that even then I don’t care. I wonder how many lines I’d have to cross to get suspended. “Suspended.” Why has that word ever held any terror for me? Suspended. Suspended animation. Not having to decide where to go to college and what to major in and, essentially, plan out the rest of my entire life. Just to completely freeze everything. Like Sleeping Beauty. Only not at Parkhaven High. Anywhere but Parkhaven. It sounds like the most blissful state I can imagine. I want to be suspended.
Miss Olivia abruptly stops dead in her tracks and looks up at someone behind me. A voice asks, “Hey, Pink Puke, how was Penn State? Awesome team. They recruiting you? Hold out for a car.”
As I turn around, Miss Olivia babbles at me, “He asked where you were. I told him Penn something and he knew right away what I was talking about. Didn’t you, Ty?” She giggles. Miss Olivia giggles.
The sun is angling in through the glass doors behind Tyler and sending beams of light shooting out around his head in a haloed, He Is Risen way so cheesy even I can’t take my pathetic fan-girl crush seriously anymore. A handsome, sexy quarterback? Could I be a bigger cliché? And it is so clear from the way he is acting that this happens all the time. It happens so much, in fact, that, like a celebrity, he’s learned to handle it gracefully. To be nice to the Little People.
I have to laugh at myself.
Tyler thinks I am laughing at his recruiting joke and the Dimple appears. OK, now he is being a gigantic cliché. It is so ridiculous that it feels like we are in some bad comedy sketch together and I have no choice but to treat it that way.
He drapes his hand over the counter for me to shake and says in this skeevy Rico Suave voice, “Tyler Moldenhauer. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
We joke-shake and he hangs on to my hand while gazing into my eyes and giving me the Dimple. Talk about cheesy. I cannot not call him on it. I bat my eyelashes in a flirty pickup way as corny as his soulful gazing and Dimple-dimpling and ask in my best Southern-belle accent, “Why, suh, are you one of the Savannah Moldenhauers or are you a Buh-mingham Moldenhauer?”
Tyler gets that I have busted him and drops my hand and the whole Señor Suavecito act. He leans down, rests his head on his hands, and points a finger at the official name tag pinned to my chest that Miss Olivia makes all the aides wear. Mine reads AUBREY J. LIGHTSEY. Tyler flicks the edge of the plastic tag. “So is that what you like to be called?”
He understands. He gets an entire life of defending a name I never liked to start off with. Correcting people, saying, “No, it’s Aubrey, not Audrey.” Then they call me Audrey anyway. Or the real smarties ask me if I know that Aubrey is a boy’s name.
“Actually,” I answer with no more thought than I’d give to my next breath, “my friends call me A.J.” No one in my entire life has ever called me A.J.
“What’s the J stand for?”
“That’s classified.”
“A to the J, I miss you. Why don’t you ever come to practice anymore?”
“I quit band.”
“You don’t go to games, do you?”
“Only if I have a clarinet in my mouth, and that is never going to happen again. Not in this lifetime.”
“Ty,” Miss Olivia breaks in with the false intimacy of a fan who would call Britney Spears “Brit.” “What do you need? You know Coach already has you automatically excused from fifth period.”
“No, I’m good, Miss Olivia.” He shoots her an extra helping of cheese complete with the Dimple and some kind of crinkling twinkling of the eyes that makes me wince and Miss Olivia wheeze like her asthmatic Chihuahua. “I just want to say hey to our girl here. See how the big college tour went. So how’d it go, A.J.?”
“It went.”
He nods as if I’ve just given the correct answer to the hardest question on the test. I know I am supposed to ask him about the schools he’s interested in and where he’s applied and what his first choices are. But I don’t care. Even if it is Tyler Moldenhauer, I can’t make myself care. So I say nothing. The moment gets awkward; he taps his fist on the counter and leaves.