That night, we found out Logan was in the Army. And that his name was Logan. (“Logan?” Dani asked me. “Isn’t that a kind of berry?”) He was stationed at Hunter Army Airfield and worked in a huge hangar where they trained him to fix helicopter rotors. That’s what the on-duty comment meant. I told him I was fifteen, even though Dani told me I should lie and tell him I was eighteen, and he didn’t seem to care all that much. He wrote age was unimportant if two people got along.
“Very true,” Dani said. “If it wasn’t for his blond hair, I’d think he might be my type.”
Dani pressed me to ask more questions, and to do it faster. She’d had trouble with the computer that afternoon and been forced to call Wynn and ask him to come over and fix it, and now she was afraid it could go out again at any moment. But I didn’t want to rush. I liked the rhythm of how we were talking. Almost right from the start, all of it was romantic. Not romantic as in, I-can’t-wait-to-hold-you-in-my-arms kind of talk. It just seemed like everything we discussed always came back around to relationships. An exchange would begin with him talking about his car and how old and crappy it was (Dani was already planning for him to come get us and take us out on the town in Savannah, so one of the first things she had me ask him was if he had a car), and then a couple of messages later he explained how he got his first real kiss in that very car back when it was still his dad’s. Dani wanted me to ask him if he used his tongue the first time, but I wouldn’t do it. “I bet you he didn’t,” she kept saying.
When I asked him why he joined the Army, he said it was because he’d been so mad about the towers getting blown up, but then a little later he admitted it was also because he wanted to go to college and didn’t have the tuition money. The Army promised to help pay his way. Later, Logan told me he always said that bit about the towers when he first met someone because it sounded better. The more he told me about his reasons for signing up, the more complicated they got. A lot of it seemed to have to do with his father and his hero brother. Logan said he’d already been on one tour in Iraq, and almost as soon as he got home, the Army told him he’d have to go back for a second one.
“So, he’s a war hero, too,” was Dani’s reaction.
We only got to exchange messages for about twenty minutes because he was using someone else’s laptop and they kicked him off to play a video game where you were a giant ant and you had to herd aphids, or some such, but before he said good-bye, he gave us his cell phone number.
“I can already see us drinking frozen daiquiris down on River Street,” Dani said. “This is beautiful.”
Dani was all set for me to call him right away—she had visions of daiquiris dancing in her head—but I reminded her of one of her own rules. Always wait three days to call.