Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (6 page)

I paused. In the millions of times I had imagined the conversation in my head, it had never occurred to me the bastard wouldn’t be in his room when I finally got the guts to confront him.

“Where is he?” I asked in a much lower voice.

Dallas shrugged as he moved aside, giving me full view of their room.

I glanced into the deserted space, stalling for time. I really wanted to get to the bottom of this, and I was afraid if I waited until the next day, I’d never find out. If I left now, I’d probably never come back. I ran through my options: I could sit at the picnic table outside and wait for Ian to return, but that could be hours and I had a paper due the next day. Plus, sitting outside waiting for a guy in an unfamiliar complex seemed a little too stalkerish, even for me. I decided to fish for answers from his roommate.

“Can I talk to you?” I asked.

He nodded and grabbed a sweatshirt from the desk beside the door before leading me out of the dorm. Luckily he forsook the picnic table for the short flight of steps leading up to the complex.

He sat down first; I had no choice but to sit next to him. He turned his head toward me and raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to start.

My resolve had vanished on the way to the steps outside, and now I had no idea what to say. After a moment of silence, I finally ventured, “Do you know why Sonof... I mean Ian never showed to the comedienne?” I was too ashamed to claim he had stood me up.

He let out a sigh as he stretched backward, grabbing the rail for balance. “I don’t know why he does some of the things he does. Maybe because he’s a basketball player from a small town and isn’t used to so much female attention.”

I didn’t know how to reply. I guess I should have realized I might have been one in a line of many.

“He has a lot of weird girls calling him all the time,” Dallas continued.

I let out my breath in recognition. “Oh, I get it. Like me.” The anger had subsided, and now I was just sad and disappointed. So much for my dreams of sitting front row at the basketball games. Despite my efforts to hide it, my Nerd Queen status must have been visible to everyone at my new school. I put my hand on the rail and pulled myself up. “I guess it was worth a try.”

“Ummm.” Dallas said, rumbling his throat in a deep whisper. “Do or do not. There is no try.”

Stunned, I let go of the railing and glanced down at Dallas. “Was that… Yoda?”

He gave a single, dignified nod before continuing in the same voice, “Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future… the past. Old friends, long gone.”

I sat back down. It was as if he could read my thoughts, and sum up my struggles to fit in at Eckhart in lines from my favorite movie series.

“I don’t think you are weird, Tammy,” Dallas said in his normal voice.

His piercing blue eyes looked right into my soul and declared I wasn’t weird.
Screw Ian
was my first thought. My second was that I had found my Number Three. Dallas. The Horse, of course, of course.

Chapter 5: Virgins on the Roof and in the Rain

I
found Jane and Linda sitting in the upstairs hallway watching TV. I had walked upstairs with much less stomping and angry words than when I had left.

“Did you talk to him?” Jane asked.

“No. He wasn’t there. But Dallas was.”

Jane frowned as Linda hit the mute button on the remote.

“So you didn’t find anything out?” Jane asked.

“Oh I did. I found out I’m in love with Dallas.”

“Dallas?” Linda seemed a little too incredulous. “As in the guy from my Heritage class?”

“As in Sonofabitch’s roommate?” Jane clarified.

“Yep,” I said confidently, sliding out of my flip-flops and sitting down in one of the lounge chairs. “He doesn’t think I’m weird.”

“Well, at least someone doesn’t,” Jane told me as she got up. I hoped she was joking.

“Hey, where does this go?” she asked, ducking into the storage room next to the restroom. Linda and I didn’t move from our spots in the lounge.

“Tammy, Linda, get in here.” Her voice was muffled. Curious, Linda and I obeyed and entered the seemingly empty storage room.

“Up here.” Jane called, peering down at us. A set of stairs led up to a small alcove, from which Jane was now perched. “C’mon,” she gestured toward a door. “It’s unlocked from this side. We can go out on the roof.”

We both climbed the stairs. “Is that door going to lock from the outside?”

Jane hesitated briefly before grabbing a wood block. “We’ll just use this.” She opened the door, shoved the block beneath it and then walked out onto the roof.

Linda looked over at me. I shrugged before following Jane outside. Linda tested the validity of the block in the doorway before she joined us.

“Hey, you can see the whole quad from here,” I said in awe, spying the infamous stairway outside Dallas’s dorm.

“If only we had binoculars, we could probably see straight into Ibsen.” Jane declared.

“Do you have binoculars?”

“No,” Jane and Linda said together. “There’s too many trees anyway,” Linda added.

“Still, you can see a lot of campus from up here,” I said, sitting down. The dorm roof was covered with gravel; some of it lodged beneath my shorts, but I didn’t mind.

Jane sat down next to me. “We should make a club and meet up here. Just the three of us,” she said, generously including my roommate, who was still standing next to door.

Linda sat down near enough to us to carry on a conversation, but far away from the edge of the roof. “What should our name be?

“How about... the Skywalkers?”

“Lame,” Jane said, throwing a piece of roof gravel at me. “How about... the V-Club?”

“What does the V stand for?” Linda asked.

Jane shot us one of her famous grins. “Virgins. We
are
all virgins, aren’t we?”

I tried to cover my surprise at Jane’s revelation by looking at Linda. She sat on the ground cross-legged, her straight hair tucked behind both ears. Her knee-length stonewashed shorts were nearly hidden by her giant Tweety-Bird T-shirt. Her eyes narrowed behind the coke-bottle glasses that replaced her contacts at night, but she didn’t say anything. I think she knew she didn't have to.

I shrugged. After eighteen years and one month, I still hadn’t had my first kiss, let alone done
that.
“Are you?” I asked Jane in lieu of a reply.

“Technically, yes.”

“Technically?” I repeated.

“Do you want me to go into the finer details?’

I waved my hand. “Well, there you have it. I guess we’re the V-club. What should be our first agenda item?”

Jane began giggling. “How about finding a way to get Tammy out of the V-club…with Dallas?” Linda joined her giggling.

I had trouble falling asleep that night. My head still raced with thoughts of Dallas and the firmness of his grip on the railing. Dallas was a bit bumbling, but in a cute way—like a blue-eyed John Cusack. In my head, I re-wrote all of the 80s movies Kellen had made me watch with Dallas in Cusack’s roles and me as the female lead. There was
Better Off Dead,
where I transformed into a curly-haired French exchange student that Dallas finally realizes makes a much better girlfriend than the trampy Beth—replaced by LaVerne in my fantasy.
One Crazy Summer
, where Dallas was hopeless at basketball but still a romantic at heart, although I exchanged Demi Moore’s dreadlocks for a sleeker mane in my imagination. And of course, there was
Say Anything.
Tomorrow morning I’d be half-asleep when I would faintly hear Peter Gabriel echoing through Alpha. I’d stare at the ceiling, wondering who was playing music when Linda nudged me. I’d throw on a robe to see Dallas standing in the courtyard, serenading me with a more compact boombox than the one in the movie and forgoing Cusack’s trenchcoat for board shorts. All we needed was a classic 80’s car for background scenery and someone playing the saxophone for effect.

But what came next? What did college couples do? I wasn’t ready to visualize losing my V-status—so far in my fantasy we’d walked around campus multiple times holding hands and having romantic moments in the hammocks by the sea wall outside the marine biology building. I finally fell asleep right after we started fooling around wearing increasingly limited articles of clothing.

The storage door leading to the roof remained unlocked, and for the next week, we met there every night. Somehow being out on the roof gave us more of a free feeling, and instead of continuing the same conversations we’d have in our dorm room, we’d talk more about our hopes and dreams, past and present. “What made you decide to come to Eckhart?” Jane asked us.

“Marine biology,” Linda said with a sigh. “Which is pointless now that I’ve changed my major.”

“You changed it?”

“Yeah. We had a guest speaker come to my Heritage class, and they were telling us all the stuff you have to go through to be a dolphin trainer. Did you know most of them have psychology degrees?”

I nodded. “Yeah. You have to work, like, 60 hours a week, and it’s super competitive.”

“And they get paid dick,” Jane supplied.

“Yeah, that
and
they don’t even have psych as a major here. So I guess I’ll never get to work with dolphins.”

“Is that why you chose Eckhart, Tammy?” Jane asked.

“Not for dolphins. I hate those friggin’ things.”

“No, I mean for its marine biology program.”

I nodded. I’d always been a fish enthusiast. While my twin sister Corrie begged for shoes and ribbons as a small child, I’d beg for a new guppy or gourami for my growing collection of tanks. Every new fish had a name, usually one first christened by George Lucas. And I knew each of their preferred temperatures and pH by heart, testing their tanks for the required elements every weekend and adjusting even slight aberrations immediately. Kellen called me The Little Mermaid sometimes, for my ability to “speak” to my fish. Before he stopped calling me anything, that is. But I was so anxious to shed my reputation as “The Fish Girl,” that I didn’t even have a beta fish now, and I’d only packed the fish books that looked text-bookish enough to appear I had an interest, and not an obsession. I left the ball cap with the fish head, worn thin from years of use, and my “Shark Bait” T-shirt at home in Michigan along with nine pages of instructions for my dad to take care of my fish.

“Have you ever had a boyfriend, Tammy?” Jane’s subject change caught me off guard.

“I told you already, I’ve never been in love.”

“That’s not what I asked. Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

“Have you?” I cast back.

“Yep.”

I looked helplessly over at Linda. She was staring at her hands.

“I’m waiting for my Prince Charming,” I told Jane.

“You’ll probably be waiting a very long time.”

“Then so be it.”

A week passed after I had declared that Dallas was College Crush Number Three, and I still hadn’t found an opportunity to talk to him again. The V-club had to meet in Linda's and my dorm room because it was the middle of the day. We were afraid someone would catch us up there and they'd have to start locking the storage door.

“Linda, you’re in his Heritage class. Can’t you try to invite him here?” Jane sat in her customary position: backwards in my desk chair. Linda was in her own chair, and I was up on my top bunk, rolled toward Jane.

“How?”

“Isn’t there some sort of project you have to work on?”

“Not really.”

“Somehow we have to get him over to Gandhi to hang out with Tammy.”

“Why don’t you just go over to his dorm room?” Linda asked.

Jane cocked her head at me.

“I’ve got stuff to do,” I said to the room in general.

“Bull shit. C’mon, Tammy, let’s go.” She got up and tugged at my arm. I reluctantly hopped down from the bed and went over to my make-up case.

“Now, Tammy,” Jane commanded.

I gave her a dirty look and then put my blusher brush down. Linda followed us out of our room.

“What if Sonofabitch is there?” I whined on our way across the quad.

“He won’t be. He’s never around,” Jane said confidently.

She was, of course, correct. The dorms aren’t locked during the day, so we could walk right in to Ibsen without getting the code. Their room door was propped open and Dallas lay on his bed, hands locked behind his head.

“Don’t you have any sheets?” Jane asked by way of greeting.

“No.” He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us as he raised himself up again.

“Were you doing sit-ups?” Jane inquired. “In that?” He was clad in his ever-present J.crew button-down.

“Yeah,” he said, rolling off his bed, which had been stripped of everything. He unfurled an old lumpy egg crate and spread it over his mattress.

“What’s up guys?” he asked, wiping his face with a towel and then turning toward us.

“Nothing,” Jane said, sitting down on what must have been Sonofabitch’s bed. At least
he
had sheets.

I stayed standing and glanced around his room. It looked like what I had pictured a guy’s room would look like, although possibly a little cleaner. There were a few random articles of clothing scattered around, but no underwear, thank goodness. In the corner sat a blue caddy filled with shower stuff.

“Whose is that?” I asked him, gesturing toward it.

“Mine,” Dallas said.

“You have a bath pouf?”

“A what?”

“A bath pouf. That mesh thing. Do you use it?”

“Yeah. I do. So what?”

“Nothing.”

Dallas threw a sock at me as Jane looked at me approvingly.
Wait, was I just flirting?

“Let’s prank-call someone,” Dallas suggested.

“How?” Jane asked.

“Check it out,” he said, meandering over to the computer on Sonofabitch’s side. He clicked a couple of buttons and suddenly Obi Wan’s voice boomed out: “Use the force, Luke.”

I grinned as Linda announced, “Tammy loves Star Wars.”

Dallas clicked some more as Han Solo declared, “Never tell me the odds.” Jane went over to stand behind him and clicked something. She crossed her arms triumphantly as Vader told us all to, “Search your feelings. You know it to be true.”