Bama Boy Read online

  I crossed my fingers underneath my desk. “That’s all.”

  Jimbo smiled a strange, twisted smile. “Well, it’s not exactly what I’d been hopin’ for, but I guess it beats nothin’.”

  Mercifully, the tardy bell rang before I was forced to think of a reply. I turned away from Jimbo and faced the front of the room, but I could feel his eyes on me, and I felt like a creep for hurting the most wonderful guy in the world.

  At lunchtime, I sat at a table and pushed cold macaroni and cheese around on my plate. I wasn’t even aware that Maggie had joined me until she spoke.

  “Gosh, Trace, you look awful! We’re not pining away for Anthony, are we?”

  “No, but I’ll be glad when he gets back. My willpower is getting weaker by the day.”

  “Didn’t you have a good time Friday night? I was hoping you and Jimbo would work things out.”

  “We worked things out, all right! We worked things out so well that this morning he asked me out.”

  “Tracy!” Maggie squealed. “What did you tell him?”

  “What else could I tell him? I turned him down. I had to, Mags! I’m in love with him, and he feels the same way about me—he practically told me so! So I turned him down, and now he probably thinks I’m a tease.”

  Maggie let out a long, low whistle. “Isn’t that going to make things a little awkward tomorrow night when he comes over for tutoring?”

  “I’d forgotten all about that!” I groaned. “And Richie’s got a ball game, so Mom and Dad will be gone. That means I’ll be alone with Jimbo for almost an hour! Maggie, what should I do?”

  “Well, you could give me your apple, if you’re not going to eat it,” suggested Maggie, ever helpful.

  * * * *

  The following evening, I approached my mother as she dressed for Richie’s football game.

  “Mom, can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked, sitting down on the foot of her bed.

  She looked up from applying her makeup. “Of course, Tracy. What’s the matter?”

  I shrugged in what I hoped was an offhand manner. “I was just wondering if it was really necessary for you and Dad both to go to Richie’s game tonight. I thought maybe one of you could go, and the other could stay home with me.”

  Mom smiled. “This is a switch! Usually you can’t get us out of the house fast enough. Why the sudden change?”

  “Jimbo will be coming over tonight, and I—I don’t want to be alone in the house with him.”

  Mom’s smile disappeared, and she looked seriously alarmed. “Tracy!”

  “No, no!” I assured her, knowing she was thinking of Russ. “It’s nothing like that. Jimbo wouldn’t do something like that. It’s just that I—I sort of wish he would.”

  She gave me an understanding smile. “He is a nice boy, isn’t he?”

  A nice boy? She had to be kidding!

  “Mom, Richie is a nice boy! Jimbo is—is—I don’t know. It’s all so confusing! I always thought I knew exactly what I wanted in a boy, and Anthony seems to have all those things. I ought to be crazy about him, but I’m not. Instead I keep thinking about Jimbo, even though he’s not at all what I’ve been looking for.”

  “Maybe you’ve been looking for the wrong things,” Mom suggested.

  I thought about that after Mom, Dad, and Richie were gone and I was alone. I had made a list of all the things that made Jimbo undesirable, but I hadn’t given much thought to what had attracted me to him in the first place. He was awfully easy on the eyes, for one thing, but that wasn’t it; Anthony was better looking, and so were several other boys I could name.

  It was easy to say I’d gotten a crush on him because he was a football star, but that wasn’t it, either. He’d been a hero, but he’d also been a scapegoat, and he’d handled both roles with poise and dignity. As for academics, he might not be on the same plane with Anthony, but he had his own brand of gentle wisdom that Anthony wouldn’t know if he met it on the street.

  Looking back, it seemed ridiculous to think I had ever hoped to reform him. Jimbo didn’t need to change to suit me or anyone else. He was pretty wonderful just the way he was.

  The jangling of the telephone jolted me out of my introspections. Maybe it was Jimbo, calling to say he couldn’t come tonight. Would that be good or bad? I ran to the kitchen to answer the phone, my heart pounding.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Tracy.”

  “Anthony, I didn’t know you were back,” I said, fighting back a strange mixture of disappointment and relief. “How was the convention?”

  “It was all right. They kept us pretty busy, but not half as busy as you’ve been.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard all about your date, Tracy. You couldn’t even wait until I got out of town!”

  “Anthony, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said impatiently.

  “I’m talking about you and Jimbo Maxwell at Tiffany’s party. I’m beginning to wonder who’s been tutoring whom!”

  “It wasn’t like that at all!”

  “Oh no? Tiffany said if the two of you had been slow dancing any closer, you’d have been looking out of the same pair of eyes!”

  “I didn’t know you set so much store by Tiffany’s opinion,” I retorted.

  “Then you don’t deny it!” Anthony accused.

  “Deny dancing with Jimbo? No, I don’t!”

  “And I suppose you don’t deny that he took you home, either!”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Or that he kissed you goodnight!”

  “No, I—yes, I do! He did no such thing. But he would have if Dad hadn’t interrupted, and I wouldn’t have stopped him.”

  “Tracy, Tracy,” Anthony sighed. “Can’t you see you deserve better than that loser?”

  “Jimbo isn’t a loser! Just because the team lost one game—”

  “Who’s talking about football? I’m talking about life! The guy’s a nobody who’ll never amount to anything. Maybe I should have seen this coming, but to tell you the truth, I thought you had better sense.”

  “I thought I had better sense, too,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “In fact, I had so much sense that I was prepared to go steady with you rather than admit that I’d fallen for a boy I thought was beneath me. Thank you for opening my eyes! I don’t care if he is a redneck—Jimbo Maxwell is a finer person than you’ll ever be!”

  I slammed the receiver down and marched back to the living room, but froze in my tracks on the threshold. There on the couch sat Jimbo, apparently deeply engrossed in his physics textbook. That was enough to let me know he’d heard every word; Jimbo hadn’t paid that much attention to his physics book all year. As I stood there rooted to the floor, he looked up from his book.

  “Hi, Tracy.”

  “Jimbo, how—how long have you been here?” I asked, not at all sure I wanted to know the answer.

  “Long enough,” he said gently. “Nobody answered the door when I knocked, so I let myself in. I’m sorry. I guess it was the wrong thing to do.”

  “No, it’s okay. That—that was Anthony on the phone.”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”

  “He has this idea that I—that you—I mean, that we—oh, it’s the stupidest thing!”

  “Is it really so stupid?” he asked softly.

  “No—yes! Of course it is!” I could feel my face growing redder by the minute. I sat down on the couch at a safe distance from Jimbo and grabbed my physics book. “We’d better get started.”

  “Tracy—”

  Jimbo moved closer to me and I tried to back away from him, but found my retreat blocked by the arm of the couch.

  “Jimbo, we’re already running late, and we’ve got to cover an entire chapter on—” I opened the book to chapter five, and discovered that my guardian angel had a warped sense of humor. “—On Newton’s laws of attraction.”

  “Tracy—”

  I plunged resolutely on. “Newton’s law states that
every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle in the universe, and the attraction between two people—I mean, two particles—is inversely proportional to the—”

  “Tracy, honey, shut up,” Jimbo said firmly, then pulled me into his arms and covered my mouth with his own.

  It was everything I’d dreamed it would be. I wrapped my arms around him, and the neglected physics book slid off my lap and fell to the floor unnoticed.

  Needless to say, we didn’t get much studying done. We kissed and talked and kissed some more, and that was how Richie found us. Lost in each other, we didn’t even know he was home until his cry of horror made us jump apart, and we turned to see him standing in the doorway, staring with stricken eyes at his fallen idol.

  “Jimbo!” he groaned. “Not you! Not with Tracy, of all people! How could you do this to me?”

  “Sorry, pal,” Jimbo said, “but you see, there comes a time in a man’s life when—”

  “I don’t even want to hear it!” Richie interrupted, insulted. “Just how long has this been going on, anyway? I’ll bet all that time I was holding the bag for snipes, you and Tracy were sitting in the truck kissing!”

  “Well, no. But the thought did cross my mind,” Jimbo confessed.

  We watched in slightly embarrassed amusement as Richie mounted the stairs to his own room, grumbling all the way.

  “Poor Richie,” I said. “He just found out his hero has feet of clay.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Jimbo predicted. “Probably by the next football game. Now, where were we?”

  Seven o’clock came all too soon, and Jimbo stacked up his books and headed for the door, just as he had a dozen times before. Only this time it was different. When he reached the door, he tucked his books under one arm while he held me close with the other and gave me a lingering goodbye kiss.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed when we finally broke apart. “I almost forgot.” He shifted his books higher under his arm to leave both hands free, then dug out his wallet. “I owe you two-fifty.”

  “But we didn’t study,” I said, pointing out the obvious. “You didn’t get your money’s worth.”

  Jimbo laughed out loud. “Honey, if this ain’t worth two-fifty, I’d like to know what is!”

  He took my hand and pressed three one-dollar bills into it, then squeezed it closed into a fist and raised it to his lips.

  “Keep the change,” he said with a grin, then loped down the front porch steps and out to his truck.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When my alarm clock rang the next morning, I turned it off without even opening my eyes, then rolled over and pulled the covers over my head. Then I remembered the events of the previous night and sat bolt upright in bed. Had it really happened, or was it all a dream? I glanced around the room for some proof that it was real, and spied three one-dollar bills lying on the dresser. I smiled as I threw back the covers and got out of bed. Today was going to be a wonderful day!

  When I drove into the student parking lot, I found Jimbo waiting for me at his truck. He came to meet me as I parked my car and then walked me to class, informing me along the way that he wanted to trade places with me in physics.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you sitt’n’ behind Anthony,” he said. “If he feels like pickin’ on somebody, I ‘druther he picked on me.”

  “I think it would be better if I sat between the two of you.”

  “You don’t think I can hold my own against ol’ Anthony?” he challenged.

  “You can do more than hold your own. That’s why I think I should sit between you. I don’t want you needling him.”

  Jimbo’s eyebrows shot up. “Needlin’ ‘im? Me? Would I do a thing like that?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, there you’re wrong,” he said, draping an arm across my shoulders. “I got the girl. I can afford to be generous.”

  I let him have his way in the end, but it proved to be a moot point. When Anthony entered the room, he took a seat as far away from us as possible and never even glanced in our direction. But if Anthony ignored us, the rest of the school didn’t. By noon, we were the hot item on the Elmore gossip circuit. It was a little embarrassing, but when I looked into Jimbo’s smiling eyes and saw the love reflected there, I decided a little embarrassment was a small price to pay.

  The only thing marring my happiness was the knowledge that nothing had really changed. All the love in the world could never bridge the gap that still lay between us. In spite of that fact, or maybe because of it, I was determined to savor every minute we had together, storing them up for the time when we would graduate and go our separate ways. After all, we might not have a future, but we had a present, and I was going to make the most of it.

  Wednesday turned to Thursday, and Thursday to Friday, and suddenly game day was upon us. This was the do-or-die game for the Elmore Eagles. A win over East Central would guarantee us a place in the playoffs; a loss would eliminate us completely. After what happened last week, I was a nervous wreck for Jimbo’s sake, but if the pressure affected him at all, he didn’t show it. He never even mentioned the game until Friday afternoon when he walked me to my car.

  “Tonight’s the big night,” he said. “You’re comin’ to the game, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Wish me luck?”

  “You know I do.”

  He didn’t need it. He set a new school record for total passing yardage, and it soon became obvious that his hero status was restored.

  “Isn’t it funny how a week can change things?” I remarked to Maggie after the game, as we gathered our blankets and stadium cushions. “Last week at this time, Jimbo was sitting out there looking like he’d lost his last friend, and I was about to go steady with Anthony. Now I’m going out with Jimbo, and Elmore is going to the state—”

  “Tracy! Tracy Brock!”

  “Oh no,” I groaned. “It’s Tiffany.”

  “She’s calling you, not me,” Maggie said. “I’ll wait for you at the car.”

  “Traitor,” I muttered, watching her rapid retreat. “Oh, hello, Tiffany.”

  “Tracy Brock, aren’t you the sly one?” Tiffany said, tossing her jet black curls. “And all this time we thought you were tutoring Jimbo!”

  “I was. I still am.”

  “Oh, come on! You can tell me the truth. Why would a genius want tutoring?”

  “I give up,” I said, all at sea. “Why?”

  Tiffany laughed as if I’d just said something hilarious. “If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t! If I hadn’t gone to that convention last weekend, I would have thought you were crazy, dumping Anthony for some redneck. But it’s such a small world, isn’t it? One of the kids I met at the convention was a girl from Alabama—I forget the name of the town—and she told me the most fascinating things!”

  “What—what kind of things?” I asked, feeling suddenly weak in the knees.

  “Things like Jimbo’s score on his college entrance exam, for one.”

  I could hardly hear Tiffany’s voice over the strange buzzing noise that filled my head. “His college—”

  “Apparently they use the ACT in the South, rather than the SAT,” she continued. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me our own Jimbo Maxwell made a thirty-six—it’s a perfect score, or so she said. I guess it must run in the family. His father is a big shot at NASA, you know. They transferred him here to oversee the TeknoCorp project. But I’m sure all this is yesterday’s news to you. I do think you could have told you friends, though.”

  “Tiffany, are you—are you sure about this?”

  “Of course! Sonya—she’s the girl I met at the convention—Sonya went to school with Jimbo before he moved here. Face it, Tracy: the secret is out. Oh, I don’t really blame you for wanting to keep it quiet until you had him all to yourself. I would have done the same thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t know he was such a prize until it was too
late!”

  “But—I didn’t know—”

  There was no need to answer; Tiffany was already gone. I stood there in the middle of the bleachers, my mind reeling. A dozen little things—a vanity license plate, a man’s photo in the newspaper, a ninety-six on a physics test—all clicked into place, and suddenly it all made sense. I didn’t remember leaving the stadium and heading for the parking lot, but somehow I found myself climbing into Maggie’s car.

  “Maggie,” I said unsteadily, “do you remember the day you told me all about Jimbo and his sordid past?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “You forgot to mention that he’s got an IQ that makes Anthony look like the village idiot!”

  Maggie merely shrugged. “Anthony’s always looked like the village idiot to me.”

  “I’m serious, Mags! We’re talking genius here!”

  She gave a skeptical snort. “Where in the world did you hear that?”

  “From Tiffany.”

  “Oh, her.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but I think she’s telling the truth. At the convention she met a girl who knew Jimbo. She says he made a perfect score on his college entrance exam.”

  Maggie let go of the steering wheel and clapped her hands gleefully. “I can hardly wait to tell Anthony! He’ll croak!”

  “Maggie, it’s not funny. It’s terrible!”

  “Terrible? Tracy, I don’t get it. For weeks now, you’ve been in agony because poor Jimbo had no future. Now you find out he’s got the world on a string, and you say it’s terrible. What gives?”

  “I wish I knew! I thought I loved him, but I don’t even know him! Do you realize I’ve spent the last seven weeks tutoring a boy who’s smarter than I am? Why would he lie to me like that? Why would he lie to all of us?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. What do you think?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that I want the old Jimbo back. And when he comes over tonight, I’m going to get to the bottom of this!”

  I had a long wait. Fortunately, no one else was home; Richie had apparently conned Mom and Dad into stopping for hamburgers after the game. I watched the clock and paced back and forth until I was sure I must have worn a path in the carpet.