Elda stopped blowing on her drink and looked up.
Holly wiped her cheek. “You’ve got something on your face there.”
“Shoot.” Elda spun around and peered into the window of the nearest storefront, the flower shop. Using the window as a mirror, she wiped away the smudge on her cheek. “God, I’m so awkward. Do you think Danny noticed?”
“No way.” Holly linked arms with her cousin. “He was definitely looking at you, but I’m positive the chocolate on your cheek was the last thing on his mind.”
Elda rested her head on Holly’s shoulder. “I wish I had half your chill around guys.”
Chill was all Holly had. It was self-preservation. “And I’d love to be half as hot as you are.” Holly had always assumed girls like Elda had it so easy—that all they had to do was exist, and they’d get any guy they wanted. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Elda still had her insecurities. She didn’t care about sports or music or movies. She found beauty in the things other people found disgusting. She enjoyed exploring the guts of almost everything—animals, cars, houses. The grosser and more covered in hair and scum, the happier she was. But those weren’t easy topics to pursue in the early stages of a relationship.
“Holly, you’re totally hot. Shut up. You’re a badass and an individual. Looks like mine can only get you so far. If we Frankenstein-ed your keen sense of what not to say with my hair and boobs, we’d be unstoppable,” Elda said. “The perfect woman.”
They totally would be. A girl with Holly’s savvy and Elda’s body would be more powerful than Wonder Woman. “We’d rule the freaking world. A guy like Danny Garland wouldn’t know what hit him.”
Chapter Two
Friday, December 15
Star was thirty minutes late.
Danny checked his phone again. No texts from her or anyone. Yet another way Danny was failing with women today. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d blurted out “I have a girlfriend!” like a jerk when he thought that girl was flirting with him in Santabucks. Oh, and then he complimented the other girl’s glasses in a way that had her looking at him like he’d just told her he wanted to make a skin suit out of her. Danny’s game with the ladies was seriously lacking at the moment, not that it was ever something to write home about.
He grabbed a fleece and went out onto the porch to wait for Star. He checked his phone again. They were going to miss their movie.
A minivan rolled down the street and slowed to a stop in front of Danny’s house. As the passenger’s side window slowly descended, the face of the Reindeer’s center, Marcus Carter, came into view.
“Hey, Cap,” Marcus yelled. “What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for Star,” Danny said. “Have you seen her?”
“Sure. The poms were practicing the same time we were. We’re all meeting at the arcade. Girls, too.” Marcus nodded toward the empty passenger’s seat. “Come on.”
“Star didn’t mention plans with me?” Danny said.
“Nope.”
Maybe Danny’d had the date wrong, or they’d gotten their signals crossed. He had been kind of off ever since his accident. Since school got out last week, he’d had no routine. He was definitely reading too much into Star not being here. It was a scheduling mishap, full stop. Danny was just feeling insecure after his very embarrassing encounter with two cute girls in the coffee shop today.
“I’ll come, too. It’ll be fun.” Danny nestled his crutches under one arm, grabbed the railing, and hopped down the stairs on one leg. Marcus jumped out of the car right away and tried to help, but Danny had already reached the sidewalk.
“You’ve mastered those crutches, Cap.” Marcus walked with Danny to the minivan and loaded his crutches into the back seat. “No surprise there.”
As Marcus got behind the wheel, Danny bit back questions about the team, even though he was dying to know how practice had gone, if the Reindeer were ready for the first round of the winter break tournament in Countryside two days from now. Any answer would gut him. He couldn’t guess which would hurt more—to hear they were doing fine without him or that they were in dire straits because of his ill-advised dunk attempt.
“You coming to the game Sunday?” Marcus turned onto Main Street. It was only about four blocks from Danny’s house to the arcade. The street lamps were on but were almost unnecessary with the powerful electric glow emanating from all the houses decked out for Christmas.
“I don’t know.” Danny scratched an itch just under the edge of his cast, something he did about six hundred times a day lately. He walked around with a pen over his ear for just this purpose. Epic under-cast scratching had taken basketball’s place in his life.
“You should come, Cap. You’re good luck. We need all the luck we can get.”
Did he mean they needed luck because they sucked without him, or because luck was a good thing, generally? “I’ll think about it,” Danny said. “And I’m not ‘Cap’ anymore.” All the younger members of the team called him that. “Kevin is ‘Cap’ now.”
“Once the captain, always the captain,” Marcus said. “Hoping I’ll be ‘Cap’ next year.”
“I bet you will be.” Danny’d had that same anticipation during his junior year, and now he’d been relegated to the sidelines.
Kevin Snow met them just inside the arcade, Santa’s Playhouse. “You made it. They’re already in the laser tag room.” He glanced at Danny’s leg and winced. “Sorry, Dan.”
In his quest to find Star, Danny hadn’t even thought about what they might be doing at the arcade. Of course they were playing laser tag, something Danny couldn’t do. They couldn’t just be sitting at one of the tabletop Donkey Kong games eating pizza. “No worries,” Danny said. “We’ll meet up when you’re done.”
“We’re only playing a round or two.” Marcus waved as he followed Kevin toward the laser tag room in the back of the arcade.
Utterly alone and feeling conspicuous, Danny went to a kiosk and purchased a game card for himself. Then he dragged a stool over to the Pac-Man machine, sat down, and started the first level. He died on the second frame, after playing for less than five minutes. He’d never been a big video game guy because he’d been too busy playing sports to invest any time in them. And Danny generally didn’t bother doing things if he might fail.
Familiar faces popped out at Danny amid the packs of tourists. Sam Anderson and his girlfriend, Tinka, were over by the Skee-Ball games. Elena Chestnut and Oliver Prince were eating cheeseless pizza while playing Q*bert. All couples. Danny had to find Star. He was missing an appendage right now.
He grabbed his crutches and bee-lined it for the laser tag room. “I want in,” he told Dinesh, one of the twenty-something guys who’d stuck around in North Pole after high school. He was working tonight as the laser-tag gatekeeper.