Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [85]
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah, I’d like that.”
My girlfriends started giggling. I blushed, admiring him for the way he’d asked, for approaching me in public instead of with a phone call, for risking embarrassment. I also couldn’t quite believe that he knew who I was, that I wasn’t just one of the faceless girls who moved through the same hallways and classrooms but might as well have inhabited a different world. But I also had the strangest sense that I knew him . . . that, somehow, my entire time in high school, maybe even my entire life, had been leading up to this conversation.
“I’ll pick you up at six,” he told me. He was very calm, looking at me steadily, ignoring my friends. “We can go to dinner first, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” I said again. “I live on Crestview.”
“I know.” He walked off, and my girlfriends fell on me, scooping me up like a quarterback in a huddle.
“Oh my God! Frank Barrow!” I smiled, feeling flushed, almost feverish. I still couldn’t quite figure out how he knew me. The next week revealed nothing. Frank smiled when he saw me in the hallways. At lunch, he’d make a point of coming over and saying “hello.” But that was all. I should have been frantic with nerves, part of me wondering if he’d asked me out as some kind of joke or dare. (In the movies I loved, the ones I’d watch every time they came on cable, 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed, things like that happened, there were pranks and jokes and misunderstandings, but the boy and the girl always wound up together, the way they were meant to be.)
My friends were useless when it came to figuring out what was behind Frank Barrow’s interest, but full of suggestions about what I should wear. I had the dress I’d bought for homecoming, but I wanted something new for Frank. So I used eighty dollars of my babysitting money to buy a simple sleeveless dress in periwinkle blue, with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swished around my ankles and had braided gold metal buckles at the shoulders, an inexpensive knockoff of the Badgley Mischka gown Kate Winslet had worn to the Oscars that year. I borrowed a pair of gold strappy sandals from Nancy and paid another twenty dollars to go to the beauty school and have my hair curled, then arranged in an updo, with a little rhinestone butterfly clipped over my right ear.
Frank wore a dark-blue suit with a light-blue tie almost the exact same shade as my dress. He held my arm as he walked me to his car, which was his father’s Buick, very old but very clean (I learned later he’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it for the occasion). It wasn’t until he was backing out of my driveway, one arm over my seat, that I realized I didn’t know where we were going. Before homecoming that fall, my date and I and three other couples had gone to the Chart House in Center City, which was, as the name implied, right on the water (the Delaware, which wasn’t one of the world’s prettiest rivers, but when you lived in Philadelphia, you took what you could get). The tables there were set with an array of silverware that most of us found bewildering, and the cheapest entrée, pasta with roasted seasonal vegetables, cost fourteen dollars.
“Burgers okay?” asked Frank.
“Sure!” My voice was too loud. I worried that it sounded like I was disappointed and trying to hide it, but the truth was, I’d left the Chart House with a stomachache, brought on, I figured,