previously… preface part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4
I was discussing my problem with Sister, who suggested I call our mom to see if she’d let Alex, our youngest brother whom we mostly refer to as The Kid, go with me.
I thought it was an awesome idea.
So did Mom.
It was decided. My date to my senior Spring Banquet was to be my youngest brother. For the first time all year, I was excited about Spring Banquet.
Wisdom would, perhaps, have whispered in my ear to exercise caution, but I couldn’t help myself. Joey was so dang funny. And easy to talk to. And nice. He was respectful, smart and had the strangest hobbies. He was, in short, fascinating.
I really tried to keep my distance. I had, after all, just come off a breakup and didn’t want to be using Joey as a rebound, he was too special for that. So I prayed a lot. I talked to my mom. And I spent more time chatting online with Joey than prudence would recommend.
Thursday before Spring Banquet was one such evening. It was 11:00 and I had homework to do, but…Joey kept chatting with me. And I wasn’t exactly signing off. Somehow the topic of Spring Banquet came up.
You should come with us, I suggested. It’s going to be me, Sister, Andrew, Laura, Stephen, our little brother, and maybe somebody else.
I don’t think I can, I have to edit this video for Matt. He said, lamely.
Whatever, you’ve never even gone to a Spring Banquet, I prodded.
He wouldn’t agree to come with us, but he did say he’d stop by later when Jamie and I were putting together centerpieces the next evening. I glanced at the clock and realized I had probably better use my head, so I said goodnight to Joey and tried to finish my homework. It was tough.
Jamie and I spent the entirety of the next afternoon going to Michael’s, picking up last minute supplies, and counting mirrors.
“I cannot believe we agreed to do this,” she said, as we were hauling a large silk tree into one of the school vans.
“I can’t either….three more days and then we are never serving on student government again,” I concurred. Jamie was the secretary and I was the treasurer. X, of course, was the president. Poor Jamie…stuck in the middle of the war.
We shoved the tree in the van haphazardly, then started walking back to the classroom we had taken over for the afternoon. It was covered in centerpiece mirrors, fishbowl things, and floating candles.
“Holy cows, what is that?” I asked. Someone was riding a unicycle across the circle toward us.
“Oh, that’s Joey,” Jamie said.
“Oh, of course it is,” I said, still gawking. I hadn’t actually ever seen him do it, he’d just mentioned it in one of our five hour conversations on the internet.
“Yeah, he and Joel both do it. Haven’t you ever seen them in the gym?” She asked.
Somehow I had not. I was still standing there looking shocked when Joey rode up, hopped off his unicycle, and grinned at me.
“Hi!” he said.
“Hi,” I replied. I tried to think of something witty and charming to say and I came up entirely blank.
Jamie took charge.
“We’re working on centerpieces. Come help us,” she said.
Joey, to my great amazement, fell in step beside me as we walked into centerpiece central. We had a video playing on the classroom TV, Toy Story I think, and put Joey to work cutting out stars. I then covered the stars with foil. For the next hour and a half we talked and laughed until our stomachs hurt.
“Hey, Jenna, help me take this outside,” Jamie said, indicating several full boxes.
I hefted one and the two of us walked outside.
“What is going on?” Jamie whispered.
“What?” I played dumb.
“You…Joey?”
“Oh. Well, OK, fine, I have a crush on him,” I admitted.
Jamie laughed. I was not expecting that. “I think you two would be good together,” she surprised me by saying.
“Well, we’ll see…it’s still early,” I said. I was being super, super cautious, it hadn’t been very long since I had called it quits with X, I wanted to be careful. My heart had moved on months before I handed the ring back and I couldn’t shake the attraction I felt to Joey. He was just…perfect. And I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him.
Jamie and I walked back into the classroom and found Joey right where we’d left him, cutting stars out of cardboard. He glanced up when he noticed me and gave me a big, heart-stopping smile. I smiled right back.
Then he glanced at the clock.
“Nuts, I gotta get to work on that video,” He said, standing up and picking his unicycle up off the floor.
“Thanks for helping us,” Jamie said, giving me one of those raised-eyebrows looks behind Joey’s back.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Joey said to me, then hopped on his unicycle and rode off.
“I have never seen him act that way before,” Jamie said. “Never.” And she hung out with Joey a whole lot more than I ever did. I sat and stared out the window as he rode away until he was out of sight.
I really needed to get myself figured out before I did something I wasn’t planning to do.
Jamie and I finished up the centerpieces and decorations by 7:30. The vans were loaded and we were exhausted. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jamie said.
“Early tomorrow,” I concurred. Blech. Early.
We dragged ourselves off to our respective rooms. When I went inside, Sister was sitting at her computer, typing away to somebody.
“I am so tired.” I moaned and collapsed on the floor. I really like laying on the floor. Always have. (The sibs call me a “floorist”, and with good reason.)
“Mom says Alex is coming tomorrow morning,” she told me. “And did you get your dress approved yet?”
Stupid dress approval process. “No, I didn’t. Thanks for reminding me.” I got up off the floor, put my dress on, looking it over carefully to ensure that no straps were visible at all, anywhere, finally having Sister do some fancy safety-pinning. (I hoped nobody would notice the safety-pinning, because that was against the rules too. It had to be completely normal.)
By sheer luck, my dress passed inspection. I stood there with my arms spread out from my sides while the RAs eyed from every imaginable angle, looking for the abominable straps of course, and then kneeled when they told me to so they could ensure that nothing was visible from above.
Glad that was over, I swooshed back to my room. I sat down in my desk chair, still wearing my lovely midnight-blue gown, and noticed that Joey was online.
I just passed dress inspection. You should come with us, you would have fun…. I flirted.
Can’t, I have to finish editing this video, he replied, it has to be done by Monday and I’m not even halfway there. I even had to skip dinner to work on it.
Oh, well I have stuff for a PB&J sandwich, want me to bring you one?
Sure! I’m at Joel’s. It’s 3351 NW 4th, almost on the corner with Arlan.
I’ll be over in 10 minutes, I typed.
“Hey, I’m gonna run over and take a sandwich to Joey,” I yelled to Sister. She was in the bathroom, sitting on the counter and plucking her eyebrows.
“Sure…” she said absentmindedly. She never pays attention to me when she plucks her eyebrows.
I changed out of my dress and back into jeans and a t-shirt. I slapped together a sandwich, wrapped it in a paper towel, and headed out the door. It was getting dark. I glanced at my watch, and noticed that it was now 8:30. Two hours before curfew, I was safe.
I knocked on Joel’s door a few moments later. He was surprised to see me, and I didn’t really blame him. Last year he had been roommates with X, but he was friends with both X and Joey.
“Hi,” I said tentatively. “I brought this sandwich for Joey.”
“Oh, he’s upstairs. I’ll show you,” Joel said, leading me into what was a very obvious bachelor pad. The cream colored carpet on the stairs had gray fuzz growing on the crevasses and lots of brown mud stains here and there. There was an empty Papa John’s box at the top of the stairs. It was slightly open and the leftover jalapeno was looking dried out, like it had been there awhile.
“She’s here,” Joel yelled as we turned a corner. There sat Joey at Joel’s Mac, doing his video-editing thing. It was pretty much the first Mac I had ever seen, and I thought it was super amazing that Joey knew how to make the thing work in the first place, much less edit a video on it.
“I hope you like strawberry,” I said, holding out the sandwich wrapped in a paper towel.
Joey smiled, took it from me, and started eating. “It’s really good,” he complimented me. I knew he was runnin’ me a line, is it even possible to mess up PB&J?
“Thanks,” I said. “What are you doing?”
Joey explained to me that he was editing a video for Student Movie Night or something like that, a bunch of guys had written a script, he had helped film it and was now doing the editing. (Some things never change, right?)
I stayed there and watched for an hour and a half, until I started to yawn. “Oh my gosh, it’s almost curfew. I better get going,” I stood up and stretched.
“I’ll walk you back, it’s dark out,” Joey said. He brushed PB&J crumbs off his lap as he unfolded himself from behind the computer desk.
“You really don’t have to, it’s—”
He wouldn’t hear my protests, though, and before I knew it the two of us were walking back towards my dorm. He kept saying the funniest things and my laugher rang out over the quiet campus. It felt so good to laugh again, especially with somebody as easy to talk to as him.
We walked under a street lamp, not unlike the one I very nearly crashed into riding Joey’s bike all those months earlier, and as we passed through the light I noticed X sitting on a bench several yards away, watching the two of us. I shook my head slowly at him, and turned my attention back to Joey.
Awkward. But then, it was a small school.
“Are you sure you won’t come with us tomorrow night?” I asked one last time as we stopped outside my door. “It might even be fun.”
I was undeniably attracted to him and I was looking for opportunities to see how he interacted with people when he let his hair down. There were some mistakes I didn’t want to make twice.
“I really have to finish this video, they’re showing it next weekend and I have to work so much this next week, plus with all those end of semester papers…I just don’t have time. I have to edit for the next two days or I won’t get it done.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and scuffed his foot on the cement.
“Well, we’ll probably have more fun than you do,” I said. “Thanks for walking me back.”
He turned back towards Joel’s.
“Isn’t that the wrong way? Your dorm’s over there,” I indicated the opposite direction.
“I have to go do more editing tonight, I probably will head home later,” He said. He smiled and did that Top Gun wave thing again as he walked backwards away from my dorm.
I floated inside and up the stairs. He had walked me home and it wasn’t even on his way! I dropped in my desk chair and announced to Sister, who was laying on her bed, “I like Joey.”
“Oh good. He’s nice.” She was totally unfazed, clearly she already knew what was going on. Sisters are like that, I think.
“Wrong; you’re supposed to tell me I’m not allowed to have any crushes because I apparently don’t have a very good track record and because of said track record I just had a messy break up…or something,” I whined.
“I’m not telling you that. You did just have a breakup, but it, like, was six months overdue because you’re chicken.”
“Point taken,” I said.
“So, major topic shift, what should we do with our hair tomorrow night?” She asked, rolling off her bed and onto the floor by my desk. I hate doing my hair and I always have, but anything’s more fun with Sister. Two hours later, we had ourselves made up, styled, and decided that we were quite ready to suffer through whatever Spring Banquet brought this year. At least The Kid was going to be my date.
And, when it came right down to it, Spring Banquet was fairly uneventful. It was boring, actually.
To Be Continued…
