Summer 1985
Several times during the week of camp meetings Nick had managed to get next to one Danielle Eversole, call me Danni, and so far found out she’s quite the runner and got her tan out on the softball field, prompting images of a strawberry blond ponytail flowing out the hole of a maroon cap (or would it be gray?). Pale blue eyes peering out from the shadow of the bill, leaving her braces to glimmer in the sun. She goes to the one protestant church school in town, the first he’d heard of someone going there without having been expelled from somewhere first.
“So what’s your middle name?” He was running dry already.
“Jeanne.”
He smiles, “that’s pretty.”
“Sure it is,” as she rolls her eyes and gives him an expectant look.
Her long, able pins are neatly wrapped in a safe ankle-length denim skirt, not even a slit, at some point she hints he’d have to come to a game to see any leg. No makeup, well, maybe some of the eyelash stuff.
Nick’s best untested moves are no match. Attempting to hold her hand yields a twisted thumb. The arm across the back of the pew trick eventually buys a slightly bruised rib, he fails to notice she’s forcing a poker face the entire time.
Danni finds a pen in her little tweed purse and starts to draw on the back of a handout, using a hymnal for surface instead of a Bible naturally, figure studies, athletes in action. He whispers “you’re good” at one point and and her lightning elbow finds that same rib, but at least this time showing some grin. She stretches her neck each way then turns to put down the hymnal. He squeezes her knee as if by looking the other way she somehow wouldn’t find out.
Caught off guard by a tingle she’d never known before, the decisive hook jab to his thigh prompts several folks to look their way. For Nick the overwhelming need to act like nothing happened somehow masks the silent scream from tissues that he didn’t even know he had until this moment. He sweats beads, ears red as a baboon's ass, and during the response prayer he doesn’t even notice as she slips outside to walk around with the other girls.
On the way home Nick stretched out on the back seat of the wagon since Tim had wiggled out of this, as he usually did, and after mostly evading Irene’s queries about the young lady he’d sat with, he just felt lighter. The summer had started out rainy and pensive, then turned cold around the time a big evangelistic event came to the fairgrounds. Nick ended up walking around with some of the youth gang of their church then disapproved of their smoking, which in turn earned their disapproval at his moral stance. And so, you can’t win.
Except, tonight definitely felt like a win, and he grinned at a knotted thigh muscle as a memento.