“Nice? Those poor guys! Probably scared out of their heads!” That was Ellie.
“Not about the sex ed class – about liking girls telling them how to do it.”
“But it probably got the message through their heads about assaulting girls, though, huh?” Noelle said. But then she looked at Dylan, and her expression seemed to soften. “So what would you do if a girl asked you to?”
He felt his insides turn to molten led, his manhood thickening up quite suddenly in his pants. Somehow, everything seemed to have gone quiet, yet his ears were ringing. Nothing quite seemed real.
He heard himself say: “Anything she wanted me to do, if it was the right girl.”
Noelle’s friends seemed to have gone deathly quiet.
*
He felt a little stupid when Noelle finally unrolled her sleeping bag, and it was quite clear that he was the only person in this part of the line who was going to be without any form of bedding to help him through the night.
She was the last of them – by the time she’d got her sleeping bag in place, her friends were already bedded down, Ellie and Sasha already asleep.
“You’re going to be cold,” she said, looking over at his modest little place between her sleeping bag and the nearest emo.
There was a distinct chill in the air – his mother had been entirely correct about the heat suddenly evaporating after the sun went down. He was shivering a little already, though trying not to show Noelle.
“I’ll be okay – the sun’ll come up in a few hours.”
“You’re insane.”
Then suddenly she seemed to make a decision, silently to herself, looking at him and standing up, saying: “I have some emergency blankets in my car.”
“Huh?”
“I have them in case I ever break down, you know? If I have to wait for roadside assistance in the cold. Come on, let’s go get them.”
“Oh, really, you don’t have to – ” He protested, but she flashed her eyes at him.
“I thought you were okay about the whole girl telling you what she wants,” she said, tapping her feet. Dylan heard a stifled giggle from one of her friends.
“Sure, of course I am.”
“So come on, then.”
Another soft giggle from somewhere over toward Chrissy’s sleeping bag.
She held out her hand for him, and for the first time he touched her.
He tried not to show it affected him, though it was hard not to. It wasn’t just that her hand was so delicate and soft – somehow the touch made her real to him. The evening had taken on a magical quality ever since he’d intruded on the girls’ conversation, and Noelle hadn’t turned her back on him.
As an ordinary run-of-the-mill guy without any kind of lofty position in the school social hierarchy, he had been frankly astonished that these girls would give him the time of day, let alone share a meal and spend all night allowing him in their circle.
Now, the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on was helping him up, ushering him away from her friends, out toward a dark parking lot to fetch a blanket so he could sleep beside her.
He felt so nervous walking away from the Apple Store with her – it wasn’t that he might lose his place in the line, he was fairly confident that was safe, it was that now they were rounding the corner and heading away from the actual mall, into the parking lot, he didn’t quite know what to say.