Chapter 6 #2
“Yes way,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know where she found a giant cake—I have no idea what you’d even look for in the Yellow Pages for that.
But she found it. And she dressed up for him—I can’t even describe it.
Like a Victoria’s Secret kind of thing. All red and lacy and—you can imagine.
” She nodded. “God forgive me for saying this, and if you ever meet her you cannot breathe a word, but she—she’s not built right for that, if you know what I mean.
” She pulled herself a little closer to him.
He wondered if she’d focused on the part about meeting Lisa.
Was she picturing some big meet-the-family moment? Did she think he was?
“I get it. I feel bad for her already.” She leaned over, kissed him, much too quickly. “And I’d love to meet her someday—but I promise I won’t say a word about how much you obviously care about her.”
Nora , a few seconds later
Everything about Daniel’s weird reaction to her outfit made sense now.
She shouldn’t have jumped to the wrong conclusion the way she had.
Yes, they were still getting to know each other, but nothing he’d done or said from the first moment they’d properly met justified her making a negative assumption.
He’d more than earned a hell of a lot of benefit of the doubt.
“So—everything I’m telling you I heard afterwards. I was friends—well, sort of friends, you know what I mean—with Jack’s little brother.”
“Jack was the boyfriend?”
Real anger flashed in Daniel’s eyes; this was the first time she’d seen that.
“Ex-boyfriend, thank God. Anyway, his brother told me all about it the next day, and he showed me a Polaroid of Lisa coming out of the cake. Her outfit, well, I already said. But she’d been sitting inside the cake for an hour, and I guess it got really warm inside, so her makeup was totally ruined, I mean, in the picture it looked like bad clown makeup.
And her outfit, it kind of—she was crouched down inside the cake, and it—it moved around on her. Please don’t ask me to describe it.”
Nora didn’t need to. She had a vivid mental picture and it needed no further details. “That’s horrible. The poor girl.”
“Yeah. So she jumped out, in front of Jack and all his friends and his little brother and God knows who else, and they all laughed at her.” He looked like he was in physical pain just talking about it two years after the fact, and it hadn’t even happened to him.
All she could think to do was hug him. It took a couple of minutes for him to gather the strength to finish the story.
“She came home, and Dad asked her—I don’t even know what he said. She shook her head, and she said—I won’t ever forget this—‘Eff off, Dad. You and every other crappy man in the whole world!’ Except she didn’t say eff.”
Nora couldn’t blame her. She would have said something similar in Lisa’s place. She also couldn’t help smiling at how adorable it was that even two years later and a hundred miles away, Daniel couldn’t bring himself to repeat a curse to his father. “Wow.”
“He could see how upset he was, he didn’t even get angry at her.
And I found out what happened from Jack’s brother the next morning.
I didn’t tell my parents anything except that she had a really bad night with her boyfriend and they needed to give her as much space as she needed.
” He took a deep breath. “I did, too. She didn’t come out of her room except to go to the bathroom for three days.
So I brought up her meals on a tray and left it outside her bedroom door.
And I put my Discman on the tray, because she’d broken hers, so she could listen to Bon Jovi over and over until she was ready to come out. ”
He would have been just seventeen. And he did all that for a sister he didn’t even really get along with.
“My outfit made you think of all that?”
Now, finally, he laughed. “I think it was the way your makeup ran. It brought that whole thing back. I mean, you look nothing like her.” He got up, went over to his desk, grabbed his wallet. “Here,” he said, opening it up to reveal a family photo. “See?”
He was right; she looked nothing at all like his sister.
He’d also been right that his sister, cute as she was, was not quite built to wear anything from Victoria’s Secret.
“I take back what I said before about not telling her how much you care about her. She already knows, Daniel. She’s very lucky to have you. And, you know what else?”
He met her eyes, and his smile told her that he did know what else. Which meant she didn’t need to say it, she could just kiss him instead. Kiss him properly. So she did.
Daniel , three a.m.
It was almost three o’clock in the morning. All they’d done, all night, was talk.
Well, they’d made out for a few minutes here and there.
And they’d danced through all of Slippery When Wet .
Right there in the middle of his room, with the CD playing on his little boombox.
Truthfully, it was mainly Nora who danced, while he mostly shuffled his feet around and waved his arms in a sad attempt at rhythm.
At least they’d been able to slow-dance to I’d Die For You . That had been pretty wonderful.
But she was yawning now, and that got him yawning. They were back on his bed, just sitting, just together. Nora really was the girl he’d told Bianca he was hoping for, someone he could just talk to all day long—or all night—and never want to be anyplace else.
“You know something?” She took his hands in hers. “This is the first time I’ve been up to your room and we haven’t…”
He hadn’t even thought about that tonight. They’d been too busy telling embarrassing stories, looking out the window and making fun of their classmates’ Halloween costumes, dancing badly to Bon Jovi and just learning more about each other.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I—of course I want to, but tonight was pretty great just as it was.”
She was still holding his hands. “I feel the same way. I’m really glad I came over tonight. It was special. You’re special, Daniel.”
“So are you, Nora.” She was so much more than special. He wished he knew a word that would describe it, but maybe there wasn’t a word big enough for her. All he could do was kiss her, and then walk her home.
Who would have thought that tonight would have started out with his girlfriend showing up in the most ridiculous outfit imaginable, progress to him telling a horrible story about his sister, and end without either one of them taking a single item of clothing off and somehow it would be the best night of his life?