“You know,” she said, “I think we can add more to this list. There are a few clichés we haven’t touched on yet. How do you feel about showing up in a whipped-cream bikini?”
“That might be a little too over-the-top.”
“What if the orchestra members are all in whipped-cream bikinis?”
She could do this the whole day, plan something out with him, pretend that, like the snow fort they’d designed freshman year, it would never come to fruition. It was just her and Dave at the pizza place. No matter how many families crowded nearby, how many kids from school waved to them from other tables, no matter how many times Gretchen’s name was scrawled on the sheet of paper in front of them, it was just her and Dave, like it always had been.
THE PROMPOSAL
A WEEK OF planning later, Julia was outside the school with Brett, waiting for the bell to ring. She was clenching a section of white string in her hand, and she stared at it sloping upward from the gray asphalt of the parking lot, swaying slightly in the breeze. She was incredibly proud of this string, despite all the clichés it would lead to, or rather, because of them. Because her tongue was planted firmly in her cheek, because her mom would approve of this, because she’d done all of it for Dave and none of it for Gretchen.
“It is stupid hot in here,” Brett said from inside the teddy bear costume they’d rented for him.
“Don’t you dare take off that mask,” Julia said, snapping a few pictures of him on her phone for later blackmail use. “You remember your lines?”
“How dumb do you think I am? It’s a sentence.”
“You’ve never really been good with words, Brett.”
“And you’ve never been good at interacting with humans other than my brother. People change.”
“I don’t know. I’m still pretty iffy about how to talk to non-Daveians. ‘Iffy,’ by the way, means unsure, suspect.”
The school bell interrupted Brett’s comeback. “Okay, get in position.” She called Dave’s cell phone as she pulled the string taut. One end was tied to Gretchen’s car door, the other led to a tree at the park down the hill. Julia had skipped her last two periods to set it up, and now she was hiding behind Brett’s truck to make sure Gretchen would follow it. Dave’s handwritten signs hung along the length of the string. Meanwhile, Brett waddled in his bear suit to the halfway marker, a single rose in his hand.
“I still think we should have gone for the walkie-talkies,” Julia said as soon as Dave answered. “It feels lame this way.”
“Walkie-talkies are expensive, shitty, two-way cell phones. You guys all set?”
“Yup,” Julia said, eyeing the crowd just now coming through the double doors of the school for Gretchen’s blond waves.
“Okay, I’ll see you at the harbor. You sure it’s okay for me to take the car?”
Julia looked across the lot at her formerly white Mazda. She’d joked about Dave’s newfound popularity, but it was incredible what a couple of text messages had achieved, how quickly the word spread, the number of people that had shown up to write on her car. She didn’t credit herself, or the tree house. This was all Dave. As much as she wanted to keep him to herself, Julia loved knowing that this was for him. He deserved to be liked this much, this widely. “If you don’t take it, the three thousand ‘you should go to prom with Dave’ messages will be kind of pointless.”
Dave laughed. “This is so ridiculous. We are outdoing ourselves.”