It Happened on Maple Street
Page 6
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“You were sitting with that girl in the blue sweater, right?”
She glanced off in the crowd. “Ann? Yeah.” Then she was looking straight at him again with those beautiful blue eyes. She had a grin on her face. And a half-full plastic beer cup in her right hand. Her left arm was folded across her chest, her free hand firmly clinched to her right arm about the elbow, as though hugging away the chill.
“I’m Tim.”
She nodded. “I’m Tara.”
“You from around here?”
“Huber Heights. How about you?”
“Eaton.”
“Where’s that?”
“Close to the Indiana border.”
“Is it in Ohio?”
He’d been asked before. “Yeah.”
“How long does it take you to get here?”
“Forty-five minutes.”
“You drive back and forth every day?”
“Yeah, or I catch a ride.”
“Wow. I thought my twenty minutes was far.”
“It’s not so bad.” But then, he’d only been at it for a few weeks.
“Is this your first year here?”
“Yeah, I graduated in May.”
“I did, too.”
She was his age. Good.
Tim didn’t want to leave her, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say, either.
“Well, I gotta go,” he said before things turned bad.
“Yeah, me, too. I’m freezing out here.” She didn’t move, though.
“Okay, well see you around.”
“Okay.”
He walked away, feeling as though he was caught in some time warp. Had that really happened? Had he actually just met the girl that he’d noticed in lab?
And that grin she’d given him—stuff like that didn’t happen. Especially not to him.
She was cute. Quiet. And she seemed so sweet. Not the type to play with a guy’s head, or jump from guy to guy. Tara was the type of young woman mothers approved of.