settled back into the booth.
“Fine.” I shrugged and pursed my lips. “Let’s see…she’s wearing all black, skirt’s way too short, fishnets, too much eyeliner. A little Goth. She has a Janis Joplin tat on her wrist and is at least twenty-one, wearing pigtails.”
Jeremy nodded. “So, what do you think?”
I tapped my pen against my planner. “I say her parents are divorced, she’s really into astrology, and she’s studying either Psych or English, but she’s taking a break right now because she needs to find herself. Oh, and she’s really into poetry. Like really into it.”
“Wow.” He looked impressed. “You got all that from her clothes and a couple of tattoos?”
“Yes, but it’s a moot point because we’ll never—”
“Excuse me,” Jeremy said to the waitress, who had returned with the check.
I gave him a don’t-you-dare glare, which did nothing to dissuade him. The waitress was smacking gum, which made me think a Psych major was a safer bet.
“Would you answer a couple of questions for us?” he said.
“Um, like what?” Smack. Smack. Smack.
“We’re just taking a survey,” Jeremy replied. “For a Psych class.”
I rolled my eyes at that. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a twenty-dollar bill and tossed it on the table next to our check. “We’ll make it worth your while.”
“Go ahead, shoot,” the waitress said, resting her tray on her jutted-out hip and smacking her gum double-time.
Jeremy grinned. “Great. First, are you parents married or divorced?”
She leaned back and scratched her wrist and laughed. “Di-vorced,” she said. “Like totally divorced.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and gave Jeremy a semi-smug look. But I didn’t want to get too comfortable.
“What’s your astrological sign?” he asked next.
“Oh, I’m a super-Gemini,” she responded without blinking an eye. “My sun sign is Cancer, but my astrologist says my moon is total Gemini.”
“Great,” Jeremy replied, refusing to look at me. He was frowning a little. “Just one more, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t,” she replied.
“At the risk of this sounding like a really bad pick-up line, what’s your major?”
“Oh.” Smack. Smack. Smack. “I was totally into Psych for a while, but then things got weird with my mom and stepdad, and I had to go home for a while and well, right now I’m just kinda working and—you know—figuring things out.”
“Are you at all into poetry?” I asked, giving Jeremy the smuggiest of the smuggy-pants looks.
Her eyes went wide. “It’s, like, so, like, funny you should say that, because I totally just started reading this amazing stuff by Bukowski, and I’ve been writing a little on my own.”
“You don’t say?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Yeah, like that’s really weird. I’ve been thinking maybe I should study English instead of Psych.”
Satisfied, I tossed my own twenty-dollar bill on the table to pay the bill, and stood. “If you like poetry, you should try Shelley,” I said.
“Shelley who?” she asked, still smacking.
“Mary Shelley,” I replied.
Jeremy stood, replaced my twenty with another of his own, and put his hand on my back to usher me out.
“Thank you,” he said to the waitress.
“No problem,” she called as we walked away. “Hey, wait. Can I ask you a question?”
Jeremy stopped and turned to her. “It’s only fair.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
Chapter 8
We were out on the street when Jeremy handed me back my twenty.
“What’s this?” I asked, blinking at him in confusion.
“Never seen money before?” He grinned.
I waved the bill in the air. “I left this to pay the bill.”
“And I’m giving it back to you.”
I shifted my purse strap to the crook of my arm. “But you don’t need to pay. I know you’re watching your money and—”
“I can afford to buy you a soda. Plus, I’m about to come into thousands of dollars.”
Standing next to him really emphasized the difference in our height. “Seriously, you don’t have to—”
“I don’t have to do anything, Meg. I want to.”
His words were so solemn and sincere. His tone made me take the money and put it in my wallet. We were just standing on the sidewalk. I was not sure how to end it all, and it was frankly feeling a little datey. “The nerve of that waitress,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “How did she know I wasn’t your girlfriend?”
The truth was, I was secretly rejoicing the tiniest bit because the waitress had asked him what I wanted to know. Oh, I’d cyber-stalked him over the weekend, of course, but there was a curious complete absence of relationship status. Plus, we weren’t friends online. From the