“You’re so cute.” She brushed my shoulder with her hand. “It’s not like a wedding with invitations and stuff. You just hear about it from someone who’s going and show up.”
“Okay.” I nodded like I got it.
“I’m inviting you, stupid. You can pick me up at eight Saturday.”
“Okay, then. It’s a date.” I paused. Was it a date? I’d never actually asked a girl out or particularly thought about asking Sydnie out. She seemed nice enough. She just wasn’t the girl I wanted.
She laughed. “It’s a date.”
Between that day and the next, three other girls asked me if I was going. I said I was. I still hadn’t talked to Amanda, but Friday, I saw her in the activities office when we were buying our parking passes.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She looked up at me. She looked up. It was so weird being taller than her for the first time in, well, ever.
“Um, how’s everything going?” I asked.
“Good. Great. Hey, we’ve got a regional game Saturday. Can you come?”
“You made it to regionals?” This was something I should have known about, would have known about if it had happened a few months earlier.
“I know, right? We’ve never gotten this far. If you come, you could sit with my dad and make sure he doesn’t, like, explode with pride all over the infield.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to prevent that. Sorry.”
“Yeah, probably not. Come anyway.”
“Sure. When is it?”
“Saturday at seven.”
The office aide called the next person, and I handed her the money for the parking pass.
“Driver’s license?” she said.
“Oh, sure.” I put my binder on the counter and fumbled for my wallet. When I finally got it out, I noticed Amanda staring at my neatly labeled tabs.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When did you say the game was?”
“Seven on Saturday. It’s okay if you can’t—”
“No, I want to go.” I really did. I wanted to see Tim and be with Amanda like I hadn’t been all summer. But I’d already told Sydnie I was going to the party. And for some reason, I didn’t want to tell Amanda about it. “Oh, wait—did you say seven on Saturday?”
“Yeah. Maybe a little later if the game before goes long.”
“Shit, I have . . . there’s a family thing, my uncle’s in town.” Groping for an excuse I didn’t really want to have to make. “Really boring.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“I know.” The office aide handed me my parking pass and asked for Amanda’s forms. “But if you win that game, there’s another one, right?”
“Yes. When we win, there’ll be another game on Sunday.”
“Okay. I’ll definitely go to that.”
“Cool.” Amanda took her pass from the office aide. “It’ll be at noon at Tropical Park, and the finals are on Sunday night.”
“I’ll see you there.”
Saturday night, I texted Amanda:
Good luck, I know you’ll be awesome
Then added and deleted a heart emoji three times before I went to pick up Sydnie.
14
You know those television shows about high school students where all the actors are actually twenty-five, have cool cars, thousand-dollar outfits, and names like Trey and Denali? High school students who bear no resemblance to anyone you actually know? Well, once you filtered out the ninety-five percent of people at my school who didn’t get invited to the cool parties, my school kind of looked like that.
At least, in the dark.
“I’ve actually never been to the beach at night,” I told Sydnie as we walked from my car, which was parked like six blocks away at a meter I’d had to pay with my debit card.
“You are so cute,” Sydnie said. “The way you get all excited about regular things. It’s great. You don’t have to worry about getting a sunburn.” She took my hand. She was wearing a bikini top made out of two scraps of fabric the size of toilet paper squares that barely covered anything. She’d had on a tank top, but she took it off as soon as we left her house.
I said, “Yeah, I guess that would be a real worry in that bathing suit.”
“Do you like it? They had an end-of-season sale at Victoria’s Secret.”
“Cool,” I said, because I didn’t know how to respond to that. I wondered how Amanda’s game was going.
“I love Victoria’s Secret, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
She laughed. “You’re such a guy. You don’t know anything about fashion.”
“Well, not girls’ fashion. Okay, maybe not any fashion.”
“Such a guy. People say I look like this one model, Kate Grigorieva. She’s Russian. Do you think I look like her?”