Chapter 5 Girl and Boy
GIRL AND BOY
During the first week of March, when Hannah drops by the student council office after school, she finds Baker holding a single red rose in her hand.
“What’s that?” Hannah asks, the scene not making sense to her.
“Clay asked me to prom.” Baker sounds like she isn’t sure what to make of it.
“Prom?” Hannah repeats. “And he gave you a flower?”
“A rose. Look, smell it.”
Hannah holds the rose to her face, but she can’t smell anything. “Awesome,” she says, the word scraping up from some hollow place inside of her.
The door opens and Michele hurries into the office, heading straight for the vice president’s desk without looking at either of them.
Hannah had planned on hanging out with Baker for a few minutes, but between Michele’s arrival and Baker’s disorienting news, she suddenly wants nothing more than to get out of this office.
“I’ll see you later,” she tells Baker, trying to keep her voice casual.
“I’ll call you about AP Lit,” Baker replies, her eyes meeting Hannah’s only briefly.
Hannah’s hand is on the door when a grating voice stops her.
“Who gave you that?”
She turns around to find Michele staring at Baker’s rose, her face pulled tight like she’s confronting something unnerving.
Baker gives her a wary glance before she drops into her desk chair. “Clay. Why?”
The silence that follows is fraught with tension.
“Did he ask you to prom?” Michele asks finally.
Baker snaps her binder shut and glares at Michele.
“I don’t see why you care. He broke up with you almost six months ago and then you ratted him out to Father Simon, remember?
But yeah, if you really want to know, he asked me to go to prom with him.
” She clenches her jaw and says the next part defiantly. “And I want to. So I’m going.”
Michele looks as if Baker just ran her over with her car. She wrenches her book sack off the desk and storms out of the room, pushing Hannah with her shoulder in her haste to get out the door.
Baker blinks very fast, her eyelashes fluttering like a bird’s wings. She throws the rose carelessly onto her desk and opens her binder as if it personally offended her.
“That wasn’t like you,” Hannah says quietly.
Baker doesn’t look up. “A lot of things haven’t been like me lately.”
On Thursday morning, when Hannah pulls into her parking spot, Clay is standing there next to Baker’s 4Runner with a winning smile on his face.
Baker stands across from him, blinking in the early sunshine, looking impossibly pretty in a high ponytail and twinkling gemstone earrings.
She holds a skinny white box in her arms.
“What’s he doing here?” Joanie frowns. “He never gets here earlier than us.”
“Morning,” Clay says brightly when they step out of the car.
Hannah glances from him to Baker, bristling at the palpable charge between them. “Hi. You’re early today.”
Clay shrugs like it’s no big deal. “Felt like it.”
“Clay brought us donuts,” Baker says in an overly shiny voice, opening the box to show them a dozen freshly glazed chocolate donuts.
“Baker’s favorite,” Clay says as if Hannah didn’t know.
“Wow.” Hannah nods. “That was nice of you. What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion, just wanted to.”
“Wow,” she says again.
“Do you want one, Han?” Baker offers. “Joanie?”
“I’m good,” Hannah says while Joanie shakes her head.
They hang around the cars and wait for Wally and Luke to arrive.
When the first bell rings and they move to head inside, Joanie catches up to Hannah and elbows her like they’ve just witnessed something deliciously entertaining.
“The hell was that about?” she snickers.
“Are donuts supposed to be romantic or something?”
“Ha,” Hannah laughs, her stomach hollowing out, “Yeah. I don’t know.”
Though Baker offers her a donut three more times that day, Hannah can’t bring herself to eat one.
The six of them spend Friday night at Clay’s house, finalizing plans for their spring break trip to Destin. They drink Coke and eat Doritos while Joanie flips through the TV channels to find a good movie.
“I’m still trying to convince them not to come,” Clay says.
“Not gonna happen,” Wally says. “Besides, if your parents don’t end up going, I doubt any of ours will let us go.”
“Ours definitely won’t,” Joanie says.
“My mom’s already skeptical enough,” Baker says, wiggling her cold feet under Hannah’s thighs. “One of her church friends convinced her that high schoolers secretly refer to spring break as Condom-palooza.”
Clay bursts into laughter where he lies stretched out on the carpet. “Condom-palooza,” he repeats like it’s the most brilliant thing he’s ever heard. “That’s incredible.”
Hannah tosses a broken Dorito at his face. “I don’t see why you don’t want them there. We like your parents.”
“It’s not that, it’s just that I think we’ll have more fun if they’re not there.”
“Yeah, how else are we supposed to enjoy Condom-palooza?” Luke pipes up, and Joanie kicks him in the ribs.
“We don’t always have to be drinking,” Hannah tells Clay. “I think we’re all perfectly okay with a chill week at the beach.”
“I didn’t say we always had to be drinking, I just wanna be able to have a beer here and there.”
“Your parents’ house is our best bet.”
Clay huffs in frustration. He rolls his head to look at Baker. “What do you think?”
She shrugs. “I think it’ll be nice to have them there. Your parents are great people and they’re being extremely generous by taking us. We should count our blessings and roll with it.”
Clay is quiet for a minute. “All right,” he says finally, “you’re right.”
When they go to leave that night, Clay hugs Baker for much longer than he normally would.
Hannah lingers by the front door, pretending to appreciate the Landrys’ fleur-de-lis wallpaper while Joanie tries to catch her eye.
When Baker finally breaks free and joins them in the car, Joanie spins around in the passenger seat and waggles her eyebrows suggestively.
“That was a beautiful hug,” Joanie says. “Did he give you more donuts, too?”
“Shush,” Baker says, rolling her eyes dramatically. Hannah watches, in the rearview mirror, as she drops her head against the window and frowns.
On Sunday, Wally asks Hannah to meet him for coffee so they can work on their AP Government essays.
They sit at the spindly black tables outside Garden District Coffee and argue about the structure of Wally’s essay, until Wally finally leans forward in his chair and watches Hannah reorganize his paragraphs.
“That works better,” Hannah says, pushing the essay toward him.
Wally tilts his head to read, sunlight reflecting off his glasses. “I think you’re right.”
“I know I am.”
“Hannah,” he says, and suddenly he looks breathless. “Will you go to the prom with me?”
Her stomach hops. Wally looks earnestly at her, the question showing in his careful, hopeful eyes. She hangs suspended for a moment before deciding there is really only one way forward.
“Yes,” she answers, and then she has the comforting sense that she is in a story, that she is correctly playing her part, that she has brought her personal touch to the role of Girl.
She looks at Wally, how he fits the role of Boy in his own way, with his fern-green eyes and his sharp square jaw and just a hint of his woodsy deodorant, and she feels good.
“Yes,” she says again, smiling. “I’d love to go with you.”
Wally smiles. He continues to look at her with that singular way he has, like he might just tell her that she made the sun rise that morning.
“Here,” she says, breaking eye contact, “let me look at your conclusion one more time.”
They stay there for another hour, comparing essays and suggesting ideas, Hannah correcting Wally’s grammatical errors and Wally pointing out flaws in Hannah’s arguments. Just as Hannah starts to pack up her things, her phone chimes with a text message.
Want to get Froyo? Baker writes.
Can’t, Hannah texts back, still at gd coffee with wall. He just asked me to prom.
She goes back to packing up her notes while Wally dashes inside to get her a latte to go. It’s not until they’re walking to the back parking lot that Baker replies.
That’s great.
Yeah, Hannah types, now we can all go in the same group.
“Bye, Han,” Wally says when they reach their cars. “Thanks for your help.”
“No problem.”
He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, thumbing his book sack straps, before stepping forward to pull her into a hug.
“Bye,” he says.
“Bye,” Hannah says.
She reads Baker’s reply after she turns her car on and lets her body release.
Definitely, Baker writes. It’s perfect.
The following week at school, the whole student body buzzes with excitement for Baton Rouge’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Hannah and Joanie arrange for their friends to come over after the parade, since they are the only ones who live in the Garden District, close to the route.
“Maybe we can sneak in some drinking afterward,” Joanie says, her eyes bright. “Mom and Dad have that party to go to.”
“Maybe,” Hannah agrees, trying to match her enthusiasm.
On Saturday, the seventeenth, a large portion of the Garden District and a long stretch of Perkins Road are shut down for the parade.
Hannah, Joanie, and their friends walk to the intersection of Terrace and Perkins, where hundreds of people mill about, all of them dressed in lime green or hunter green or kelly green, eagerly waiting for the parade floats to roll by.