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This isn’t you.
Barb was right. The thrill of it was that Barb was right, and Nancy smiled at the thought of becoming someone different—transforming into someone older but somehow new. She wasn’t really walking away from anything important. She climbed the stairs two at a time, thinking of Steve’s pretty face while reassuring herself she had still studied for her Chemistry test. She still felt confident she had aced it.
She rounded the corner, stepping into Steve’s room. And her heart beat faster at the realization that she had just entered Steve’s room, and his parents were gone, and her clothes were drenched. Her skin broke out in goosebumps. Mostly, though probably not entirely, because she was wet and freezing.
“Hey,” Steve said. He turned with a neatly folded bundle of dry clothes in his arms. His lips slanted in a half-smile, and he actually looked a little startled to see her, like some part of him hadn’t believed she would come upstairs.
“Hey.” Nancy repeated the greeting quietly. The old her, Barb’s friend Nancy, would have disliked the mimicry, would have charged headlong into conversation, spouting off something interesting or clever. A random factoid from a magazine or a funny anecdote her favorite teacher had shared in class.
She would have been impatient to get the conversation rolling. The most important thing to her would have been learning something new from Steve or about Steve. Or teaching Steve something new, letting him learn something about her.
But, as Steve approached her, all she cared to focus on was the snug fit of his stylish jeans. His veiny forearms bared by his rolled-up sleeves. His shoulders only partway drawn back, like he wanted to appear proud, confident, but he wasn’t quite succeeding.
Nancy liked that she could intimidate him. She enjoyed figuring that out more than anything else he could have told her.
“Here, I got you some dry stuff.” Steve extended his arms, holding the clothes out for her to take them. “Uh, it’s actually, like, my stuff. So, it’s probably too big or whatever, but it’s, like, you know… dry.”
He sounded like a complete moron.
Nancy smiled wide.