After we’d dropped off Sin-Jun’s things at the infirmary, Mr. Kim announced that he was taking us to the Red Barn Inn for dinner. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. As we drove, he lit a cigarette-at Ault, you never saw an adult smoke-and when we got to the restaurant, we ordered steak, all three of us. Mr. Kim ate half of his and Sin-Jun ate almost none and I finished mine, every bite until all that was left was fat and bone.
The next night, after the dining hall had mostly cleared out, I reentered the kitchen. Dave Bardo’s glove was a wad in the front right pocket of my jeans.
“Excuse me,” I said to a young woman pulling cellophane over a silver tray of pear halves. “Dave Bardo’s not here, is he?”
“He just went to put out the trash. You know where the dumpster is?”
When I started retracing my steps out of the kitchen, she said, “There’s stairs right there.” She pointed to a pale pink door I had never noticed. It had a round window near the top and a grid of thin lines crisscrossing the pane. When I opened the door, I found myself in a stairwell lined with shiny tan bricks; there was something gymnasiumish about the stairwell, and the smell in it wasn’t that different from a gym, either. I had the strange sense that I was not at Ault; no other part of campus, including the actual gym, looked quite like this.
At the base of the stairs was another door, and after I pushed on this one, I was outside in the winter night, standing at the top of a shorter set of concrete steps, and Dave was at the bottom in a T-shirt and apron. I could see the curved muscles of his upper arms, the hair on his forearms-it was dark brown, like a grown man’s, but it was not disgusting to me at all.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey there.”
When we spoke, our breath was visible.
“I was looking for you,” I said.
“Was I hard to find?” He smiled, and it was that leisurely, half-expectant smile-seeing it was like knowing I had remembered something exactly the way it was.
Not, of course, that this affirmation made me any less flustered. “Here.” I pulled the glove from my pocket and held it out to him.
He squinted. There was a spotlight on the corner of the dining hall roof, and another one above the door I’d just emerged from, but the darkness still made dark objects shadowy.
“It’s your glove,” I said. “I accidentally took it when you gave me a ride from the hospital.”
“No big deal. I had a feeling you’d bring it back. How you been?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I said, “You know what, the mashed potatoes tonight were really good.”
He laughed. “Thanks.”
“Is your sister better?”
“Yeah, she’s good again. I’ve been telling her to take it easy, but you know how it is for single moms.”
“My friend is better, too,” I said. “I ended up going back to the hospital yesterday to help her dad bring-actually, I don’t know. It’s kind of a long story. Aren’t you cold with no coat on?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “You don’t have a coat on either.”
“But I have a sweater.” I held out one arm, my fingers clutching the cuff, as if to offer proof.
“That’s a nice sweater,” he said. “Is that cashmere?” He pronounced it right, but he said it jokily, as if he’d never used the word before. And in fact, the sweater was acrylic. But he assumed-I’d sensed this before and now I was sure-that I was rich, that I was one of the true Ault students. Perhaps that explained his attention to me.
“I’m not sure what material it is,” I said.
“It looks soft.”
“I guess so.” I was still holding out my arm, and I realized just seconds before it happened that he was going to touch either me or my sweater, and realizing this made me feel as if the sun was rising inside me and because this was, without a doubt, a good feeling, it is hard to explain why I snatched my arm away. Very briefly, his hand hovered where my arm had been, and my face burned; I couldn’t look at him. When I finally did, he was regarding me curiously.
“I heard it might snow,” I said loudly. “Have you heard that? That’s what they’re saying for later tonight.”
He continued to look at me.
“So it’s good you have your glove again,” I said. “In case you need to shovel your driveway.” I wanted to say, I’m sorry. But it’s hard to rectify an unspoken mistake by speaking; almost always, it only makes things worse. “I should let you get back inside,” I said, and neither of us moved.
“I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “Those mashed potatoes were no good. What you had for dinner-they were crap mashed potatoes.”
“I didn’t think they were bad at all.”
“You want to taste real mashed potatoes?”
Was I supposed to answer?
“You ever been to Chauncey’s?” he asked.
I actually had, my sophomore year. It was, as far as I could remember, indistinct-nicer than a diner but not fancy. But I said, “I don’t think I’ve been there.”
“We should go.”
“Now?”
“I can’t now. I’m working.”
“Right. Of course.”
“What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?”
“I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t-we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date.
“How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.”
What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.”
“In the parking lot?”
“It’s kind of hard to find my dorm,” I said. “And they’re weird about letting guys inside.”
“Gotcha. What about seven o’clock. Is seven good?”
I nodded.
“These are gonna be the best mashed potatoes of your life. Poems have been written about these mashed potatoes.”
By you? I wanted to teasingly ask him. But I couldn’t because my anxiety was exploding, the flower was swirling outward infinitely. “I have to go study,” I said. As I walked down the steps, I could have brushed against him. But there were so many tricks I didn’t know then, so many gestures that I’d have thought would lock you in and represent promises. I turned sideways so we didn’t touch at all.
When I was on his other side, he turned and patted my shoulder. “You be good, Lee.”
This is what I want to tell my sixteen-year-old self. Say, I’ll try. Say, I won’t do anything you wouldn’t. You’re not promising him anything! What I said was, “Now you have your glove back.”
When I told Martha what had happened, she cried, “You have a date!” and leaped out of her chair to hug me.
“But it’s on Sunday.”
“So what?” She pointed at me and said in a singsong, “You have a date with Dave Bardo, you have a date with Dave Bardo.”
I wanted her to stop. And it wasn’t because I was afraid that if we presumed too much, we’d jinx it. It was more that it just sounded weird, it sounded hard to understand.
“I barely know him,” I said.
“That’s the point. You go out for dinner, and you get to know him.”
“Why would he have asked me out?”
“Lee, I can’t read his mind. Maybe he just thinks you’re pretty.”
I winced. This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn’t be entirely wrong-nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those things, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn’t pretty, and on top of that I didn’t take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn’t even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he’d somehow been misled and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards. What I wanted to know about Dave was, had he noticed me before that time in the hospital, or had I piqued his interest during that conversation? But why would he have noticed me before, or why would I have piqued his interest then? Was I the best that he could do?