Page 66 of Don't Bet On It
She rolled her eyes but didn’t respond.
“I always kind of hoped you would go out for cheerleading,” I admitted, enjoying the game. “Not only would that have forced you into one of those short skirts, but I imagined scenarios where we would end up on the bus together at night, on the way back from the game, and we would talk.”
“Talk?” she challenged on a hiked eyebrow.
“I don’t know what high school fantasies you had, but mine did not involve doing anything sexual on a bus.”
“Oh, see, I had plenty of those fantasies.” She grinned, warming to the topic. “In my fantasies, we took a bottle of my mother’s Boone’s Farm, sneaked on the bus, and turned it into a little apartment.” She looked wistful.
“You didn’t think the school administration would notice that?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t always the smartest kid.”
“Oh, that’s not true.” I shook my head. “You were extremely smart. You just never let yourself believe it.”
“Is that why you stood me up for prom?”
I froze, confused. “What?”
“Prom.” She looked resigned more than anything else. “You know, senior prom. We were supposed to go together.”
“I don’t… I’m not sure…” I worked my jaw and collected my thoughts. “Tallulah, I never had any intention of going to prom.”
Her eyes flashed with annoyance. Another emotion was there under the surface too. It was frustrated vulnerability. “Then why did you ask me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You did so!” Her voice ratcheted up ten notches. “You told Becky Carpenter that you wanted to ask me but were too nervous, so she asked me. She made all the arrangements and everything, only you never showed.”
Pity welled inside of my chest. “Becky Carpenter asked me to prom, and I told her I wasn’t going.”
Tallulah looked as if she was going to argue further, and then she stopped. I could practically hear the gears in her mind working.
I chose my next words carefully. “I didn’t know that you and Becky Carpenter were friends.”
“We weren’t.” Tallulah rubbed her forehead. “She was one of the girls who always got digs in about my mother.” She closed her eyes, grief lining her face. “I’m such an idiot.”
“No.” I shook my head. Her feeling bad about herself was going to make me feel wretched. “This isn’t on you. Becky was a terrible person.”
“She must have picked up on my crush on you.” Tallulah wouldn’t look at me, her gaze focused on the ceiling. “She was totally the type to try to embarrass me like that. I used all my savings to buy a dress and then only got to wear it for two hours. That’s how long I waited.”
I wanted to find Becky Carpenter and lock her in a storage room for a few days. “I’m so sorry.”
Tallulah adopted a brave face. “You didn’t do it. In fact, it turns out that I’ve been holding a grudge against you for thirteen years and you didn’t deserve it.”
I still felt guilty. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a stupid teenage dream. What are the odds that you actually would’ve wanted to go with me?” She slapped her hand over her face. “Ugh. I’m so freaking stupid. The only thing I had going for me that night was my mother had taken off and hadn’t shown her face in a week. She never knew, which meant she could never make fun of me.”
I wanted to find Sharon and lock her in that room with Becky. Because that wasn’t an option, I rolled so I was on top of Tallulah and wrestled her hands away from her face.
“Again?” she demanded, her face red and her eyes glassy. “I thought we agreed it was a mistake.”
“Itwasa mistake,” I confirmed. I felt that deeply, although not as deeply as I felt something else when I looked at her. I would have to file that away to think on later. “I need you to listen to me, though.”
“You don’t have to be on top of me for me to listen to you.”
“I need you to look at me.”
