The Perfect Couple

14

We went down to the kitchen and I heated up a frozen pizza in the microwave. October is one of the nicest months in the San Francisco Bay area so we took our lunch out on the patio and soaked up some rays while we ate and talked.

"What's Tom doing this weekend?" I asked.

"He's sitting in on a gig with his dad," she told me. "the Eight Steps in San Francisco. They call it that because it's eight steps below street level."

Kim had been going with Tom Caplan since shortly after school started. He lived in another neighborhood and she hadn't known him till she joined the music club at the beginning of the term. She'd joined mostly because she wanted to belong to a club, not because she was so interested in music. If there'd been a fashion club she would have been the president of it. Once she'd met Tom though, she really did begin to enjoy music.

Pretty soon all she was talking about was Tom Caplan. "He plays the trumpet. His father is a jazz musician a pro. Isn't that exciting?"

"Your fathers a doctor. He saves lives," I'd reminded her.

"Oh, sure, but" she waved a hand and I noticed she was wearing a purplish-black nail polish. "You know something else about Tom? He's not interested in how I look, Kelly! I don't think he even knows I'm a blonde. He likes to talk to me not at me, but to me!"

I'd thought that Tom, the music maker, would soon go the way of Dean, the jock and Brian, the brain. But it turned out that Tom really was different. He was a slender, nice-looking guy with mild brown eyes behind big owlish glasses. His light brown hair was long and straggly and he didn't seem to care or even know what he was wearing. He treated Kim like she was a real person and not a doll made for boys to admire.

I could see where that appealed to her. She was smart and ambitious and already interested in some kind of fashion career. I was beginning to think Tom might last the whole fall term maybe the whole year, even.

Kim sighed now. "Sometimes I can't help being jealous of Tom's music. The way he half-closes his eyes when he plays his trumpet, you just know he's in another world."

"I'll probably be jealous of Alan's football," I responded.

It was so much fun to talk, now that I was in love, too, that we could hardly break off to do our homework. Finally we had to, though. She went home and I went up to my room where I chewed on a pencil for about five minutes before I could even remember what the assignments were.