Free Pass/Fail (2012) by David Wellington Page B

opened the passenger side door of the station wagon and climbed inside. Too late he remembered that he was supposed to open her door for her. He jumped back into the driver’s seat and got the car moving.
    The township of Fulton wasn’t much more than the high school and a large residential neighborhood, but it had a few shops on the main highway, including a two screen movie theater. He pulled into the wide parking lot and then escorted Megan up to the box office to buy their tickets. Megan had chosen some kind of light romantic comedy—not Jake’s kind of thing, normally, but he wasn’t there for the entertainment value. He bought her some popcorn and then found them a pair of seats near the back of the theater. “I wasn’t sure if you would want to go eat, first,” he said.
    “I already had dinner. Didn’t you?”
    He hadn’t but he pretended he had. He couldn’t have even said why he lied about it—there was no clear reason—but for some reason he felt like he had to agree with everything she said or chose.
    Jake didn’t know why this was so hard. Clearly Megan liked him and wanted to be on this date. She’d never said a truly mean thing to him, or given him any kind of impression that he was in danger of scaring her off. Yet every moment he spent with her—as exciting as it might be, as warm and desirable—was an agony of torture.
    He was seventeen years old and he expected more of himself. He’d heard other boys his age talking about their dates—their conquests. He’d heard them discussing what they’d “gotten”, about how far various girls had “let them go”, often in graphic detail. He was smart enough to know that most of that had to be bragging, but he knew for a fact that most of the boys in his class went on dates all the time and that none of them had died of a heart attack in the process. Yet Jake had never so much as touched a girl’s hand before he pulled Megan out of the burning car, had never, really, even thought about sex as far as he could remember.
    Now it seemed like the only thing he could think about. He would have been better off, he imagined, focusing just on the tests. On passing the tests. Yet when Megan was near him, when he smelled her skin, when their arms brushed against each other, all that went away for a while.
    Maybe he was just a late bloomer, he thought. Maybe he was perfectly normal, and that his hormones just hadn’t been jumpstarted at age twelve like most boys, but that from now on he would be just like them. It was a comforting idea.
    In the darkened theater she took his hands and twined her fingers through her own, then let their hands rest on her thigh. After a few minutes Jake’s arm started to fall asleep but he knew he would never voluntarily move it from that position.
    The movie was pretty bad—a very slow story about a reporter who was only dating a millionaire to gather information for the story she was writing on his shady business dealings, only to find out that she really loved him after all. Jake couldn’t follow the plot very well, and after the first few minutes he didn’t try. Occasionally Megan would laugh and look over at him and he would smile back. Their eyes would meet for a very enjoyable second and then she would go back to watching the screen.
    He spent a lot of the movie studying the curve of her neck. He wondered if it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen or if it just felt that way.
    Eventually the movie ended and they got up to head back to the parking lot. Jake offered to drive her straight home but she said she wanted to walk a little. Of course he agreed. They walked along a covered sidewalk along a row of shops that were closed for the evening, talking about the movie—Jake, feeling almost comfortable for a change, took a chance and admitted he hadn’t seen much of it, that he was much more interested in the curving shape of her ear.
    She stopped and froze in place. He watched as a shiver went through her