It would be a short week, with school closed for Thanksgiving.
I decided to wear the leather pants on Monday to make a great first impression. And when school opened after the holiday, the ice would be broken.
At seven-thirty that morning it was an unseasonable seventy degrees. I’d never worn the leather pants before, and I found they worked like rubber sweatpants. I began to sweat, and they stuck to me like a second skin.
Half a dozen kids stood at the bus stop, including the foxy blonde from next door. She was not a disappointment up close. Swingy shoulder-length hair, shaggy bangs that gave huge gray-blue eyes a peekaboo quality as she turned her head. Taller than most girls but shorter than I was, so maybe five foot eight or nine.
I like to think I would have smiled at her. But I’d just become aware of one more disastrous side effect of the leather pants. I guess it had to do with the heat, the clinging, the rubbing as I walked. I couldn’t do anything but cross my hands over the notebook I held in front of myself, down low.
I like to think she would’ve smiled back when I smiled at her. I do think she gave me a sort of once-over, the corner of her mouth pulled up to expose the dimple she had in one cheek. I hadn’t seen that from across the driveway, and I had a thing for dimples.
When she offered up her slow-motion smile, an invitation to say hi, she offered it to someone else, a guy who came up to the group from the opposite direction. He was about my height, but with massive width and depth to his body. He was nearly as wide as he was tall.
As for me, there was an almost forgotten pull at my heart when I looked at her, and when I pointedly didn’t, a kind of longing. I don’t know if that’s love. It’s almost sad, that feeling. Excited and interested and hopeful and fearful.
I didn’t speak to anyone that day.
I also missed gym class. With Mr. B. I’d left my shorts at home. I didn’t do so much walking around between classes that I had a problem, and I was comfortable in the leather pants after that first experience. But I couldn’t show up and run around the gym, shooting baskets.
I figured I’d explain all that to Mr. B later.
I hung out in the locker room. That was where I overheard two huge guys—huge, as in not just tall but wide and deep as steers raised for beefsteak—talking about the blonde as they dressed for their next class. It didn’t seem to bother them that they were running late.
One of them was the monster she smiled at at the bus stop that morning. I’d seen the ripple of expression pass across his low brow—he didn’t want to look too eager. He smiled but let himself be distracted by someone else, and almost instantly, so did she. I didn’t catch his name but in my mind it had one syllable, something with punch. Biff.
He put a textbook into the locker he’d chosen. “I got it from Melanie,” he said with a moronic chuckle as he tossed a piece of paper into his locker. “It’s Patsy’s unlisted number.”
Patsy. What a sweet name. It suited her slow smile. I couldn’t picture her charging through a department store like a hunting dog.
“If she didn’t give it to you,” the other kid said, “what makes you think she’s going to be so thrilled to hear from you?”
I was only watching from the corner of my eye, but I could see the monster was acting super casual. “I’m a hunk,” he said with an expressive spread of his overdeveloped arms. “And I’m gonna be a football star.”
I stopped idly spinning the dial on my combination lock.
It had just hit me—this was Mr. B’s find.
They passed me as they left. I must’ve looked like Gumby next to them. Especially the one who claimed to be a hunk. He was a wall. A walking wall. I was grateful I didn’t play football.
It was after they left that I spotted the piece of folded paper under the bench. The phone number was scribbled in pencil. It must have fallen out of his locker unnoticed while he was busy looking cool.
I could have put it through the vents in his locker, but I pocketed it. I imagined calling her. I thought about the dimple in her cheek, and about hearing that smile in her voice. I could say I was new in town. We could talk a little, discover we had a few things in common. Then I would say I’d seen her at the bus stop. I’d describe myself, she would remember me.
“You’re that dork in the leather pants,” Patsy would say.
And that would be that.
I didn’t plan to ask her out. What would be the point? I didn’t expect to use the number at all.
It was enough just to have it.