Understudy

“It’s too late for that.” I put the key in the ignition and start the car. “You can live your life in an ocean of lies, but I prefer to keep mine honest.”

Derek’s hand grabs my door before I can close it, the other hand rests on the car roof. He leans in enough for me to smell his body spray. “Let me take you to dinner. I’ll explain. If you still want to hate me, then fine. But at least give me a chance to win you back.”

“Back?” I say with a laugh. “You never had me.” It feels good to say those words even if they are a total lie.

Derek smiles. He presses a hand to his chest. “You’re all I think about, Wren. I hope you’ll let me make it up to you.”

My forehead drops to the steering wheel. I wasn’t going to let this happen. I was over Derek. I mean, I am over Derek. If I give him a chance he will just ruin it again with all his crazy little secrets. But he’s so cute. He’s smart and he works hard and he makes me laugh.

I inhale a deep breath and let it out in a huff. “Fine,” I say. “But you’re paying.”

Derek takes us to the Fisherman’s Warf, a two-point-five star restaurant right on the bay. Half the tables are outside on a dock that goes out over the water. The waitresses dress like street walkers but the food is delicious. I like how Derek didn’t ask if I was cool with it—he just took us here. Most guys ask where I want to go and when I say I don’t care, they say they don’t care and then we end up driving all over town being indecisive until the only place that’s still open is the drive thru at Jack-in-the-box.

Our hostess is hot and our waitress is even hotter, and I try not to sneak glances as we walk to our table and listen to the speech about which fish are on special tonight, because if my suspicions are true and Derek is checking her out then my ego will be flattened to the floor and I’ll feel miserable, fat and ugly for the rest of the night. So even though I keep my head down while Miss Boobs takes our orders, I still go ahead and imagine that Derek’s checking her out anyway, because that’s what guys do. They’re programmed at birth to stare at gorgeous women and boobs. Because after all, what guy doesn’t think that his mom is the best and boobs are awesome?

“A cheeseburger?” Derek lifts an eyebrow.

“Yeah, why, what did you order?”

“You were sitting right here, you didn’t hear me?”

“Guess not.” I stare out over the water, seeing a tiny little sail boat in the distance. I wonder what the man on that boat is thinking right now, being surrounded by nothing but water and the sparkling lights of Lawson on the shore. I wonder if he’s ever had nightmares that some kind of man-eating monster squid lives under the water and how it could jump up at any second and swallow him whole. I jump a little, when I realize that our table is just three feet and one rope fence away from the water.

“I wish things weren’t hella weird,” Derek says, stirring sugar into his tea. “I wish we could just go back to acting like we used to.” He pulls a beanie from his back pocket and tugs it over his head. He looks like a dufus, kind of. But it’s also really hot. I never knew I had a thing for long-haired ex-criminals.

Our waitress and her boobs bring us a basket of hot fluffy rolls that are glazed with a layer of butter on top. I grab one and tear off a piece and shove it in my mouth. I don’t groan in pleasure at how delicious it is, but I want to. Derek lifts his eyebrows like I’m supposed to say something, and then I realize I never answered his passive aggressive form of a question about going back to the way things were.

“I wish things would go back to normal, too.”

And at the outer edge of my subconscious, I know I’m being a grade A mo

ron by thinking all of this, but I don’t even care because these are the things I think about and it hurts me deep down, rational or not.

I take another bite of my roll and it’s still delicious even though I’m a little bit upset. A lock of Derek’s bangs fall from his pony tail and he tucks it behind his ear. I realize in this moment that Derek is not like any other guy in Lawson High School.

Derek doesn’t make excuses for who he is or what he thinks. He dresses the way he wants to and he lets his hair get long and he pulls it back like a girl but he doesn’t care. He kissed me without warning on his squeaky futon and he didn’t apologize for it. He took me to Fisherman’s Warf without asking where I wanted to go, and now he’s calling me out on acting hella weird, despite the fact that when you call out a girl on her emotions, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that the rest of your night will be ruined.

He peers at me over the dimly lit table. “What are you thinking about?”

Derek isn’t like any of the guys I know from school. He doesn’t deserve some bullshit answer. “I was just wondering if you were thinking that the waitress is hot and if that made you feel shitty for being here with me, who is like, a one compared to Miss Surgically Enhanced Boobs, who is totally a ten.”

He laughs. His elbows are on the table and he laces his fingers together under his chin. “She’s hot in a showering-and-you-need-something-to-think-about kind of way. But since you’re wondering, I wasn’t thinking that.”

Our waitress pops out of nowhere, balancing a tray of our food on her shoulder. She calls Derek Honey and me Sweetie as she sets down our food and asks if we need anything else. Derek and I stare at each other as she walks away, both wondering if she had heard us talking. “There’s no way she heard that,” Derek says, answering my unasked question.

I cut my cheeseburger in half, a practice Derek seems to think is blasphemous, but I tell him I don’t care because the only way you can eat one of the Fisherman’s bacon avocado cheeseburgers is to cut the thing in half, otherwise everything slides out the end when you take a bite.

Derek starts yapping about the play and it kills the pretend first date mood I’m in. For once, I just want to hang out with him without discussing the play or working on the play or doing anything to do with the play. And maybe there’s something in the water, or my burger has mad cow disease or something, because suddenly I’m saying, “Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?”

He bites the body of a shrimp off, holding the tail between his fingers. With his pinky finger he pushes that strand of hair behind his ear again. “I was thinking that I was going to grab the check when our hot waitress brings it, and that if you tried to pay for your food instead of letting me get it then I’d be crushed.”

“Why would saving money crush you?”

“Maybe emasculate is a better word.”

“So you’re one of those guys who think they have to be manly and the woman is just housewife material who needs to be sheltered and taken care of because she’s so fragile?”

He takes another bite of shrimp. With his mouth full of food, (which for some reason I find sexy) he says, “Never said that.”