Chapter 5

The next morning, it took Clara longer than usual to get it together. Their parents had bought Dana her car last month—The Bribe, Dana called it, something to sweeten moving mid-season. Dana loved having her own wheels, even a junker like The Bribe, but one condition was having to drive her sister to school. After school, of course, Dana usually had practice, so Clara took the bus or rode with a friend, when she wasn’t staying late for yearbook stuff. But mornings, Dana always had Clara. This usually worked out.

Usually. Dana simmered the whole speeding way.

“Hey!” Clara yelled, “don’t brake so hard! I nearly poked my eye out!” She squawked again as Dana stepped on it, throwing her back in the seat.

“That’s what you get for putting eyeliner on in the car,” Dana grumbled.

“If you’d waited for me, I could have finished before we left.”

“If we’d waited, we’d be even later.” Dana turned into the parking lot hard enough to squeal a tire.

“We’re not late.”

Dana pulled into a free space, just in time to hear the warning bell. “Only if we run, we’re not.”

As they got out, Clara muttered, “Not very late.”

Dana’s mood softened over the morning as the cheerleaders continued to be friendly, greeting her in the hallways. This after spending a month being known only as the New Girl—attention from a popular clique. Dana was pleased, until Russ, on the basketball team, didn’t notice when she twiddled fingers at him—maybe deliberately. Dana wasn’t sure. He could have just not seen her, across the hallway, or been preoccupied. But it took away her good mood.

At their lockers before lunch, Tina looked at her, annoyed. “Where’ve you been?”

Dana hadn’t seen her since Spanish yesterday, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk then. “Sorry—Clara ran late again.” And yesterday after school there’d been practice. Then Dana realized—Tina wanted to talk. “What’s up?”

Tina all but growled. “That boy.”

She and Josh must be not not-together again. “What about him?”

“He asked me out!”

“Um.” Dana paused. “And this means—?”

“We’re NOT going out,” Tina snapped. Dana quickly made a time-out sign, then held it as Tina glared at her. Finally, Tina snarled, “What?”

“What kind of going out are you talking about?”

Tina looked at her a moment. “What difference does it make?”

“Plenty,” Dana promptly said. “I mean, I’m going out tonight with Heather, but I’m not going out steady with her.” Not by a long shot, she wasn’t. Even if she was the type to go steady.

Tina turned back to her locker. “It doesn’t—” Then she did a double-take, complete with head-whip. “Wait—Heather Burns?”

“Please tell me there isn’t another Heather in this school. I don’t think I can deal with Heathers.”

“Get out!” Tina said. “When? Where?” All complaints of Josh forgotten, for the moment.

Dana briefly described the plan while Tina grabbed her lunch. For someone concerned about her not looking gay, Tina was awfully interested in Dana’s relationships with other girls. With cheerleaders. Whatever. “After which,” she concluded as they walked into the cafeteria, “they lived happily ever after.”

After a moment, Tina smiled, as if against her will.

“No, really,” Sandy said as they approached the others, “they’re not gay—just roommates.”

“Who?” Tina asked, sitting down at the end of the table. Dana hesitated, then took the remaining empty seat—beside Josh.

“Bert and Ernie,” Josh said.

“One of TV’s great couples,” Dana said as she unwrapped her first sandwich.

“Ha!” Mike said.

Before Spanish began, Tina complained about Josh again. Dana made commiserating sounds as appropriate—though she was too edgy to quite follow the complaints. She still wasn’t sure what Josh had done wrong, aside from being a “typical boy.” Dana she wondered why, if boys were so much trouble, Tina didn’t give them up.

Tina continued complaining through class by notes—until Señora Garcia noticed. Was she going to keep this up till the cows came home? And fall round-up was half a year away. Or maybe just until Tina and Josh made up. Dana couldn’t wait that long.

When class ended, Dana ducked out quickly, while Tina asked Señora Garcia a question about homework. Josh wasn’t there. Maybe if she got his side of the story, she could help them work things out. Or at least understand what was going on. Dana hesitated, then turned not towards her locker, but his.

On the wall beside his locker, someone had taped a pink flier. Dana peered at it as she walked by—a five-by-five square of celebrity photos, with an invitation to play celebrity bingo. Okay, that was just strange. She shook her head and nearly walked into Josh.

“Hey, girl,” he said with a smile. “You’re the talk of the school.”

Dana’s first thought was that finally her performance in Friday’s game had gotten her noticed. But she knew better. “Do tell,” she said guardedly.

“I’ve had two people ask me if it was true you went out with a cheerleader.”

“Ah.”

“A different cheerleader, each time,” he went on. “Nikki, I knew about—but what’s this about you and Heather? It’s as if, link you with one cheerleader, link you to any.”

“Oh, well,” Dana tried to say diffidently.

Josh did a double-take. “Wait—you and Heather? When was this?”

“Wasn’t. Yet. Tonight.”

“Heh.” Josh paused for a moment. Then with a diffidence as fake as her own, he said, “You know, if you go out only with cheerleaders, people might get to thinking you like only girls.”

Dana blinked. “What are you getting at?”

“It sounds like you could use some help emphasizing your straightness. Want to go out Thursday night?”

“Um.” Dana blinked again. She thought about Jimmy Nichols, and Russ, and a passing sneer from a goth boy she didn’t know. About Heather and Nikki and rest of the Bi-State All-Stars.

“Well, how about it?”

But all she said was, “What about Tina?”

“Tina can blow it out her horn.”

His anger startled Dana. “But she...”

He glanced away into his locker. “I’m tired of this,” he said softly, then looked at Dana full on. “I’m tired of the whole seeing-each-other-but-not-together thing.”

“Have you told her this?”

“That’s what started our current fight. I asked her to go steady.”

Ah.

Josh went on, “The way I see it, we go out, either she’ll get jealous enough we’ll get together for real, or admit that we can see other people.”

Dana pinched the bridge of her nose. “See, this is the kind of Tina logic that makes my head hurt.”

“It’s not Tina logic—it’s girl logic.”

He had a point—she knew girls who’d pulled this kind of thing on both boyfriends and girlfriends—but she wasn’t about to admit it. “What kind of boy logic is behind this?”

“I have a way of helping you out, you have a way of helping me out. And that’s what friends do—help each other.”

Being who she was, Dana had always paid more attention to Tina’s appearance, but he was good-looking in a tall, lean sort of way, though nothing her sister would call cute. Almost as tall as Dana. She could deal with that. Not that it’d be going out as more than friends. She swallowed, too aware of how close they stood, alone in a moil of students. “Something like that.”

“So how about it—friend?”

Dana wasn’t sure this was a good idea. But she found herself saying, “Okay.” It really would, she told herself, make her look as straight as her cover story. Josh’s locker neighbor tried to get by her, and she moved out of the way, shifting away from Josh.

“Okay then, Thursday it is.”

Josh’s neighbor looked at them oddly.

Dana smiled at Josh. “I’ll text ya.”

In the locker room, the cheerleaders greeted Dana—just about every one of them. Dana responded to them all. It wasn’t flirting, quite, except from Heather. Dana saw Nikki watching them, and found herself hoping she’d flirt too, but she didn’t. As it was, she kept the words innocent with Heather.

“I like a good movie.”

“Do you?” Heather said, voice laced with laughter and suggestion.

Dana opened her mouth to answer, then saw Janet’s knowing look. And Sue-Ellen’s troubled look, and Tawnia’s frown. She quickly changed her response to, “Yup. Listen, I gotta—” and pointed towards the gym with her thumb.

Dana threw herself into practice, focusing on the drills, on playing, on moving without thinking about anything but the ball and the net. She stayed on the court after, working on lay-ups with Tawnia, until the squad was gone.

It was cold and windy as Dana drove home—the clouds had gotten lower since lunch, and it even splattered a few drops of rain. Which made it easy for her to dive straight into homework. She didn’t finish it all before she had to prepare to go out.

By then, it was raining in earnest—a solid late-winter storm. She checked the forecast: snow levels down to a thousand feet higher than Riverton. It still felt strange to her, measuring how bad a storm was by altitude. In this case, roads would likely be okay but temperatures would still get close to freezing. Dana dressed in a long-sleeve hoodie, and at the last moment grabbed a jacket as well.

“Dana,” her father said beside her as she closed the closet door.

“Mm?”

“I trust you’ll be careful?”

A small knot hit her stomach, as if she’d swallowed a frozen peach pit. That voice, the Concerned Father voice, meant another warning. It was bad enough, moving to a place like Riverton, without being reminded every time she turned around. The only thing to do was innocently misunderstand hints. “Dad—I know how to drive in rain.” Heather had asked Dana to pick her up, even though she’d asked her out. She shrugged the jacket on. “It’s not like I’ve forgotten, just because we moved away from the coast.”

“That is not quite what I meant.” He took her hand, preventing her from leaving.

“I’ll drive carefully,” she said deliberately, and moved to kiss him.

“I realize this hasn’t been an easy move for you.”

“I’m doing fine, Dad.”

“Are you?”

“I’m up on my schoolwork.” Well, once she finished, after she got back. “And I’m playing as good as ever.”

“Still—”

“Dad, it’s good—except I’m going to be late.” And before he could say anything more, she bent to kiss him again and left, feeling a little torqued.

She picked up Heather at her house, running through the cold rain to the door. Heather answered it, and invited Dana in while she got her coat. She introduced her father, who congratulated Dana on her play last week. Dana vaguely remembered seeing him and his overweight wife in the stands. It turned out he’d played guard in high school—and Mrs. Burns had been a cheerleader, like her daughter after her. Which explained why Heather was willing to introduce a girl date to them. Though had the cheerleaders been bi, back when?

Mr. Burns saw them off with hearty hopes for a state championship. As if Dana and Heather were about to play a game instead of go on a date.

In the car, Heather said, “So those are the folks.” Her voice was half wry, half embarrassed.

“They don’t seem too bad,” Dana said.

“They aren’t really. It’s a pain, their trying to relive their glory days through me and my brother.”

Dana shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“What?”

“They’re adults,” Dana said. “They’re grown up, independent. They can do anything they want. How could high school be the best part of their lives?”

Heather snorted. “It’s clear you didn’t grow up stuck in Riverton.”

She had a point.

“Oh, we were thinking,” Heather said, “that Bob’s wasn’t the best place tonight, and maybe we should go to the Route 77 Diner.”

Dana felt excluded by that ‘we,’ but no, not a drive-in during a winter storm. “Sure.” As Dana slowed to turn, she considered telling her parents about the departure from plans, but she didn’t feel like it—not while still torqued at her father.

“Great.” Heather texted Sam, confirming they were on for the diner. This took till Dana pulled into the gravel parking lot. “They’ll be along in five,” Heather said.