The Perfect Couple

18

"unless you're Betsy Ross and are about to demonstrate how you made the first flag, would you kindly take your seat, Miss Black? As for you, Mr Rogers, we're supposed to be studying American history here, not anatomy."

Almost everybody have been the victim of Mrs Cole's biting wit at one time or another and you wouldn't think they'd encourage her, but they we always did. As the hoots and hollers rang out I felt myself turn crimson. I would have crawled to my desk on my hands and knees if I hadn't paid that Mrs Cole would make the situation worse by asking me if I've lost something.

What's I was in my seats and the class had quieted down, I felt a little better. I could live with my own humiliation if I had to. But Alan wasn't used to anything but admiration and applause. He'd never forgive me for putting him in such a spot. Why don't you leave me alone? I don't even know you, I could hear him be rating me if ever I had the nerve to speak to him again.

I slunk around the school the rest of the day, hoping he wouldn't notice me, hoping no one would notice me. There were worse things than being invisible, as I told him when we walked home that afternoon. "Alan hates me now. I'm responsible for him being humiliated and he will always think of that and feel sick, whenever he sees me. Which I hope will be never. I'm going to ask my folks tonight to send me to a private school."

"You know they won't and don't be such a defeatist," Kim lectured me, using one of the terms I was sure she learnt from her father's psychology books. "For one thing Mrs Cole would have made that remark if Alan hadn't been admiring your anatomy. So you've reached your first goal. He's noticed you as an attractive girl."

"Well, yes," I had to agree. "But, still, everything's ruined between us, unless," I broke off as a saving thought occurred to me. "Unless I apologise to him," I finished. "Yes, that's what I'll do!"

"Don't you dare," Kim said. "You'll really blow it if you do anything like that. Don't you see, that would only confirm his feelings of humiliation? The thing to do is to turn the whole episode into a joke. Life about it and make him laugh. That's the only way he'll get over his embarrassment."

Kim do a lot about boys, but this time I thought she was out in left Field without a mitt. "Oh, sure, I just go up to him and say, haha wasn't that funny the way everybody goes hysterical when Mrs cole call me Betsy Ross and accused you of studying my anatomy in history class? Couldn't you just die laughing?"

Kim gave me a hard stare. "I'm glad you have that out of your system. Now maybe we can get serious and map out of scenario that will turn this thing around. We can talk it over when we get home. I have to get out of the shoes before I can think."

I couldn't help being glad that Kim's heals bothered her feet a little bit, too. I've been afraid I'd ruined my arches by wearing sneakers all time. "We'd better go to your place," I said. "Mom is roughing out her column today."

"Sure. We'll go to my place." Kim snapped at the suggestion like a hungry trout going for a fly. The only time my mother is temperamental is when she's doing the first draft of her column, at which time you think she was writing the Great American Novel. Kim's mother rehearsing Macbeth was a trip to Disneyland in comparison. Popping open a can of soda in my house was likely to cause forth something like, "if you have to rent the place would you please do it some other time?"