psyched to hear from you) nor negative (ugh, it’s you). Her tone seemed completely indifferent, which only made him more nervous.
“I just wanted to check and see how you were,” he went on, his voice quavering slightly. “Carrie said you were OK, but I just wanted to make sure.”
“I had a splitting headache for a couple of days,” came her reply, “but I’m all right now. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened. I heard you got in trouble with your frat.”
The apology surprised him. It was the last thing he expected. Damn, he thought, was Watkins right?
“No, I should be the one apologizing,” he said, relaxing a little. “I never should have let you drink that much.”
“I guess it could’ve been worse. At least they didn’t have to pump my stomach.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess.” It blew him away that she could have a sense of humor about the whole thing. “It was lucky you guys knew that doctor.”
“Dr. Cogan. Yeah, he’s cool.”
They talked like that for another minute or so. First he apologized, then she did. Then he said, “Hey, I gotta bounce. I’m about to be late for a meeting with my history TA. But could I call you again? You know, to check up on you?”
Silence. His throat tightened, his heart pounded hard in his chest.
“Yeah, sure,” she finally said. “Just no more parties. Not this year, anyway.”
“No, don’t worry. No more parties.”
A couple of days later he called her again. This time her hey was more friendly—friendly enough, anyway, for him to think she might actually be glad he was calling. So after a minute or so of small talk, he asked her to the movies that coming Sunday.
He said, “Hey, I’m thinking about hitting a movie Sunday. A couple of good ones just came out. Wanna join me?”
At first, he thought she was going to turn him down. She said she’d already seen the first movie he mentioned. And when she began to offer her assessment of it, he thought it was her way of easing into a brush-off. But then, out of the blue, she said, “What time?”
“What time what?”
“What time are you thinking of going?”
He met her at the theater at five-thirty, twenty-five minutes before the movie was supposed to begin. He picked the twilight show for a couple of reasons: not only did it play into his low-key, this-may-or-may-not-be-a-date approach, but it also afforded him the time to take her somewhere after the movie.
The place he had in mind was The Blue Chalk Café, off of University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. Blue Chalk was a full-scale restaurant, with a large bar upstairs and a gaming area, off to the right when you first walked in, that was home to four blood-red pool tables and a long, solitary shuffleboard table. Though the place generally attracted an older, professional crowd, there was always a small contingent from the U., and he and a couple buddies from school sometimes went there during the week to play shuffleboard.
“Blue Chalk, huh?” his sister would call to pry the next day. “So civilized, Jimbo.”
They spent a little over an hour there—enough time to play three games. Kristen had never played shuffleboard before, so the first match wasn’t much of a contest. She kept sliding her rocks into the side and end gutters. But by the middle of the second game her touch began to improve, and she actually would’ve beaten him in the third game if he hadn’t come up with a great shot to knock one of her rocks out of the three-point zone.
“What’d you talk about?” Carrie would ask.
As he had hoped, the activity had helped put them both at ease. During the first game, he was mainly instructing, teaching her the not-so-fine art of shuffleboard strategy. But by the second game they’d moved onto gossip. He asked her about some of the freshman and sophomore girls—now sophomores and juniors—whom he’d thought had potential when he was back in high school. She told him whose stock was on the rise and whose wasn’t and how these two computer geeks she knew had just put out a popularity index, which was totally brilliant. It was a sociological experiment. They had a computer formula for rating people and, though your looks and what clique you hung with were big factors, there were intangibles.
“We talked a lot about that popularity list,” he’d tell Carrie. “Who was on it and where and all that. I hear you’re ninety-seven and