Catching His Eye

“Hey!” the runner said as he got to her side.

Oh, God.

“Emily! I didn’t know you ran.”

She smiled at Scott, who looked like he should have been on a box of Wheaties with his perfect chest and windswept hair. She thought about her own hair, elegantly swathed in a decrepit sweatband, with just a few insouciant tendrils plastered against her cheek. About the shirt she had so carefully chosen this morning, emblazoned with Bart Simpson shouting “Don’t Have a Cow!”

“Hey, Scott,” Hope said, looking far too pretty.

“Hope? Oh, man, this is old home week. You’re still here, too?”

“I ask myself why every morning, but yes, I’m still here.

He laughed as he slowed down to meet Emily’s pace, and try as she might she couldn’t improve it. It was probably better to go slow than to actually have a heart attack at the next quarter-mile. On the other hand…

“So what about that cup of coffee we talked about the other day?” he asked.

She nodded, not sure if she could continue to jog and speak at the same time.

“Great. How about tomorrow. You don’t work on Sunday, do you?”

She shook her head this time.

“I’ll have to,” he said, “but I can take a break around four if that works for you.”

Again she nodded. This time throwing in a smile.

“Great. I’ll call you. You’re in the book?”

More nodding.

“Okay, then.” He turned to Hope. “Great seeing you again.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice as even as his. “Nice to have you back.”

“Have a good run,” he said, then he put on some speed, leaving her and Hope in the dust.

At least he gave Emily something terrific to look at as he raced away. She kept moving her legs, swinging her arms, all the while looking for an escape plan. At the next curve in the track, she headed for the girls’ locker room, and she didn’t stop until she was safely inside.

She made her way to a bench and collapsed, her lungs burning like fire, her legs like Jell-O, her face so hot she could fry an egg on her forehead.

The door slammed and Hope found her still gasping for breath.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “What are the odds? But hey, he asked you out. That’s something. That’s incredible.”

Emily looked up into Hope’s beautiful, sweatfree face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Tomorrow. I heard him ask you. And you said yes.”

“For the record, I said nothing. There’s no way I’m going to coffee with him tomorrow.”

Hope sat down on the other side of the bench. “Emily—”

“Don’t start. Don’t quibble. Just know that I quit. Right here, right now. It was a stupid idea.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. But what I don’t understand is why you want to quit.”

“You were right there!”

“Where?”

“Don’t be dense, Hope. He thinks I’m his buddy from English lit. He’ll never see me any other way.”

“You don’t know that.”

Emily gave her a look, but she didn’t argue. In fact, all her arguments ended right then. Except…

“It’s completely unacceptable. You’re going to see him if I have to drag you to the coffee shop by your hair.”

“You and what army?”

“Lily, Sam, Zoey, Julia—”

“Sam and Zoey aren’t even in town.”

“They’ll fly in for the occasion.”

Emily let go a troubled sigh. She’d had such dreams about meeting Scott. How she’d look, her hair, her nails. How cool she’d be, sophisticated enough to sit next to Dorothy at the Algonquin. She’d imagined his reaction dozens of times. His eyes widening, his jaw slackening. His inability to string three words together. It was supposed to have been heaven. A meeting so gorgeous songs would be written about it.

Instead, she’d sweated and gasped, panted like a dog. She could have gotten over the incident in the school hallway. But now she was two strikes down. She wasn’t anxious to go up to bat again.

“Are you listening to me?” Hope asked.

Not only had Emily not been listening, she hadn’t even seen Hope get up and take her shirt off. Her dark hair was a mess, but it still managed to look sexy and sleek. Hope, who considered her looks average, who thought that she was too short and her nose too big, wasn’t any of those things. She was beautiful. Everyone saw it but her.

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” Emily asked, surprised that she’d said it aloud.

“What?”

“Think of ourselves in the worst possible light.” Hope grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on, then came back to the bench. “I don’t know. We do, though, don’t we?”

“All the time. It’s never about how happy we are with our eyes, but how miserable we are with our nose.”

Hope nodded. “Men don’t do that.”