Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,42
out.”
Jeremy leans down so that we’re face-to-face. “Come find me after our set. I want to hear what you think.”
“What was that about, Janie?” Emma wants to know as we all watch Jeremy walk off in the direction of the kitchen. “You’re not—? I mean, you couldn’t possibly—?” She turns toward Sarah. “Tell me Janie doesn’t have a thing with Jeremy Fitch.”
“How should I know?” Sarah has pulled herself into a small, miserable ball in the corner of the booth. “Janie seems to be very socially active these days.”
“You know I don’t,” I tell her. “In fact, I think he’s a creep. He made me pay for gas.”
Emma raises an eyebrow. “He made you pay for gas? Do tell.”
“Yesterday, after Jam Band. He offered me a ride home, but when he realized how far out I lived, he sort of implied that I should chip in for gas. I offered him five dollars, but I didn’t think he’d take it.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Sarah insists. “I mean, you should have offered to pay anyway, right? Unless you thought you guys were on some sort of date. Is that what you thought?”
“Hey, Cinderella,” Emma says, leaning over to tap Sarah on the wrist. “It’s the last stroke of midnight, come back to Realityville.”
Sarah jerks her hand back. “What do you mean by that?”
“Jeremy Fitch is lame, okay? He lives to flirt, hates to commit. The more girls in love with him the better. And, hey, he’s cute, I admit it, but life’s too short. You guys deserve somebody better, somebody with some substance. Somebody like Todd.”
Todd waves his copy of The Four Quartets at us. “I’m a keeper,” he says with a goofy grin.
Then Emma looks across the room and her face lights up. She turns to me. “You deserve someone like Monster Monroe,” she tells me, pointing at the doorway.
And there he is, Monster, tall and broad-shouldered, bass in hand, fielding greetings from all over Sid’s.
And there’s Verbena, right behind him.
Chapter Eighteen
Night of the Living Accordions
Verbena squeals when she sees me.
She is the first squealing friend of my friendship career. “I can’t believe I’m actually doing something on a Saturday night!” she calls as she rushes over to our table. “Monster gave me a ride. Well, he’s the one who told me about the open mic in the first place, and then I begged him for a ride. We talked about you the whole way over! I mean, how great and cool you are and everything.”
I have about thirty-seven different thoughts and impressions rushing around my brain all at once. I have the impression, for instance, that Sarah is staring at Verbena openmouthed, as though she has just been shot with a stun gun. I have the thought that Emma might find Verbena a little bit, well, verbose, for one thing and quite possibly vapid, for another, but any negative vibes from Emma are overridden by my sense that Todd finds my cherubic and very enthusiastic friend delightful beyond measure.
But the thought hovering over all other thoughts, the thought I find quite disturbing and am exerting a great deal of effort not to think, is this one: I am overwhelmingly relieved that Verbena is not here as Monster’s date.
Not that Monster is my type.
The band onstage launches into its first song, an original ditty entitled “Tears for Tina” about—get this—love gone wrong, and any possibility of further conversation is put to rest. Verbena squeezes into the booth next to me and begins keeping time with my coffee spoon. At one point she leans sideways and yells into my ear, “I feel like I’ve finally arrived!”
I glance over at Sarah, whose expression seems to say, And now why don’t you go away?
I want to reach out to her somehow, give her a little shoulder bump (Sarah’s not big on emotional displays, but the occasional shoulder bump’s okay) or a sympathetic smile. Because suddenly there’s something about Sarah that strikes me as sad. Not sad as in pathetic, but sad as in . . . I don’t know, lost, I guess. Which seems a funny thing to say about a girl who has firm career plans, is waging an impressive campaign against child slave labor in the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast, and is at this very minute planning a multimillion-dollar civic project to honor two of our community’s civil rights heroes.
But in spite of all that, it occurs to me that I’m not the only one who’s spent this fall