Dallas (Time for Tammy #1) Read online

  Time for Tammy Part 1: Dallas

  by Kit Sergeant

  Copyright © Kit Sergeant, 2016

  Published by Thompson Belle Press

  Cover Design by Elena Karoumpali, courtesy of 99designs.com

  Although this is a work of fiction, many of the characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are based off the author's real-life experience. Most names and some identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals featured.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  To contact the author: [email protected]

  Dedicated to the real-life people who inspired the characters in this book,

  But especially to JMP: thanks for helping me survive E-C!

  Sung to the tune of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer:

  Dallas the long-faced horse

  Had a very stupid roommate

  And if you ever met him,

  You might even say an idiot

  All of the other doormmates

  Used to laugh and call them names

  They never let poor Dallas

  Join in any volleyball games!

  Then one drunken Christmas Eve,

  Tammy came to say:

  “Dallas with your face so long,

  You should get your own theme song”

  That’s when Tammy realized,

  As Dallas yelled, “Sroot the Free!”

  Dallas the long faced horse,

  He’s a drunken S.O.B.

  By an author wishing to remain anonymous—but really, who is she kidding?

  Prologue

  I intended to avoid him. Walking in from the parking lot to the restaurant, I reminded myself that my objective was the same as it had been the past four months: to sit as far away from him as I could.

  He was late, as usual. My anxiety grew as the chairs around me were filled one by one by my classmates. Finally, the only seat left was the one beside me. Apparently my Psycho Guardian Angel was up to his (her?) old tricks.

  My face heated up when Dallas entered. He scanned the table from the hostess stand, his eyes settling on the lone empty chair and then on me. As his shoulders angled toward his ears, I could almost hear him let out a giant breath. He kept his eyes on the carpet while he walked over and sat down, all without a word or a glance in my direction.

  Due to my self-imposed restraining order, I hadn’t been that close to him in years. But I’m much more mature now, I told myself. I had a boyfriend of my very own, and didn’t need to stalk boys anymore. Maybe I should tell him that. I surreptitiously glanced over at him. He sat stony-faced, his oversized J.crew button-down puffing out from his bony frame. Maybe not.

  It was the end of the first term of my senior year of college. Despite ending up in the same class, Dallas and I had managed to spend an entire semester without actually acknowledging each other’s existence. If he participated in a class discussion, I would stay silent, and vice-versa. I was extra conscientious of getting to class early, as Dallas was always late, and I would wait until after he’d left the room to pack up my stuff.

  But now my former-crush-turned-archnemesis for the bulk of my college career was sitting beside me as we both ordered the orange chicken. Throughout lunch, as during class, Dallas and I sat in a mutual silence—at least toward each other. I made polite conversation with Helene, who sat across from me, and he exchanged monosyllabic comments with the girl on his other side.

  And then came fortune cookie time: the time that had for thousands of years united ex-lovers and ex-friends in cracking open stale cookies and reading bits of nonsense. I looked down at his hands as he split his open, his giant knuckles and long fingers fumbling with the tiny slip of paper. He bumped my arm in the process and I gave that notorious button-down a shy smile, avoiding his eyes.

  “Who do you think makes a living writing such trite?” he asked, turning toward me.

  After three years of silence, that was his opening line? I was a block of ice, my arms frozen by my side as the waitress whisked away my abandoned plate.

  “The sentence structure is all wrong,” Dallas continued.

  I unlocked my body to open my cookie, pretending that my fingers, despite his scrutiny of them, were defter than his. I crumbled the wafer on the tablecloth in front of me.“You will have a successful career,” I scoffed.

  He reached over to pluck the fortune from between my fingers. I folded my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking. I hated that Dallas could still have that effect on me.

  “You could have a successful career writing fortune cookies!” Dallas exclaimed.

  I shook my head, still avoiding looking at him.

  “Come on, Tammy, you have such an, er... creative mind.”

  I shrugged again. Why was Dallas acting so casual? As if nothing had ever happened.

  “I read your columns, you know,” he continued.

  “Thanks,” I replied, for lack of anything better to say. He reads them?

  “They’re really good. Sometimes I wonder how you come up with some of that stuff, but you know, you’re…you.” The way he said it, I think he might have been referencing the gift, the one I gave him three years ago. Not the crab. The one that caused the end of our friendship.

  “I’m going to be a science writer,” I told him, trying to divert the conversation from going down that road. “A successful one.”

  “Yeah. I’m going to write, too.” He seemed grateful for the change in conversation. “I’m going to be a travel writer.”

  I couldn’t resist looking up as he handed my fortune back to me. His cerulean eyes looked kind; I hadn’t seen those eyes look anything but icy for years. He was smiling at me, actually smiling.

  I gave him another shy half-smile in return. “Well…good luck.” I wanted to tell him more, tell him I was sorry—again—but I didn’t. I’d already said it enough. And, for the first time, I actually felt as though he had, maybe, forgiven me.

  “You too, Tammy.”

  He got up to leave, nodding at our classmates as he sauntered out the door, his ill-fitting striped shirt fanning out behind him as he walked away.

  My professor Helene stared at me as as I tucked the fortune into my purse. I met her eyes and shrugged. All around me, people were shaking hands and exchanging phone numbers. I quietly ducked out of the restaurant.

  As I started my car and pulled out of the parking lot, a strange feeling took over me. It felt like Dallas and I had possibly achieved peace, but instead of being relieved, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. When I arrived at my dorm room, I did what any girl in the midst of her senior year in college would do if she felt uneasy at four o’clock in the afternoon: I cracked open a beer.

  I was content to spurn Dallas forever. But, me being me, couldn’t stand the thought that someone would have ill feelings regarding me. If I was having an optimistic day, I’d picture him thinking of me as a girl he used to be friends with. On a great day, a girl he had long ago defended when he helped put her main adversary’s bike on the roof, but then sort of had a “falling out” with. And on a bad day, well, who ever knew what went through that boy’s mind?

  But I guess he tried to make things somewhat right. Forgive and forget perhaps. Maybe he was too dense to know something had gone so wrong between us that we were not supposed to speak to each other in
the first place, let alone make casual conversation about fortune cookies and our future career choices. I gave up trying to figure him out a long time ago.

  “So you actually spoke to him?” Jane barged into my room a few minutes later. If she was startled to see me sitting on the foam couch in my dorm room with three discarded beers on the floor at 5 PM, she didn’t say anything.

  “Yep,” I said, stifling a burp.

  “Did he say anything that made any sense?”

  For quite possibly the hundredth time in two hours, I reflected on the lunch conversation between Dallas and I. “Not really. But at least he talked to me.”

  “I guess.” Jane was never Dallas’s biggest fan, which was, as I had eventually begun to suspect, in stark contrast to his feelings for her.

  “What a Blockhead,” she said, opening the mini-fridge and pulling out a beer.

  An hour later Jane was as drunk as me, and we were laughing hysterically as we recalled all of the Blockheads of the past.

  “Remember Sonofabitch and his cowboy boots?” she asked.

  “And Jungle Funk and the prostitutes?”

  She sat up. “I forgot about him. I still see him sometimes. My friend interviewed him for her film class. Do you know what he said his favorite movie was?”

  “What?”

  “Taxi Driver.”

  I gave her a blank look.

  “The one with Jodie Foster as a child prostitute?”

  “No. He didn’t,” I said as her meaning finally got through.

  “He did,” she exclaimed gleefully.

  I shook my head again. Only I could have almost gone out on a date with a guy that hires ‘girls-of-the-night,’ in Cuba and then locks them in the trunk of a taxi. Only I could have found out about that an hour before our date. I cringed as I remembered him knocking at the door, expecting to find me dolled up and ready to go. Instead, I was hiding under the covers, willing him to go away. Just another tick on the Blockhead List.

  THREE YEARS EARLIER

  Chapter 1: The Not-So-Fun Olympics

  The “Fun Olympics ‘97” weren’t turning out to be very fun after all. Billed as a freshmen-meet-and-greet festivity, one of many in the first few days of college, they were fundamentally failing because a) I wasn’t meeting anyone and b) I barely had anyone I knew to greet.

  We were supposed to be cheering on our complex, Alpha, which I learned had already been nicknamed “Alpha Lame.” I stood in a group of ten or so of my dormmates, feeling the early August Florida sun on my back, while sweat fell off my forehead into my eyes like tears dripping in reverse. I was just about to suggest to my roommates Linda and LaVerne that we go back to our room when a girl with a long tie-dyed dress and cornrows approached us.

  “Do any of you want to be in the 3-legged race? We need another pair of legs.” She gazed at our group dismissively, probably assuming that none of us would want to participate.

  Linda shook her head vehemently as LaVerne said, “No way.”

  Cornrows looked over at me. Half of me wanted to say no, but the other half didn’t want to be labeled as a loser sideliner my first day of college.

  “Sure. What do I have to do?”

  “Come with me.” She led me over where another dorm in our complex was gathered. “You’re going to be tied to Eric,” she said, gesturing to the back of a tall guy with a mop of unruly hair.

  Eric turned around and held his hand out to me. He wore mirrored sunglasses that wrapped around his face in the manner of a primordial mosquito, but the part of his face that was visible under the wrap-arounds was chiseled and sprinkled with freckles.

  I shook his hand limply. “Tammy.”

  “Are you ready for this?”

  I straightened the leg of my denim shorts, grateful that I had shaved them that morning as Eric was wearing board shorts and there was likely going to be some shin-skin touching shin-skin. Going around half-naked was a necessity in Tampa, Florida, but it was going to take some getting used to. “I guess so.”

  “C’mon, it’s no big deal. The entire incoming class will be watching us the whole time, so if we fall on our asses, there goes our reputation for the rest of our college career.”

  I let out what I hoped would be a sexy giggle, but it sounded more like a loud snort as Cornrows came over with a bandana. “Stand together,” she commanded. I did what I was told, although it suddenly seemed like I had too much saliva inside my mouth and not enough on the outside. I licked my dry lips and tried to keep my legs still. The leg that Cornrows was currently tying to Eric’s became a ramen noodle.

  The whistle blew and we were off. I could barely force my legs to strut across the path as the one hundred-some students of Alpha complex cheered us on. Eric draped his arm over my shoulders to help coordinate our movement, which caused me to trip over a patch of grass and nearly fall over. Eric tightened his arm around me in response.

  I didn’t know which was sadder: the fact that it was my first day of college and having someone put his arm around me was the furthest I’d ever gone with a guy—did an arm-around count as a ‘base’? Or the fact that these thoughts crowding my head lead to me stumble, again. Even Eric couldn’t right me this time and we ended up falling in the dirt. Not on our asses, as Eric had joked, but it was just as well. The jocks from Delta complex won, of course, but even the hippies from Kappa beat us. Eric was a good sport about it, though. After Cornrows untied our bandana, he helped me off of the ground and then told me, “See you around, Tammy.”

  I guess that meant the Fun Olympics weren’t so bad after all. Not only did I finally meet someone new, but I had found my first college crush to boot.

  That night our complex held a dance in yet another attempt to get freshmen to mingle. My one roommate was going out with her parents, and I wasn’t sure where the other one had gone, so I got dressed in my room alone. All of the rooms Eckhart College—the small liberal arts school I had chosen for its marine biology program—were essentially the same: beige cinderblock squares. They were only slightly larger than what you find on the university campus my twin sister was attending but at least the new maroon carpeting and wooden furniture kept them from feeling too mental hospital-ish. The dorms themselves were glass-fronted, two-floored buildings. Each floor’s hallways wrapped around nine rooms. My room was the middle of one hallway, conveniently across from the centrally-located bathroom.

  I jumped down from my top bunk, avoiding the blue flowered quilt spread carefully on Linda’s bed directly below mine. I hesitated and then pulled my fish-printed bedspread over my purple sheets so that my bed appeared somewhat neat. I walked to the stereo system, ducking beneath LaVerne’s yellow-flowered duvet cover. The stereo, along with other necessities—the fridge, microwave, and TV—were located under LaVerne’s vaulted bunk. I picked up a couple of stray yellow throw pillows and placed them back on LaVerne’s bed before sliding my only CD—Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, because, let’s be honest, it’s really the only CD worth having—into LaVerne’s sound system. I tried to psyche myself up. My old self—“Tamara” from Small Town Michigan—would have forgone the party for intellectual conversation over coffee and pie, much to the chagrin of my sister Corrie. But my wanna-be new personality was forcing “Tammy” to take stock of her closet. I had left all of my plaid shirts and cardigans at home and spent the summer working in my dad’s office in order to afford sundresses and tank-tops. The party was called “Alpha Tropics,” but I didn’t really have any Hawaiian shirts or dresses, so I put on a pair of jean shorts and a knitted tank-top. I went over to my mirror and frowned. The shorts were acceptable, but my arms looked flabby and pale. I suppose answering phones and filing papers weren’t exactly the key to a good tan. I settled on inserting a white T-shirt underneath the tank-top.

  I chose to put my make-up on in my room rather than the all-together-too-bright lights of the bathroom as those fluorescents could be a harsh blow to the ego. Make-up applied, I moved on to my hair, the feature that had always
been the bane of my existence. Corrie and I were fraternal twins—she was blessed with my mother’s straight, shiny light brown hair that naturally took on blonde highlights in the summer. I must have gotten hair from someone on my dad’s side: dark brown and mostly curly, although there were a few pieces, notably by my ears, that refused to do anything but hang limp. I tackled them now with a curling iron. The bottom of my shoulder-length hair responded nicely, but the humidity was causing the top of it to bloat outward. The newly curled tresses were landing every which way no matter how many times I tried to smooth them down. I thought about putting my hair up, but wearing a ponytail for too long caused me to get migraines. I guess having ‘Big Hair,’ is just another thing I’ll have to get used to. I switched off the curling iron and sat on my bed, gazing around the room.

  I was lucky (unlucky?) to have a triple dorm room, which—I found out later—was only slightly wider than a double, and not half-again as big the way you’d think it would be to accommodate three people. My roommates were both out. I had spoken to them briefly over the summer as we planned on what each would contribute to the room. LaVerne had called even before the letter with my dorm information arrived. We didn’t exchange the niceties you would think future roommates and best friends would: what’s your hometown like, how big was your graduating class, which friends are you most afraid to leave, etc.

  Instead, LaVerne went on to more or less assign me to bring the TV while she would supply the fridge and stereo, and then went on to say that Linda would bring the VCR.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Linda. Our other roommate.” And that was how she broke the news that there would a third girl sharing our room.

  A week later, I finally received the letter confirming that I indeed had two roommates: LaVerne Van Arden from New Haven, Connecticut and Linda Kingsley from St. Paul, Minnesota. Two weeks before I left for Florida, I finally worked up the courage to call Linda.