I didn’t realize I had stopped breathing until they disappeared around the corner and air filled my tight lungs.
It was already happening, I realized. James was already transforming me into a person worth noticing, a person that the most popular girl in school would give her number to—a number I wouldn’t be able to use because I didn’t talk, but still. If this was what happened the second time I met James, what would happen the third? Would he ask me on a date? Would we go to the movies? Would he kiss me like Andrew McCarthy kissed Molly Ringwald after their first date in Pretty in Pink?
I could not wait to see.
. . .
The next Monday, Veronica’s participation in the hallway monkey calls stopped. She didn’t speak to me again directly like she had with James there, but she stopped saying nasty things about me in a polite tone of voice within my earshot. Also, she ceased letting it register on her face when my paper came back with a higher grade than hers.
In fact, after two weeks, nobody was bothering me anymore. Not even Perry, who was still riding high on the victory that the team had managed to snag with him stepping in as substitute quarterback after James had been thrown out of the game. It was like I was invisible again, and this time I knew enough to appreciate it. Best of all, I could resume stalking James, without having to worry about Veronica and her sister coming after me for it.
I had already thought my heart chock full of love for James, but there must’ve been some room left, because over the next two weeks, something else came to reside there.
It sent me floating through the halls, unable to see time as anything but filler between James sightings.
Back then, I thought it was a new, shiny layer of love that I had never known before. But having lived for seventeen more years, now I recognize it for what it really was: hope.
Because if he could recognize the beauty of my hastily written note enough to smile at me and keep it, then maybe he would recognize the beauty of me, even though I failed to wear mine on the outside like his sisters—or the head cheerleader. I saw him with her sometimes, had heard they were dating now.
But I didn’t care. Jake Ryan had also dated a pretty girl before meeting The One in Sixteen Candles. And as sure as I continued to breathe, I knew that James would eventually be mine.
. . .
Right around the time that Veronica and her minions stopped terrorizing me, Cora turned on the news, and it said that Mr. Farrell was now our district’s U.S. representative.
The Saturday after he got elected, Mr. Farrell—no, Congressman Farrell—showed up at the house with a bottle of champagne. While Cora was in the kitchen opening it, he handed me a hundred-dollar bill instead of the usual ten.
My mouth dropped open when I saw Benjamin Franklin on the front, then I smiled up at him in happy disbelief.
He grinned back at me. “Now where have you been hiding that beautiful smile all this time?”
Of course I didn’t answer that.
Then he winked at me and whispered, “Our little secret.”
Now this is where it got kind of strange, because it felt like he was paying me not to tell anybody about him and Cora, which was funny on a few different levels, since:
1. I didn’t talk.
2. Who would I tell? I didn’t have any friends. And most of all,
3. Veronica already knew all about it. So his secret was out.
It made me wonder how much he was paying Cora to keep quiet about their affair. It had to be a lot if he was throwing hundred-dollar bills at a kid like no big deal. And Cora’s lifestyle was not luxurious, so she had to be sitting on a wad of cash. Maybe it was even in the house someplace.