Chapter 26: Late Friday Evening Part 1

Gravity sucks! There I was, serenely floating off the bus, when the last step down from the bus to the ground turned out to be further than I thought. Next thing I know, gravity sucked me down and thumped my feet solidly onto the ground. The jolt kind of brought me to my senses a bit. I headed over to where the team bus was unloading and arrived in time to see Pearl greet Dan as he climbed down from the bus with his bag slung over his shoulder. It was a friendly greeting with a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. I think Pearl was congratulating Dan for his touchdown. My sisterly matchmaker gene cut in then and I started thinking about how the “Stop Dan Being Stupid” campaign seemed to be coming along nicely.

It was at that point that I remembered that Pearl and Dan were supposed to be going out for pizza after the game. I cursed myself for messing up getting a lift home with Dad because now I was going to throw a spanner in the works simply by being there. I briefly considered slipping away before they saw me and catching a bus home, but the prospect of a long, late-evening bus ride was too scary for words. I sighed and sidled up to them.

“Hey Bec! I thought you were going home with Dad.”

I shrugged at him. “So did I, but apparently Dad didn’t realize that. He left without me – abandoned me to my fate. So here I am, this lost little waif, standing by the side of the road, destined to die in a ditch somewhere, friendless and alone.” In case you haven’t guessed by now, I was acting this out, all very dramatic and over the top. “Unless, of course, some sweet, loving, brother should take pity on me and drop me off at home before heading out for his hot pizza-date.”

In books, they always write about a girl in this situation fluttering her eyelashes at the guy. I never realized how hard that is to do. I wanted to keep fluttering away madly at him until he said he would do it, but it was starting to feel like I was having a seizure so I had to stop. It’s probably just as well I stopped anyway because it was several minutes before Pearl and Dan stopped laughing long enough to say anything rational.

“Of course I’ll take you home, Bec. But if you’re not too tired, you may as well come to the pizza place with us for a while.”

“But I don’t want to crash your date.”

“Oh yeah, about that! Our quiet, little pizza and coffee after the game has turned into something bigger than Ben Hur. Coach booked the top floor of Bennie’s Pizza for everyone. For some reason I missed out on hearing about it. So Pearl and I are going there with the whole crowd. You’re officially invited too if you want to come. If you’re too tired, say the word and I’ll take you home first.”

“Um, okay, thanks, I guess I’d like to go for a while.” I looked at Pearl. “Sorry about the date, but you know what the mice said about best laid plans.”

Pearl didn’t know what I was talking about, so while we walked to Dan’s car, I explained about the mice in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently she’d heard of the book, but never read it so I suggested she should read it because it’s a lot of fun.

When we got to Dan’s car, Pearl tried to get me to sit up front next to Dan. I refused and told her she should sit in the front. In the end she slid across the bench seat and sat in the middle with me next to her so all three of us were in the front.

“You’re trying to play match-maker with me and Dan,” Pearl said to me, with a sly smile.

I tried to put an innocent expression on my face. “Not really.”

Dan laughed. “Which is code for ‘Yes.’ Also Bec doesn’t want to sit next to me because I made her angry before. I’ve been bad and now I’m being punished. I’ve been thrown into jail without any hope of appeal.” He stuck out his lower lip and pretended to whimper.

Pearl turned and looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What did he do?”

“He got sent directly to jail, that’s what. He didn’t get to pass Go and he didn’t get to collect his two hundred pounds.”

“Two hundred dollars, you mean?”

“No! She means two hundred pounds,” explained Dan. “Our Monopoly set is the one we brought from England so it has English money. It has all the English places too, Trafalgar Square and Park Lane and so on.”

I was in such a good mood, that Dan could have done nearly anything and I would have let him off. I smiled to myself because I’d worked out how I could continue the Monopoly discussion. This was going to be fun.

“What Dan’s forgetting is that he has a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card. If he wants to use it, he can,” I said.

“I do? Cool! How many times can I use it?”

Pearl’s head was flipping back and forth like she was watching a game of tennis. She had a half-smile on her face. I think she was finding our conversation entertaining. I sure was.

I looked straight ahead at the traffic on the road in front of us and kept my face as straight as I could.

“It’s a one use card. Once it’s used, you have to throw it on the discard pile and hope you get another one.”

“Darn!” said Dan.

“My advice,” said Pearl, “is to play the cards you’ve been dealt. If you have a card, you may as well use it.”

“Okay, how do I use it?”

“You say something like, ‘I’m sorry, Bec, I didn’t mean to scare you. Will you forgive me?’ and I say ‘Yes!’”

“I thought I’d already said something like that.”

“You may have, but I wasn’t ready to hear it then. Now I am.”

“Ah! Okay then. I’m sorry, Bec, I didn’t mean to scare you. Will you forgive me?”

“Yes!” I smiled at my reflection in the window. “See? That was easy wasn’t it?”

“Yay!” yelled Pearl, clapping her hands. “So whose move is it now?”

“Well, Dan played his get out of jail card, so he still has to move.”

“What piece are you, Dan?”

“I’m the car. I’m always the car.”

“Yup, Dan’s always the car,” I explained to Pearl. “Dad’s the battleship, Mum gets the hat, Tara’s always the horse and I’m always the dog.” Hmmm. That didn’t come out right. I called myself a dog! I should be more careful about how I say that.

Thankfully Pearl didn’t pick up on what I’d said – or if she did she ignored it. “That sounds pretty final.”

“Yeah! It’s one of Dad’s Rules. Tara and I used to fight a little bit...”

“They used to fight a lot!” put in Dan – quite unnecessarily, I thought.

“ ... we used to fight a little bit, until Dad got sick of it one day and he made a new rule that from now on each of us would have a set piece and that was final.”

“That’s convenient, because I like either the shoe or the thimble and both of those are still available.” Pearl said with a grin.

“So what do you want to be tonight?” I asked.

“I’ll go with the shoe.”

“Cool! You’re the shoe, I’m the dog and Dan’s the car. Okay Dan, it’s your move.” (Doh! I said it again!)

“How do I roll the dice?”

I groaned to myself, sometimes Dan has no imagination.

Pearl had an idea though. “We could use the next number-plate we see. Take the last digit as your roll.”

“You guys better do that! I have to drive.”

Pearl and I quickly picked a car, “Seven! You rolled seven!” We both called out in unison.

“Excellent. So I move my car seven squares. Where does that take me to?” Dan was finally getting into the spirit of the game.

“Just a minute!” I closed my eyes and pictured myself opening up the monopoly board and laying it out in the bottom of my skull. I put the car next to the jail cell and carefully moved it forward seven squares. “Community Chest!”

“How do you know that?” Pearl asked, looking at me curiously.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, I remember stuff like that. We’ve played Monopoly a lot.”

“So what does the card say?” Dan wanted to know. “We better hurry up and finish my turn because we’ve arrived at Bennie’s Pizza.”

“Let me read it,” I said and mimed picking a card up from the dashboard and turning it over so I could read it. “It’s Pizza Night! You must buy both other players pizza and a drink.”

“It does not,” protested Dan.

“Here, show me,” said Pearl. She mimed taking the card from me and read it herself. “Yep, that’s what it says – pizza and a drink. Look! See for yourself.” She held out her hand for Dan to read it.

He groaned. “I knew this game was going to cost me money.”

Dan parked and we climbed out of the car.

Pearl grinned at me and gave me a little hug. “That was fun. I’ve never played Monopoly like that before.”

I grinned back at her. “We only just started. We should play it some more some time.”

“It’s a deal.”

Dan and Pearl and I headed inside the pizza place and it was obvious where we should go as soon as we walked in the door. There was a wall of noise – talking and laughing – coming down the stairway. We walked up the stairs and into the noise.

It was hard not to jump and skip in excitement. I was in such a good mood. This had been an awesome night already and it wasn’t finished. I felt like my head was so full of happy thoughts that it would explode and scatter bits of happiness over everyone around me. There was that one, nagging bit of my brain that wanted me to sit down and think about what happened with Lance. I pushed it into a corner of my skull and piled up happy thoughts on top of it until I couldn’t hear it anymore. It was time to party.

Upstairs was packed with players, cheerleaders and supporters. Dan put some money in the pot to cover the three of us. They were bringing out large pizzas as fast as they could cook them and everybody was grabbing slices of whatever they wanted. I claimed a slice of Supreme and got a soda from the bar. Then I found a corner where I could nibble on my pizza and sip my soda and stay out of the way. Most people were standing up and milling around. A few people came up to me to talk about the game and my touchdown. At one point, I made the comment that if you counted my touchdown then we’d actually won the game. I was being silly at the time, but they took up that idea and soon I heard it being repeated around the room, accompanied by a lot of cheering.

I could see that Pearl was sticking with Dan. I watched as they stood in a small group with several other players and their girlfriends talking about things that happened during the game. Pearl seemed to be enjoying herself, so that was a good thing. I saw Al join their group and that made me look around for Lance. I saw him sitting down with his back to me talking with a small group of high-schoolers. I thought I’d go over and join him, but then I thought I should really sort out my feelings before I did that. I was a bit confused about how I felt about what had happened on the bus. I saw an empty booth and slid into it so I could think things through.

On the one hand I’d really liked kissing Lance. The feelings that had been going through me while we were kissing were indescribable. On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling Lance had rushed me into it. I mean I really liked him from the talk we’d had on the way to the game, but then suddenly we’d jumped to kissing. I wasn’t sure that I should blame him too much for that though, because I’d kissed him first. It was as if, by doing that, I’d given him permission to kiss me back. I laid my head back on the backrest of the seat and closed my eyes, trying to clear out my head from all the confusing thoughts spinning around inside.

All that did was allow me to hear the conversation happening in the booth behind me. The seats were really tall, so I couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see me. I could tell they were a group of cheerleaders, though, from the things they were saying. They were all talking really fast. They kept talking over the top of each others’ sentences before they were finished as they rushed to throw in their own comments. Their words kind of kept piling on top of each other until they spilled over the top of the seats into my booth. Then I realized they’d changed subjects. They were talking about ... me!

“Didn’t you see the little minx offering herself to all of them?!”

“C’mon, it was more like they were each getting a piece of her and then passing her on to the next guy.”

“Who is she again? I’m sure I’ve seen her around before.”

“Bec? She’s Dan’s sister. I met her at the basketball game last night.” I recognized Silvia’s voice – she’d been with Steve last night.

“She’s cute!”

“And that gorgeous little smile. Wouldn’t you want to kiss her if you were a guy?”

“Hell! I wanted to kiss her and I ain’t no guy.”

“You’ll kiss anything in a skirt so that doesn’t mean anything.”

“The only guys out on the field that didn’t kiss her were the officials. I bet they were pissed.”

“If I was a guy, I’d want to do more than kiss her.”

“Especially the way she was dressed. That oversized jersey hanging off her looked so damn sexy.”

“I’ll bet a lot of the guys wearing those plastic cups were hurting.”

There was a lot of snickering at that comment. My brain was struggling to cope with what they were saying. They thought I was sexy? Unbelievable!

“When she was sitting with us in the changing room and brushing her hair she looked so adorable.”

“Oh yeah! I wanted to gobble her up.”

“I wanted to kill her.”

“Yeah! I know what you mean. God I hate her. Those legs! Arrgghh!”

“I’d kill for her hair!”

“I’d kill for her complexion. Did you notice she wasn’t wearing even a scrap of makeup?”

“At least she doesn’t have anything up here. If she did, they would have had to call the game. And then the riot squad.”

“So it’s a good thing she’s as flat as a pancake, then.”

“Sooner or later she’ll either grow a pair or learn how to stuff her bra. Then we’ll have some serious competition.”

“Let’s kill her before that happens!”

They were all laughing. I was glad they were laughing. If someone had said that without laughing, it would have been a bit scary. It didn’t make sense that they would say those things about me. They all had such beautiful bodies. Why would they be jealous of mine? My skinny little body was nothing compared to theirs.

“You might not find her that easy to kill.” That was Silvia again. “Did you hear the story about Sarah Taviori getting put in her place at the basketball game last night?”

“Sure, we heard. What about it?”

“That was her.”

“You’re kidding! That little thing took out Sarah Taviori?”

“I didn’t hear, what happened?”

“I was there. Dan turned up with this girl, Bec, at the basketball game last night. Everybody thought she was just another date for Dan, but she was a bit younger than usual. We found out later she was his little sister.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a couple of football players trying to get them to go back and join the party. The girls chased them away saying they were having some ‘important girl talk’ and promised to come over in a few minutes.

“Go on, what’s this about Sarah Taviori – I can’t stand that bitch!”

“Sarah started in on Dan, going on about how he was reduced to dating high school girls because all the college girls were sick of him.”

“Like that would happen!”

“Oh yeah!” I heard at least two different girls sighing.

“Shut up! I want to hear the story!”

“So then Sarah gets stuck into little Becky, going on about how she’s too innocent and so on. Dan made some comment about how he’d already had more fun with Bec on one date than he ever did with Sarah.”

“Dan dated Sarah Taviori? Eeew!”

“Shut up! Every guy is allowed one mistake! I think it was back in high school. Keep talking!”

“I didn’t hear exactly what Sarah said then, but it was something about giving blowjobs to show Dan a good time. Little Bec looks her up and down and says, as sweet as pie, ‘If Dan’s having more fun tonight without me doing that, then your blowjobs can’t have been very good!’”