My stomach drops. “Youwerethere.”
“Yes,” Jake says drily. “After that, I gave up on trying to make chatting with you look natural. I had about, I dunno, eight cans, then walked up by myself.”
“What time was it?”
“Almost ten. I was getting scared you’d leave.”
Heshouldhave been scared of getting puked on. I’d put that at T-minus five minutes before I was playing exorcist in the back field.
“What did you say?” I ask.
He gives me a wry look, then transforms before my eyes, ducking his head, hunching his shoulders and avoiding my gaze. “Hey, Ada. How’s your night?”
He sounds like a teenager. Helookslike a teenager. Before I can marvel at his acting prowess, he lurches back, scowling like a homeless dude just accosted him. “Why areyouhere?”
He can’t do my accent, but his deadpan expression is pure me. Drunk me. The me I’ve sometimes seen in shaky, semi-lit videos.
Jake relaxes his brow and rubs a hand across his forehead. “I was, uh, wondering, Ada… if you wanted to, uh… maybe…?”
He scrunches his face, flipping back into Drunk Ada. “I'm not gonna suck your dick, dude. I don’t care how good you are at tackling.”
I can’t help smiling. “That does sound like me…”
Jake scrubs the back of his neck fast enough to start a forest fire. “Ahhh, it’s nothing like that, I swear. I was just wondering, would you maybe wanna go to the ba?—”
He flicks up an exaggerated hand. “Okay, I’m gonna throw up, like, extremely soon, so I’ll leave you to do… whatever this is… by yourself.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” Jake says grimly. “So that was it. You ran off, didn’t look back, and I realised not only did younothave a secret crush on me, you thought I was some rugby dickhead wasting your time, and there was no way you’d ever let me take you to the ball.”
My stomach plummets. The school ball. The social highlight of Pukekohe High. The thing I never even vaguely entertained attending, what with being social arsenic. Cece went. She took her nice guy equivalent, Finn, who gave a barf performance worthy of me on the dancefloor.
Rhys offered to go with me, but I was sure we’d be the targets of a Carrie-esque nightmare, so I opted to stay home and cry. I also wrote the sonata that got me into Juilliard. I never perform ‘Lost Worlds’ anymore. Not because it’s embarrassing. Unlike my shitty blog, it’s so thick with sincerity and teenage despair that it sucks the life out of me every time.
“Asking me to the ball was so… big,” I tell Jake. “Why didn’t you just get my number or something?”
His lips curve in a humourless smile. “Because you were right. Iama rugby dickhead.”
“You think asking me to the ball makes you a dickhead?”
“I think putting that much pressure on you made me a dickhead. Expecting you to feel the same way as I did. I should have just found you at lunchtime, tried to get a conversation going, but I dunno… I thought asking you to the ball was…”
“What?”
His massive shoulders creep toward his ears like they’re trying to protect his head. “Romantic.”
“Oh.” I swallow. “I don’t remember talking to you at the party, but I would have thought you were making fun of me.”
Jake lowers his head, and the finality of why we’re here returns to the table, hanging in the air like smog.
“It’s my biggest regret,” he says. “Not following up. Trying harder.”
I think of myself on that hay bale, drunk and desperately alone. “Why didn’t you? I was a weirdo, but I wanted someone to want me. I might have actually believed you were into me if you talked to me during daylight hours. Why didn’t you? Why not?”
He lifts his gaze, and I see the answer in his eyes. The one I already knew way back when he first approached me at Stabbies.
“You were too scared,” I say, dully. “I was still the school freak, and it was too much pressure to ask me out, sober, without knowing I liked you back.”
