Chapter 62: Dating Darla

Sunday, December 19, 1982

After church, I followed Jasmine’s plan and called Linda. She wasn’t home but had a machine, so I left a deliberately vague message letting her know I’d called.

Next, I tried Darla. Of course, she didn’t answer. Her mother, Clara, did. That put me immediately on alert. I’d talked to Clara dozens of times. Zero of them were during this life.

“Hello?” Clara said.

“Hello, Mrs. Winton. My name is Steve Marshall. I’m in Debate with Darla. I wanted to check in with her.”

She chuckled a bit. “Of course, you did. Darla’s up in her room. I’ll get her.” I heard her set the phone down, then call, “Darla!”

Muffled sounds followed, then “Phone!”

Clara came back on. “She’s coming.”

“Thank you.”

She seemed a little surprised. “Well, you’re welcome. Hang on!”

Darla picked up a minute later. “Hello?”

“Hi, Darla.”

“Steve! Good to hear from you!”

“I assume your mom is listening?”

“Yes, all’s quiet here. Just family time.”

I chuckled a little. “I wanted to call and see if you might want to just go hang out at the mall or the like.”

“Sounds like fun, but I can’t. I need to do some Christmas shopping at the mall this afternoon.”

I chuckled a bit more. “I’ll be at the food court in half an hour or so.”

“Sure, we should be able to get together later in the week, I think. Well, most likely.”

“That might be good, too.”

I got the feeling I almost made her giggle, which probably would have been a bad thing. “Bye, Steve.”

“Bye, Darla.”

When I looked over, Angie was watching. “Her mom was listening?”

“Yeah. She told me she couldn’t get together because she had to go shop at the mall.”

Angie grinned. “Another reason having our own line is a good thing.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, grinning back.

I was still nervous about this whole thing when I arrived at the mall, but I felt backed into a corner. Oh, I wasn’t entirely reluctant. Darla was quite cute, and I’d gotten the impression — more than once — that she was at least curious. How far would her curiosity go? I had no way of knowing.

My feeling was that she wanted to be pursued, and I wasn’t that much of a pursuer right now (or, ever, really). Linda was much more likely to chase me than Darla was. According to Angie, Darla had a spotty dating history. She’d been to a few of the dances, but missed most of them. Missing the Winter Formal meant she didn’t have a steady boyfriend. She’d missed Halloween, but gone to Homecoming. Boyfriend, or just stag? I wasn’t sure, nor was Angie.

All this might just be over-analyzing things. Neither Angie nor Jasmine thought so, though. And, to be honest, neither did I. Darla hadn’t approached me about getting together over winter break for no reason. I thought Linda might have nudged her, but Darla had gone along with it.

Darla appeared a few minutes after I’d gotten there, wearing a dark green dress under a winter coat (or what passed for a winter coat in Houston, anyway). My instincts said that dress implied ‘date’. Darla wasn’t particularly prone to dresses at school, and this looked like a nice one.

She spotted me and waved, and I waved back. She crossed over, then hugged me right away. The coat made her slightly shapeless, and I’d almost gotten used to hugging Darla, but ... not entirely.

“Hey, Steve!”

“Hi, Darla!”

She smiled. “Good catch on the phone. Mom doesn’t mind my dating, but she’s not used to it, and I’d need to do some explaining. It’d get quite awkward, because she knows your name, and knows you’re dating Jasmine. As much as she loves romances, I don’t know what she’d think of an open one.”

I shrugged. “It’s not necessarily any of her business. Not that going behind parents’ backs is a great plan, long-term, but...”

“But it happens now and then, yeah. Of course. I’ve heard that your parents are ... surprisingly reasonable.”

“It’s a surprise to me, too. They’ve been fine with things I’d never have expected them to be fine with. I’m happy about it, of course, and grateful, too.”

She looked around. “Hungry?”

I chuckled. “I’m a teenage boy. I could eat.”

That got a giggle. “I’m a teenage girl. I shouldn’t! Especially here! But I’m actually hungry, too.”

“You pick.”

“Mmm ... that place.” She pointed to the Chinese place.

“Sounds good.” I offered my arm, which got a blush, but she took it.

“Someone has you well trained.”

“Nah. Or ... well. I trained myself as much as anything. I always had this notion that I wanted to be dating, even when I was a bit timid around girls, and a bit chunky and introverted.”

She giggled a bit more. “You?! None of that sounds at all like you!”

“I have witnesses!”

She grinned a little at that. Our conversation was interrupted by ordering our meals and going to a table to wait. We sat down across from each other, and I picked up where I’d left off.

“Seriously. Ask Angie, or ... well. Anyone who went to Spring Branch Junior High with me. Eric, for instance. I’ve barely seen him in the last two years, but I imagine he remembers the old me.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “Life’s too short to live in a shell. I decided that high school was an opportunity to start over. Only about a quarter of the kids would know who I’d been, and the ones who did were used to people changing as the hormones took over. Plus, Angie. Angie was a big influence.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know if you know the story, but Angie’s ... um, originally, I suppose ... my cousin. Her father, my uncle, passed away, and her mother couldn’t keep her, so she wound up coming down here, and my parents adopted her after a few months, so, now, sister. But having a girl my age living next to me changed a few things.”

“Oh, my! That would change things! My brother Daniel keeps griping — playfully! — to my parents about having a girl, and that it would’ve been better if they’d kept having boys. Mom really wanted a girl, so she told him it’d have been a brother and a sister. Or two brothers. And three boys would drive anyone crazy, I think!”

“Probably so.” I was pretty sure that the three boys Clara Winton had raised had driven her up the wall a few times in my first go-round.

“I guess that’s why you’re so close. I got on Daniel’s nerves, and he got on mine. We’re friends, now, but we still irritate each other sometimes. I think he thinks I get away with murder, and ... I think he gets away with murder. If I failed half as many classes as he does, I’d be in deep trouble!”

That completely tallied with my knowledge of Daniel. It’s not that he wasn’t smart — he was very smart. Daniel’s problem was that he loved being at U.T., in college, taking classes. Easiest way to keep doing that? Fail a required class as many times as possible. He’d played that game for three years before finally getting his act together and graduating.

“So ... hrm. Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I said. “Since I told you about Angie.”

“Interesting. I don’t know what you might know,” she said, grinning. “Hmm...”

We were again interrupted, this time by our orders being ready. I fetched them, and we nibbled a little while she thought. She used a fork, I used chopsticks. Yes, I was showing off just a little, but I do like chopsticks, too.

“I never learned to use those,” she said. “And, no, that doesn’t count. Too simple. Let’s see ... um ... okay. Despite the dress, and the makeup I grudgingly wear, and all that, I’m pretty much a tomboy.”

“That is something I didn’t know.” I could see it, perhaps, now that she’d said it. At school, she tended to favor less ‘girly’ tops and usually wore jeans, not dresses or skirts nor even slacks. That had played into my earlier reading of her dress as ‘date clothing’, and it seemed like that was confirmed.

“Yeah, well, you see me in an activity where I need to wear dresses for tournaments. So, I need to stay in practice. You can tell — well, girls can tell, anyway — which girls at tournaments are wearing a dress only under protest. And a female judge might get ... judgmental.”

“I’ve heard things like that, from Angie and other friends.”

“It’s the way of the world. Women are catty.” She grinned. “Just how we are. Anyway, Mom doesn’t like that I’m a tomboy, but I am. She wants me to be the heroine in one of her Harlequin romance novels — she reads one a day or so, I think — and get swept off my feet by some hunky guy. Mind you, a lot of those women are strong, too. Professionals or businesswomen or whatnot. Makes the romance all the sweeter if she’s not some little delicate flower, I think. But still, they all wear dresses and know how to be perfectly made up, or at least they learn that in five minutes once Mister Right has entered the plot.”

I chuckled. “I’ve really never read any of them, so I wouldn’t know.” Amazingly or not, that was a dodge. I’d read things I would count as ‘romances,’ but not the sort that Clara Winton would read.

“I’m not surprised. I hear they can sell okay with gay guys, sometimes, but otherwise? Totally a girl thing.”

“Tell me about being a tomboy?”

She shrugged. “The neighbor kids were all boys. They climbed trees, so I climbed trees. They played with bugs, so I played with bugs. They tromped through the woods and crossed creeks and got muddy, so I did, too. Mom got really upset when I came home, knees skinned, muddy, all that, but she never put her foot down, so I kept doing it.”

“I think people need to be who they are. You can force a child to behave mostly the way you want, but not completely, and the more you force them, the more likely they’ll rebel destructively later.”

She tilted her head. “Yeah. I actually rebelled about six months ago. Mom is ... I love her, she’s great, but she’s such a control freak! I had to show her every homework assignment, every essay, every ... everything, so she could make sure I was doing my work. The instant Daniel got to U.T., things fell apart for him. I don’t want that. I need to learn to make my own structure. I told her that, as long as I got A’s and B’s, she needed to just let up. Amazingly, it stuck.”

“Different sort of rebellion, but that sounds like a good plan.” It really did, too. Dave had fallen apart the same way as Daniel for a while, before I and our friends became surrogate ‘mom’ until he figured out how to manage for himself.

“She’s waiting for me to go off the rails. I’m not going to! Well, I suppose going off to meet a boy at the mall without telling her might count as ‘off the rails’ in her eyes, anyway.”

“Maybe so.”

“Okay, your turn. Tell me something I don’t know.”

I pondered. The list was long, and — of course — I immediately thought of things that I could never, ever say. Like, ‘By the way, there was this guy, Dave... ‘

Best not to think about that. Okay ... something about me that Darla didn’t know.

“You might know this, or you might not. It took me until my last tournament of my first half-year on the Debate team to qualify for State. So, you and Linda have easily outdone me.”

“Hah! No, I did not know that. That’s funny. You get some credit, there. You’re a good mentor.”

“That’s part of why we’re so good. Most of the team are good mentors. It’s a very individual activity, and we needed to really start pulling together as a team. We always cheered each other on and helped build evidence files and the like, but there’s a lot more ‘Here’s a better way to do X’ or ‘Here’s a way to win over judges’ style mentoring than we used to have.”

She nodded. “I didn’t know what to expect, just that I saw a lot of cool people in Debate and figured it was worth a try. I’m not all that big on the whole grade-point thing, you know? I’m not going to take Advanced Latin to get that extra point.”

“Yeah. I surprised my mom with that right after school started. She had no idea that a few choices before you even start high school can lock you out of valedictorian no matter how good your grades are.”

“My mom knew that, but she wasn’t too worried. I’ll be happy with top five percent or so. Which, well ... duh! Of course, I’ll be happy with that! But climbing past the ten or so more competitive people ... no. Not a chance.”

“I might well be in the top ten percent. With straight A’s! Having two years of Drama and Debate and no advanced languages, plus PE, will just kill you.”

“I’m taking Band. That helps.”

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. How did I not know this? Especially since Dave had been in Band, too. But — anything that surprised me about Darla was a good thing, considering.

“I ... didn’t know that. How’d you manage with football season?”

She shrugged. “I made a deal with Mister Baker.” Mr. Baker was the band director. “I got to be off on tournament weekends, and he got me for every weekday game in the spring. Normally we don’t play every game, since it’s a reduced band for basketball.”

“Do you play at the girls’ games?” I said. I was still regretting never getting to any of Megan’s games last year and had vowed to do better.

“Yes! I’m looking forward to seeing Megan play! We didn’t go to JV games, so I didn’t see her last year.”

I nodded. “I’m looking forward to it, as well. And Calvin. I never made it to any of the games last year. I barely even saw any football.”

“Whereas I was at every home football game and some of the away games,” she said, grinning. “And Calvin’s pretty good. I mean, he’s not his dad, but he’s got some of the right tools. Hopefully, he puts on a bit more height, though he’s plenty tall enough compared to me!”

Darla was hardly short, but also not anywhere near Megan or Calvin’s height. I wasn’t keeping up, either.

We continued to chat back and forth. Along the way, I picked up some things I’d already known (her dad’s prowess at fixing petrochemical plants, for instance) and some things I hadn’t (she played drums in the band, which fascinated me since Dave had played clarinet).

After lunch, we did a bit of window-shopping — and some actual shopping, so that her mother wouldn’t be suspicious if she came home empty-handed — and continued to chat. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to go to college, but right now both A&M and U.T. were high on her list. Debate really had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, as it had for me my first go-round. Unlike me, Darla had been quite social before joining Debate. It wouldn’t transform her life, but it would almost certainly improve it.