Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) (17 page)

“And the night before you would have bad dreams your bag would be completely empty on February 14 because everybody hated you.” I continued. “Or maybe that was just me,” I added as Lizzie gave me a funny look.

“Anyway, you had to find just the right card to give to that special someone so he could figure out you secretly lusted after him. ‘I flip for you Valentine’, and there’s a picture of a dolphin!” Jane poured the remains of the vodka down her throat.

“I hate dolphins,” I cut in.

“We know.” Jane tossed the empty bottle into a nearby recycling bin. “But somehow he never got the hint.”

“And you grow up and go to college and find out love sucks,” I said, heaving out a heavy, smoke-filled breath. “And Valentine's Day is even worse. As soon as Christmas is over, the stores pull out the doilies and red hearts. And you think, oh no, I've only got one month and fourteen days to find a boyfriend so I won't be alone on Valentine's Day. But it never works.”

“It's all a big conspiracy,” Jane agreed. “V-day is so commercial now. It's not love unless you get a diamond bracelet. And chocolate, lots of chocolate. Get your girlfriend big and fat so you can leave her for someone skinnier. And don't forget to ask for the bracelet back.”

Lizzie, whose head had been bouncing back and forth during Jane’s and my exchange, suddenly asked, “Hey, when you look at somebody, do they move to the left, or what?”

“They’re moving to the left, and the right,” Jane countered.

And wouldn’t you know, who chose to come galloping by at that moment but the Horse. He passed right by us without acknowledgment.

“Look who it is: a horse of course, of course!” Jane shouted.

I wanted to leave immediately and flee back to the dorm, but Jane and Lizzie were satisfied to sit and watch Dallas try to get into the library—it was, of course, closed at 11:30 pm on a Saturday night.

“I guess he really does do homework on the weekends,” I said, stabbing my cigarette out on the underside of the picnic table.

“No, he thinks the library is for drive-thru fast food!” Jane exclaimed.

Dallas stood at the library door for a few minutes, although it was obviously locked and the lights were out.

“He thinks it’s a drive-thru!” Jane repeated again, loud enough for everyone on campus to hear. “Can I go tell him it’s not McDonalds?”

After finally realizing the library was closed, Dallas started back toward us, although he could have reached his dorm via the pathway behind the library. I suddenly decided I couldn’t let him walk past our way again and hopped off the bench. “I need to go now. I gotta go,” I declared. Lizzie and Jane, who were watching Dallas’s slow-gaited progress, made no move to get up. Lizzie lit another smoke.

Leaving was easier said than done given my current condition. Dallas was coming around the corner and would be walking past our picnic table again. Running away would have been too obvious, so I quickly scanned the vicinity for somewhere to hide. The only viable option was behind the message board a couple of feet from the path he was on. I ducked behind it and crouched down as I heard Lizzie say, in a voice much quieter than Jane’s, “We’re sorry, Dallas.”

“Are you ashamed of us? Are you ashamed of us cause we’re drunk, Dallas?” Jane inquired, loud again.

“No, he’s ashamed of Tammy T. Tymes” Lizzie replied, louder. “Go find Tammy, Dallas. She needs to talk to you. Go find her. You could make her so happy."

“Yeah, go find Tammy. She’s fucking PLASTERED!” I heard Jane exclaim as I crouched lower.

I heard Dallas yell, “I’m not going that way ‘cause Tammy’s over there.”

But he must have pointed in the wrong direction because he galloped right toward me.
Nothing got by that one.
As soon as he caught sight of me trying to blend in to the Post-it notes and bulletins as best I could, he changed directions and trotted away.

This newest rejection reached beyond my threshold, and I started crying hysterically. “You guys SUCK!” I screamed at my non-helpful friends.

To which Jane, ever the tactful one, replied “We didn’t suck anything; we haven’t sucked anything in a long time.”

I cried harder. “Don’t worry about Dallas, he’s just a horse’s ass,” Lizzie told me in consolation as we began walking back to our dorm.

Linda was sitting outside on the steps to Gandhi, reading. She put her book down and stood up when she spotted us approaching.

“Tammy…” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my heart speeding up. “Did my parents call?” I pictured one of them in the hospital. What if something had happened to Kellen, or even Corrie? Despite our animosity, I knew I’d be sad if something bad had happened to my sister.

“No.” Linda clasped her hands in front of her. “It’s Mark Hamill.”

“Who?” Lizzie asked, stumbling slightly and grabbing the stair rail to right herself.

I stalked past Linda and ran up the stairs. I typed the code in wrong the first two times. Jane appeared beside me and punched in the right numbers. The door clicked and Jane held it open for me. I threw open the unlocked door to our room and marched inside, confronting the poster on my closet door. Someone had drawn a large penis on Mark Hamill and a text balloon next to his mouth claimed he likes “to eat dick.”

Jane licked her finger and rubbed at the words, but they remained as offensive as ever. “I think it’s permanent marker.”

I buried my face in my hands as Linda appeared in the doorway.

“What happened?” Jane asked.

“I don’t know.” Linda replied. “I went to shower, and when I came back, I noticed… that had happened.” I don’t think my roommate could bring herself to say the word “penis.”

Jane guided me to my bed and handed me a Kleenex.

“Who do you think did this?” Jane asked.

I shrugged. “Dallas could have done it on his way back to Ibsen. Or else maybe LaVerne? Sonofabitch? It could have been anyone.” I said when I found my voice.

“Can you get a new one?” I knew Linda was trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t working.

“No. I’ve had that poster for years. I got it when I signed up for the Lucas Film Fan Club in the 6th grade.” I climbed up to my bed. “I doubt they sell it anymore.”
First Kellen, and then Dallas, and now Mark. You win, Psycho Guardian Angel. I’m destined to be alone forever.
“It’s no use,” I told my friends before rolling toward the wall.

I guess he was still mad at me—that would explain the Mark Hamill graffiti. I supposed I was to blame; after all, I did make a complete fool out of him. And all I wanted to do was to tell him I was sorry, but I couldn’t seem to get that right either. The first couple of times I called after the library incident, Sonofabitch answered and told me his roommate he was in the shower. I never knew Dallas to take
that
many showers. One time a girl’s voice told me Dallas had died. The worst time, though, was when I called and he answered the phone. “Can I talk to, um, Dallas?” I asked.

“Sure, hold on,” the Horse said.

“Dallas?”

“Hello?” an unfamiliar voice asked. He must have handed off the phone to someone else.

“Oh, that’s really cute.” I told the voice sarcastically. Then I heard nothing but dial tone. I threw the phone across the room and cursed.

“I can’t believe he didn’t want to hear you out,” Linda told me.

“I can’t believe he doesn’t even have the balls to talk to me, let alone apologize for what he did.”

“You have more balls than he does,” Linda replied.

“And he must have big balls” Lizzie added. “He’s a horse, so they must be hanging pretty low,” she continued.

I declared to everyone who asked that I was over Dallas, but the thought of him and Ian telling their friends about my now-excessively endowed poster of Mark Hamill or picturing them playing my tape at parties kept me up at night.

I was forced to go back to my medium of choice from the beginning of last semester: e-mail. I even sent a trite copy to Ian and the Dadian apologizing for the tape. The only reply I got was from that stupid Sonofabitch: “No problem, don’t worry about it.” There was no mention of Luke Skywalker.

Sometimes after I’d been drinking, I called their room, but hung-up as soon as someone answered. Linda caught me in the act one night. She’d stopped hanging out with us as much as she still didn’t drink. Jane, Lizzie, and I had been getting drunk that night in Caleb’s room. I had left for a few minutes, ostensibly to grab my Abercrombie sweatshirt, but I saw the phone sitting on Linda's bed and couldn’t resist another call.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I put the phone down on her desk. “I really wanted to make things right with Dallas, but he won’t let me.” Even I could hear that I was slurring my words.

“Let me call him.” She picked up the receiver.

“What are you going to say?”

Linda shrugged, but the phone was already ringing. “Dallas?”

I really had to pee, and debated leaving the room, but then decided I should stay and listen.

“Hey. It’s Linda. How are you?” Linda waited for a reply, and then asked, “So, how you’d like the tape?” Linda glanced over at me and then put the phone on speaker.

“Well, when I first put it in, I was shocked.” Dallas’s deep-voice rang out into our room. My heart clenched a little upon hearing it.

“But did you like it?”

“It was uh, an amazing experience.”

Linda shrugged at me. “Well, why don’t you come visit Tammy and tell her about it?”

“No.” Dallas was emphatic.

“Why not? Are you mad at her?”

“I’m watching football.”

“Well, what about when you’re done watching football?”

“Never.”

“Why, did she do something to you?”

“Yes.”

“What, the tape?”

“No. She makes prank phone calls and stalks me.”

And that was that. He hung up.

Jane entered the room while I was crying. “Did I just hear Dallas’s voice?”

“Yep. I called him,” Linda said.

“Why?” Jane asked, sitting down on Linda’s bed. Linda told her the whole conversation, and repeated it again when Lizzie walked in, still holding her plastic cup.

“You should call him again,” Lizzie told Linda.

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jane said.

“He’s mad because of the calls,” I told her. “And I only did it like three times. Per night. I wonder if I should care that he’s mad at me. No. Yes. No.”

“But you’re over him, so it doesn’t matter,” Jane stated matter-of-factly.

“Yes, but I hate it when people are mad at me. And he’s mad at me for a stupid reason. It was his ass that liked to play all those pranks.
He
decided the bike would look best on the roof, and was the main coordinator of putting it up there and founded the Vernie-nator four. He even called my room one time and yelled “Sroot the free!” and Linda was like, ‘What the hell?’”

Jane started to lecture me about guys treating me poorly and me putting up with it. I half-tuned her out as my only thought was how I was going to get Dallas to forgive me for this new misstep on my part.

“What? Guys are going to shit on me?” I interrupted, trying to focus back on the conversation.

“No, you dummy.
Cheat
on you, and you’re going to take them back. Oh, my little horse. Whose face is as big as your leg.”

“I’ll call and ask Dallas if he would shit on you.” Linda offered.

I said to Jane “No, that’s not true. Last night I had an epiphany and...”

“An epiphany? What the hell is an epiphany?” Jane demanded.

“I have no idea.”

“Then why did you use it? Is that even a word?”

“Well, I heard Lizzie say it, and Linda say it, so therefore it’s a word because they’re smart.” I countered. “They don’t get C’s on their report card.” I grabbed Lizzie’s plastic cup and took a long sip.

“Maybe Dallas knows what an epiphany is. Call and ask him,” Linda said.

“An epiphany is an awakening,” Lizzie announced to no one in particular as she grabbed her cup back.

Jane commanded, “Why don’t you just say you had an awakening?”

“I had an awakening...”

“And why all of a sudden is everyone having an awakening? Before nobody had an awakening. Now we are all having awakenings.”

“It came from Jeff,” Lizzie replied.

“Okay, but do we all have to have awakenings?”

“Yes, because they shit on us,” I retorted as I grabbed a pack of cigarettes from my desk drawer and headed outside.

“Tammy. You’re going to have to get over him,” Jane told me. She had come outside with me while I had a smoke.

“I can’t,” I said, blowing out.

“Why not?” Jane swung her hand absent-mindedly to send my smoke in the opposite direction.

“Because he was supposed to be my first boyfriend.”

“Dallas? He has the face of a high-bred mule.”

“Right. And he still didn’t want me.”

“I don’t think you
really
ever thought that he’d become your boyfriend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s face it. Ian and even that Duck-guy—they were always out of your league.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s not that you’re not pretty enough. But the Duck was the Big Man on Campus, and Ian, even though he was an idiot, he was still a basketball player. It’s just, guys like that go for girls with experience. Rich girls with corvettes and four-inch heels, like most of the other girls around here.”

I lit another cigarette. “Is this supposed to be cheering me up?”

“And then there’s Dallas.”

“The Horse-faced Club Volleyball player. And even he rejected me.”

Jane placed her elbow on the picnic table and tucked her hand under her head, tilting it at me. “Have you ever heard from that guy you made out with over Winter Break?”

“Trevor? No. He was in love with my sister.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You deliberately made out with some guy that’d never date you for real. I think that’s your M.O. So that way you don’t really have to get close to anyone.”

“It’s not me. It’s… like it’s my fate that I go after the wrong guys. The Blockheads. I think my guardian angel hates me or has a vendetta against me for some reason.”