Chapter 2: Simple Gifts - Mike

As anyone who knows Teri, Dana, and me can tell you, all three of us can be pigheaded. For Teri, she needs to feel in control and will dig in till she gets it. Dana cannot let go of a challenge till she masters it. Me, I can’t stand it when something’s left unresolved—it’s like it’s physically there, looming over me. Enough with the waiting, just get it over with already.

The afternoon after the family dinner at Teri’s house, she stood at the open door to the front passenger seat of my van. “So explain to me again why the fuck this has to be Right Now?”

Dana buckled up in the seat behind me. “Because Mike won’t be happy till we either do it or decide we won’t.”

“You’re making it sound like it’s all about me,” I complained.

“That’s because it is,” Teri said.

“The timing is,” Dana corrected her. “It itself is about us.”

Right—I had to go and date two of the smartest girls in the school. Keeps me on my figurative toes. I sighed. “Humor me, okay? Please?”

Teri shook her head but got in the van.

“Unless you’ve got something better to do,” I had to go and add. I checked the mirrors and behind me, and backed out of the parking space.

“We ought to do algebra,” Teri grumbled. We’re in the same math class and do homework together.

“Something you’d rather do,” I corrected myself.

“Oh, I can think of something,” Dana immediately said in a sultry voice.

I mentally winced—okay, I rolled right into that one. Trust Dana to turn everything into sex.

“Several somethings,” Teri said.

“Not all of which involve syrup,” Dana added.

Pause while Teri and I considered that. I turned out of the school parking lot onto the street, heading towards the nearest and largest mall. “I’m not touching that,” Teri finally concluded.

“You’d just have to wash the sticky off,” I agreed.

“Not helping,” she informed me.

“Awww,” Dana mock-pouted.

Teri frowned, but then shook her head and laughed. Slowly, she’s learning how to be teased. Which is what makes it so much fun to tease her.

“So what, exactly, are you thinking of?” she asked me.

“That’s the point—I don’t know. But buying your bracelet got me to thinking—there’s enough possibilities, cheap enough, at the jewelry store we could find something appropriate for commitment gifts. All of us together.”

Teri glanced at her right foot—during dinner last night, Dana and I had given her a surprise gift of a thin chain bracelet with our initials. She’d shown up at school wearing it not on her wrist but her ankle, just visible between low sandals and the bottom of her black jeans.

“Commitment gift?” Dana asked.

“Whatever you want to call it. It was your idea.” Our first real date, just over two weeks ago, when we three decided to go out together.

“Whatever,” Teri said.

“Ah,” Dana said behind me. A sound of realization.

I glanced at Teri, who turned and looked at Dana for both of us. “Spill.”

“For Mike, the important thing is that we do this together. That’s the commitment he wants.”

I had no idea how to answer that.

“Ah,” Teri agreed. She looked at me for a few moments. Then she faced forward again. “Gotcha.”

Staying on my figurative toes is good for me, I reminded myself.

Three jewelry stores and an earring shop later, we decamped to the food court.

“Personally,” I said as a jammed a soggy french-fry in the paper cup of ketchup harder than needed, “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

“Mm,” Dana said, not meeting my eyes, as she slurped her smoothie.

Teri silently munched on her double-meat gyros. Looking as if she didn’t care. As if she wasn’t the big sticking point.

It was brilliant: each of us buy a pair of earrings and give one each to the others—that way, we have a pair that’s half from each. Best yet, all three of us contributed part of the idea: Teri, earrings themselves—Dana, the splitting up—me, wearing both in, say, the left ear.

Teri, however, was dead set—well, no, that’s an exaggeration. Not dead set against the idea, but firmly Did Not Approve. Dana was hesitant as well.

Dana continued slurping. It was her idea to take a break to eat and think—and not talk about it till we’d finished eating. Which, yes, I’d agreed to do and then tried talking anyway.

Fine. Whatever. Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. It’s not like they cared—

I cut myself off—not the road I was going down, not today. Teri, at least, totally did care. This morning, when thanking me for the bracelet, she’d said, for the first time, that she loved me—as in being in love. With both me and Dana, I had every reason to believe. The girls even cared enough about the idea of commitment gifts to have come here today. I, however, was being too pushy and mulish to listen, and they were pushing back.

I stared at my last, now-congealed fry, and sighed. “Okay, calmer now.” I looked at Dana and Teri.

Dana finally met my eyes. “Thing is, whatever we do, it has to work equally well for all of us.”

“Right,” I said.

She waited. For—?

Oh. Right. So sometimes I can be just a little thick in the head. I’m new at this dating thing, okay?

I said, “Teri, why don’t you want to do the earrings?”

She finally looked at me, instead of behind my shoulder like the past half-hour. “I don’t know if I can explain, exactly,” she said. She wiped her mouth and hands with a wad of paper napkins. “It’s—so public. I don’t want us to be in the closet, of course, but I don’t want to announce it either. Three kids hanging together all the time, suddenly wearing color-coded earrings—it’d be so obvious.”

Even more than wearing our bracelet on her wrist.