She's the One

Chapter 6 – Afternoon

I found it hard to sit still in many of my morning classes. Multiple times I found myself lost in a daydream about the night before. I tried my hardest not to recount any of the moments where I had so shamelessly thrown myself at Viola, but I would be reading my textbook and suddenly find that I had been thinking about what happened in the car for nearly 10 minutes. She had seemed very genuine when she said she didn’t find me weird, and when I’d looked in her eyes I knew that she meant it. Still, something was nagging me about those moments we shared, tucked away in that sleeping bag. Something seemed like it had been out-of-place and dishonest, and it kept nagging at me through my first four subjects until lunch time, when I returned to my room and started cooking a frozen burrito.

While I waited for the microwave, I checked my email. There were two from my mother, two newsletters, a notice about prom tickets, and one from Viola. I eagerly ignored all others and opened hers right away.

Olivia,
I should probably be sleeping right now, you know? I’m wide awake. I was going to call you but I thought you probably would be in class. So email it is.
Hope you are looking forward to tonight. Well, that’s weird to say. But I’ve been dreading coming home for this thing all week, and now I’m excited about it. Remember to bring some shorts and a jersey! Don’t worry about shin guards, those sixth graders can’t kick very high. If you want to do something after, my mom said I could borrow her car. She gave me the funniest look and said “try to be home before midnight this time” haha!
I’ll see you soon
Vi

I smiled as I read it over again the second time. My microwave chimed to let me know that lunch was ready, but I postponed my burrito feast to hurriedly type a reply.

Hey Vi
Thanks for writing, I’m glad that you did. As you suspected, I was in class. It’s lunch right now. I hope you get some sleep today! Can’t have you passing out and laying around on top of the field tonight. Your mom will definitely start thinking that I’ve given you a cocktail of narcotics and street drugs.
Hmm, I don’t have any sports shorts, only some denim ones, and beach shorts. Also I don’t have a jersey, either. Is that a necessary item? Because a tshirt seems so similar in every way, except for the numbers. If my beach shorts and tshirt are acceptable apparel, that is what I will bring!
I’ll see you tonight
Love, Olivia

I hit ‘send’ and checked the clock; I only had about 10 more minutes before my next class started. I hated to eat in a rush, it always left me feeling bloated and full for hours. However this time I really couldn’t avoid it. I downed that burrito like it was something more delicious and inevitably less-frozen in the middle. While I ate, I pulled my skirt and Illryia polo out of my closet to get ready for my upcoming subject – P.E. It had never made sense why the school bothered with the façade of having a P.E. course, when in actuality, it was simply tennis every day. Probably something to do with requirements for graduation.

When the bell rang, I was still running across the oval to get to the tennis courts, carrying my racquet and a can of balls. Upon my late arrival, Mr. Gosford threatened to write me a detention slip the “next time”. Usually I would have trembled in my shoes over such a possibility, and apologized more times than necessary to avoid my most dreaded fate of getting into ‘trouble’ at school. However, this day was different for some reason, and I managed to see the frivolity in it all, and shrugged coolly before doing a few stretches. When it finally came time to play a match, I was like a cat on that court, bouncing from side-to-side and nailing ace serves that I can normally only do on Wii Sports. Justine Dagmyer (my opponent), had to stop halfway through one game to find a sweatband she could borrow, so sweat would stop dripping in her eyes from the severe work-out I was handing her.

It was serious tennis, and I was not letting up.

Finally Justine had enough and forfeited the final game of the match. I felt a swelling pride of achievement, along with some relief for having found a clever way to make the period pass by so quickly. We shook hands courteously and headed in to the locker rooms for an early shower. Not many girls were there, but I saw Holly out of the corner of my eye as I started to undress.

“Hey, where the fuck were you this morning?” She shouted, coming closer. “You’re pissed off so you don’t go running? Since when?”

“Relax Holly. I didn’t get home until 7. I wasn’t blowing you off.”
Her jaw hung open, an action that didn’t help her to look very intelligent. “You spent the night with Viola Hastings? The TRANNY?! Oh what the fuck, Olivia? That is some desperate shit, you have just got to be kidding me.”

I clenched my jaw and could feel my ears starting to burn with fury, but I simply grabbed my soap and anti-perspirant out of my locker and slammed it shut.
Another brain-dead peon on the same mental level as Holly had overheard our conversation and decided to join in with her idiocy. “You slept with Viola? How was it? What did she do? Was she dressed as her brother? Wait… whoa, aren’t you DATING her brother?”

“They broke up!” Holly, the newscaster, decided to chime in with her special report.
I started to walk toward the showers, but the two douchebags followed me.

“So is that why you did it with his sister, some kind of weird revenge? Or was it like a crazy love-triangle where you had to do it with her, dressed up with him? Wait… whoa. Did you know it was her? Or did she trick you? That is so messed up!”
Holly agreed that she also found it to be “messed up”.

While the thought occurred to me that I may find pleasure in kicking them both in their respective stomachs, I also realized that if I continued to ignore them, they could amuse themselves for hours and assume that I was speaking to them. This was decidedly most appealing, since it meant I could go on with my shower and pretend they didn’t exist.

“I once saw this show on Discovery Channel about people who are trannies, and they really think they are not trannies, but then they will get people pregnant and never tell them!”

“Whoa… wait. I was watching the L word…”

It amused me beyond belief that this girl had just admitted to such a thing.

“…and this girl became a guy and she liked girls, and had sex with them, but then some guy hit on her, and she was a guy, so she didn’t like it. Then the guy was like ‘it’s not what you like, it’s if you’re gay’ or something. So like, people who are gay, if they become trannies, they are gay again.”

My rage subsided easily when I could plainly see how the two most ludicrous girls should not give me any cause for alarm. They continued to stand outside the shower stalls for the duration of my shower, then chased me back to my locker where I proceeded to get dressed. The entire time they compared notes on all the lesbian films or tv shows they had ever seen, followed by their theory of how that applied to the “sex” that Viola and I had all night long.

Finally I was finished and it was time to move on. I turned to face them both and quietly said: “You both realize that you just spent 10 minutes watching other girls shower and talked about the lesbian sex you watch frequently in your spare time? Frankly, I’m uncomfortable being around you both, if you can’t stop thinking about naked girls long enough to get through one P.E. class.”

The looks on their bigoted faces were so priceless, I was almost sad to leave them that way when I walked out of the locker room.

As soon as the final bell rang, I bolted from my chair and made a hasty exit to my room. I grabbed my prom dress, all of my make-up, a spare change of clothes, and my toothbrush, throwing them into a duffel bag. Before adding my laptop to the mix, I checked my email once more to find a response from Viola.

Liv,
Come over early tonight, I’ll set you up with clothes. Sorry this is short… I’m passing out! Be asleep soon for sure.
Vi

I snapped the computer shut and added it to the assortment in my bag. Before Holly (or anyone else), had even returned to the dorms, I was out the main double doors and nearly to the parking lot.

Briefly I debated whether I ought to go home and get myself ready, or drive straight to Viola’s. Of course, I chose the latter. Why get dressed in something just to go to her house in order to get dressed into something else? That was my logic.
There were a few cars on the sidewalk when I pulled up, and I was forced to park further down the street. I recognized one of them as Mrs. Bigbee’s red mustang convertible, which was rumored within Junior League to be part of her alimony payments that came in her divorce settlement. The irony of the story was that her husband had bought that car in his midlife crisis in order to snag young blondes – the very vice which secured the divorce and ultimately his loss of the car.

When I got to the door I could hear several women’s voices in some type of giggle-inducing discussion. Mrs. Hastings came out to greet me and quickly directed me toward the stairs so that I may avoid her apparent afternoon tea. I obliged her, because why on earth would I want to hang around? Sometimes mothers had the weirdest ideas.

Viola’s door was three-quarters closed. I gently pushed it open, seeing that the shades were drawn to take nearly all light from the room. It took me a minute to adjust to the darkness, but I could see what appeared to be the outlines of a desk and a large bed. On the bed, of course, was Viola: sound asleep.

Closing the door behind me as softly as I could, I took care to memorize the location of the bed so I could make my way over to it. It was even darker now without the light from the hallway, so I had to stumble around and feel for the side. When I was touching something, and facing the general direction of where I believed Viola to be, I whispered quietly.

“Viola? Are you awake?”

There was some sort of mumbling response. I tried to move closer to it and knelt down on the side of the bed.

“Viola? It’s Olivia. We have to get ready for Big Mentor, remember?”

A few more mumbles and then something that sounded remotely like “okay”.

“Okay, good? So we’ll get dressed in some soccer jerseys and do some kicking. What do you say?”

No response this time. I felt around on the blankets until I found some bumps that seemed to be a shoulder and arm. I gently rubbed my hand in a circle over the comforter in this general region.

“Do you want to go back to sleep?” I asked quietly, to maybe see if she was aware that she was asleep at all.

“No… I’ll get up…” she mumbled. Her lack of movement made it clear that she was doing the opposite.

I waited for a few moments longer, gently stroking her arm through the blankets. My vision was beginning to adjust and I could see a bit of her face, enough to tell that she was sleeping serenely. This only lasted a minute longer, as she slowly began to shift out of her dreams and open her eyes slightly.

Viola groaned a little, and then looked up at me. “Hey… Olivia, are we late for the thing?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No, I just came over right after school. We should still have about half an hour to get ready.”

“Oh… good.” She started to stretch a little bit, and then looked down at my hand on the blankets. “So, how long have you been groping my boob like that?”

“Uh…” I jerked my hand away and looked at where it had been, which was clearly too far away from her head to possibly be her shoulder. “I thought it was… your arm or something.” I was grateful that the darkness of the room hid the flush of red that I could feel building in my cheeks.

She laughed wholeheartedly. “I’ve heard that line from guys before, but didn’t expect you to be the type! Next time I fall asleep, I’ll tell my mom to guard the door. Who knows what I might wake up to?”

I punched her lightly in the arm… her real one this time. “Stop your dirty dreams and help me get ready. Do you think there will be food there?”

“Probably not. We can eat something here, or stop on the way and get burgers. Whatever you wanna’ do.”

I got off the bed and Viola followed me, flicking on the light.

“Did you get much sleep?” I casually asked as she headed to her closet and began to pull out random soccer-type items.

“Yeah a few good hours in there somewhere. I kept dreaming that I was at the mentorship thing and it lasted for three days so I didn’t get back on the plane to school in time. I think that made me wake up a few times.”

She continued to talk to me about the events of her day as I browsed the framed photographs she had displayed on her desk. There were several of her with either of her parents, separately, a few of her and Sebastian, Paul, Kia, and Yvonne. There was a soccer team shot that looked pretty old, probably 8th grade or so. Then I found one that surprised me; a picture of Sebastian and myself at a party. I vaguely remembered taking it, when we were very first dating and hadn’t become an official “couple” quite yet. It was about 3 weeks after the Cornwall vs. Illyria soccer game where I (and the rest of town) had discovered the truth about the twins. It wasn’t in a frame like the others, just sitting there on top of a stack of loose photos.

“…then of course, I emailed you. You probably knew that because of the time. I thought ‘maybe I should eat some lunch?’ But then I remembered this Vietnam veteran guy once told me that eating and sleeping were interchangeable, so I should probably sleep instead. That’s when I went to sleep. Ok, which shorts do you want?” She held up a pair of Illyria reds and some black Adidas soccer shorts.

I pointed to the Adidas and she tossed them to me quickly. “Do you mind if I look at your pictures?”

“Sure, go for it. I don’t even know what’s in this room anymore since I moved so much stuff to school. Probably really old ones.”

Viola went back to rummaging through her closet and grumbling about how her mom had moved her favorite jersey somewhere in her absence, while I thumbed through the stack of photos with surprise. Several more were from the same night as the first, with shots of Sebastian and me making strange faces for the camera. There were a few that he had taken of me (standing by my car, holding up a loaf of bread in a grocery store, talking on my cell phone). I wondered if maybe their mother had found the pictures and put them in Viola’s room by mistake. Or maybe Sebastian didn’t like them because his hair didn’t look right and so he’d asked his sister to get rid of them.

“Aha!” Viola shouted, emerging from the closet. “I knew it could not have gone far. Here’s your jersey, and here’s mine!” She held it up dramatically for me. I responded with a look of awe, because even I am not quite so out-of-it to not know that a jersey that says Beckham on it is probably valuable.

I took my “soccer clothes” and went to change in the bathroom. While there, I checked my hair and make-up for good measure, and performed a few touch-ups where needed. The uniform she gave me was a bit baggy and boyish compared to my usual athletic gear, which was ashamedly a collection of skirts, polos, and even country club-issued sweaters. I would have preferred to wear something that made me look slightly more feminine and not make it appear as though I were impersonating one of my brothers.

I expected that Viola would laugh at me when I returned to her bedroom, but she surprised me by greeting me with a smile that was not at all meant in mocking.

“You look ready to play some ball.” She remarked.

“I think I might feel ready. Except for the part of being ready where I actually know how to play.”

She smirked. “Don’t worry, I’ll help ya’ out. I got a lifetime of knowledge.”

I wiped the cocky and lopsided grin off her face by quickly tossing a well-aimed pillow that hit her in the chest. She caught it with both hands, but not before it made impact.

“Hey, no hands,” I taunted, “that’s a foul, of some kind.”

“Oh is that right? I didn’t realize you had this game all wrapped up under your hat there, Miss Lennox. Well in that case, I might just hang out here at home tonight, catch up on some episodes of CSI, and let yooooou take over for me.” She stalked towards me and (predictably, but cute), batted my arms with the pillow. For good measure she laughed hysterically, bounded out of her bedroom, and literally hopped down the stairs. I could hear the shocked yet somehow still repressed squeals of the ladies in the dining room as she likely made a ridiculous face at them.

Something in me wondered where all her energy and childishness came from, but I couldn’t complain. It made being around her so much more fun than being around anyone else.