, but the others … I don’t know why Carter said—”

“Hold on, which one’s Carter?”

“Carter is Dwight’s friend—the one with half an eyebrow missing. He’s in my art class. Anyway, he’d said I shouldn’t really hang around with him even in art class because Tiffany and the others might get annoyed.”

“That’s high school for ya,” Jenna says with a bitter kind of twist in her smile. “It can get pretty shitty.”

“Like I don’t already know that,” I mumble. She hears me; I can tell by the way her expression softens and turns sympathetic. But she doesn’t say anything. “Hold on a sec, let me just reply to Dwight.”

“What’re you saying?”

I tell her as I type, but I speak slowly, struggling to multitask. “
It’s nothing much. Just some waiter gave me his number
. Then I’ve put a laughing face at the end,” I add.

“Any kisses?”

“No. I don’t usually put any kisses to him.”

“Usually?” Jenna picks out. Then she laughs a little. “How often do you text him?”

“Not much at all. I texted him, like, Wednesday about something, I don’t remember what. It wasn’t a particularly long conversation. Then he’s just messaged me today.”

As I’m talking, a text comes through.

It’s not Dwight replying, though. This one is from Bryce.

Jenna assumes it’s Dwight, and doesn’t ask what he’s said. But I do see the expectant, slightly impatient look she’s giving me through my computer screen.

Movies tomorrow night? I’ll pick you up at six. XXXX
, it reads.

“Uh, Jenna?”

“Yes?” she replies, drawing the word out.

“Bryce … Bryce just asked me on a date.”

“What’re you wearing?” Tiffany asks. I’ve got her on speaker, and my cell phone sits facedown on the bed.

“Jeans, I guess?”

“Uh!”
she says, making a noise like a buzzer. “Wrong.”

“Shorts?”

“
Uh!
Try again.”

“What, then? What do you suggest I wear? We’re only going to the movies.”

“A skirt,” she says. “Duh. And a cute top. Make sure it’s casual.”

I know I should take her advice. Tiffany knows a heck of a lot more about what to wear on a date to the movies than I do. Jenna told me to wear a skirt too, so I know it’s legit advice.

So I say, “Okay.” And I take a pair of dark denim cutoffs out of my closet and step into them, simply because I don’t want to wear a skirt.

“You want a girly top to go with it.” Tiffany’s still talking. I’m barely listening, though. I texted her this morning to tell her I was going to the movies with Bryce, and she insisted on coming over. I managed to stop her, but she still called me.

I rifle through my closet, but I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to wear. I’m really worried about my first date, and I want to look good. But I know I don’t want to wear anything I feel awkward or uncomfortable in, so I have to try and find some sort of balance.

I’d have explained to Tiffany, but that would have given away too much. She and Jenna might have the confidence to wear anything at all and look good in it, but I don’t, and I know that.