For about a month after the complex party—and after he started Club Volleyball—I didn't see much of Dallas. I didn't hear from him either, until he called our room to ask how to spell the word "redundant." After I spelled it for him, I managed to work up the nerve to ask him if he wanted to come over and watch some John Cusack movies that weekend.
"Oh, are you guys having a movie marathon?" The term 'you guys,' hung in the air like a lead fishing weight.
"Yep. Me and Linda and Lizzie and maybe Jane," I said, emphasizing the latter name a little more than necessary.
"Probably. Although I'm not sure what I'm doing this weekend."
I ended up waiting up for him at the picnic tables alone, Sonofabitch-style, long after my friends had gone to bed. I was convinced that as long as he continued hanging out with my friends and me, he'd catch on to how fabulous I was and fall madly in love with me. I thought all I had to do was play the game exactly right, and then just wait until he realized how much he liked me. Me, not Jane. Or Linda. Or Lizzie.
But it wasn't working. I was miserable, thinking about him all the time, wondering why he didn't realize how perfect we would be as a couple. It was time to get over him. For good.
"I'm over him," I told Linda and Jane as I scrubbed off my red toenail polish the next day.
I could feel Jane gesturing something over my head. "Heard that one before," she said.
I was examining the length of my toe hair when the phone rang. I looked over at Linda and then down at my toes again.
"Aren't you going to get that?" Jane asked.
"We'll let the machine get it," Linda said, crossing her arms.
I nodded. The answering machine clicked on and Dallas's voice filled the room. "I've got hooters in my room now, guys! Hooters!"
The three of us looked at each other. "Oh yeah, apparently he got a stuffed owl," Linda said. "He was talking about it in Heritage the other day."
"Does anybody want go over to Ibsen and see it?" I asked.
"No," Jane and my roommate replied simultaneously.
I grabbed my razor and headed to the bathroom.
"Listen, Tammy," Jane said when I returned. "We've been talking..." Jane glanced over at Linda. "And we've agreed that you need to either get over Dallas for real, or just Sroot the Free and ask him out. It's time to take a shit or get off the toilet. You're driving the rest of us crazy. Lizzie too."
Linda nodded vigorously.
"How am I supposed to actually ask him out? The only modes of transportation between the two of us are rollerblades and a bike with half-deflated tires."
"Well, I wouldn't e-mail him," Linda said unhelpfully.
~*~
I decided not to go home for Thanksgiving. We only got a few days off, and I'd much rather hang with my roommate than my sister and Kellen. Linda's parents stayed in Minnesota, but her brother offered to have a small meal in his apartment in Orlando. He also was getting us free tickets the day after to go to the theme parks.
I harbored a secret hope that Linda's brother Donny would be handsome and we'd fall in love that weekend, but Donny was a male version of Linda, down to the coke bottle glasses and Goofy T-shirt. I also quickly discovered Linda's Fargoaccent became much more pronounced around fellow Minnesotans.
The meal itself was uneventful. Donny had picked up a rotisserie chicken from the local grocery store and we had canned green beans and watched It's a Wonderful Life when dinner was over. The next morning the three of us got up early to head to Epcot.
"Are you having fun?" Linda asked in her ever-cheerful voice, turning toward me as we waited in line in front of a giant geodesic dome. The bright sun revealed several light-colored hairs on Linda's upper lip.
"Uh-huh," I told her, frowning as we passed a woman dressed as The Little Mermaid. I tried to stop myself from having negative thoughts, but I felt bitter all of a sudden. I was usually cheery whenever I managed to get off campus, as if there was still a real world that existed outside of Eckhart, but I was feeling like an unwelcomed member of it. I had survived nearly an entire semester of my freshmen year of college and what did I have to show for it? Nothing. No stellar grades, no boyfriend, not even a first kiss. At least I hadn't dropped out of my major like most of the people I knew.
"Have you thought anymore about asking Dallas out?" Linda asked as we moved forward in line.
I shrugged. "I don't think I want to go there. I just wish he'd figure out that I'm a great girl and we'd make the cutest couple ever. I want him to ask me out. It'd be so much easier."
Linda picked at a mosquito bite on her arm. "What do you see in him, anyway? You should hear some of the comments he makes in Heritage. They're really out there. Like, to solve overpopulation we should just move everyone in central Africa to Siberia or have rich people adopt all the poor kids. He's pretty clueless."
"I think he's funny."
"I think you are too good for him," Linda said with a defiant tone in her voice.
I turned toward her. "But if that's true, then why doesn't he like me?"
"I don't think he likes anybody in that way."
"I think he likes Jane."
Linda obligingly turned a corner in the line and then turned back toward me. "Jane'd never go for him. I think she knows he's a loser, but she puts up with him for your sake."
I didn't have anything to say to that. I knew Jane, unlike my twin sister, would never date anyone I had liked. Not that Jane harbored any feelings toward Dallas.
"You should just ask him out. It's better to know now, before you get even more obsessed over him... if that's even possible."
It was hard to believe that Linda, with her twangy accent and Mickey Mouse T-shirt, was giving me dating advice. Dictating that I had to stop mooning over Dallas and just ask him out. What I should have told her, should have told all of my friends, was that not only was I scared to ask out yet another guy, but I was almost certain of Dallas's rejection since he'd never given me the slightest hint he liked me back. But as Linda stated, perhaps it was time to do or die. I'd make a move, and if it didn't work, well then I'd forget about him. No problem.
Yeah, right.
The day we got back from Thanksgiving Break, I called Dallas to come over. I was going to use the coupons I'd won at Delta Flashback as an excuse to ask him to go out with me. Lizzie even offered to let me borrow her car. I wanted to get the whole asking Dallas out part done with ASAP to stop my pounding heart. Jane offered to have Linda hang out in her room for the night, but I told them I'd rather have them stay.
Dallas actually showed up when he said he would for once. But he was in one of his goofy-story moods and started talking about jobs he had in high school.
"I worked at an ice cream palace in Illinois," Lizzie said. She had entered the room mid-conversation.
"Ice cream?" Dallas repeated.
"Yep, and I'll be working there for Winter Break. My cousin Cameron works there too."
"In Illinois?" Dallas's ears perked. "I'll be visiting Ian over break. You're going to hook me up with free food, right?"
"Sure, all the food you want," Lizzie told him, as if she and Ian didn't actually live in towns located five hours away from each other. "And ice cream, too."
"Oooh, sweet, do you have Mackinaw Island Fudge?"
Lizzie nodded. Throughout this conversation, Jane's eyebrows had been arching higher and higher until they were practically sitting on top of her scalp. She decided it was time to change the subject. "Speaking of food, Tammy, don't you have coupons for free pizza?"
"Yeah," I mumbled in reply as I could feel my face turning red. "They're for a restaurant in downtown Tampa," I continued, wanting to fill the silence as their faces all swiveled toward me; the girls' were looking expectant while Dallas's face held his regular blank expression. "I won them at Delta Flashback. Instead of the Grand Prize, which was a trip to the Bahamas." Now I was just babbling. I took a deep breath. "Maybe-you'd-like-to-go-with-me-sometime-Dallas," I said in a rush.
The time before his reply seemed to stretch forever until he said, "Maybe... although I'm not sure I'll have time. You know, with Volleyball and stuff."
There was another pause. Lizzie, Linda, and Jane's faces seemed to fall simultaneously. Their outward expressions seemed to mimic what I was feeling inside: as if the upper part of my chest was collapsing into my stomach. "But Dallas," Lizzie finally asked. "Don't you want free pizza?"
"The free pizza is a guarantee," he replied, which I took to mean that he'd come out with me.
Lizzie and Jane both sighed audibly. My lungs seemed to right themselves and I could breathe fully again. But what if he meant he wanted free pizza from Lizzie's restaurant hook-up? What if he got confused with the question and reverted back to the previous conversation?
I'm not sure what happened in the five minutes after that until Dallas left our dorm. I think Linda was telling them about her job working in her dad's store in Minnesota. Dallas claimed he had to go to Volleyball and said his good-byes. I mumbled back at him. As soon as the door shut behind him, I stated my fear to my friends.
"Tammy, he said it was a guarantee," Lizzie replied.
"He said the free pizza was a guarantee. What if he meant when he visits Ian, and he wants Mackinaw Island fudge and pizza from your restaurant?"
Jane and Linda didn't reply, but Lizzie was nodding thoughtfully.
"We have to go over every pointless tidbit of that conversation to figure this out," I told them.
"Tidbits of conversation are often pointless when Dallas is concerned," Jane said with a sigh. "This could take forever."
Indeed, we spent the next hour debating over the contents of that dialogue. The results were inconclusive.
"Call him now. I think he's done with Volleyball," Jane said as she picked up the phone and dialed Dallas's number.
"No!" I yelled, lunging for the phone. Jane dropped it on the bed. It was ringing. "Shit!" I called out as someone answered. Finally I got a hold of it and pressed the END button. "Great, Jane. That was either Sonofabitch or him, and they'll know it was me by the sound of my voice."
"So call him now and ask him out. Tell him the phone hung up accidentally."
"No."
"Fine. Then stay up all night wondering if he really agreed to go out with you. But don't bring it up again to me until you ask him out for real. Slowly, in plain English and enunciating every word so he doesn't get confused again."
"No."
"Hey, I've got an idea," Lizzie said as Jane and I stared heatedly at each other.
It was decided Lizzie and I would construct a double date, going out for pizza and then on to the free "semi-formal" on campus—nobody would have even had to pay a cent. She had this guy coming around, Jeff, who was drop-dead gorgeous, but also a dumb jerk—which often seems to be the case with drop-dead gorgeous guys. Incidentally, I hated Jeff, but it was agreed that since he had a four-seated car, he would be the ideal double on Dallas and my "date." At any rate, Dallas and Jeff could talk about dumb stuff together.
This would be my second attempt at asking a guy out—the intermediate "free pizza as a guarantee" offer didn't count, and, since the first time resulted in me being stood up, maybe that didn't count either.
I waited until the next day to reinstate the offer to Dallas. I called during the late afternoon, before Volleyball. Jane was still taking a nap, but Linda was in the room. Dallas seemed game at first, especially when I played up the free pizza angle. I guess he thought it would be a group of us. "Are Linda and Jane going too?"
"No," I said, playing with the quilt on Linda's bed. "It's just going to be Lizzie, her new guy Jeff, and you and me." Linda looked up at me from her desk, eyebrows raised.
"Oh." There was a long period of silence. I crumpled my face at my roommate, knowing what was coming.
"Well, I think I won't be able to go. I have too much homework this weekend."
Homework? Dallas? On a Friday night at the end of the semester?
"Okay I get it. Whatever, Dallas. Have a great Winter Break." I hit then END button and threw the phone on the bed. Linda got up from her desk to put the phone back on the charger.
"Well, I guess that settles it," I told her. "What could have been Tammy and Dallas is now over. He really doesn't see me in that way." I blinked back tears.
"Are you all right?" Linda asked, coming over to hug me.
I shook my head as the tears really started coming. "No."
"Oh, Tammy." She dropped her arms to pat my leg. "I've said it before and I'll say it again. You're too good for that stupid horse."
"But why? Why, if he's so immature and trivial, if he's so skinny with such a long face, why wouldn't he want me? And why did he tell me he had homework? Why didn't he just say he was hanging out with the Brazilians or going to a Kennedy party?"
Linda sensed that nothing she could say would cheer me up. "I don't know, Tammy. I really don't."