Mainly because she was right, I think. The great majority of Glass was provincial and boring—it hadn’t really changed much since the fifties when Farrell Fine Hair had built their second factory outside of Texas in our town. Plus, Veronica gave them something to aspire to, and even better, something they could never achieve. Much like nirvana, and a life without sin, nobody outside of Veronica’s immediate family would ever achieve actually being liked by Veronica.
So this meant that everybody at school, save James and me, expended a lot of energy trying to get Veronica to like them.
. . .
The thing that pissed me off most about Veronica’s treatment of me was all the extra attention I was getting, which resulted in me having to give up James.
Everybody looking at me meant that I couldn’t look at James without somebody figuring out that I liked him. Which would turn an already bad situation into a nightmare, since we weren’t quite at the Great Transformation point yet.
So no more chemistry class breaks. No more shadowing him in the hallways. No more waiting for him to finish practice, just so I could watch as he walked from the field to his car.
Basically no more stalking.
I think I would have been okay with the rest, if it hadn’t been for not being able to see James on a regular basis. But factoring that in, the Dark Days returned.
FIVE
I was tired when I woke up, tired when I went to bed. I walked around all day with my eyes on my shoes. It reminded me of how I had felt for those two years after I had stopped talking but before I had discovered Molly Ringwald movies. Truth be told, I was dying without James.
He didn’t have the same lunch period as me, and our schedules weren’t such that we necessarily had to be passing each other in the hallway. So if the fortunes weren’t with me, I could go days without seeing him. I was missing him in a way I can only describe as something terrible. Like a piece of my heart was missing, and I knew where it was, but I couldn’t go to it, because of certain situations. . . . Yes, Something Terrible.
But then one night, while watching Pretty in Pink at bedtime, it occurred to me that this Veronica situation might be a good thing. Something bad always happened to Molly Ringwald before she got her perfect kiss. In Pretty in Pink, Andrew McCarthy dumped her right before prom. In The Breakfast Club, she got in that horrible fight with Judd Nelson. And in Sixteen Candles, she not only missed Jake Ryan’s call but was also humiliated when her panties were held up on display for a bathroom full of freshmen geeks—just like I was being humiliated now.
Maybe this was God’s way of telling me that it was time for me to make my Big Move. I had to sew together my own prom dress or transform Ally Sheedy from goth to pretty, or help my horrible sister get married. But what was I, Davidia Jones, supposed to do in order to get the guy I liked to finally notice me?
Well, I knew that first I had to get him to see me in a different light. Like when Molly Ringwald talked to Andrew McCarthy at the record store, and he realized she was pretty cool. I had to get James alone. But how?
I thought and thought on it for a whole week, then the answer came to me like a lightning bolt during one of Corey Mays’s litanies. I could go to one of James’s football games. I didn’t know what I’d do once I got there, or how I’d get him alone, but it would be a start.
So the first Friday of November, I spent two of my dollars to get into the Glass vs. Roosevelt game, and I found a spot underneath the bleachers. I laid a blanket down over the one patch of grass that had managed to grow in all that darkness and opened John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. It was a thriller that I had just picked up at the library because the back of the book said it was set in Mississippi. That it was also engaging had taken me by pleasant surprise.
In fact, it was almost hard for me to put the book down when the announcer yelled out, “Presenting the Robert C. Glass High School Tigers!” and then started calling the players’ names.