Page 20 of Twice
“The way you don’t give up until you’ve figured it out.”
One afternoon during my junior year, I was sitting by a baseball field with Wesley. He had developed into a great athlete, slim and tightly muscled, and I think a lot of girls secretly liked him. He was more confident socially than I was. Despite experiencing many crushes, I was yet to know any affection in return. No girl had ever written me a love note or dreamily scribbled my name on her three-ring binder.
“Can I ask you something, Wes?”
“Yeah?”
“If you liked a girl, and you had two chances to get her to like you back, what would you do differently the second time?”
Wesley thought for a moment. He was never afraid to take time to answer a question, a quality I found rare.
“Well,” he said, digging a cleat into the dirt, “I guess I would use the first time to find out everything she liked andeverything she didn’t. And the second time I would just do all the stuff she liked.”
Brilliant Wesley. I had always been so focused on correcting mistakes, I never thought of my first pass as a research opportunity. Armed with this new approach, I immediately set my sights on the loftiest target: our classmate Jo Ann Donnigan, who could sing like a professional and got all the leads in the school plays. She had straight auburn hair, a delicately upturned nose, and had already won several local beauty pageants. She never arrived at school without looking as if she could go directly to a fancy restaurant. I’d had a secret crush on her since freshman year, but on the scales of high school popularity, she was way out of my league.
That was the challenge. We’d never spoken a word. But I did sit across from her in homeroom. The morning after my conversation with Wesley, I noticed her notebook had the cover of David Bowie’sDiamond Dogsalbum on it. I summoned all my courage and, remembering this was just the first go-around, leaned in toward her.
“Hey, Jo Ann, do you like David Bowie?”
She scowled, as if wondering what gave me the right to speak to her.
“David Bowie?” I repeated. “You like him?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Everyone calls him Bowie,” she said flatly.
“Yeah. Right. Bowie. So... what do you like about him?”
She sighed. “I dunno. How he dresses. His hair.”
“Yeah.”
“And his makeup. Even though he’s a guy.”
I shrugged. “If I came home in makeup, my father would shoot me.”
She snorted, which I took as a breakthrough. From that point on, I studied everything I could about Bowie—and Jo Ann Donnigan. I learned that she wanted to be an actress, that her favorite Broadway musical wasPippin, that she liked onions on her pizza, that she drove her parents’ Dodge Dart, that she wore Charlie fragrance by Revlon, that she’d had a summer job at an arts and crafts supply store, and that she’d once taken tap dance lessons. She had a thing for guys with sideburns, and she dated only athletes on the high school sports teams.
I learned most of this from a friend of hers named Lizzie Clark, who was willing to gather the information after I helped her study for a chemistry test. Lizzie had acne and a serious overbite and not many boys paid attention to her. When she got a B on that test, she ran up to me after school and kissed me on the cheek. She said “Thanks for helping me” and I said “No problem” and she said “I like you, Alfie” and I reflexively said “I like you, too, Lizzie.” But I think she got the wrong idea because after that she never stopped seeking me out and touching me flirtatiously and asking if I wanted to go to Burger King on the way home from school. This one time I took her up on it, I made a joke, which made her laugh so hard she spit up her soda through her nostrils. Then she blurted out, “OK, you know I have a crush on you, right?”
That was the first time anyone had uttered those words in my direction. Sadly, I wasn’t interested in Lizzie. But with her help, I was able to learn a ton about Jo Ann Donnigan—even though Lizzie often asked, “Why are you so obsessed with this girl? She thinks you’re a dweeb!” Eventually, I had enough information to test Wesley’s hypothesis.Onlydo the stuff she liked.My plan was to jump back in time to before we ever spoke and get her to like me by becoming her perfect match.
Such was my dedication to this love experiment that I traveled all the way back to the summer before my junior year and began practicing basketball four hours every day. Although I had the height, I was never too interested in the game—until Jo Ann became my motivation. I drilled lay-ups, jump shots, dribbling behind my back. I forced my way into pickup games to get used to the banging, rebounding, and jockeying for position.
“Again, with the basketball?” my father asked when he’d see me heading out.
“I like it,” I said.
“You could like a summer job, too, you know.”
“Yeah, Dad. Gotta go.”
That summer I also grew what I could of sideburns—not much, but something. When school started, I tried out for the varsity team and, thanks to my summer’s worth of dedication, I made the cut, which afforded me the right to wear a jacket that readjennings basketball.
In our first game of the year, the opposing team heaveda long pass over my head in the final seconds and their best shooter threw up a prayer to beat us. Afterward, I noticed Jo Ann in the stands. I wiped away my sweat and immediately transported back to that last play. This time, anticipating the pass, I stepped in front, intercepted it, and dribbled the other way for a game winning lay-up. The gym erupted with applause.
The next morning, donning my jacket, I sat down next to Jo Ann in homeroom and, without looking at her, softly sang the lyrics, “Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess...”
