Once When You Were Mine

Chapter Nine

                                     "But everything changes and my friends seem to scatter..."

                                                                                        - Don Henley

So now, all of a sudden, I was Nate's girlfriend. And I had none of the confidence one would think that would engender. It's just that I wasn't really sure how to act around Nate. I liked him, but there was none of that unselfconscious camaraderie that I enjoyed so much with Austin. Nonetheless, I continued to find hanging out with Nate, and his friends, to be a lot of fun.

After the Monty Python group outing, I had gained Nate's friends' approval. However, they really adopted me as one of their own when, to their surprise, I joined in a game of elevator tag at the mall, instead of acting like how they supposed a proper girlfriend would by rolling my eyes at their immaturity. I wasn't sure why it felt unusual to them - honestly, it was the 90s, not the 50s.

When Nate went skiing with his parents for the weekend, I was pleased when they included me in a pilgrimage to GameWorld. While there, Howie, Dave V., and I found a karaoke booth and tried in vain to convince Delhern and Brandon that recording "Ramblin' Man" would be a good idea. I ended up with a tape of the three of us singing front on an insistently twangy backup of "Lord, I was born a ramblin' man", complete with Howe's oblique references to Spinal Tap's lead guitarist during the guitar solo. At the end, you could hear Dave V. exclaim over the fading music, "Boy, that really sucked!"

Delhern and I were inordinately fond of Trivial Pursuit, much to everyone else's dismay. We were allowed to play on occasion, as long as Delhern and I weren't on the same team. Our games never lasted for very long as everyone else's attention invariably wandered and Delhern and I would finally have to relent and allow a movie (a favorite was Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey) to be popped into the VCR.

When it was found that Dave V., who aspired to be the next Steven Spielberg, was in possession of a video camera, we tried our hand at home movies. We filmed a scene with me driving Delhern's Volvo in circles around the cul-del-sac at the end of Dave V.'s block, and another scene featuring a mock battle whose participants took an elaborately long time to die. At one point, Dave was busy staging us, so Delhern wandered off near the birdfeeder with the camera. Seeing Delhern messing with the camera, Dave V. shouted, "Are you recording?" Delhern called a negative back to us. Clearly he had been recording though, as Dave's epic battle was interrupted by ten seconds of footage of the birdfeeder, with Delhern narrating sotto voce, "I like to watch birds eat." There was a pause followed by a loud "NO!"

When the movie Wayne's World came out, Delhern was so taken with it that he painted flames on his car to match the ones on the car in the movie. They looked really incongruous on a Volvo, but when Bohemian Rhapsody came on the car radio, being able to headbang in a car with painted flames on it was all the more sweet.

Not only did I have fun with Nate and his friends, I felt that increasingly, his friends were becoming mine.

* * *

Not all my friendships were going so well. As the weeks went by, I ended up talking to Austin less and less. I still saw him at school, but when I called him, he talked in a frustratingly vague manner, and always hung up as soon as he could manage. When I tried to tell him some of the things I did with Delhern and the rest, he'd end the conversation, claiming that he had a pile of homework to start. I started thinking he might be feeling left out, so I invited him along a couple of times. He knew Nate and his friends at least in passing, so it's not like they were strangers. He kept declining (most likely to Nate's relief), so eventually I stopped asking. He stopped calling me, so eventually I stopped calling him.

On the surface, things were okay, but I knew they really weren't. I just wasn't sure what to do about it.

Austin's birthday was coming up at the beginning of February, so I decided that I would throw him a surprise party to try and smooth things out between us. Dave Kendall agreed to help me with the arrangements.

Our plans were proceeding smoothly, when it happened. About a week before the date of the party, a bunch of us were sitting in the library one morning, working on homework. Austin and I were, again, arguing over a physics problem.

"You're so wrong! The answer is 50 Tesla, not 500." Austin scornfully started to erase my answer.

"I don't think so," I said in my best "what are you, stupid?" tone of voice. "And stop erasing my answer! Look, I'm going to ask Mr. Thomas."

I grabbed my paper and stalked out of the library. Mr. Thomas, who was in his classroom working before school started, validated my answer, so I went back to the library and dropped my paper in front of Austin. "Ha! I was right!"

"You are not!"

"According to the physics teacher, I am!"

"Aw, go to hell," Austin finally said in frustration. He scooped up his stuff and stomped out of the library. By this time, the whole table had stopped what they were doing and were watching the fight.

"Don't worry," I announced once Austin was gone, desperately feeling the need to explain. "We do this all the time." I flashed an anemic smile. Satisfied, they all went back to their own conversations.

The problem was, I was wrong. Not about the physics problem, but about Austin. Everything wasn't fine. He didn't talk to me for two days.