Offside

“No,” I replied. “I never go in there. I have a laptop in my room. Last door down the hall.”

I took her into my room and tried not to dance from foot to foot as she looked over everything in it. She ran her fingers along the edges of the CDs, pulled one out, and then carefully pushed it back to where it was before as I let out a sigh of relief.

“I won't mess anything up,” she said with a wry smile.

I tried to laugh.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just…I've never had anyone in here before.”

“No one?”

“Not outside my family, no.”

She gave me a strange look and then went back to her surveillance.

“You have a lot of trophies,” she said. The tip of her finger traced my name on an MVP award from freshman year. She looked around for another minute and then sat down on the edge of my couch. “So where's the computer?”

I grabbed the laptop from its shelf in the closet and pulled out a small, folding table from beside the couch. I set the laptop on it, and we started our research again at top internet speed. After a couple hours, Nicole said she was hungry.

“Should we go back to your place?” I asked.

“Don't you have food?” she teased.

“Um…some,” I said. “Considering what you tend to make, I don't know if you would really consider it food or not.”

I was right. She was pretty appalled at what we had in the fridge.

“Thomas, this is…disgusting,” she said as she eyed some of the green items on the bottom shelf.

No, they hadn't been green when they went in there.

“Um…yeah,” I agreed. I couldn't really argue with her. “I usually eat something from the freezer or the pantry.”

“I can see why.” She looked up at me from her crouched position on the kitchen floor and raised her eyebrows. “Bring me a trashcan.”

I hauled the kitchen trashcan out from under the sink and over to the fridge.

“I can’t believe you keep your locker looking like something out of Better Homes and Gardens, but your fridge looks like it’s out of an episode of Clean House.”

“I hardly ever look in the fridge,” I said with a shrug. I took another handful of something from Nicole and tossed it in the bin. It may or may not have once been a mesh bag of peaches. “I usually eat stuff out of a box from the freezer. I don’t really know how to cook.”

“I get the idea you never look past the top shelf,” she said as she pointed to the neatly lined bottles of Gatorade. There were six different flavors, arranged in rainbow order.

Yeah, rainbow order.

“Pretty much,” I replied.

“Okay,” Nicole said, “I’m going to need bleach for the rest of this.”

While Nicole washed down the shelves of the now nearly empty refrigerator, I hauled the trash to the cans outside. She ended up finding something she called “reasonably edible” in the pantry and cooked it up for lunch while I put plates and forks on the table. We spent the rest of the afternoon on our project and didn’t even realize how late it was until Nicole’s phone rang.

“Um…hi,” she said as glanced over to me. I figured it was

Greg and hoped she wasn’t in trouble or anything for being over at my place. She turned around and talked kind of quietly. “Yeah, I can…but you have to give me about an hour…okay, a half hour…I’m not even home right now…It doesn’t matter…”

I tried not to listen, but it was kind of hard. I figured out pretty quickly it wasn’t her dad, but I had no idea who it might have been. She gathered up some of the papers we had on the table as she said “uh-huh” into the phone a few more times. Finally, she bit down on her lip and looked up and me.

“I’ll be there soon, okay?” She ended the call and shoved the phone into the pocket of her jeans. “I gotta go.”