Chapter 2

The night before our homecoming football game, the school sponsored a big bonfire out on the baseball field, and most of the kids from the high school were there. The mood was effervescent, and my buddies and I contributed to the manic energy by throwing huge logs into the fire, laughing and showing off. Later, off in one of the dimmer areas away from the giant fire, a bunch of seniors from the football team were passing around a lot of cheap wine in grape drink bottles, and most of the team was gathered around. Since the quarterback, a senior, was hot and heavy with the head cheerleader, a lot of her friends were there also, including Melissa. Mutual attraction exerted its gravitational pull on both of us, and pretty soon we were standing side by side, shivering and stamping our feet at the cold, taking sips and gulps from the bottles as they were passed around, joking and chatting with each other and with those around us.

By the time the wine had been by us four or five times, couples had started pairing off into more private conversations. I had my arm around Melissa's shoulder, ostensibly to provide a little warmth, and our conversation got quieter and softer and more exclusive with the mood around us. We were still just talking about easy stuff, about teachers and coaches, dissing our friends, that kind of thing, but there was an undertone we were both aware of, even if we weren't actually acknowledging it. By evening's end we were holding hands and laughing comfortably with each other like we had been doing this for months. Later that night, back at Fabrice's after the bonfire, our two groups had merged, and we were all sitting at a bunch of tables moved together, still paired up and talking now as couples instead of groups separated by gender. Brad, my best friend since 6th grade, gave me a thumbs-up when no one else was looking.

The next day was Homecoming. The cheerleaders were all marching together in the parade, and the football team pretty much stayed together and soaked up the cheers and good wishes from the town. It's a great feeling to know that you are a part of all that good karma, and my buddies and I really hammed it up. At the game we all wanted to give back to the town and the school a team "thank-you" for their enthusiasm, so we really played tough, and everyone on the team concentrated on the game, so there wasn't the usual goofing off on the bench that day. I did manage to glance over at the cheerleading squad when I was not involved on the field, and a couple of times I saw Missy watching me. It kind of gave me the chills to think that she might like me as much as I liked her. But the important thing at the time was that we played well, and we won the game.

A week later a bunch of us met at the local movie theater and paired off again. I don't for the life of me remember what the movie was because I was so nervous. By the time the opening credits had finished, Missy and I were holding hands and paying more attention to each other's body language than to the movie playing on the screen. By the end of the second reel, our knees were touching, and I had my arm draped around her shoulder. She leaned in closer to me, and stayed that way until the end of the film. We were still feeling a little tentative, however, which made us sit up a little straighter than we would have otherwise. My arm started to tingle and fall asleep. but I was not going to remove it, no matter how uncomfortable I got.

At the end of the movie, just before the house lights came up, I painfully lifted my arm off her shoulder and started rubbing it, trying to get some feeling back into it. Missy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, and started giggling. My first thought was What the heck is she laughing at?, but I couldn't hold that thought for more than a moment before I started chuckling, too. It was kind of funny, I thought, to think that through most of a two-hour movie I had no feeling at all in my arm, this arm that was closest to this girl I was beginning to really like a lot.

We walked out of the movie holding hands, bundled up against the cold, and joined our friends as we all piled into cars to go back to the pizza joint. Missy and I jumped into my friend Brad's car with about 6 other kids, and she sat on my lap the whole way. I was not comfortable at all, seeing as how I had about 110 pounds of cheerleader sitting almost directly on a part of me that was getting distressingly larger and stiffer by the second, but I wouldn't have traded the moment for anything. Missy, meanwhile, kept on wriggling around, trying to make room for the other kids also wedged into the car, and incidentally increasing my discomfort. She made no indication at all that she felt me rising beneath her, other than glancing over her shoulder at me occasionally and smiling, but she certainly had to have noticed it.