I grabbed Keun and hugged him with one arm and with the other mussed up the hair sticking through his
visor. “I need some cheesy waffles in the worst way,” I told him. The Duke asked for hash browns and
then collapsed into a booth next to the jukebox. JP and I sidled up to the breakfast counter and talked to
Keun while he cooked.
“I can’t help but notice that the cheerleaders are not, you know, hanging all over you.”
“Yeah,” he said, his back to us as he worked the waffle irons. “Yeah. I’m
hoping Twister will change
that. They did try to flirt with Mr. I-Have-a-Ponytail-but-I’m-Still-Macho,” Keun said, gesturing with his
head toward a guy passed out at a booth, “but apparently he is obsessed with his girlfriend.”
“Yeah, the Twister seems to be working really well,” I said. The wet mat lay crumpled on the floor,
utterly ignored by the cheerleaders.
JP leaned over me to look at the cheerleaders and then shook his head. “It
only occurs to me now that I
can awkwardly glance at cheerleaders while eating pretty much every day during lunch.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I mean, they obviously don’t want to talk.”
“Indeed,” I said. They were crowded around three booths in a kind of oblong huddle. They were
talking very fast, and very intently, with one another. I could hear some of the words, but they made no
sense to me—herkies and kewpies and extensions. They were talking about a cheerleading competition.
There are discussion topics I find less interesting than cheerleading competitions. But not many.
“Hey,
the sleepy guy awakes,” JP said.
I looked over at the booth and saw a guy with dark eyes and a ponytail squinting at me. I recognized
him after a second. “That guy goes to Gracetown,” I said.
“Yeah,” Keun answered. “Jeb.”
“Right,” I said. Jeb was a junior. Didn’t know him well, but I’d seen him around. He apparently
recognized me, too, because he rose from the booth and walked up to me.
“Tobin?” he said.
I nodded and shook his hand.
“Do you know Addie?” he asked.
I looked at him blankly.
“A junior? Beautiful?” he said.
I scrunched up my eyes. “Um, no?”
“Long blonde hair, kind of dramatic?” he said, sounding both desperate and also like he couldn’t get his
head around the fact that I wouldn’t know this girl he was rambling on about.
“Um, sorry, dude. Not ringing any bells.”
His eyes closed. I saw his whole body deflate.
“We started
dating on Christmas Eve,” he said, staring into the middle distance.
“Yesterday?” I said, thinking,
You’ve been dating for a day and you’re this worked up? One more
reason to avoid the happy middle.
“Not yesterday,” Jeb says wearily. “A year from yesterday.”
I turned to Keun. “Dude,” I said. “This guy is in bad shape.”
Keun nodded while scattering the Duke’s hash browns on the grill. “I’m gonna
give him a ride into
town in the morning,” Keun said. “Although what’s the rule, Jeb?”
Jeb said it like Keun had told him the rule a thousand times before. “We don’t leave until the last
cheerleader leaves.”
“That’s right, buddy. Maybe you should go back to bed.”
“Just,” Jeb said, “just if you happen to see her or something, will you just tell her I got, um, delayed?”
“I guess,” I said. I must not have been convincing enough, because he turned
around and made eye
contact with the Duke.
“Tell her I’m coming,” he said, and what’s weird was that she got it. Or seemed to. Or anyway, she
nodded in a way that said,
Yeah, I’ll tell her, if for some reason I see this girl I don’t know out in a
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