When Mitch came by the gym to talk to me, I was completely caught off guard. After Millie left me totally stranded with him—I gotta teach that girl how to be a proper wing woman—Mitch blurted, “I’m sorry about acting so weird at the pep rally.”
I nodded. “It is what it is.” Instinct told me to play it cool, but somehow I didn’t think Mitch was the kind of guy to respond to playing it cool.
“Listen,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it if you gave me another chance.”
And that was about the time Millie piped in, stealing away whatever shot I had left at playing it cool.
So I’m giving him a chance. Partly because what the hell else do I have to lose? And also not many people outside of Millie and her friends are clamoring to hang out with me. And there’s something about the boy that makes me want to get to know him better.
The real obstacle now is getting my mom to agree to lifting my grounding enough to let me hang out with a member of the opposite sex.
I decide the best time to strike is Saturday morning. I wake to a flurry of text messages from Millie. She included me in a group text with Amanda in the middle of the night.
MILLIE: If everything is horrible every day for the rest of my life, just remind me that this night in April was perfect.
MILLIE: Is it silly to think that you can find true love in high school?
MILLIE: Have y’all ever thought about how weird it is that birds are just little feathery dinosaurs?
MILLIE: Okay, that last text wasn’t relevant. But I think I’m in love. Real love.
MILLIE: happily ever after romantic comedy love #HEA
ME: What’s HEA?
MILLIE: HELLO?? Happily ever after!
I laugh to myself. So I guess it’s safe to say her date with Malik was a success. I don’t get how she just feels everything so hard. That must require some serious energy.
I can smell my mom’s omelets from where I sit upstairs in bed. My door creaks open, and Kyla pokes her head in and then shouts down the stairs, “She’s awake! Can we eat already?”
I push myself out of bed. “You didn’t have to wait for me,” I tell her, yanking on her ponytail as I jog past her and down the stairs.
“Mom said so. She said to let you sleep in.”
That makes me perk up. Maybe it will be the perfect morning to ask for a reprieve. Maybe I do deserve to sleep in and even go on a date.
Downstairs, I find my mom setting the table while my sister examines each omelet to be sure she gets the best one.
“Keith had to run into work for a bit,” says Mom. “So it’s just us girls.”
The three of us sit down, and my mom pours two glasses of orange juice, for herself and me, while Kyla demands to pour her own. I think this is the first time we’ve all sat together for a meal in weeks. Mom’s always busy with work and running Kyla to dance class and soccer, and Keith has been picking up extra shifts to save for the vacation he and my mom have talked about taking us all on for years now.
“I don’t want to take dance classes anymore,” announces Kyla with her mouth full of egg and cheese.
“Excuse me?” asks Mama. “Swallow your food and try again.”
Kyla takes a sip of orange juice and then sits up on her knees, so that she’s at eye level with both of us. “I want to quit dance.”
I slink back a little. This is definitely my fault. “You’ll regret it, Kyla bear,” I tell her.
“And just what brought this on?” Mama asks. I can hear it in her voice, the way she’s trying not to overreact. But truthfully, Mama is a dance mom. She even has the bumper stickers to prove it.
Kyla shrugs, oblivious to the tension mounting around her. “Callie doesn’t dance anymore.”
Great. One more thing for Mama to blame me for.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say she quit of her own volition,” Mama reminds her.
“Well, it’s not like that was my choice,” I remind her.
Kyla looks to me. “Well, you don’t seem to miss it very much.”
I shake my head. The kid misses nothing.
“Well,” says Mama, “after the spring recital we’ll look at taking some time off of dance. But you’ve already made a commitment, and we always follow through on a commitment. Don’t we?”
“Only ’cause you make us,” says Kyla.
Mama stares her down into submission.
Kyla huffs. “Okay.” After a few more bites, she hops down from her chair and announces that she has television to catch up on.
“Don’t watch Tiny House Hunters without me!” I call.
“Put your plate in the sink,” Mama tells her.
With Kyla in the living room and the TV turned up a little too loud, I watch as my mom scrapes her fork around her plate, not really eating anything.
“I’ll talk to Kyla,” I tell her.
She doesn’t look up. “I think you’ve done enough damage.”
That stings. I pull in a deep breath. “You can’t be mad at me forever.”
“No,” she says, “but I can be disappointed in you for an awfully long time.”
I slump back in my chair. Why can’t we just have a conversation without her slinging guilt on me from every direction?
She’s in a shit mood, but this is the only chance I’ve got. “A friend of mine wanted to hang out.”
“Is it that sweet little thing Millie? She’s welcome here anytime.”
I clear my throat. “It’s a boy.”
“Oh Lord.”
I put the orange juice away and try to sound as casual as I can. “It’s not even a real date, Mama. We just wanted to hang out.”
“What’s his name?” she asks.
“Mitch Lewis.”
She pauses for a moment with her arms elbow-deep in the suds-filled sink. I can see her flipping through the mental files of every student she’s had an interaction with. “That big ol’ boy with the cheeks?” She looks at me. “He is very sweet . . . and not someone I ever thought I’d see you spending time with.”
I decide not to take that as an insult. “I’m full of surprises these days.”
“That you are.” Mama takes her time as she weighs her options. “Okay,” she finally says. “Y’all can hang out here tonight. At the house.”
“But—” I stop myself. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mitch arrives at seven thirty on the dot. The doorbell rings, and Kyla races from the kitchen, where she’s dyeing eggs with my mom and Keith. She peeks through the window beside the door and shouts, “He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!”
“I heard you the first time!” I yell down from my room. “I’m sure he did too!” I give myself one last glance in the mirror hanging on the back of my door. I haven’t honestly tried to look this decent in weeks, but with Mitch coming over to my house I didn’t want to look like I tried too hard, so I kept it simple with a pair of denim shorts and a fitted gray T-shirt with the outline of Texas across the front. I curled my hair and painted my fingers and toes the shade of red my mother swears was made to match her lipstick perfectly.
I run down the stairs, but Keith beats me to the door. He turns to me. “You girls and your mother only let me answer the door when it’s a steak salesperson or a Jehovah’s Witness. My turn.” He swings the door open. “Well, aren’t you a big fella,” says Keith.
“Keith!” I smack his arm and push him out of the way.
Mitch takes off his sweat-stained baseball cap and shoves it in the back pocket of his khaki shorts. “Mitch Lewis, sir.”
“You’re a Lewis boy,” says Keith. “Theresa,” he calls over his shoulder, “didn’t we go to high school with a Lewis?”
Mom steps out from the kitchen in a food-coloring-stained apron. “You know, I think your father was a few years ahead of us,” she says.
“Class of eighty-nine, ma’am.”
“Hey,” I say, interrupting their trip down memory lane.
Mitch grins. “Thank y’all for having me over tonight. My mama sent over some of her cranberry-orange muffins for Easter morning or just whenever a craving hits ya, I guess.”
Mama clicks her tongue. “Well, that is the sweetest dang thing ever. You come on in. We just ordered some pizza and are dyeing eggs, but I’m sure y’all would rather—”
Kyla takes Mitch’s hand. “You should dye eggs with us. Will you, please?”
Mitch’s broad shoulders cave in a little and he says, “Sure.”
I groan. Wrong answer.
“Actually,” Mama says, “why don’t y’all go for a walk or something? Pizza won’t be here for a little while.”
I squint at her, trying to figure out if this is some kind of trick question.
“Go on,” she says. “Y’all get outta here before I change my mind.”
Keith raises his brows, and his whole expression tells me he’s just as surprised as I am.
I shove my feet into my boots and throw on the sweatshirt I left hanging on the railing.
Outside the dusky sky is nearly dark enough to be nighttime, but daylight still burns at the edge of the horizon, which is only visible because everything around here is so damn flat.
“It was cool of your mom to let me come over,” says Mitch, once we’re a safe distance away from my house.
“It would have been even cooler if she would have let me go out.”
“Haven’t you already been everywhere in this town?” he asks.
“Well, sure,” I say, “but isn’t the whole point of a date so you can show me some magical hidden gem of Clover City that I’ve never seen?”
“Would it be horrible of me to say that maybe you’re the hidden gem of Clover City?”
“Very cheesy,” I tell him, but I look away and do that thing where you stretch your jaw out to stop from smiling.
“Well, then I won’t say that.” He bites down on his lips until they disappear.
“Okay, good,” I say. “I mean, at the very least, we could have made out in the back of your car.”
He clears his throat, and his cheeks turn so red they’re practically purple. “I . . . uh . . . that’s not why I asked you out. Of course it’s not like I don’t want to do that. It’s just that . . . it’s not . . . I don’t think you’re some kind of—”
I laugh a little too hard and touch his arm. I can almost feel his heart beating right there in his bicep. “Hey, I was just messing with you. Chill.”
He lets out what appears to be a long-held breath.
We reach the end of my street and I lead us toward the aging man-made water feature at the center of my subdivision that’s supposed to be a lake with tons of fountains, but the fountains haven’t been turned on in years.
A few ducks splash around in the water and then chase each other onto land and then back into the water.
“You wanna sit here for a bit?” asks Mitch.
“Sure. My ankle monitor electrocutes me if I go any farther.”
“A joke,” he says. “I got that one.”
I cock my head to the side and nearly tell him he’s kind of cute, but I fear it might send him into a frenzy all over again.
He takes off his letter jacket and lays it on the grass for us both to sit on. “You don’t have to do that,” I tell him.
“I don’t have much use for the thing anymore,” he says. “I finally quit the football team.”
“Wow. Really? But you only have one year left. I mean, you could probably not even go to college and just be like a spokesperson for one of Bryce’s dad’s car dealerships for the rest of your life. Is that why I haven’t seen you at the gym much?”
“Partly.” He pauses for a moment. “But that wasn’t the only reason.”
“I don’t do well with coy,” I tell him.
“Well, I quit the team. And then things were weird with us.”
“Which was your doing,” I tell him. “And what was that about anyway?”
“I don’t want to make you mad,” he says.
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” I laugh. “I’m always a little mad about something.”
He clears his throat. “I had a sort of falling-out with Patrick and all those guys. They were planning some awful hazing prank for the incoming freshmen at spring training. It wasn’t right. I’ve known for a long time that I didn’t like the kind of people they’d become and the way they treated others, ya know? It’s embarrassing how long it took me to act on that, though. Like, I’ve been over their bullshit for a long time, but I just played along, because I was scared of not having friends. Not having a place to sit or whatever. And then you told me to start looking for new friends, and it just made me really think.”
“Well, good for you,” I say. “Those guys are pretty big assholes. Especially Bryce. Not like I’m biased or anything. But what does that have to do with you shutting me down?”
“So . . . okay. Well, you shut me down the first time I asked you to hang out, which is cool and totally fine. But then I started thinking about that joke . . . you probably don’t even remember, but it was this joke you made about Millie.”
“On your first day at the gym,” I say. I let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, I remember.” I feel at once both guilty and defensive.
“And then—”
“Oh, great, there’s more?”
His lips form this soft little half smile. “Then there was that day at school when the hallway was covered in those green flyers with all those secrets, and I assumed it was you. But maybe not?”
I twist my boot into the grass until it hurts dirt. “Nope, that was definitely me.”
He sighs. “I just . . . I started thinking that if I was gonna go to the trouble of cutting all these guys out of my life, maybe hanging out with you wasn’t exactly the best thing I could do. Like, it was cool how you stood up to Patrick that one day. But . . . man, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”
“You’re already halfway there,” I say. “Might as well finish me off.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time, Callie. Maybe we’ve never been close. But we went to grade school and then middle school with each other, and you were never . . .”
“A very nice person,” I say.
He clears his throat. “You’ve just always kind of said and done whatever you want. To anyone you want. And part of me really admires that, but it doesn’t always sit right with me either.”
I’m quiet.
“You’re mad, aren’t you?”
I pause for a long moment. “No,” I say. “Yes. But at myself. But also you. Just a little bit. Even if that’s unreasonable.”
“I decided to go back to the gym and see if you wanted to hang out again because I got to thinking what would happen if people just judged me on the little they saw of me and the company I kept. You’re funny and smart. And pretty, too. But mostly I liked how funny and smart you were.”
“Flattery is good,” I say, and this time I can’t keep from smiling. “Keep that up.”
“I knew you were experiencing a little of what I was, so I thought that maybe getting to know you would be a good idea after all.” He stops for a moment, and the only sound is the ducks squabbling back and forth. “Say something. Please.”
“Well, all of that kind of sucks,” I say. “But I can’t blame you, really.”
“Yeah?”
“And at least you’re not hanging out with those assholes anymore.”
“We can agree there.”
“But why football?” I ask. “Why did that have to go?”
“Isn’t there anything in your life you just do because you’ve always done it?”
“Um, are you kidding?” I ask. “I was born wearing a Clover City Shamrocks uniform.”
“Yes!” he says. “You get it. Football has always been that thing for me. I finished out the last season, and I was going to go back and just do my senior year to make my dad happy and maybe even get some scholarships out of it. But then I’d be stuck playing for another four years at the very least.”
“But free school,” I tell him. “And don’t you enjoy it? Even just a little bit.”
“If I don’t get injured,” he says. “I guess it felt good to win. But I kind of wonder what it feels like to love something so much that you’re even happy to fail at it.”
I shake my head. “That sounds all nice and good. But I don’t know how that’s possible.”
He shrugs. “Guess I’ll have to let you know. And I’ve always wondered what I would do with a whole year of high school if I got to call the shots. Like, have you even taken the time to imagine what you’ll do with your time when your grounding is up? No dance-team commitments to worry about?”
“I have thought about it,” I say. “A little.” But not fully. Maybe I’ll take dance classes on my own. Or write for the school newspaper. Or join the volleyball team. I don’t know.
“Video game designer.” He nods to himself. “It’s this thing that I’ve always wanted to try, but I don’t even know how someone does that. And, I mean, my dad would give me so much shit. I can practically hear him. ‘What kind of bullshit job is video game design?’”
I think for a minute about what I could do if I could do anything. I wonder if Claudia has ever felt like this and if she could choose who she was going to be today, if she would still choose opera.
Once the sun sets completely, Mitch and I stand up to walk back home. He offers me his arm like a true Southern boy, and I loop my arm through his. For a moment, I even rest my head against his shoulder.
“I better get home,” he says once we’ve made it back to my house.
Suddenly I feel like I’ve wasted my whole night. Like, what if he decides he doesn’t want to see me again after this? Breathlessly, I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him on the cheek.
When I step back, he touches his hand to the spot I just kissed. His cheeks burn with blush.
Heat spreads down my neck, and it takes all kinds of willpower to not do things that would really make him turn red.
We could do more. We could get in the backseat of his Bronco or we could get back to the lake and roll around on his letter jacket. And all that would be fine. It would be fun even. Because there’s nothing like tumbling around in the dark with someone you like.
But I feel like I’m stepping out of my house for the first time after a colossal storm. I just want to take my time. Survey my new reality. Most of all, though, I want to savor it. I want to go to bed tonight and dream about the way a simple kiss on the cheek made everything tingle all the way down to my toes.