I eyed the roughly sketched picture of a house and yard, then flipped back through the pages. A couple more sketches of houses spread out on the paper, complete with porches and driveways. The pages behind those were diagrams of the football field. X’s and O’s marked the players. “Is this your playbook?” I asked. “Do they let you carry that around?”
He didn’t answer because the drive-through attendant had come to the window to hand him our food.
“Aren’t you worried it will fall into the wrong hands?” I asked as he drove away. “I’m going to homecoming with a guy from the opposing team.”
“Do you know what any of those plays mean?” he asked.
“No, but I could still surreptitiously take pictures of them.” I rested the book in my lap. “Is this actually some sort of trap? You expect me to send them to my date, but really, the plays are all different, and when TC implements them, their team will be trounced?”
Cooper’s head whipped to mine. “You’re going to the dance with TC? TC Mullins? How do you even know him?”
I flipped through more pages of the book, curious as to how many plays it contained. “His mom works for my dad’s firm. I see him at every company picnic and Christmas party. How do you know him?”
Cooper gave me a look like it was a stupid question. “I played league football with him from the time we were both in elementary school.” Cooper’s disapproval was etched in the crease between his eyebrows. “I don’t think you should date him. He’s not your type.”
“What do you think my type is?”
“Rich Ivy League guys.”
I preferred to think of them as smart, ambitious guys. “Rich Ivy League guys” sounded snooty. “Maybe my type is expanding and becoming more inclusive. Watching football games isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.” I turned my phone’s flashlight on low to see the notebook’s pages. “So, is handing me the playbook part of your nefarious plan to win the homecoming game?”
Cooper gave me the side-eye. “First of all, that’s not the team playbook. If it were, I wouldn’t be sketching date-night diagrams in it. Those plays are just my own inventions. Second, we don’t need help to beat Riggs. Their team isn’t that good. And third, don’t you want your school to win the game?” He shot mea quick, wry look. “Or are you making another football reel and want to see me tackled?”
I was, but not that kind. “I guess my answer depends on how you treat me from now until the homecoming game.”
“Right now, I’m treating you pretty well. I didn’t order both of those desserts for myself like I told you.”
I flipped the pages back through the house diagrams. “What does the triangle with the lollipop represent?”
“That’s your stick figure.”
“Should I be worried that I no longer have limbs? What type of date is this going to be?”
He laughed and shook his head. “I didn’t give myself arms or legs either. I’m the square figure. I know we talked about going to your house, but I think the best way to pull this off is to kiss on my front porch when your father drops my mother off.”
I flipped back a page and realized that the first diagram was the downstairs of my house. “What’s wrong with our original plan?”
“Too much time elapses from the time your garage door opens until the time your father walks into the family room. Any normal teenagers would stop kissing once they heard the garage door, or at least when they heard the door to the house open. That plan will seem too suspicious, like we want to get caught. So we’ll go with plan B instead.”
He plucked a fry from the bag, popped it into his mouth, and went on. “I’m not supposed to have a girlfriend over unless someone else is home. We’ll pretend that we forgot Claire was gone, and we went out on the front porch to talk because being outside the house is technically not against the rules. One thing led to another, and when the headlights hit us, we’ll be getting to know each other better than our parents want.”
Deep breaths. Don’t think about the kiss in too much detail. “How do we make sure we time things right? Our parents could be out late.”
“I doubt my mom will stay out late. As soon as she checks my phone’s location and sees I’m back at the house alone with you, she’ll want to head home. I’ll just keep an eye on where my mother’s phone location is, and when she gets close, we’ll start kissing.”
He’d put a lot of thought into this. I examined the last diagram more closely. “Why is my triangle on top of your square in this scenario?”
Cooper cleared his throat uncomfortably. If my eyes were seeing correctly in the darkness, he also blushed. “I forgot about that. That’s just symbolic to show that you’re the, you know, the more aggressive one. If it looks like I’m the one who’s all over you, your dad will jump out of the car and hurt me. Plus, it will worry my mother if you’re the more aggressive one. That way she knows that you won’t be putting the brakes on our relationship.”
“The more aggressive one? Honestly, Cooper, how do you kiss a girl?”
His eyebrows lifted upward to tease me. “You’re one of the few girls at school who know the answer to that question. So far, I haven’t gotten any complaints.”
The boy wasn’t lying about that. Cooper was an amazing kisser. Dahlia’s words flashed into my mind again. Somehow,the idea of kissing him on his porch before he drove off to see her—the one he actually wanted to kiss—became less appealing. I ran my tongue over my teeth and wondered if he would think I was jealous if I asked him when he was going to see her next.
Cooper noticed my hesitancy. “You’re not about to give me one of your drama critiques about my kissing, are you?” A smile grew on his lips. “But hey, if you think I need extensive practice, I’m game.”
Should I feel complimented or insulted that he didn’t mind having a noncommittal make-out session with me?
