He did his best not to lie, but saw no reason to correct their views of him, either.
He found out more about Noelle and her friends – they seemed so normal to him, even though they were all like minor deities to him. They didn’t seem to talk much about the whole reason they were all there – the upcoming iPad launch – and he began to suspect that only Chrissy was anything close to being an Apple geek.
They seemed quite impressed that he was queuing through the night on behalf of his sister – that got him some brownie points, and a lovely smile from the enchanting Noelle.
Conversation was easier when there were more people to share in it, and Dylan found that although he was grilled quite a bit as the newcomer to the group, he was able to leave the talking to the others when the subject came round to areas in which he was not an expert.
Compared to everyone else in the line, their group seemed to stay up much later – into the small hours. Until midnight came and went, the girls’ conversation appeared to steer clear of the kind of dirty subjects they had been talking about before Dylan came along. But as they passed into the day on which the mighty iPad would be launched, things began to loosen up a little again.
All through the evening since he’d joined them, Dylan had been given the strange sense that the other girls were trying to get him interested in Noelle. He thought at first that it was just his ego going nuts because a pretty girl had actually shown him a tiny bit of attention that night.
But as things drew on, it was hard to mistake it.
There were the unabashed attempts to impress him with something about her.
Ellie saying at one point, “You know, Noelle’s, like, one of the best swimmers in the Marchmont team?”
Chrissy telling him: “Noelle’s going to get into law school, you know that, Dylan? She’s so brainy. She’s Ivy League brainy.”
Or the fact that she’d once been on Good Morning America as a seven-year-old, or the fact that she used to be the best gymnast in middle school before she took up swimming because it was less traumatic on the joints.
There was the way that every now and then when some small detail about Dylan emerged – his passion for travel, for example, or his love of movies – they tried to point out how his interests fit so well with Noelle’s.
“Noelle drags us to the movies, like, all the time.”
“Hey, haven’t you been to Italy, Noelle?”
Noelle seemed to be good at fending off the more obvious attempts, and Dylan just found himself ignoring it in order to protect himself from blushing. What was going on?
After midnight, and a lot the queue-goers around them seemed to be fast asleep, all bedded down and blanketed up, and the girls’ voices might have gotten a little quieter out of respect for the sleepers around them, but their conversation topic took a distinct turn for the filthy again.
*
Somebody had said there was a rumor that St Josephs people had regular rainbow parties, or at least that’s what Chrissy had asked Dylan about once things started getting more relaxed and there were less concerns about the queuers around them overhearing.