She's the One

Chapter Two – A Proposal

It was a shot in the dark, and I was scared shitless. But I had to do it.
Call it pride, call it a fantasy, call it my secret desire to know what would happen.
I had put it off for as long as possible (the actual asking, that is). Yet something in the back of mind kept telling me that the situation seemed too perfect. In a way, I was much happier about the prom than I had been when I originally thought Sebastian was still going to go. It seemed as though fate were making it all happen. After my little run down to the soccer field, I’d gone back to my dorm and found an email waiting for me.

Hey!
Mom is making me come home from school for the weekend to go to some junior league fund-raiser. Lame, right? She said it’s called Big Mentor and I have to talk to sixth graders about being debutantes. Even lamer. Are you going to be there? Maybe we can sneak in some really forbidden and scandalous items. Like… pie.
Give me a call if you aren’t gonna make it and we’ll hang out while I’m home. Otherwise, I’ll see you there. With key lime and whipped cream, baby.
Viola

It was almost as if this was the way it was all meant to turn out. I tried not to let myself think that, because it seemed like I was destining myself for disappointment, but it was hard to ignore the idea that I was being forced into one direction by the fates.

“Come on, this is easy. We’re friends. Friends just call each other. That’s not weird.” I whispered to myself.

Holly and crew were nowhere to be found and I had the room all to myself. Which was good, because I’d been staring at my cell phone and psyching myself up audibly for about 45 minutes.

The problem was, Viola and I weren’t really friends, at all. After she “came out” as a girl and returned to Cornwall to play soccer on the boy’s team for the end of her junior and senior years, we pretty much never spoke. There were no hard feelings or anything, just that she was always hanging around the jocks and the jock-worshippers, and I… I became a bit of a loner. Turns out the real Sebastian was a lot more unpopular than the fake Sebastian had been, and his girlfriend was considered equally uncool by most. I saw Viola around a lot, and we were always friendly. Occasionally I bumped into her if I happened to be over at one of their respective parents’ houses hanging out, but those were rare events. She stopped coming to the mixed-sex junior league functions after our debutante ball, which clearly had something to do with her avoidance of Duke Orsino.

That’s why her email had been a surprise to me, and seemed so extraordinary. Why now, after nearly two years, would she decide to contact me out-of-the-blue? Maybe Sebastian had told her about leaving me like a jerk and she felt guilty for his behavior. Or maybe she knew it was prom weekend and she secretly was fishing to see if I was still going with her brother.

“This is ridiculous!” I exclaimed to my teddy bear, Meriwether Lewis. “I should just call her, already. Right? Ok, I’ll just call her.”

Then it happened, I was dialing.

The phone was ringing.

“Hello?”

“Hey uh… Viola. This is Olivia Lennox.”

“Hey! How are you? Wow, I just emailed you about… an hour ago, or something.”

Oh shit, she was going to think I was desperate. Or creepy. “Yeah… did you? That’s funny. I mean, I knew you did. I read it.”

“Sweet! So you’re going to this Big Mentor thing on Saturday? I don’t want to go but I really owe my mom for getting me a new laptop for school. It’s not just a regular laptop, I mean it is way tight. I can use it for gaming and so I bought this FIFA game which looks bad-ass with my video card and 3 megabytes of ram, but it also has a webcam…”

I smiled slightly and remembered how much I loved Viola-babble. I’d thought maybe it was something she had only done to imitate her brother, but after dating Sebastian for a while I realized that he never babbled. If he was nervous, he went silent, the opposite of his sister. Of course, that meant she was nervous talking to me now. She didn’t have any reason to be, maybe there really was something going on.

“…so, that’s the story of my laptop. I used it to email you.”

“Sounds really awesome. You’re right, you owe your mom big time.”

Viola chuckled quietly. “Are you teaching any sort of classes for the kids this weekend? They asked my mom if I would teach soccer drills, which doesn’t sound like something the junior league would approve of, but it seems like they are branching out a little more.”

“To be honest, I hadn’t even heard about it until your email. I’ve been too busy getting ready for…” I paused and took a deep breath, “prom.”

“Wow, prom is this weekend? Really? That’s nuts. Where did you get your dress?” Her voice sounded genuinely surprised. If she did already know, she was hiding it well.

“Just… a wedding tailoring shop. Something Blue for Brides, I think it’s called.”

She whistled into the phone. “Nice. You went all out.” There was a brief pause. “Hey wait. Isn’t my brother on a cruise ship somewhere heading toward Mexico? Did he know it was prom weekend?”

I tried to reply to her, but found myself choking back tears instead.

“Oh shit. Olivia, I’m sorry. That was dumb.”

“No, it’s ok. It’s not your fault. You didn’t even know it was prom, so… yeah.”

“I don’t know what to say. I guess, that’s my brother.”

I realized that she must not have known about any of this, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up and then berated herself for it. “You don’t have to make excuses for him, I know that his band is really important. It’s ok. I didn’t mean to be weird or anything.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, I really did want to hang out with you this weekend. I know we haven’t usually, before. But this will be my first time back at home since school started and I realized that I miss seeing you. Around. You know? I don’t have class on Friday so I’m actually flying in tomorrow afternoon. If you need to talk or just chill we can hang whenever you want. Or if… it’s weird or something, that’s cool. No pressure. No worries. Just cool… coooooooooool.”

“It’s not weird, I really miss you, too.” I felt myself blushing a little, but for no apparent reason. “Maybe we could get together tomorrow night. There’s some stuff I was hoping we could talk about.”

“Sounds good to me, as long as you don’t mind, uh… picking me up. My car is here at school.”

“No of course I don’t mind. Are you staying with your mom, then?”

“You know it.” She blurted out, in a bit of her old ‘boy’ voice.

“All right,” I stifled a giggle, “we can go to Cesario’s then, at 6.”

We made a bit more small-talk about school and the latest news around Illyria before my phone started beeping to tell me I had new voicemail. We agreed again that I would be picking her up at 6 and said goodbye until then. When I saw that my voicemail was from Sebastian, I wished that I hadn’t hung up with Viola after all. How could I go from nearly bursting into tears, to giggling and laughing and feeling elated all within seconds? Something about the silly way that Viola said everything, like she was constantly making a joke she didn’t even know about, just could put me in a good mood instantly.

The message from Sebastian was cold and brief. I didn’t expect much else, he simply called to tell me that the ship was leaving the dock and he would soon lose his signal. He sounded quite irritated and made a snappy remark about me not answering my phone.

Normally I’d be broken up about him talking to me that way, but all I could think about was how excited I was for tomorrow to come.