I didn’t see Dani again until the end of second-period lunch. She had third-period lunch and came into the cafeteria as I left. According to the clock in the cage up above the salad bar, I had exactly three and a half minutes before the bell. We went out on the breezeway.
“I got an answer for you,” she said.
“An answer for what?”
“You know, it being too fast.” Dani poked a stiff index finger through her fist a few times.
“Oh,” I said.
“I talked to Barbara Ann.”
“You didn’t tell her it was me, did you?” I moaned. “Dani. Shit.”
Barbara Ann Habersham was a bottle blonde with a body that made boys turn their heads as she passed in the hall. Back when she still wore a cheerleader uniform, they’d wait for her in clumps below the front stairs in hopes of a panty flash. I’d heard she dated a frat boy from Georgia Southern. She looked like a college senior, but she was only a high school one. I seriously doubt she even knew who I was. She’d been the youngest-ever head of the varsity cheerleading squad until she got kicked off the first quarter of her junior year. Some people said it was because she got caught smoking pot in her hotel room at a preseason exhibition game over in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but I’d heard a few other people say it was because she got pregnant and had an abortion. Despite all this, Barbara Ann was still popular. Maybe even more so because pretty people could do shameful shit and not even the teachers seemed to care. These days she was kind of like the queen of the burnouts and baddies. Still, I didn’t much care for her to know all about my private sexual goings-on.
“Of course I didn’t tell. I acted like I was only curious to know if it was theoretically possible to fix a hair-trigger penis.” She made air quotes around the word “theoretically,” one of her favorite bandying-about words, along with “homunculus” (as in, “we had a homunculus good time at that party”) and “plethora,” which she emphatically believed meant an enormous fat person (like, “look at that plethora on the bike over there, his butt’s gone and swallowed the banana seat right down to the tires”). It didn’t matter how many times I tried to shove a dictionary in front of her face.
“ ‘Is there any cure for such a poor, sad condition as this?’ That’s what I asked her. I described your boy as a three-scoots-and-shoot kind of guy.”
“You did not say that.” I sucked in two lungfuls of air in one breath. “Did you?”
“Oh, please, tranquilo the hell out.” Dani had just come from Español with Senora Pulawski. “The last person she’d expect it to be is you. She probably thinks it’s me that’s wondering.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And I wasn’t wondering.”
“I’m hungry, so I’ll make this quick. Barbara Ann told me to take a hair tie or a scrunchie in your emergency-type situations, and wrap it nice and snug around the bottom of his dick once you’re sure he’s good and hard. That’s key or it won’t firm up in the first place. Are you paying attention?”
The bell rang.
“Dani,” I said.
She ignored this. “Listen, Lynn, this is good stuff. You wrap it nice and tight, but not so tight it starts turning blue. The idea here is this’ll keep the blood in there and the whole thing will last longer. Depending, it could be like two or three times longer. She wrote the instructions on a Juicy Fruit wrapper. Here, I’ve already memorized it.”
Dani handed me the wrapper. It was folded up into a tiny square. I thought of Logan’s sweet little origami roses and made up my mind to chuck the wrapper as soon as Dani left. As I put it in my hip pocket, she sighed in her most dramatic way. “I wish I could meet him. I hardly know what’s going on and it was all my idea to begin with. You never tell me anything.”
“He’s probably leaving tomorrow, but he says he’ll come back and visit me.”
“Why tomorrow? I thought you planned to move him in for good.” She winked.
“My mom’s going back to work and he’s sick of it in there. I’ll admit it’s pretty hot.”
“I bet.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” She tossed me one of her more superior looks. “Still, while you’ve got him locked up in there, you should try to get him to stay as long as you can. I mean, what’s a few more days at this point? And also, do you think he’ll really come back? I very seriously doubt it. Think about it, Lynn, when’s the next time you’ll get a chance like this?”
“I’ve thought about that.”
“Maybe you should tie him up? My dad has some real police handcuffs.”
That made me laugh. The thing is, I did think about it. Not really. Well, I don’t know. What I was mostly thinking was, What the hell am I doing?