Notes from the Dog (9 page)

“What are we doing?”

“Not we. You. You have a date tonight.”

She saw my face as she got to me, and draped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me in for a half-hug. “Don’t look so scared. Dates are fun.”

“Fun. They’re fun. You think they’re fun.”

“Most people do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I arranged a date for you because I didn’t think you were going to do it on your own. That pretty girl from the river walk who stopped by with money awhile back came into the bookstore today and I helped her pick out a few books—”

Girl from the river walk.

My mind was moving too slowly.

“—and so we got to talking and I asked if she had a boyfriend and she said no, so …”

It finally dawned on me.

“You set me up on a date with Karla Tracey.” The pounding in my head made it hard to hear my own voice.

“Yes, I did.” Johanna looked maddeningly pleased with herself and I wanted to put her in what my dad used to call, when I was little, the naughty chair. She needed to reflect on what she’d done and then apologize.

“I thought … I thought you knew that, I mean, can’t you understand how … well, she and I are just not … Johanna, I can’t go out with a girl like that.”

“You can and you will.”

I was completely terrified.

And yet there was a tiny thrill, too.

“What did she say when you asked her out? Uh, for me, that is? Does she even know who I am? What if”—I started to panic—“she said yes thinking you meant someone else and then, when I show up, she takes one look at me and realizes her mistake and I’m just standing there not knowing what to say because you know I can never think of the right thing to say in a normal situation much less something as horrible and weird as this and it’ll just be awkward and embarrassing for both
of us and the moment will drag on forever and then …” I ran out of steam.

“Then what? This is a fascinating, if highly unlikely, scenario. You know that, don’t you?”

“No. That’s exactly how I see things playing out.”

“Would you,” she said in a serious voice, “do it for me, Finn?”

“Go on a date with Karla Tracey for you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted you to make a garden for me, too, and that’s working out pretty well, isn’t it?”

“Well, when you put it that way …”

“I called Matthew after I spoke to Karla. He’s on his way over.”

“For what?”

“To keep you from running and hiding.”

I looked at her. She looked at me. Then she smiled. “It’ll be great.”

She turned and walked back to her house, running into Matthew at the corner of our yard. They nodded at each other. Matthew headed toward me, a paper bag in his hand.

“Rocking news, Finn—Karla Tracey.” He whistled between his teeth.

“Can you even believe it?”

“Nope. Not really, but stranger things have happened, I guess. I mean, that’s what my mother always
says anyway. C’mon, get your stinky pits in the shower.”

I stood in the shower until the water ran ice cold. Maybe I’d wake up and realize this was not really happening to me.

When I finally stepped out of the shower, shivering and a little blue, Matthew was sitting on the bathroom counter reading the back of a small tube.

“What’s that?”

“Self-tanner.”

“What’s it for?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Let’s face it, Finno, tan fat looks better than pale fat.”

“I’m
not
fat.”

“You’re not tall and thin, either. No matter how tall you stand or how hard you suck in your gut.”

It was at times like this when I wished Matthew didn’t notice so much.

“And besides,” he said as he tossed the tube to me, “you still have a few poison ivy scabs that could use camouflaging.”

I read the directions out loud. “‘For best results, exfoliate well before applying product.’ What’s ‘exfoliate’?”

“To remove rough, dead skin.”

“Why would I have rough, dead skin and how do you know these things?”

He shrugged.

“I think I’m pretty … smooth and … undead. Can’t we just skip that part?”

“Yeah, just smear it all over like sunscreen; we don’t have that much time anyway.”

After I applied the “product” wearing the plastic gloves included with it so I wouldn’t “stain or discolor” my palms, which made me wonder what was going to happen to the rest of my skin, Matthew and I waited for me to dry, like a wall we’d just painted.

We decided I’d keep things low-key. He and Johanna thought I should suggest to Karla that we go to the free outdoor concert the city band put on every Thursday in the summer. Matthew and Johanna would be there, too, so I’d have backup nearby. “You know, in case you melt down and need to be rescued.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

He looked at his watch and jumped up.

“Dude. We gotta get you dressed.” He poked me in the arm. “Ugh. You’re still tacky. Here, let’s use the hair dryer to speed up the drying.”

This is not going right, I thought, but I stood with my arms outstretched and my legs spread wide and Matthew pointed the blow-dryer at me.

“This is not good,” he said finally when he’d clicked the dryer off and studied me.

“What’s not good?”

“Well, the heat from the blow-dryer seems to have caused an adverse reaction with the chemicals and—
now, don’t freak out, Finn, but you’re not exactly ‘golden brown’ like the tube says. It’s more like, um …”

I wheeled around to look in the mirror. “Orange. I am the color of orange sherbet.”

“Maybe just a little.”

I dove into the shower and blasted the faucets on, forgetting that I’d used all the hot water. I howled when the icy cold needles hit me, and scrubbed my entire body frantically with a washcloth. I had to be scraping the tanner off because I felt like I was removing all the layers of my skin.

I stepped out of the shower and looked in the mirror.

Orange.

Only now I was shiny clean, too, with a pink tinge from all the scrubbing.

“Long sleeves,” Matthew said, nodding. “And pants. That’ll work.”

“It’s eighty-nine degrees outside.”

“And you have orange and pink skin with crusty scabs.”

“Good point.”

I got dressed and we agreed that, for me, I looked okay. Except for my face, but I vetoed Matthew’s plan to get Johanna over with her makeup bag to try to “powder down” the color.

Finally, I took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

Johanna was sitting on the front steps waiting for us. She did a double take when she saw me, but she didn’t say anything even though I looked like a highway caution cone. Then the three of us walked over to Karla’s house.

Silently.

I don’t know about them, but between the long sleeves and pants and my nerves, I was sweating buckets, and I kept glancing at the bushes on the edge of the sidewalk in case I needed a convenient place to barf.

While Johanna and Karla were talking at the bookstore that afternoon, they’d arranged that I would pick Karla up at seven, and Johanna had gotten the address and directions. I could have saved her the trouble; I knew that Karla’s house was exactly three hundred and
ninety-four yards from my house and that the numbers in her address added up to seven, my lucky number.

We came around the corner of Karla’s block and Matthew and Johanna gave me one last critical look. Johanna smoothed my hair off my forehead. “Now, Finn, tonight is about having fun. Talk to her like you do me and you’ll be fine. And remember that people will always think you’re fascinating if you show that you’re a good listener, because everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. Ask her about her interests and hobbies and pets and family and friends and favorite classes—actually, ask her about her favorite
anything
and you’re good to go.”

“That’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“That’s how you talk to people? Ask them about themselves?”

“It’s one way.”

“I wish,” I said, glaring at Matthew, “someone had told me it was that simple a long time ago. He could have saved me a lot of worry.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” he replied. “I’m always too busy dazzling people with tales of my wonder and might to notice if they have much to say or not.” He punched my shoulder, but I could tell he was impressed with Johanna’s advice too. “See you at the concert. I’m meeting Kari there. Have a good time.”

They disappeared around the corner, heading
toward City Park and the bandshell three blocks over. I looked at Karla’s house.

Silence.

House just sitting there.

Matthew and Johanna were out of sight and I thought about what Johanna’d said. I stood tall, or as tall as I could, and sucked in my gut. Then I marched up to Karla’s house.

She must have been standing behind the door because it flew open before I pulled my hand away from the doorbell.

“Finn?”

“Karla?” Genius. Who else is going to answer the door at her house? I started to perspire again and a faint wave of nausea hit my gut.

Then she smiled at me and I felt … wonderful.

Karla was smiling at me.

Me.

Finn Howard Duffy.

And she knew it was me, too. She hadn’t screamed or pretended not to speak English or to have amnesia when she saw me. She looked … she looked kind of glad to see me.

“I love your friend Johanna.” She was talking very fast, the way I do when I’m nervous. “It was great to talk to her today.”

“Johanna … Johanna is … the best person I know. And she’s always got the best ideas. She … um … she
said I should ask you if you wanted to go to the concert in the park.”

Karla nodded and called goodbye to her parents in the back of the house. We walked over to the bandshell. We’d gone a block and a half without speaking and I was starting to feel that clutchy panic again, the kind that made it hard to breathe and see and stay upright, but I forced myself to turn to Karla and say, as if I talked to the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in person or on the movie screen every day of my life, “So, tell me what you’ve been doing this summer.”

And she was off, talking a mile a minute about hanging out at the mall with her girlfriends and learning how to knit with her gran who was visiting from Phoenix and her aunt’s brand-new baby who, she said, looked weird and smushy only she wasn’t allowed to say that out loud or her parents swore she wouldn’t get her allowance until she was thirty. She talked all the way to the park and while we were finding our seats in the grass and right through the concert.

And Johanna had been right: If I listened to Karla and asked questions about what she said, I didn’t have any problem talking. There weren’t any of those horrible silences where you can hear the blood rushing through your veins.

During the third or fourth song, the people next to us shushed us. Karla looked embarrassed. She looked, in fact, like I always feel. I gestured with my head: Let’s go.

We ducked out of the concert and walked downtown. Good thing Matthew had reminded me to bring my wallet. When I saw the ice cream place, the kind where they mix the toppings in the ice cream on a slab of frozen marble, I asked, “Do you want a cone?”

We decided to share a mondo sundae and drove the poor guy who worked there crazy adding more ingredients until we wound up with a bowl full of graham cracker crumbs, mini-marshmallows, baby chocolate chips, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, almonds and bananas over triple-chocolate-chunk ice cream.

Karla dug right in. “You’re really easy to talk to, Finn,” she said, licking her spoon. “Most people are so busy thinking about what they’re going to say that they never really listen to what you’re saying. Do you get what I mean?”

“Absolutely.” If she only knew.

“But, well, you’re a really great listener. I mean, Johanna said you were and—”

“She did?”

“Yeah, she said you were a really great guy who just needed a chance to prove it.”

“That sounds like her.”

“And then she told me you’re the kind of boy I should be getting to know; that good guys like you who can be good friends are way better than—” She stopped and looked uncomfortable.

“Way better than popular guys who are good-looking and self-confident?”

“Uh …” She poked at the ice cream with her spoon, avoiding my eyes. Then she looked up at me, took a deep breath and said, “That’s exactly what she said. And that I could do better for myself than to fall for the outside of someone when it was their insides that really counted.”

“Did she say it would be a waste if you didn’t?”

“How did you know?”

“Waste is a big thing for Johanna.”

Karla stared down at the table for a minute. “How does she come up with all these things?”

“I have absolutely no idea; I’m just glad she tells me what she’s figured out.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Matthew sitting three tables over with Kari. He waved. I figured he and Johanna had agreed that he’d keep an eye on me.

I don’t know if it was that my first date was going so well, all the ice cream that was melting in my gut or the way Johanna had known I’d have a good time on a date with Karla, but I had never felt more right in my skin in my whole entire life than I did at that moment.