Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,60

this the whole day, plan something out with him,

pretend that, like the snow fort they’d designed freshman year, it

would never come to fruition. It was just her and Dave at the pizza

place. No matter how many families crowded nearby, how many kids

from school waved to them from other tables, no matter how many

times Gretchen’s name was scrawled on the sheet of paper in front of

them, it was just her and Dave, like it always had been.

JULIA 201

THE PROMPOSAL

A WEEK OF planning later, Julia was outside the school with Brett,

waiting for the bell to ring. She was clenching a section of white string in her hand, and she stared at it sloping upward from the gray asphalt

of the parking lot, swaying slightly in the breeze. She was incredibly

proud of this string, despite all the clichés it would lead to, or rather, because of them. Because her tongue was planted firmly in her cheek,

because her mom would approve of this, because she’d done all of it for

Dave and none of it for Gretchen.

“It is stupid hot in here,” Brett said from inside the teddy bear

costume they’d rented for him.

“Don’t you dare take off that mask,” Julia said, snapping a few

pictures of him on her phone for later blackmail use. “You remember

your lines?”

“How dumb do you think I am? It’s a sentence.”

“You’ve never really been good with words, Brett.”

“And you’ve never been good at interacting with humans other than

my brother. People change.”

“I don’t know. I’m still pretty iffy about how to talk to non-Daveians.

‘Iffy,’ by the way, means unsure, suspect.”

The school bell interrupted Brett’s comeback. “Okay, get in

position.” She called Dave’s cell phone as she pulled the string taut.

One end was tied to Gretchen’s car door, the other led to a tree at the

park down the hill. Julia had skipped her last two periods to set it up, and now she was hiding behind Brett’s truck to make sure Gretchen

would follow it. Dave’s handwritten signs hung along the length of

the string. Meanwhile, Brett waddled in his bear suit to the halfway

marker, a single rose in his hand.

“I still think we should have gone for the walkie-talkies,” Julia said

as soon as Dave answered. “It feels lame this way.”

“Walkie-talkies are expensive, shitty, two-way cell phones. You guys

all set?”

“Yup,” Julia said, eyeing the crowd just now coming through the

double doors of the school for Gretchen’s blond waves.

“Okay, I’ll see you at the harbor. You sure it’s okay for me to take

the car?”

Julia looked across the lot at her formerly white Mazda. She’d joked

about Dave’s newfound popularity, but it was incredible what a couple

of text messages had achieved, how quickly the word spread, the

number of people that had shown up to write on her car. She didn’t

credit herself, or the tree house. This was all Dave. As much as she

wanted to keep him to herself, Julia loved knowing that this was for

him. He deserved to be liked this much, this widely. “If you don’t take

it, the three thousand ‘you should go to prom with Dave’ messages will

be kind of pointless.”

JULIA 203

Dave laughed. “This is so ridiculous. We are outdoing ourselves.”

“We are outcliché-ing ourselves. Ooh, I see her.” Julia hung up

without another word, and pulled the string up higher. Paper arrows

pointing down the line dangled, and kids—those not involved in the

plan—were starting to point. Gretchen was reading a book as she

walked, and part of Julia kind of wished that she would get in her car

without noticing and drive off, dragging the string behind her. Then

Gretchen looked up and noticed the string and the first sign, which

read, FOLLOW ME!

Julia never thought she’d want to be in Gretchen the soccer girl’s

shoes. Or cleats, whatever. But that’s exactly what she wanted: to be

acting out this cliché-riddled promposal that would eventually lead

to Dave. Swallowing down the thought that she was doing all of this

for him, not Gretchen, Julia waited for her to take the string in her

hand. When it was clear Gretchen would follow, Julia turned to go

into the high school, where the band kids would be waiting to load

their instruments into Brett’s truck. Jealousy would have to wait.

THE FIRST ROSE

Brett in the teddy bear suit sitting motionless, the rose in his

hand. If Julia were being honest with herself, the bear suit was not

really crucial to the whole operation. It just made it a little cheesier, and therefore better. And how many chances was she going to get to

convince Brett to pretend he was a teddy bear? She didn’t know what

she was planning to do with the pictures of him in it,