“Fine. I’ll call you a pyromaniac from now on.” He smiled, then disappeared down the staircase.
A few minutes after Brett’s pickup had pulled away from the blacktop, the first of the teachers started showing up, their classroom windows sliding open, their silhouetted heads looking down at their desks, most of them not even looking outside. “How many more Nevers to go?” Dave asked.
“I’m not counting Marroney or prom king yet, so three down, seven to go.”
Dave drank from his coffee, thought about the last Never. At the start of it all, he probably wouldn’t have said anything. But now that he was liberated from certain things, his curiosity got the best of him. “What about the last one? We’re not going to date each other, are we?”
Julia smirked, looping a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d actually thought about that already.” She spun around on the stool she’d taken, one of the dozen that lined the edge of the tree house. The sun was getting to ready to peek out from behind the hills, though the morning fog would probably make for an unimpressive sunrise. “We were always gonna go to prom together, right? We can just call that a date. Our one and only date.”
“Okay,” Dave said simply, finding a sort of comfort in the words being spoken out loud.
o o o
By lunchtime, Brett had sent the video through his system of friends, many of them still closely linked to current SLO High students. Everyone knew who was responsible for the tree house that had sprung up magically over the weekend, and when Dave walked into the courtyard, the assembled seniors broke into applause. Julia had gone to nap in the library, but she insisted that Dave continue his ploy to get in with the popular crowd for the sake of his campaign. He might have shied away from going alone if he hadn’t seen Gretchen climb the stairs he’d helped build.
“Dave!” Vince Staffert called to him from the corner of the tree house. “I saved a spot for you, man.” He stood and waved him over, a bag of chips in his hand. The tree house was packed, people on every stool and sprawled out on the floor, making use of the pillows. Underclassmen gazed up with wonder, peering like tourists drawn in by a crowd, wondering what they were missing out on.
As it turned out, Gretchen and Vince were friends, and when Dave took the seat that Vince had reserved for him, Gretchen was only two stools away. Vince and a few others kept talking about what a cool thing Dave and Julia had done, but Dave could barely focus on what they were saying. He and Gretchen kept exchanging looks so obviously that it was a shock no one called them out on it.
He chatted amicably with everyone around, even laughed a little with Vince, who was all the time proving himself to be nicer than Dave had ever given him credit for. That other clichéd football-player side of him that Dave assumed existed never made an appearance. But at one point he decided there was only one person he really wanted to talk to, and when the girl sitting next to Gretchen stood up, he immediately moved over.
“How was your weekend?”
“Not quite as constructive as yours,” Gretchen said, plopping a piece of papaya into her mouth with a smile.
“I see what you did there.”
“I’ve been thinking of it for, like, six whole minutes.”
Dave laughed, leaning into her shoulder with a nudge. “Come on, how was your weekend?”
Gretchen chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Not too shabby. I think some weekends feel wasted if you don’t have a ton of fun, and some feel wasted if you don’t have a ton of sleep, and I did a solid amount of both.”
“What did you do for fun?”
“I slept,” Gretchen said, picking out another piece of fruit from her Tupperware.
“You are on a roll today.”