Y ou better wake up,” whispers a voice.
Someone bumps against my shoulder and I snap my head up. I’m sitting at a table, surrounded by Yearbook dorks.
Martin Farris is beside me.
“Is the teacher here?” I ask.
“No.”
I refocus my eyes. “Then why did you wake me up?”
“Because you’re gonna fall off your chair.”
“I happen to be good at sleeping in chairs.”
Martin goes back to his fascinating freshman swim team article.
“Why are you sitting next to me?” I ask him.
“There was no place else to sit.”
When Yearbook lets out, I can’t get out of there fast enough. I can’t lose Martin, though. For some reason he follows me down the hall.
“So…I…uh…” Martin says to me in a voice that is not his usual overconfident, robot dork voice.
“So you what?” I say back.
“I asked my friend Kaitlyn about you.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked her where you might have been last semester. She said you were in rehab.”
“That’s right,” I say, walking a little faster.
“She laughed at me. She said everyone in the whole school knew about it, and why was I so stupid?”
“That’s kind of what I thought too,” I say.
“And then I started thinking about it,” he says, trying to keep up. “And it all made sense. That’s why you go to the library. Because you used to hang out with Jake and Raj and those guys. But they usually skip out and smoke weed during lunch, so you go to the library and do the crossword puzzle and sleep.”
“Good work, detective,” I say.
“So then I was thinking you probably don’t have anything to do on weekends, or anytime really, and maybe I should offer to do something with you.”
I keep walking.
“Not anything big,” he continues. “Just like, maybe you need someone to hang out with. Or go somewhere with. Or something like that.”
“And you were going to volunteer yourself for this duty?”
“Sure. Why not? We could go to the mall. Go ice-skating or whatever. It’s not like I’ve got that much going on right now.”
“No kidding? A cool dude like you has nothing going on?”
He frowns at this but continues his speech. “I just thought I should offer. It was Kaitlyn who suggested ice-skating.”
“Ice-skating?”
“Yeah. She said girls like that.”
“God, you really are a dork.”
“Or a movie. Or whatever.”
“And this wouldn’t be a date?”
“Not at all. It would just be…helping you out. A good deed. Because you probably don’t have any non-stoner friends. Obviously you don’t. You probably don’t have any friends now, if what Kaitlyn said is true.”
“So you’re offering yourself as a dork-replacement-friend sort of thing.”
“No. Actually, I don’t think I would want to be your real friend. You’re not very nice. But I could spare a little time to help someone, you know, in a difficult situation.”
“How thoughtful of you.”
“It is thoughtful of me. I just…we could even just sit around and do crossword puzzles if you wanted.”
“No offense,” I say, veering away from him, toward the parking lot. “But that sounds like the worst idea ever.”