Chapter 17: Date 2 – The Game

Standing in line to get in to the arena, I heard a voice that was vaguely familiar in a whiney, nasally sort of way. I turned and was confronted by a pair of boobs pointed straight at me like cannons on a warship. Not recognizing those, I looked up a bit and saw a red-haired girl with a face that looked like she was permanently sucking lemons.

Now I remembered. This was Sarah something or other. Dan had dated her a few times when he was in high school. She’d visited home a couple of times and while she was fairly pleasant when Dan was around, the couple of times she was alone with Tara and me, she swore at us and called us brats and a few other words. Later on we figured out we should have told Dan what was going on but at the time we didn’t know what to do so we stayed out of her way and kept quiet.

After that, Tara and I developed a rating system for Dan’s girlfriends. We gave them a score out of ten, based on factors like politeness, range of interests, sense of humor, intelligence and so on. Surprisingly the size of their boobs didn’t count at all. We decided Sarah had been a three. We never told Dan about our system of course. After her, there were three girls Dan brought home who rated four or less. For each of them, we marched up to Dan and told him that we didn’t like her and could he please not bring her home again. At the time, we were amazed how well Dan took our comments. We were expecting to have to fight him about it. Maybe he knew they weren’t satisfactory. We decided that a score of five or more we would tolerate. After all, Dan deserved to have his own life and not get too much interference from his little sisters, even if a girl who scored less than something like eight was clearly not good enough for him. Dan never did bring a girl home that scored nine or ten. We couldn’t work out why. He was obviously such a great guy that the decent ones should have been tripping over each other, throwing themselves at him. There was one girlfriend who scored an eight. Dan stayed with her for almost all his senior year of high school but she and her family moved overseas due to her father’s job. Dan’s last girlfriend, Missy, had been about a seven point five, but they split up three weeks ago. I didn’t know why.

Sarah the Three sneered at me and then turned to Dan.

“What’s ya problem, Dan Freeman? Girls your age got sick of ya? Are ya so hard up, ya gotta date high school girls?”

Huh! She obviously doesn’t recognize me. And she thinks I’m in high school. Awesome!

Dan’s voice was calm. “Strangely enough, Sarah, I’ve never had a problem getting dates. It’s interesting that so far I’ve had more fun with Bec in one evening than I had on all three of the dates I went on with you. And the evening’s only half over.”

Sarah turned her sneer towards me. “What’s that s’posed ta mean? I bet she didn’t give ya blowjob in the movie theater!” She leaned in so close to me, I could smell her stinking, cigarette-fouled, alcohol-laden breath. Then she whispered, “And that was the first date.” She stood up and sneered some more – or maybe that was her normal face.

My insides kind of turned cold. I could feel tiny spots of red growing on my cheeks but I was more angry than I was embarrassed. Part of me wanted to shut down and hide like I usually did but Sarah the Three was so far beneath contempt that I couldn’t stand letting her beat me down like that. I decided to try to be more like Liz. Liz would fight back! I glared straight at her.

“No I haven’t,” I said, calmly and clearly. “But he’s still had more fun with me. Surely that must mean your blowjob can’t have been very good.”

A bunch of people standing around us started laughing at Sarah. That included the pair of girls who were obviously there with Sarah. She scowled and took a step towards me. Dan took a big breath in such a way that he suddenly seemed to occupy a lot more space.

“Sarah, there were a lot of reasons why I dumped you back in high school and lousy blowjobs was only one of them. Do yourself a favor and don’t try to take on Bec. You won’t win. You don’t have the brains to win a slanging match against her and if you try to get physical, they’ll be carting you off in an ambulance.”

I wasn’t sure if Dan was saying that I would beat her up, or that he would. I was pretty sure Sarah couldn’t work it out either. I stood there and glared her straight in the eyes and tried to look confident. If Dan thought I could take her down, then that’s what I was going to do. It’s amazingly easy to feel brave when you have a mountain-sized man standing right beside you.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Sarah’s friends hustled her away and they went to join a different line. I watched her go and slowly the tension drained out of me. My stomach was all tied up in knots. I hated facing off with someone like that. Dan reached around behind me and gently rubbed up and down my spine until he felt me relax a bit.

I pulled Dan down a bit and stood on my toes so I could whisper in his ear. I even cupped my hand around my mouth so no one else could hear what I was saying.

“Later on, you’ll have to tell me what a blowjob is.”

Dan started laughing.

Dan was still laughing when the gate finally opened and we got in. When someone’s laughing like that, it’s hard not to join in. Even if you didn’t think what you said was all that funny. As a result I had this silly little grin on my face. I held tightly onto Dan’s big hand and walked with him around the concourse, looking for the right stairs to go up to find our seats.

I pulled Dan out of the stream of people and reached up to whisper to him, once again cupping my hand around my mouth.

“Is it that thing where a girl puts the boy’s penis in her mouth?”

Dan’s eyes were sparkling as they darted around to make sure no one else had heard my question. “Yup, that’s about right!”

The idea sounded a bit icky to me, but I wasn’t going to say that. Last time I’d thought something was icky, Mum had said “Don’t knock it ‘til you try it.” So maybe I’d wait until I got around to trying it. That was probably years from now, though. I wasn’t in any hurry to put a boy’s penis in my mouth.

I leaned up and whispered again. “I thought so but I wasn’t sure. I once heard some girls at school talking about blowjobs but half the stuff those girls say is complete rubbish so I never know what to believe.”

He nodded at me, and then waved over my shoulder. I turned and saw Steve coming towards us with a girl beside him. Steve’s okay I guess, but he’d been a bit sleazy last Saturday night when he was drunk. The girl with him looked ... well she totally looked like a cheerleader, except without the uniform. She had long, strong legs wrapped in skin-tight blue jeans and gorgeous looks and bouncy blond hair and ... well, you know! As she came closer, I kind of recognized her. I didn’t know her name but I’d seen her among the cheerleaders at Dan’s games.

Steve waved at us and his voice carried clearly over the noise of the crowd bustling through the concourse. “Yo Dan! Yo Bec!”

He led his friend over to us and immediately went into his traditional caveman greeting routine with Dan, leaving me to look at this unknown girl in an embarrassed silence. After a moment I realized it was up to me, so I stuck out my hand. I tried hard to soften my accent so I sounded completely American.

“Hi! I’m Bec.” I was pretty pleased that, at least as far as I could tell, I didn’t sound English.

She smiled and took my hand, “Hello, I’m Silvia. I haven’t seen you around school. Are you still in high school?”

“I haven’t made it to college yet!” Hah! That was the truth, and I dodged her question. Grin! She thought I was a high school girl too! I was loving this!

Now I had to make sure Steve didn’t blow my secret. I glanced sideways at Steve and saw that he and Dan had finished beating their chests at each other and they were now quietly following our conversation.

“Do you go to school with Steve and Dan?” I asked.

“Uh huh, but I’m taking accounting so we don’t have any classes together. I met Steve ‘cause he’s on the football team. I’m a cheerleader.”

“Yeah, I’ve been to a few games. I thought I recognized you.”

“So is this your first date with Dan?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” I said with a smile.

“Have a good time.”

“I will, thanks!”

I’d been aware of Steve and Dan exchanging looks, and then they’d both given little shrugs at each other, so I figured Steve had gotten the message. He butted into our conversation at that point.

“Hey, Bec! We saw your little run-in with Sarah Taviori at the ticket gate. We were behind you in the line. That was priceless. When I first met you, you were such a quiet thing. Look at you now, all grown up and feisty. You’re looking terrific, by the way.”

“Thanks Steve. You’re looking a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

“Oh! Yeah! Sorry about that.” He turned an apologetic look towards Silvia. “I was totally wasted. You know, that party last week?”

“Ah! You were at that party?” Silvia asked me.

“No, I met up with him later. I had to help get Steve and Dan home that night. It wasn’t pretty.”

“That was nice of you, to look after them.”

I shrugged.

“Come on,” Dan interrupted. “Let’s go find our seats.”

On the way to our seats, Dan bought me a scarf with our team’s colors. A few other people from Dan’s school spoke to us and they were all interested in me. When I was asked what I wanted to study when I got to college, I told them I wasn’t sure but I liked drawing so maybe I would do art. Dan backed me up and told them I was a pretty good artist. We climbed the stairs to our seats and there were more of Dan’s friends to talk to. We weren’t quite in the nosebleed section, but our seats were pretty high up. They were okay though! The view was still really good. I was having fun! Everyone was being nice to me. Nobody really asked me who I was or how I met Dan, they all assumed we’d got together somehow and wanted to find out what I was like.

I sat and looked around. The two teams were out on the court in their warmup suits, loosening up and practicing their lay-ups. I spotted my favorite player. He’s really tall, even for a basketball player. He visited my elementary school a couple of years before and I got to shake his hand and he gave me a signed photo. It’s still in my room on the wall behind my desk. He’s so tall he had to duck his head when he walked through the classroom door. I stood next to him, and to look up at his face I had to put my head back as far as it would go. For a while before then, I’d thought I wanted to marry him, but when I was standing next to him like that, I decided that it probably wouldn’t work. I’d have to stand on a ladder just to talk to him without getting a sore neck. Let alone whatever else married people do – hey I was ten, I didn’t know much back then.

So here I was, virtually thirteen. Obviously so much older and wiser, and I still thought he was pretty hot. Other girls at school giggle at pictures of actors. I much prefer basketball players. Sigh!

Dan nudged me and told me to look up at where the ceiling arched above us.

“What shapes do you see?”

“It’s an arch, like for holding up bridges. I suppose a roof like that is a bit like a bridge, it has to go over a big empty space like a bridge goes over a river. And the girders have triangles in them. You said triangles are strong shapes. A big roof like that must be pretty heavy, so it needs strong girders to hold it up. How am I doing?”

“Clever girl! We have one little conversation about bridges in the car and suddenly you know everything I know.” He threw his hands up in pretended despair. “I don’t know why I bother working so hard when it’s apparently all so easy.”

I slapped his arm. “Doofus! Of course it’s more complicated than that. Stop being all condi ... what’s the word?”

“What word?”

“The word for what you were being! It’s condi ... something.”

“I don’t know. You’re the brains of this outfit, not me.”

I rolled my eyes at Dan. Just because he’s a jock, he sometimes pretends to be stupid. A bit of my brain wrote the word “condi... ?” on a yellow post-it note and stuck it up on the inside of my skull. I’d have to look it up in a dictionary when I got home.

“I’m also feisty. Don’t forget that. Apparently I’ve become feisty!”

“Bec, you’ve always had that feisty side to you. You never used to let it out in public. Even at home, you mostly keep it hidden.”

“Except when I’m fighting with Tara.”

“Except then! Tara can be feisty too.”

“I think we got it from Mum, like it’s our inheritance. And she got it from Nana. We’re all feisty women.” I love the way that word sounds. You can roll it around the inside of your mouth and it comes out sounding even feistier!

“Yup! Lucky for Dad and me that we both have thick skins.”

We both kind of laughed quietly to each other.

I leaned in a bit closer. “You know that thing we talked about before? I have another question.”

Dan groaned and looked around crowded arena. “Must you?”

“You promised! You said I should always feel free to ask you about stuff if I had questions.”

“Yes but,” he flipped his hands at the crowd, “do you have to ask here? Can’t it wait?”

“No!”

Sometimes you want to know things when you want to know them. Sometimes you can’t wait until it’s more convenient. I leaned over and put my hand around my mouth so I could whisper in his ear. Dan made it easier by putting one arm around me and pulling me a bit closer.

“Is a blowjob really fun? She seemed to think giving you a blowjob was fun.”

Dan looked at me and shook his head. “I have a headache.”

“Huh?”

“It started round about when you learned to talk. No sign of it easing up anytime soon.”

I pouted and slapped his arm.

Dan sighed heavily and then took a moment to think. Then he leaned down so he could whisper into my ear. “I’ve never heard of any guy who didn’t enjoy getting a blowjob. Even a lousy blowjob is still pretty good. As for girls though, some girls seem to like doing them, but others don’t.” He gave a little shrug. “The important thing for you to know is that Sarah had it all wrong. She seemed to think that the only way to have fun on a date was to do stuff like that. We’re having fun without it. You don’t have to do things like that on a date.”

I grinned cheekily at him, and then leant in to whisper, “Does that mean you don’t want me to give you a blowjob later?”

Dan sighed and shook his head at me, rolling his eyes in despair.

“Yep, that headache’s gotten a whole lot worse.”

I giggled a bit at his reaction. Dan leant back, but he left his arm wrapped around me. I tucked myself in against his side and looked around the arena. The teams had disappeared into their locker rooms and the seats were all nearly full. It was good to get my questions answered. I had more questions, but I needed to sort them out in my head before I asked them. I grinned to myself. I think every girl should have a part of their sex education occur in the middle of a crowd of thousands of people at a basketball game. It was kind of fun. It was kind of naughty. It was kind of embarrassing for Dan and that was fun too.

The people in the row behind us, on the other side of Dan, leant forward to talk to him. Dan introduced me and they included me in the conversation. It was interesting for a bit, but then they wanted to talk about lectures and tutorials at college so I lost interest. Three girls had moved into the empty seats next to me. The closest was a really pretty Asian girl, only a bit taller than me, with the usual jet black hair and gorgeous almond shaped eyes. I introduced myself to her and she said her name was Pearl Wong. She had really clear, strong English with a natural-sounding American accent. That reminded me to concentrate on making sure I sounded American too. Her friends were Faith and Danielle. I said “Hi” to them and we chatted about the coming game. Pearl asked me if I was with Dan and I told her I was. It should have been obvious because his arm was draped over my shoulder and I was leaning against him while I chatted to her. Then I wondered if she’d meant was I “with” Dan, but it was too late to change my answer.

“You look kind of young for college. Are you still in high school?” I loved it that so many people were thinking I was in high school.

“I haven’t made it to college yet.” True, but misleading!

“So what school do you go to?”

I gave the name of my school. The high school up the road has the same name as mine. The only difference is you put either High School or Middle School after the name. So by telling her the name without saying either, it wasn’t a lie. Fortunately she’d heard of the school but didn’t know much about it so we changed the subject. I found out she’d shared a couple of freshman classes with Dan. I asked about her studies (business) and her sport (gymnastics) and told her I played basketball.

About then, the music got louder and the announcer came on and started the build up for the teams to come out. It got too hard to talk so we turned to watch the action. The players came running out and I waved my scarf and yelled, along with thousands of other people. Everyone stood up, and that sucked because it meant I couldn’t see anymore. Pearl was in the same boat so we grinned at each other and shrugged. I stood there and jumped up and down and watched on the big screen while the players lined up for the start of the game. It was all very exciting. And it was noisy with the music going and everyone shouting.

Everyone sat down again before the game started, so I could see again. That was better. I could barely sit still in my chair for the tip off, and the game was under way. My heroes were playing basketball and I was actually there in the flesh, watching them play. So awesome!

The start of the game is usually a bit unsettled as the teams kind of feel each other out and try to set up their game plans. It’s pretty common for players on both teams to make some mistakes in the first few minutes while they get into the swing of the game. It took me until halfway through the quarter to realize that neither team had settled down. Both teams were still making mistakes left, right and center. The crowd was kind of quiet because the play wasn’t really that good. Neither side had anything much to cheer about.

Both teams were making stupid, unforced errors one after another. Too many shots were missing the hoop. Players were passing the ball into empty space, only to see it caught by someone sitting in the third row. I was shocked by how badly they were all playing. But more than that, I was disappointed by what I was seeing. No actually, I was pretty well crushed. I’d built up this game so much in my head that I guess I was expecting some sort of brilliant display of highly skillful basketball. Instead I got what could have been mistaken for one of the games I played in at middle school. Except I suppose they were doing it all quite a bit faster. All that meant was they were making mistakes faster. Even my biggest hero made a fool of himself by tripping over one of his own teammates on the way down the court. And later on he found an opening to make a lay-up, but the ball hit his foot on the last dribble and shot out sideways instead of coming back up into his hands. He should have had an easy two points but he completely messed it up. It was like watching a nightmare.