Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (8 page)

“You’ll see.”

When Jane and I got back to my room, we dumped the condoms on my desk. Linda glanced down at the pile and then at me. I shrugged.

I was reading up on marine acornworms a few hours later when I began to smell the most atrocious scent. It was a cross between a really ripe fart and socks that had been worn for a week straight. It was worse than when my mom’s Shih-tzu ate the wrong dog food—Pookie could clear the room, but at least it was only temporary. This one lingered. I sniffed and glanced over at the door. Because our new room was across from the bathroom, I wondered if perhaps one of my fellow virgin dormmates had to go Number Two bad enough to stink up the hall and resounding rooms. But our door remained shut tight. I glanced at Linda wondering if she could have perhaps been the source of the smell. Her head was bent over a book.
A smell that bad couldn’t possibly be emanating from Linda.
I gazed around the room, wondering if perhaps Linda was sorting her laundry and forgot to put it back in her closet. There were a few small items on the floor but nothing that would account for the pungent odor. And anyway, Linda would have had to soak her clothes in methane for them to smell like that.
I flipped backwards in my textbook as I realized I had read almost an entire chapter on Hemichordates, but had absorbed nothing. With a sigh, I slammed the book shut.

Linda glanced over at me. “Everything OK?”

“Yeah. Going to take a bathroom break,” I told her. I had to escape that smell.

“Good luck,” she told me cryptically.

But the stench smelled as equally bad in the hallway. I kicked open the revolving bathroom door, and sniffed cautiously. The bathroom smelled of air freshener and bleach. I turned and breathed out a giant breath involuntarily as one of my dormmates stepped out of her room.

“Do you smell that?”

She gave me a funny look. “Is this your first time?”

“What?”

“The sewage treatment plant is across the street from the school. When the wind blows the right way, you can smell the sewer gas.” She locked her door.

“Ewww. You mean it’s going to smell like that a lot?”

She shrugged. “Welcome to Eckhart. It might be ‘the right climate for learning,’” she said with air quotes, “but it also smells like shit. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” With that she headed out the dorm door. I went back into my room.

“Are you feeling all right?” Linda asked.

“Yeah, why?”

She sniffed. “I just thought you were having… bathroom issues.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean that smell? I actually thought for a second that was you.”

“Me?”

I told her about the sewage treatment plant. We were both still giggling when Jane came back. “This place really stinks!” she called as she walked in. “Are you ready Tammy?”

“For what?”

Jane grabbed some condoms and nodded at the ones on my desk before walking back out.

I looked over at Linda, but she was absorbed in the book again. I grabbed the rest of the purloined condoms before following Jane. She walked downstairs and then to the back of the dorm to where the bikes were stored.

“What are we doing?”

She remained silent as she grabbed LaVerne’s bike out of the rack and began walking it toward the first floor lobby. That bike was LaVerne’s pride and joy. Whenever she rode by, Jane would hum the witch song from the Wizard of Oz.

“LaVerne’s bike? She’ll kill us!” I half-whispered. It was probably expensive and specially made.

Jane turned to look back at me and finally spoke. “You wanted to do some pranks so Dallas will respect you more, right?”

“Only if they involve me not getting killed by my ex-roommate.”

She wheeled the bike around the corner into the middle of the lobby and then set out the kick-stand with her foot. “Sometimes you gotta Sroot the Free, Tammy. Sroot the Free.” She threw a condom at me. “You do the first one.”

I slowly peeled back the wrapper and took it out. I’d never seen a condom before. I gingerly pulled it out to maximize its size.

“It’s greasy.”

“Shit,” Jane exclaimed, looking at the package. “They’re lubricated.”

“What does that mean?”

“Really, Tammy? Really?”

I shrugged.

“They’ll probably leave grease stains. Oh well,” she said, glancing out the window of the dorm. “Hurry, we’ve got to move.”

And so we decorated LaVerne’s prized possession. The piece de resistance was when we put the condoms coming off of the handlebars like flags.

“Not bad,” Jane said admirably. “Hold on.” She ducked into her dorm room, which was right off the lobby, and came back with a disposable camera. “Now you have something to talk to Dallas about over dinner!” She snapped a picture.

Just then we heard a door open on the other side of the hall. Both of us ducked into her room giggling as LaVerne’s thundering voice screamed, “What the hell?”

Jane thought it would be a good idea to casually mention our prank to Dallas the next day. Linda had finally stopped shirking her roommate duties and tried to strike up a friendship with my crush. Or at least she had gotten his class schedule out of him, so we knew he also had Thursday afternoons—one of the few days a week when I also didn’t have a lab—off. Linda had a gen-ed class, but Jane was free, so she declared we’d pay another visit to his room.

As soon as we arrived at his complex, we could see Dallas sitting on the couch in the common area of Ibsen. He didn’t look up from his book as we approached the glass front of the dorm. Jane had been walking in front of me, but she stepped back, signaling for me to open the door. I did, despite my heart, which had started pounding earlier than it normally did when we visited Dallas’s dorm. With him sitting in the open, I didn’t have the customary few seconds before we knocked on the door to his room to calm the rollicking acornworms in the pit of my stomach. I hesitated briefly, contemplating running back to Gandhi, but Jane nudged me forward. I don’t know if Dallas saw Jane’s and my exchange since he was still engrossed in his book when we walked inside.

“Hey, Dallas,” I said in a cheerful voice.

He looked up from his. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. What you doing?”

“Reading.”
Duh.

“Oh.” I had nothing more to say, although I could feel Jane’s eyes imploring me to say
something
.

“Uh. Hey, Dallas, thanks for saving me the other day. You know… with LaVerne.”

“No problem.”

I could hear Jane sigh. “Yeah,” I continued, “She was about to beat me up, so you kind of saved my ass.”

He placed a bookmark into his book and set it next to him. “Was she really going to beat you up?”

“You should have seen her,” Jane cut in. “Tammy was as white as a ghost.”

“I was not.”

I could feel Jane nod at Dallas over my head. He looked over at me with his lopsided grin as my heart swelled. “She really ought to be stopped,” he said.
My hero.

“She should,” Jane agreed. She sat in an adjacent chair, glancing over at me and tilting her head ever so slightly toward the space next to Dallas.

“What are you thinking?” I asked as I gingerly sat next to Dallas. Something touched my leg. My face felt hot as I pictured Dallas caressing my thigh. Instead he found his book buried in the crevice next to me and moved it to the other side of the couch.

“You guys know how to get on the roof of Gandhi?”

“How’d you hear about that?” I inquired.

Dallas winked.

“Oh, right.” The Dadian lived across the hall from both Dallas and Sonofabitch.

“So let’s put her bike up there.”

“She’d kill us. She already suspects Jane and I are the ones who put condoms on it.”

“You put condoms on LaVerne’s bike?”

“Yeah. It was Tammy’s idea,” Jane told him.

“Nice,” Dallas said, nodding at me with approval.

I silently thanked Jane for the lie.

“Yeah, but LaVerne figured out we were the ones who did it, and she was super-pissed because she couldn’t get the grease stains off the seat,” I said. “So she took my Yoda and threw it in the toilet.”

“Your what?”

“My Yoda doll.” It had been a present from Kellen in the 6th grade. Needless to say, it had sentimental value, and I was less than pleased that it now had a bluish-tint to it from the toilet bowl cleaner.

“See? That girl has to be taught a lesson. Anyway, LaVerne will never need to know it was us who put her bike up there,” Dallas added.

And so Jane and Dallas concocted a plan to get even with LaVerne while I calculated how much more Dallas-hanging-out time their plan would gain. As we were getting up to leave, Dallas called back to us. “Hey guys...”

I turned around before Jane.

“If we’re going to do this, we need a secret knock.” He thought for a second and then began banging on the wooden arm of the couch. “Do you recognize it?”

“Was that a song?”

“It’s Third Eye Blind.” He resumed his banging as Jane cocked an eyebrow at me. I shrugged at both of them.

“
How’s It Going to Be
?”

“When?” I asked.

“No, that’s the song.” He banged it out one more time, closing his eyes and humming the opening lines of the song. He must have seen the looks on our face after he opened his eyes because he stopped knocking. “Or not.”

“See you around, Dallas,” I told him. Jane was already out the door.

~*~

Fall Break was two weeks away. Dallas and Jane decided the weekend before would be the best time to do put LaVerne’s bike on the roof. That way if LaVerne figured out it was us, she’d have a week to cool off before murdering the three of us—four if Linda decided to participate after all—with her bare man hands. Jane and Linda were going home for the break, but Dallas and I weren’t. Dallas because he was trying out for the Club Volleyball team; Eckhart is too small to have any real sports teams besides basketball, but the Volleyball team occasionally plays other schools’ club teams. Consequently, Dallas was never around anymore, citing volleyball practice every time we tried to get him to come back to our dorm.

I wasn’t going home for Fall Break because my parents were visiting the week before.

“And now my sister’s coming too,” I told them during one of our roof meetings.

“Your twin, right?” Linda asked.

I nodded again, gathering a scoop of gravel in my hands.

“How come you never talk about her? I thought twins were inseparable,” Jane said.

“Not Corrie and I. We’re fraternal,” I told them. I didn’t want to get into the finer nuances of our relationship. Not to mention the Kellen-factor. “We don’t even have the same birthday. She was born at 11 pm, and I was born at 12:30 am the next day.”

“You don’t even share the same birthday?” Linda clarified.

“No. What about you?” I asked Jane. I already knew Linda had two older brothers, one who worked at Disneyworld and got a discount on clothing, hence the fact that Linda’s wardrobe was filled with T-shirts with cartoons on them.

“I’m an only child.” Jane said. Linda looked over at me and nodded knowingly, as if Jane not having any siblings explained a lot.

On one rare night when Dallas showed up to dinner while we were there, I waved to him as he walked in. I didn’t dare to hope he’d join us, but my heart leapt a little bit when he sat his tray down at our customary four-top. Since it was usually just Jane, Linda, and me at mealtimes, we stopped sitting at the longer tables. That way it looked more like we didn’t want anyone to join us than we just didn’t have any more dining companions to add.

“What’s up guys?” he asked, grinning at the three of us.

I shrugged shyly back at him.

“Dallas, what the hell are you eating?” Jane asked, taking stock of his tray.

He picked up a long, greenish pod. “Snap peas.”

“Is that it?” my sawdusted tongue managed to squeak out. His plate was piled up high with the pods and nothing else.

He nodded.

“You are so strange,” Jane said, glancing over at me. I shrugged again.

“Hey, are you any of you guys rich?” Dallas asked.

I swallowed the diet pop I’d been drinking. “What?”

“You know, do your parents have money, like most everyone else around here?”

“Nope,” Jane said, popping a fry into her mouth. “Tammy’s dad’s a doctor though.”

Dallas finally looked at me with interest. “Do you have a car?”

“No. I have a sister and a brother, and my dad has a small practice. We are NOT rich.”

Dallas looked over at Linda. “What about you Pam... Linda?” he quickly corrected himself as Jane frowned at him.

“I don’t have a car.”

Dallas went on describing all of the various cars his dormmates (but not Sonofabitch or the Dadian) sported. I couldn’t help feeling my status at Eckhart would have risen dramatically if I possessed a car. I could get off campus whenever I wanted to. Maybe Dallas would have wanted to go get fast-food and call me to take him. Maybe there was a movie he would want to see, and I would be his only ride, and then he’d asked me to go with him and buy me popcorn as a thank-you. And then our fingers would touch as both reached into the popcorn container at the same time…

“I think my roommate’s rich,” Jane returned to our previous topic. “She bragged to me today that her parents were taking her out for sushi tonight.”

“She told you that and didn’t invite you?” Dallas asked her. “Man, if someone told me they were eating someplace other than this hellhole, I’d demand they take me with.”

“Do you even eat sushi?” I asked.

“I’d eat whatever as long as it’s not from here,” he said, using his long arm to point to the food lines.

“I don’t think the food is that bad,” Linda said.

“My parents are actually coming next week,” I told Dallas shyly.

Jane coughed and raised her eyebrows at me. I gave her a curious look as she said, “I think LaVerne is rich too.”

“She still owes me two dollars,” Linda said.

“Two dollars!” Dallas said in a low, menacing voice.

“I want my two dollars!” I said, matching his low tone to the best of my ability.