Do-Overs (15 page)

-35-

He Didn’t Call

“Lottie, Lottie wake up!”

I was in the most fabulous dream. A dream where I was dressed in a flowing gauzy white gown and Al was wearing a white piratey shirt, half open. Like those pictures on paperback romance novels. And he was carrying me across the threshold of some amazing. . . And then someone was pounding at my door, which echoed in my concussed head. It was Saturday morning. Serious sleeping time. Somebody was going to die.

Kasha came bouncing into my room, followed by Kyra and Kaylee. “Look, look!” they all kept saying together like a bunch of yippee dogs when they meet you at the door. Kaylee was holding a take-out bag from the Coffee Corner, Kyra held a cup of coffee, and Kasha held some daisies.

“I was working the desk and he came in,” said a very excited Kasha.

“He brought you breakfast,” said Kyra.

“And flowers,” said Kaylee.

By this point Stina was up and out of bed also. “How romantic,” she chimed in.

I was about to say, I thought so too, but before things went too far I had to check one basic fact. “He who?”

“Al Dansby!” they shouted like a chorus of demented cheerleaders.

All I could do was smile.

Sometimes life is good. And then it gets better.

But very, very seldom did it get as good as it was that morning.

I opened the bag. There was a blueberry bagel and a banana muffin and a doughnut and a raLSPSerry torte. Also, most importantly, a note.

Lottie,

I hope you are feeling better this morning. I still feel dreadful for leaving my book bag in your path. I thought you might like breakfast in bed, but seeing as how your dorm isn’t co-ed I’ll drop it off at the desk.

I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I sent a variety. For some bizarre reason I thought you liked skinny cinnamon dolce latte coffee. Don’t know why, but hope I’m right.

                                                                      Al

He remembered my coffee order from a time that never really happened. (Wow, I’d never had a guy remember even when it did actually happen.) I wondered, as I had since the whole impossible magic eraser adventure had begun, how much could really be erased. Even if it changed time did residual thoughts still remain somewhere in the very recesses of others’ minds?

The room had gotten really quiet. I looked around to see what had happened. Kyra was eating the muffin, Kasha the donut, Stina the torte and Kaylee the bagel.

“Can I at least have the coffee?” I asked, pretending to be angry, but in such a happy mood even food thieves couldn’t bring me down.

All of a sudden a cell phone began to ring. I went flying across my bed to my dresser to grab my phone. Taking a deep breath I went to answer. But the ringing kept on. It wasn’t my phone.

“Oops, that’s me,” said Kasha sheepishly. “Hey, . . . oh yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I’ll be right there.” Kasha hung up and then started dying laughing.

“What?” we asked.

“I have to go back to work. I got so excited about Al bringing you breakfast, I just left the desk without thinking.”

With that a trio of laughing K’s left the room.

-36-

A Whole New Chapter

I was finishing drying my hair, very gently with my sore head, when Rachel came rushing into the room.

“Did he call?” she asked breathlessly.

“Better,” Stina answered before I could. “He brought her breakfast. Isn’t that romantic?” Stina finished with a heavy sigh. I wasn’t the only one enjoying my new romance. It was if the whole wing of our dorm was basking in the wonderful aura of hopeful bliss. All I could do was smile. I’d been doing that a lot all morning.

I always loved romance novels growing up. From the sweetness of
Cinderella
to those bodice rippers with half-clothed men on the front, nothing made my heart melt more or my toes curl tighter than, after hundreds of pages and when it looks all hope is lost, the girl finally gets the guy of her dreams. And then the book ends.

It’s so not fair. I’ve read for hours and hours and invested all my emotions to get to the happily-ever-after and then it just ends.

So what happens after the end? He liked me. I liked him. I had spent so many hours hoping and dreaming of ways to get to this point, but this was a whole new chapter. The best chapter? Who knows. It’s the chapter the authors never write.

What if after getting to know me Al decided he didn’t like me after all? Or what if he did and I suddenly realized I didn’t like him? Maybe I was not actually infatuated with the real Al Dansby, but the fantasy one I had created in my own overactive, hormone-driven imagination? What if he expected sex? On the first date? What if I wanted it and he thought I was slutty? And if I didn’t, would there be a second date? What if he was okay with waiting but after dating for weeks or months or even just a few days he changes his mind? What if we find we have nothing in common, nothing to say to each other? What if he’s a bad kisser? What if he thinks I’m a bad kisser? What if I really am a bad kisser? What if his dad doesn’t like me? What if he finds out I don’t floss regularly? What if...?

“Lottie, what’s wrong?” Rachel asked. I guess my poker face was a tell-all book again. “You look like you’re getting ready to have a panic attack. Where is that McDonald’s sack we used last time? Everything is working out just like you wanted. What in the name of heaven and Hugh Jackman is wrong with you?” she asked again.

I had to get a grip. My ninjas had gotten me this far. I’m sure they could help with the rest.

“I don’t know what happens next,” I said in a small, bewildered voice.

Stina giggled. Rachel laughed out loud. Olivia yelled from the adjoining room, “Can you guys be quiet in there! Some of us need our beauty sleep!”

-37-

Getting To Know You

“It sure is nice weather we’re having today,” he said.

“Yeah, not much wind,” I replied. This just couldn’t be happening. I had tried for months to get Al Dansby to notice me, without me making a catastrophic fool of myself, and this was it? We were sitting there in a lovely restaurant while the candlelight flickered, talking about the Oklahoma weather?

Silence. I knew what he was thinking. It had been a mistake. He wanted to find an excuse to leave. Ever since he had picked me up for our date he’d been glancing at his text messages and looking at the ground. He was regretting our date, our whole start of a relationship. He had been so eager and now, he wanted an out. I knew he did. I started to dig in my purse for my trusty magical friend. I’d just do this over and cancel the date. Save us both a lot of embarrassment.

“Lottie,” he broke the silence. “I’m sorry,”

Oh no, here it came. He was apologizing for asking me out and then he was going to end the date. WHERE WAS THAT STUPID ERASER?

He kept talking while I kept digging. I was going to have to learn to make sure that my magic escape route was always easily accessible. I needed to buy a purse with a special magic eraser pocket built right in for just such emergencies.

“I was so elated that you would go out with me tonight. I . . . um . . .,” he kept struggling for words and looked down again at his phone. Obviously he couldn’t find a nice way to say,
This ain’t gonna work
.

Instead he said, “I’m so happy to be with you that my brain doesn’t seem to be communicating with my mouth.” And then came that mischievous, but shy little boy smile again. “It was so much easier to talk to you in the dark.” Pregnant pause. Was it going to turn into the whole nine months? Should I ask the waiter to turn the lights out? But then he was talking again. “I know we barely know each other. It’s strange, because I always seem to feel like I’ve known you longer. But, I do know that I want to get to know everything about you. Not just what you think about the weather.” With that he gave a relieved laugh and million-watt smile and continued. “I have a confession to make.” He paused and looked at his phone again.

For the past ten seconds things had seemed to be going well. We weren’t going to talk about the weather and then suddenly he was confessing. What? Was he already engaged to someone else? Was it one of those third world country childhood betrothals?

My fingers finally touched that pink eraser, when he spoke again. “I am a little bit shy. On stage is easy because someone else has written all the lines and I simply repeat them. But in real life I have a very hard time thinking and speaking at the same time.” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but I wrote down some things to say on our date on my iPhone and then I lost them and I keep trying to find that app and it was making me even more distracted and making it even harder to think of the right thing to say. So then all I could think about was the weather and . . . can we start again? Without the meteorological updates?” Al gave a sheepish smile and I dropped the eraser back in my bag, glad that I hadn’t undone what promised to be a great evening. I had to learn not to be so trigger happy with changing time.

“I think this is the point where we start to play twenty questions,” Al suggested. “You go first.”

Twenty questions. Try twenty thousand. Where to start?
Will you marry me?
would probably be too pushy. I’d start with something more generic.

“Where are you from? You don’t sound like most of the people around here.” Oh that sounded stupid. He didn’t sound like the people around here, he sounded glorious.

“Whelp, little lady,” he said with his worst Oklahoman accent. “I reckon I do sound a little foreign as I’m not being from around these here parts.” With that he laughed and returned to his luxurious voice. “I’m from California.”

“Oh, but . . . well, I don’t know. There’s something a little different.”

“You should go into linguistics if you picked up on that. Yes, I am a little different.” Oh no, now he’s going to tell me he’s a vampire. Or gay. Or a gay vampire. “My mother was from London. I spent some summers there with my grandparents. So, there are some times—some little phrases that I use that sound not quite from around these parts.

“My turn. Where are you from?” he asked.

“Just down the road a fair piece,” I said with my best Okie accent which wasn’t hard as I always said everything with an Okie accent. “I moved a whole three hours away from home to go to school. I’ve lived in Oklahoma my entire life. In fact the same house since I came home from the hospital at birth. Pretty boring, huh?”

“No, not boring. Settled. Secure. It’s a nice place to live.”

“How does a guy,” a gorgeous, sexy, accented guy, “from California with a British mother end up at OKMU? Do you have the world’s most faulty GPS?”

That got a laugh out of him. Oh, and what a laugh. Not a loud, barky laugh that seemed fake, or a snorty, wheezy laugh that sounded geeky. No, just the perfect masculine, deep laugh. Yep, he even laughed perfectly.

“I came for their theater program. OkMU has the best theatrical department anywhere except the coasts.”

“But California? That’s movie world. Wouldn’t you find better schools there?”

He was quiet for a while, deep in thought. Like there was a lot more to the story, but unsure how much he wanted to tell me, someone he barely knew. “Let’s just say, I needed my own space. Next question.”

Oh great, now I’d blown it. One, okay maybe two if being really picky, down on my twenty questions and I’d already made him defensive.

“Favorite food?” I asked hoping that was safe.

“Tacos.”

“La—ah was right.” Oops, did I say that out loud? “I mean, she just was observing what people prefer in the cafeteria one day.” Bad cover.

“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment that my eating habits make the daily news. Tune in tomorrow for my favorite drink.”

“Mine’s Diet Dr. Pepper.”

“I like coffee. No let me correct that. I love coffee. I live for coffee. Don’t ever come around me in the mornings before I’ve had my coffee.”

That sent my brain on a short fantasy trip of what would he look like in the mornings before his coffee, with just PJ bottoms and tussled hair and a little bit in need of a shave?

“Lottie, you okay?”

Oh crap! I hoped I wasn’t drooling on myself.

“I seem to have lost you there for a moment. Are you sure your head is okay from yesterday’s accident?” he asked, concern filling his voice. Fortunately, we were distracted by the waiter who came to take our orders. I’ve no idea what I ordered. Some sort of food. I assumed he did too.

“Back to our questions,” he resumed after our order was taken. “Tell me about your family.”

“That will cost you more than one question.” I proceeded to tell him of my siblings and my parents. I tried to explain my life as the middle child without sounding whiny about it. I didn’t tell him of my extended family. I didn’t want to scare him off.

He seemed mesmerized with my boring life. “It must be great to have a brother and sisters. I’m an only child. I always wanted a brother.”

I opened up and confessed to him something I had never admitted before. “I have always said that it would be wonderful being an only child. Sometimes in really loud shouting matches with my sisters,” I laughed. “But deep down I don’t really mean it.” There I was saying out loud to a guy I barely knew what deep down in my heart I never had wanted to admit. For all my moaning and complaining about being the normal, un-special middle child, I really did like my brother and sisters. Some days I even loved them. “They are what make my family, my family. And Christmases and snow days and family vacations would be pretty dull without them.

“Now tell me about your family.” It was my turn to make demands.

“Not much to tell. There’s just me and my dad now.”

“Oh, divorced? That happens a lot.”

The look on his face was so sad. It must have been a really messy affair. I wished I hadn’t brought it up.

“No. Not a divorce,” he began. “My mother. She was so special. You’d have loved her. Everybody loved her. My dad always did. Still does.” He paused and took a deep breath. “She died when I was fifteen.” He stopped talking for a moment. Again, deep in thought. It seemed he was trying to decide if he should confide in me his deepest hurts or keep it simple. After a moment he looked me in the eyes and continued. “She had cancer. You always hear how awful it is to have someone you love die of cancer, but you don’t know until you’ve actually lived it. They don’t die all of sudden, but every day, a tiny bit, right before your eyes and you’re helpless to do anything about it. It’s like there is a murderer right there in the room and nobody can stop him. Everyone is powerless, helpless.” He stopped and took a drink of coffee. His hand was shaking ever so slightly. I sensed that he was telling me thoughts that he didn’t share often or with just anyone. My heart ached for him. “We all knew it was coming, yet we pretended—hoped—prayed she’d get well. Always knowing that she wouldn’t. She struggled so hard, kept taking all the drugs they gave. Sometimes it seemed that the cure made her sicker than the disease. My dad felt guilty for giving her medicine that didn’t seem to work. But what was the alternative? Just give up? She couldn’t eat or sleep. By the end she was so emaciated even her friends wouldn’t have recognized her. Except when she smiled. She had the most beautiful smile.”

“Is that where you got your smile?”

I was rewarded with a melancholy version of his glorious smile. “Yeah, everybody always says I look just like my dad. Except when I smile. Then I’m all my mother.”

We sat there for a moment in silence. Strangely it wasn’t awkward. Then he looked into my eyes and smiled. “You’ll love my dad. He’s special too.”

Not as special as his son, I wanted to say. But, I was trying to play it cool. Also, I was trying not to cry.

We spent the next two hours playing our version of twenty questions. The music montage of life. All the endearing smiles and laughs as some wonderfully syrupy romantic song played. I’ve always loved those in movies. But also wished that they would slow the happy times down and let me experience them. This time I did. I learned what his favorite song was.

“I just love that Michael Bublé song. ‘Just Haven’t Met You Yet.’ All last semester when I’d hear it, it would bizarrely click in my head like there was this someone special that I knew, even though I hadn’t met her. Or should I say you, yet.”

That comment totally made my heart race and my toes curl. But, there it was again. That tiny lingering fragments of feelings left from a do-over, of remembering a meeting that hadn’t happened in his reality. I also wondered, as I hadn’t really allowed myself to wonder before, if doing time over wasn’t hard on others. Did it leave them with confused, déjà vu feelings that could never be explained or resolved? I didn’t wonder for long as he was on to his next question.

“What is your favorite book? Writer? Movie?”

“That’s three questions.”

“I know. I thought I’d try putting them all together and hope I could get more than my twenty in.” Little did he know he could interrogate me until forever and I wouldn’t complain.

“Hmm, book? Anything by Jane Austen, of course. And Agatha Christie. But I’m also a
Harry Potter
freak. I almost went into depression when the last book came out and I knew there wouldn’t be any others.” Now to tell or not to tell? I also was obsessed with
Twilight
. But for some reason, guys didn’t want to hear about it.

Al took a sip of his coffee. I think he was on about his tenth cup. We had been there a while. In fact that pause made me look around and realize we were the only people still in the restaurant.

“I thought you would like
Twilight
. Most people who like Jane Austen do,” he said.

“Busted.”

Then he looked around the room like an undercover spy, making sure there were no bugs or surveillance cameras. “I’ll make a confession to you. But if you tell, I might have to kill you.”

Oh no. Here it came. The something bad. That’s how I’d felt since the breakfast in bed had arrived. This was all too good to be true. Any time he’d confess to some major obstacle that would doom our chances of being together forever.

Then he gave a very sheepish smile and said, “I’ve read them too. And I didn’t hate them. But, if you ever tell anyone, I’ll deny it.

“Now favorite movie,” he continued.

“That one’s easy. Anything with Alistair Dansberough in it. They’re always so good. Did you ever meet him in California?”

Suddenly, Al seemed to realize what I had known for awhile, but didn’t want to mention, the restaurant was empty. “We probably should go. I think they want to close up.