Mary was short, dark haired, tanned… and stacked. She wore a tight pair of jeans shorts with flatly rolled cuffs that ended almost two-thirds of the way up her generous but smooth thighs. Up top, she had on a horizontally striped blue and red teeshirt that called attention to her impressive rack, chiefly by how hard it strained to contain those puppies. I remembered that Mary and Maddie had been among the first of our age to start to develop, way back when, but now that she was grown, she had really grown. I briefly wondered if she and Maddie still dressed identically every day. It would be one hell of a sight now.
Carrie was… Carrie. She was tall for a girl, maybe even five-eight now. She had been taller than me back when, but I had clearly shot past her in the last four years, as I had most everyone else. Her high-waisted, cream-colored slacks accentuated her incredibly long legs, and she sported a robin’s egg blue Lacoste shirt with the collar popped up, framing her elegant neck. The outfit fit her perfectly, just like everything she had ever worn. It wasn’t tight anywhere, but you could still clearly see and appreciate that her slender, elegant figure had developed sweeping curves in all the right places and in all the right dimensions. Nowhere was Carrie too generous, nor was she anywhere disappointingly small. And she carried herself now with an incredible grace and poise. She wasn’t proud or stuck-up, and she didn’t pose, she just was… graceful.
Fuck. Was I getting goddamned hard just sitting here chatting?
The girls’ body language sure looked like they were ready to move on now.
“How’s Donald?” I asked Carrie quickly, hoping to extend the conversation. Donald was a handsome dude in our class who had been childhood sweethearts with Carrie since the eighth freaking grade. The only times I had heard Carrie even mentioned since, it was always in the context of ‘Donald and Carrie’.
It turns out, this question was a bit of a turd in the punchbowl.
Carrie scowled and Chris winced. I looked confused.
Mary had mercy on me. “They broke up a while ago, Al,” she explained with a note of friendly caution.
“Oh. Sorry,” I mumbled to Carrie.
“Don’t be,” she sighed. “I’m over him by now,” she went on in a tone of voice that suggested the situation remained complicated.
Chris seemed unhappy to be in an uncomfortable conversation with these two higher beings, and shut up to let me work my way out of it. Thankfully, he didn’t try to fix things by saying, “Let’s go.”
“Wow,” I just said, gently. I may have had zero success with girls, relationship-wise at least, while away at school, but I actually did have a fair number of friends who were card-carrying, certified girls. Through them, I had managed to learn that quiet empathy was usually helpful.
To Mary’s evident surprise, Carrie responded to my quiet invitation to keep talking. “Actually, I think I really am over Donald. I mean, I should have seen it coming. I think probably did see it coming, subconsciously, when I got into Vanderbilt and he didn’t,” she admitted with a wry smile. She could humblebrag too, apparently.
“The problem,” Carrie went on with a grimace, “is that nobody else believes that I have moved on! We broke up at Thanksgiving and I still have not had a date.”
“What? Come on,” I almost laughed incredulously. This was Carrie Croenke I was talking to here. It was not possible that she not be in demand if she was available.
“No, really,” Carrie frowned at me getting up a head of steam. “Everybody thinks I’m just waiting around for Donald to ‘take me back’.”
“As if,” snorted Mary. I shot her an inquiring look. “He knows what he did,” she added with a mutter.
Carrie glowered at Mary. “Whether they think I’m not over him, or they think I’m still his damn property or something, I think there is not one guy here who is willing to ask me out until someone else does first. It’s a vicious circle. I’m going to go through my last semester of high school with no social life?”
“No problem,” I said easily. “We will break the circle. What time can I pick you up Friday night? There’s that new horror movie opening.”
Those words just slipped out. I swear. I heard them coming from my mouth, but it only fully dawned on my what I was doing once I had finished. When I said I had had zero success with dating, I mean zero. I had literally never even asked, much less gone out with a girl, and here I was asking out Carrie freaking Croenke. I hadn’t even meant to, really. I just saw an obvious solution to a problem that someone I was well-disposed toward had, and suggested that solution before my social mind caught up.
And the intent in my mind, even before I grasped the enormity of what I had just done, had not been to get Carrie to actually say yes to my invitation, but to get her to see that her situation was really more easily solved than she had worked herself into believing.
I wanted to spontaneously die, right there and then. I only survived because I immediately grasped that I had never supposed the answer could possibly be yes. That made my imminent humiliation semi-bearable.
Carrie’s eyes widened for a moment, then softened. “Friday? I’m sorry, Al. My parents have plans for the family.”
Thank you, Carrie, for saving my pride.
I started to smile and shrug when she added, “But how about Sunday?”
“Sure,” my mouth said. “Sounds good.” That was all I could manage.
“What time?” Carrie prompted patiently.
“Uh…” I gasped. “Let me check the showtimes. Um,” I added, desperately trying to search my mind for what the hell a guy is supposed to work out when asking for a date. “Dinner first?”
Carrie brightened. “Yum. Sounds good. Give me your phone.”
“Huh?”
“So I can give you my deets,” she said calmly.
My phone had been forgotten in my hand the whole conversation. I swiped it open and handed it to her, my fingers numb. Carrie furiously typed away into it. After a few moments, I heard the swoosh of a text message sending, and a ding from her pocket on the most delectable backside on Planet Earth. “There,” she said, returning my phone and pulling her own out of said back pocket. “Now I have your number too,” she said with a smile.
I told her that I would set things up, and call her as soon as I got home, and with that, the conversation was over, the two girls ambling off on down the road to wherever Mary’s car was parked. As they walked away, I saw Mary steal a glance over her shoulder back at me, a strange expression on her face like I was some kind of exotic animal or something.
We got in the car and I headed off toward home.
I nearly wrecked, however, when Chris began punching me in the shoulder, hard and repeatedly. “Carrie? Dude,” Chris yelled. “Carrie?!?”
I pulled over, ostensibly because I wanted to make him stop hitting me, but also because I was shaking just a little, all on my own. “What?” I protested, after I blocked a few more punches against my by now bruised shoulder.
“You have been keeping me out of the loop,” accused Chris. “What have you been up to at that school of yours to make you such a fucking player?”
“I am not a ‘player’,” I protested. “And I have not been ‘up to’ anything. Any. Thing,” I emphasized. “Shit, Chris! You do realize that that was the first time I’ve ever asked a girl out in my life, right?”
He stared at me. “So you just thought, ‘what the hell, might as well start with Carrie Croenke’?”
“Get over it,” I said dismissively, trying to convince myself as much as him that this was not such a big deal. “We will have dinner, we’ll see a movie, and then I’ll take her home. And my ego will get a boost-a fucking huge one. And hopefully this will mean that I will not strangle myself with my own tongue when I finally screw up the courage to think about asking out some other girl later who is actually in my league…” That got a bark of laughter. “But mostly, word will get around that Carrie went on a date, which is what she needs. Win-win.”
“Take me home,” Chris sighed dramatically. “I want to go to my room and cry.”
“Fuck you,” I laughed and put the car back in drive. “I haven’t seen you in months.”
“Fine,” Chris said. “Let’s go to Falwell’s, eat ice cream, and you can tell me what non-player shit you have been up to.”
*
As I said, I had never had a girlfriend, but I did make friends with people who happened to be girls when I was away at school, friends with whom I had bonded over running, and one academic subject or other. Among the things that my ‘girl friends’ had beaten into my hapless, nerdy, male head were some faint ideas about the importance of dressing well. Did I dress well all the time? Hell no. I’m still a bit of a geek, and I have better things to spend my time and money on besides clothes. But at least I don’t wear mostly brown anymore, and I do have at least a few nice thing to wear.