Chapter 14
Jannie’s eyes narrowed. “You quit?” she asked, and I nodded.
“I did,” I confirmed. “I didn’t like that job, anyway.”
“I remember when you used to babysit for your neighbor,” she said. “You told me that the family left moldy food for your dinner and the kid tried to stab you with scissors.”
“Luckily, they were safety scissors.” But he hadn’t understood that when he’d tried to impale me with them.
“You still kept working for those shitheads, even after all that. But you quit at the motel.” She looked at me. “Good, I’m glad you did. Make some changes.”
I nodded, because the change really was good.
I was relieved not to be there anymore, dealing with the bug problems and bruised knees due to falling off the stool.
Anyway, Jannie needed me here more now, too.
She was experiencing a boom in business due to the presence of the Woodsmen players, who had kept coming in even when Everett wasn’t with them.
They seemed to have adopted her bar as a new place to hang out, and where Woodsmen went, their fans followed.
The increase in customers had meant that she’d had to order more inventory, so everything was fresher.
The bar itself was fresher because she’d invested some of her profits in a cleaning service, and they were doing a great job.
She had even bought herself a new hat, a very fetching fedora.
She looked great and I wasn’t the only person who had noticed.
The guy who came in to drink 7 and 7s had asked her out, and she said she would consider it.
“Are you going to the next game?” she asked me.
It was away, but it was midweek. “Want to come? It’s on me,” Everett had offered, but I had decided that I couldn’t quit even more jobs. I did still have to turn up here and at the school, so I’d had to say no and that was what I told her.
“Greet him when he comes home,” she suggested.
“I will. Did you think that I would ignore him?”
“You should be naked,” she explained. “Or maybe just wearing stickers over these.” She pointed to her nipples. “It sounds weird but it’s actually very sexy. Just don’t press them down too hard. Think ahead about removal.”
“What am I supposed to wear on the bottom?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Why would you need anything on the bottom?” She clarified it for me, because I was missing the obvious. “You’re going to have sex with him,” she said. She spoke slowly to make sure that I understood.
“I still haven’t done anything,” I told her, and now she was the one who didn’t understand. I spelled it out. “I haven’t even kissed him yet.”
Jannie’s eyes widened and then she stuck her finger in her ear and wiggled it, as if she hadn’t heard me correctly. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “I’ve kissed people before,” I reminded her, “and it didn’t work out well.
Afterwards, everything was weird between us.
We were still in the band together and it was very awkward.
The same thing happened with the guy who invited me to the prom as a joke.
After that, he always acted like he was mad at me.
I don’t want to mess things up with Everett that way.
I like him too much.” I paused. “I really like him. I really, really like him.”
“Yeah, I can tell that you do.”
And I was liking him more and more every day. It seemed as if that feeling increased as we were together, and in spite of his busy football schedule, he was spending a lot of time with me.
“What are you doing right now?” he had texted me earlier today, and it turned out that I was in the car and it was easy to meet him for a quick coffee at a place near the stadium.
Actually, it had been herbal tea for me and a fruit and greens smoothie with added protein for him, but it had been just like one of the coffee dates I’d heard about.
Since I hadn’t been working at the motel for the past few nights, we’d been at home together.
He had made dinner and then had thought we should watch a movie that he swore was great, something about gangsters.
I had appreciated the nice suits they wore even if I hadn’t been a huge fan of the plot, the dialogue, or the actors.
I had also appreciated getting to hang out together.
That reminded me of something else. “Things can go wrong with friendships, too—you just never know about any kind of relationship. I had a friend in high school and I lost him over not liking movies,” I told Jannie.
I didn’t mind them as much now, I supposed.
“He kept inviting me over to watch something or another and I said no, and then he stopped talking to me.”
“Because he was asking you out,” she said. “He was asking you out and you turned him down, so his feelings were hurt. Same thing with the kissing. It got awkward because you rejected them.”
“He was asking me out?”
“Yeah,” she said. She rolled her eyes heavenward. “And so was that guy you’re always talking about, the one who said the prom invite was just fake. He said that to cover up how embarrassed he was.”
“It was a social media trend to—”
“Zoey! Those people were interested in you,” she said.
“You just didn’t see it. Maybe Everett is, too, and you’re also missing that.
Open your eyes! And get another 7 and 7 for Len,” she said, pointing to the guy in the booth who was listening to this conversation.
We both looked over at him and he winked.
“I like the idea of stickers,” he told her, and she said to come back to her place because she had a drawer full of them.
I shook my head and got his drink, but she’d made me reconsider some things.
Had I really been oblivious to people’s interest?
Everett thought that my former cooperating teacher was a lech, like my other coworker had called him, and I had missed it.
I still hadn’t decided what to do about that, if anything.
Jannie decided to bring the drink over to Len herself but when my phone exploded with noise, she dropped it. “What the hell was that?” she yelled.
“Sorry! I had turned up the volume.” It got loud in the cafeteria, and I didn’t want to miss it if Everett texted. Or my sister, of course, or my mom. But mostly him.
Right now, my phone was actually ringing, and I went into the back room to answer this call from my former cooperating teacher—not the lech, but the nice woman who’d taught me so much when I’d worked with her in her first-grade class a year ago. “Hi, Sarah,” I said.
She was just as nice as I remembered from when I’d been in her classroom.
“Hi, Zoey! How are you doing?” We chatted for a minute, but she was also just as busy as I remembered.
She had kids of her own to care for, prep to do for her job, and a house to maintain.
There wasn’t much time left for chatting, so she got to the point pretty quickly.
“I heard from Everett Ford. He sent an email to my school address to apologize for the field trip last year,” she said.
“He did?”
“It was brief but nice. No, you may not have ice cream tonight…Zoey, hold on.” She came back to the call after a moment and had an important topic to discuss with me. It turned out that her life was about to get even busier.
Jannie was sitting in the booth with Len, the 7 and 7 guy (sitting on his lap, squeezed in there) and she wouldn’t have understood my excitement about what Sarah had said. So I called Everett next, because I thought he might.
First, I asked him about his email to her. “You said you were sorry?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I was thinking about people who needed to apologize and I figured…anyway, I wrote to her and to my former agent. And to Luke Whitaker, too. He’s one of the owners of the team and he was the guy who came into the storage closet and knocked you over.
I’m sorry about that, Zoey. I’m sorry about the puke and I’m sorry that I was an asshole. ”
“I know,” I said. “I knew it that night when you came to the bar and you were so sad but—listen, there’s something else.” I explained the other thing that Sarah had talked about.
“Really? She wants you to take over for her?” he asked me. “How does that work?”
“She’ll have her baby in January and then she’ll be out until next fall, like a year from now.
She said that she’s not even sure that she’ll want to come back but at the very least, she needs a long-term sub.
And she wants me to do it, because she thought I did a good job when I was with her. ” I heard the pride in my voice.
“Don’t they have regular people to hire?”
“Regular?” I repeated.
“When someone goes down on a football team, there’s a backup, and then they have the development league to call up more guys. Or they could try to sign someone from another team,” he explained.
“Sure, she could choose someone else. I better go,” I told him. “I have this job to do.”
“Zoey—”
I hung up and I turned down the volume on my phone. I didn’t need any more calls, and I had customers to serve. It was something I was sure I knew how to do well.
It was dark with the moon hidden behind clouds as I drove home after my shift, and it was dark in Everett’s house, too.
I let myself in through the garage and walked into the quiet kitchen, and I started to put down my keys and bag.
Then I jumped and threw them, because the light of a phone suddenly glowed at the island. He sat at one of the stools there.
“You scared me!” I gasped as I picked up my belongings from the floor. “What are you doing? It’s late.”
“I was waiting for you because you never answered me. You didn’t answer my texts or my calls. I left voicemails. I emailed you.”
“You can see my location,” I reminded him, because he’d wanted to start sharing that and I’d agreed. I could see his, too, and I’d wondered if I’d watch him go out to a club when he was away at the next game.
“Yeah, I watched you driving here. The roads are so empty.”
“Well, now I’m back,” I said, and I started to walk toward the stairs.