Free Tell by Carrie Secor Page A

be a math book?”
    Shane shouldered his backpack.  “What?”
    “Isn’t abacus that stuff in insulation that causes cancer?”
    “I’m leaving.”
     

 
     
     
     
    Six
     
    Melody had been sitting at the kitchen table for over an hour staring at her phone.  After her conversation with Susan, she was convinced that the time had come for her to ask Andy out on a date.  Susan was right; he was not going to be single forever.  But if this kept up, Melody was.  She just had to screw up the courage to pick up the phone and call him.  And then, of course, once that was accomplished, she would need to find some more courage in order to ask him out.  She knew it was very likely that she would hang up once he answered the phone, or chicken out and talk about something completely mundane.
    She took a deep breath.  This was it.  She was going to call him.  Melody was going to ask him out on a date.
    After a few more minutes, she reached out and picked up the phone.  Progress.
    Melody shook her head, suddenly completely disgusted with herself.  She found Andy in her contacts and lifted the phone to her ear as it started to ring.  There was no reason to be nervous, she told herself.
    It stopped ringing.  “Hello?”
    Melody fought the urge to throw up.  “It’s me,” she said.
    “Hey.  What’s up?”
    “Um… Um, I was just wondering what you were doing after the game on Friday night.”  She stood and started to pace the kitchen.  There was no way she could do this telephone conversation without moving.
    “I don’t really know yet.  Why?”
    “Well… well, I was just wondering if you, like, wanted to do something?”  Melody waited with bated breath.
    “What?  I couldn’t hear you.”
    She cleared her throat.  “I was wondering if you wanted to do something,” she repeated more loudly.  “You know, on Friday.  After the game.”
    “What did you have in mind?”
    Did he sound interested?  She could not tell.  “I don’t know, I was thinking maybe like… a movie or something.  And then maybe Eat’n Park?”
    “What’s playing?”
    What’s with all the questions? Melody was raging inwardly.  “I don’t know,” she admitted.  “I hadn’t looked yet.”
    “Oh.  Well, who all is going?”
    Her heart stopped.  She was asking him out on a date, and he did not even realize that it was a date yet.  She cleared her throat again.  “Well, no one, yet.  But I was thinking… I was thinking it could be just you and me.”
    There was a brief silence on the other end of the line.  “I don’t know,” he said slowly.  “Usually after games I just like to go home and relax, you know?  It’s like… it’s really tiring.”
    “Well, we wouldn’t have to do the movie thing,” Melody said, grasping at straws.  He was rejecting her request for a date, and she was not entirely sure he even knew what he was rejecting.  “Like, we could go to that party that Susan told me about.”  She internally kicked herself.
    Andy snorted.  “Oh, yeah.  A party at Susan’s sounds like a blast.”
    “No, it’s not her party,” Melody answered.  “It’s at Stacy Monroe’s.  It’s the post-game party that they do every week.”
    He was quiet.  “You mean, the party that all the football players and cheerleaders go to?”
    Now he definitely sounded interested.  She was sure of it.  “Yeah.”
    “I guess that could be fun.”
    Melody was elated.  “So you want to go?”
    “Yeah, I’ll go.”
    “Okay.  Okay, great!”  She was afraid she was going to drop the phone because her hands were shaking so much.
    “But how are we going to get there?  My mom won’t let me drive past eleven.”
     
    Cadie was sick and tired of limits.  She remembered limits vaguely from her trigonometry class last year, and she remembered how much she had hated them.  Cadie deathly hated Mrs. Johnson today, and she would probably hate her for the rest of the year.
    Math had never been her