Have I got me the coach’s daughter for a girlfriend? I’m trapped in a young adult novel. A girls’ novel, so it’s all about the love story instead of the death squads coming to get me.

I already had a triangle with Xena and Pat. What does Nicki make it? A square? No, this is solid geometry now: a tetrahedron.

But at school the strangest thing happened. Nicki made no effort to follow him in. She just waved at him, and it was Lieder who explained, “Got to get her all signed in.”

And when Nicki showed up in his first period class partway through—was that arranged on purpose? To have some of the same schedule as him?—she gave no sign that she recognized him. One of the guys near Danny whispered, “Hubba hubba,” and for the first time Danny realized that Nicki, now that she wasn’t sick-looking, was quite attractive. Not that he had thought she was ugly, but he hadn’t realized that she was attractive in general, and not just a nice-seeming person to him in particular. Her shape was high-school-girl slender, but with unmissable breasts, though she wasn’t Laurette—there was no cleavage showing. How did I not notice this before? Even when she was kissing me and those breasts were pressed up against me, how did I not notice how they give her a pretty nearly perfect shape?

Nicki turned toward the hubba-hubba guy and gave him the shy smile. What a tease, she can turn it on and off whenever she wants. The come-hither, I’m-so-shy smile that she must have practiced in front of the mirror.

Has she been playing me?

She spent the whole rest of the period not playing him. Unless ignoring him was the game. She certainly had him thinking about her most of the period. She had spent the morning on the porch in her nightgown and lacy robe watching him sweat, she had come into the bathroom while he was naked in the shower and taken away his clothes, she had come into his house and washed his dishes and then kissed him long and with her body pressed to his and now, in this class, she didn’t notice he existed?

Two can play at this game, he thought.

But a moment later he realized, no they can’t. Girls can play it on guys, but guys can’t play it on girls. At least I can’t play it, because I keep glancing at her and she never looks at me, it’s like I had gone through a gate and was now watching invisibly through a porthole in spacetime, and why would I do that? Because I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s playing me and it works, I’m just a fish dancing on the line.