Count On Me(95)

It was hard to put all of this together with only a half hour to work with, but somehow I did it. It might not be an exact duplication of the dance, especially since she won’t be appearing in the Cinderella dress and I’m in a suit instead of the ruined tuxedo, but it’s as close to perfection as possible.

The lights from that night are filling the room with stars. There’s a bottle of soda and soup from the deli, sitting on the table off to the left. It’s as close to her favorites as I could manage and I really hope that when she does show, she’s surprised by it. I’ve even got the tunes, though it’s definitely not the system they used for Homecoming. It’s a beat up old boom box that Coach had hidden in his office. Since it plays CD’s though, it’s everything I can possibly ask for.

Everything is ready. The only thing missing is her.

The door opens and I can hear Ms. Taylor’s voice coming through, the low tone telling me that Isabelle’s here and she’s on the other side of the door. After a few minutes, where I start to wonder if she’s ever going to make her way in, she finally steps inside. Her eyes are closed, but she’s walking toward me just the way I imagined her doing in my head.

There’s an excitement level in me, seeing her move that I’ve never known before and if I thought it couldn’t get any stronger, I’m wrong. As she opens her eyes, it feels like an explosion goes off in my chest at the sight of her, as she takes it all in.

“Umm…”

I actually expected her initial reaction to be something worse. When Ms. T agreed to help earlier, she explained, in excruciating detail, all of the ways that she pictured this going wrong. She warned me about Isabelle’s fear of surprises and that I needed to prepare myself for whatever the fallout might be. I’d taken it all in and prepared myself as much as possible, but in her typical way, she goes and does something I never prepared for at all.

“Belle, are you okay?”

She moves closer to me, her head moving up and down in a nod and it scares me. With the way she talked so easily in the hall earlier with Dillon, the last thing I want is for her to revert back to silence now, especially if I’m the reason why.

“What is this?”

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like Homecoming.”

“Then I guess you have your answer, don’t you?”

“Why?” she asks and I’m actually stumped by the question. Not because I don’t have an answer for her, because I do. I’m stumped that she’s even asking me at all. Does she really not get why I would want to do this for her?

“You don’t know?”

She shakes her head and I frown. With the way she looked at me in the hall, I thought she might have been on the same page as me. That she missed me as much as I did her and wanted to fix everything that I stupidly broke, but now I’m not so sure. For the second time in as many minutes, I’m scared I’m doing the wrong thing again.

Shit, I suck at this part. Explaining how I feel, why I do the things I do, what she means to me. I mean, she’s the one that dropped her feelings on me first, because I choked the last time we were like this. I can already see that I’m going to blow it before I’ve even started.

I can’t just leave her hanging. I’ve done that for far too long already. Even if I can’t get the words to come out right, I have to at least try. She’s standing here now, giving me a chance, despite all the crappy stuff in our history. I owe her the words, even if they’re not as perfect as I want them to be.

“In my life, I don’t have a whole lot of memories that end happily, but the ones that I do have and can easily pull up in my mind, Isabelle; they all have you in them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know, but I’m going to try and explain okay?”

“Okay.”

“The first real memory I have, is one of the first times I was old enough to remember being at your house. We must have been about three, maybe four. I came and sat down beside you while you were playing and it’s like, even then, you knew I wasn’t anything special because you just ignored the hell out of me.”

I stop, allowing myself to recall the moment as clearly as I can in my head and unable to control it, I feel the smile spreading across my face.

“It bugged me so much. I tried everything I could to get your attention and nothing worked. Then one day, you finally looked up, those big blue eyes of yours pointed right at me, an annoyed look on your face. I swear, it was like the best thing ever. I didn’t even care that I annoyed you. The only thing that mattered was—I finally got your attention.”