And I was just glad I had turned down his offer of a date and wouldn’t have to go through that again. But wait a minute, had I turned him down?
I went over the conversation again in my mind. I had said, “No,” but had he understood that meant no to the whole date, not just no to him sending a car over for me? I mean, would he have smiled at me like that before he left if he had understood I was saying that I never, ever wanted to see him again? An unpleasant, heavy feeling started to build in my stomach.
“Who was that?” Nicky demanded, nosy like the sister I had never had. I had forgotten that he was still in the room with me.
“James Farrell,” I answered. My voice was so weary, you’d have thought I’d just run a marathon.
Nicky’s mouth fell open, and for once he didn’t have something smart to say.
. . .
“What do you mean he didn’t recognize you,” Mama Jane said. I had called her as soon as I was out of my gown and makeup to tell her about the Return of James Farrell.
“I mean he didn’t recognize me,” I repeated. “He must have forgotten me.”
Mama Jane, bless her heart, sounded honest-to-God confused when she asked, “But how could he forget you?”
“I don’t know, Mama Jane. Maybe he never really even saw me the first time.” This whole conversation was making me high-school-level depressed. “Maybe that’s why he asked me out, because he didn’t recognize me as the same girl from high school who gave him that note.”
“Well, are you going to tell him who you are on the date?”
“No, I can’t tell him. And there’s not going to be any date.”
“Why can’t you tell him? And why can’t you go out with him?”
“Because . . .” I trailed off.
The truth was I had done some bad things In Between Then and Now. Not just bad, actually. Awful. So awful that I couldn’t tell Mama Jane about them, even though I told her just about everything else. So awful that I didn’t even dare to think about meeting James at Café Stella next Tuesday.
Even if he was James Farrell and still the finest boy on the planet.
So I told Mama Jane the sorta truth. “He’s obviously slumming,” I said. “And I don’t want to be some rich kid’s adventure.”
“You don’t know that,” Mama Jane said. Even though she was a truck driver and really should have known better, Mama Jane was in the habit of assuming the best in everybody. “Just in case you haven’t taken a good look at yourself lately, you’re a real cute girl. Plus you’re smart, and you’re scrappy, and you’re very talented. There ain’t no reason to assume that boy don’t want to go out with you for all the right reasons.”
Before she could continue on with her self-esteem pep talk, I asked, “How’s Akron? Did you ask that waitress out yet?”
Lucky for me, Mama Jane was very susceptible to a changed subject, especially when it involved her love life. “I can’t tell if she’s flirting with me or just being friendly.”
Mama Jane was in her sixties now, but she still seemed to have trouble reading the women she liked.
So we talked about that, and I tried to stuff James back into the memory box I had kept him in for fifteen years now.
But it wasn’t that easy. He lingered with me for the rest of the evening. And when I closed my eyes that night, I dreamed me and him were on the steps of Glass High, and that I took a diamond stud out of my ear and put it in his. Just like Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club.
“Goddamn it,” I said to myself after I woke up from that dream, my heart all sped up. “James Farrell just handed me an Invitation to Crazy.”
. . .
But I didn’t have to take him up on his invitation. I could obsess over it, and turn it over, and examine it from every angle under an electron microscope, but I did not have to take it.