“T-people?”
I stare at him pointedly until he says, “Oh.”
“So what do you think? Will you come? It could be like Angel Club, except without Angela, because she’s … busy.”
He shakes his head. “No, thanks.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to learn to fight. That’s just playing the game. It’s not for me.”
“Jeffrey, you’re like a champion fighter. You’re a linebacker. You’re the district mid-class wrestling champ. You’re—”
“Not anymore.” He stands up, gives me a look that says very clearly that he’s done talking about it. “Enjoy the pizza. I have to get back to work.”
10
DINNER AND A MOVIE
“You should go black,” Angela says.
I turn around, startled to see her standing behind me at the mirror. She points at the dress I’m holding in my left hand.
“The black,” she says again.
“Thanks.” I hang up the other dress. “Why does it not surprise me that you would choose black?” I tease. “Goth girl.”
She walks stiffly over to Wan Chen’s bed and sits, helps herself to a bottle of peppermint-scented lotion Wan Chen keeps next to the bed, and starts rubbing it into her feet. I try not to stare at her belly. Just in the last few days she’s kind of popped. With the dark, baggy clothes and the way she always hunches her shoulders lately, she’s still able to hide that she’s pregnant if she wants to. Not for long, though. Pretty soon there’s going to be a baby.
A baby. The idea still seems too crazy to be true.
I step into the bathroom and change into the dress, the very definition of the little black dress, sleeveless and form-fitting and cut to the knee. Angela was right. It’s perfect for a date. Then I go over to the mirror that hangs on the back of my closet door and contemplate whether I should pull my hair up or leave it down.
“Down,” Angela says. “He loves your hair. If you leave it down, he’ll want to touch it.”
Hearing her say it that way, as if I’m preparing myself like a plate of food to be served up for Christian, only increases the anxiety I feel about this whole situation. Everything I do to get ready for this date boils down to the same thing: Will Christian like it? Will he like my perfume? My strappy shoes? My hair? The necklace I chose, a tiny silver bird’s wing that glints against the hollow of my throat? Will he like it? I ask myself each time, and then I have to ask myself if I want him to like it.
I pull my hair out of the ponytail and let it fall freely down my back. There’s a sharp knock at the door, and I run to open it. Christian’s standing in the hall wearing khakis and a blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows. He smells like Ivory soap and shaving cream.
He holds out a bouquet of white daisies. “For you.”
“Thank you,” I say, which comes out as a squeak. I clear my throat. “I’ll put these in some water.”
He follows me inside. I rummage around for something to use as a vase, but the best I can find is a Big Gulp cup. I fill it with water and set the flowers on my desk.
Christian glances at Angela sitting on Wan Chen’s bed, scribbling away in her black-and-white composition notebook. “Hello, Angela,” he says.
“Hi, Chris,” she says, but she doesn’t stop writing. “Clara said I could crash here while you were out tonight. I need to get away from my roommates. They’re treating me like an episode of 16 and Pregnant. So. You brought flowers. Very smooth.”
“Yeah, I try,” he says with a smirk. He looks at me. “You ready?”
“Yes.” I fight the urge to tuck my hair behind my ears. “Bye,” I say to Angela. “Wan Chen will be back from her astronomy thing around midnight. You might want to get off her bed before then.”
She waves her hand at me dismissively. “Go,” she says. “Get swept off your feet already.”
When we’re both situated in his truck, Christian puts the key in the ignition, but he doesn’t start it. Instead he turns to me.
“This is a date,” he says.
“Oh, good,” I say, “because I was wondering, what with the flowers and all.”
“And as a date, there are certain ground rules we need to go over.”
Oh boy. “Okay,” I laugh nervously.
“I will be paying for all of our activities this evening,” he begins.
“But—”
He holds up his hand. “I know that you are a modern, liberated, independent woman. I respect that, and I understand that you are capable of paying for your own meal, but I will still be paying for the movie, and then for dinner, and whatever else. Okay?”
“But—”
“And even though I’m paying, it doesn’t mean that I expect anything from you. I want to treat you tonight, and that’s all.”
It’s cute that he’s blushing.
“All right,” I fake-grumble. “You’ll pay. Anything else?”
“Yes. I’d like us to steer clear of all angel-related topics tonight, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to hear the word angel, or purpose, or vision, or any of our other special terminology. Tonight I want us to simply be Christian and Clara, two college students on a date. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good,” I say. More than good, even. It sounds perfect.
It was a great idea in theory, not talking about angel stuff, but what it really means is that an hour later, sitting in the dimly lit auditorium before the movie begins at this amazing little indie film theater in Capitola, we’re running out of things to talk about. We’ve already been through how the first week of winter classes went, and the gossip going around Stanford, and our favorite movies. Christian’s is Zombieland, which surprises me—I would have pegged him as a profound type, like The Shawshank Redemption.
“Shawshank’s good,” he says. “But you can’t beat the way Woody Harrelson kills zombies. He takes such joy in it.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, making a face. “I’ve always found zombies to be the least threatening of the scary monsters. I mean, come on. They’re slow. They’re brain-dead. They don’t plot evil or try to take over the world. They just—” I put my arms out in front of me and give him my best zombie groan. I shake my head. “So not scary.”
“But they just. Keep. Coming,” Christian says. “You can run, you can kill them, but more of them always pop up, and they never stop.” He shudders. “And they try to eat you, and if you get bitten, that’s it—you’re infected. You’re doomed to become a zombie yourself. End of story.”