She sighed. “I know. I don’t deserve it.”
“You were cool when we were kids. What happened to you?”
“I wanted to be cooler, I guess.”
“Was that what you called it?”
“I thought it was. You had to hate me.”
“I kind of did. And yet...” He shook his head. “Moth to the flame.”
“I’m truly sorry.” Would she ever be able to say it enough to make up for the person she’d been?
He shrugged again.
“You never should have helped me cheat on those math tests.”
That brought a bitter chuckle. “You’d have flunked otherwise.”
“Maybe I should have. It would have served me right.”
“It would have,” he agreed.
She winced. Eating humble pie was hard work.
“You know what the worst moment of my whole young life was?” he said.
She could guess. She braced herself.
“That first dance at Eagledale High School. You’d found your new friends that summer, but I still thought you’d dance with me. You weren’t dancing with anyone else, so I took a chance.”
Darby had seen him coming, then turned her back on him right before he reached her. She’d snubbed him in the halls when she was with her cool friends but hadn’t been above using him when she needed help with math. Once she’dgotten through algebra, she’d pretended he was completely invisible.
“If I had it to do over again, I’d have danced with you.”
“Too bad you can’t go back,” he said, unbending.
“But you can go forward,” she said in a small voice. Knees still knocking, she rose from her chair, crossed the room, and stood in front of him. “Would you dance with me now?”
He looked at her suspiciously. “Okay, Darby, where’s the punch line?”
“What?”
“This is some kind of sick joke.”
“No, it’s not,” she said earnestly. “I am sorry, Gregory. I’m sorry I was so awful. I’m sorry I trampled on our friendship. On your kindness. On your heart. I deserve to go through life with a deformed nose to match my deformed heart.” Oh, great. Now she was all teary and dopey. The ultimate humiliation.
He looked at her, apparently shocked. “Your nose is going to be deformed?”
“No, it’s not that bad,” she said. “I’m just trying to make a point. I’m trying to get you to like me again, just a little. Just enough that we can be friends and I can be a better person.”
That did it. There came the tears. She should have made this speech in some public place so she could have been truly as humiliated as she’d made him back when they were kids.
His expression softened, and he stood and did something amazing. He put his arms around her. “Hey, don’t cry. We were dumb kids.”
“You were never dumb,” she said, sniffing. She wiped at her nose and winced.
“Stay here,” he said, and left the room.
