I spun the second quarter into the slot, visualizing its journey through the works and gears and levers until it splashed into the metal box deep inside the bowels of the glowing, glorified refrigerator. A magic trick of the imagination.

Sad when that’s all a guy’s got.

Stepping back a half pace, I considered my selections. Choosing a beverage for study hall shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, I did this every day. What I wanted was a Diet Coke. But in the land of macho seniors sporting full beards and beer guts (and that was just the girls!), I had to be careful not to bring undue attention to myself, forced to answer for my wimpy taste in soda.

I usually went with a Coke. Simple. Non-controversial. Palatable enough. Today, however, I somehow managed to end up at one of the long cafeteria tables next to Kim Kurtz, red hair already blazing onto the pages of her Algebra II homework, a can of Sprite opened and sitting next to her Peanut Butter Twix.

I hated Sprite.

So I punched the large plastic square covering the green and white label, grabbed the too-cold can from the hopper, and headed back to our table (ours!) with my Sprite.

What’s a guy to do, right?

We had not been assigned to the same study hall, but at Gus Grissom Memorial High School, kids could go to the cafeteria to enjoy a snack and do homework, if they could get to the sign out sheets fast enough. Competition for those few spots was fierce, but I had English in the same room the period before, so I always got my name down first. When I wanted.

Kim didn’t always leave class for the cafeteria, but after the first time I saw her there with her Sprite and PBT, I always wanted to sign out.

I am tempted to say there are no words to describe her beauty, but this would be partially true at best. English simply does not contain descriptors powerful enough to do her justice. Hair: forest-fire red. Face: freckled like the photonegative of a starry Montana night. And a smile capable, I’m sure, of curing cancer in babies.

How or why she ended up at my table only added to the mysteries of the universe, like the pyramids, Spam, and night baseball at Wrigley – all things beyond my powers of explanation or understanding. We could sit no more than two to a table, the long picknick-style kind, one student on each side, and at opposite ends. Ten minutes earlier, I had been minding my own business, waiting for Mrs. Williams, the old battle-axe on cafeteria duty, to call roll and release us to the machines when Kim sat down at the other end.

Jiminy Christmas!

I didn’t talk to her of course. This would have required bravery. If medieval physicians had ever numbered that as one of the body’s humors, my tank had long ago run to empty.

Catching her out of the corner of my eye, I almost smiled at her. I mean, I did smile; I just never turned my head towards, well, her.

Later, when I sat back down and cracked my Sprite, she glanced over and, I swear to baby Jesus, looked at me.

To my great credit, I refrained from crapping my pants. Mostly.

I pulled out my German book, and began the inane homework Frau Schwarzenegger thought would somehow make us fluent. Okay, in fairness, that wasn’t her name. It was Mrs. Jan McKee. In class, she was Frau McKee. Everywhere else, well, there it is.

Maybe twenty minutes into the period, my right arm needed some stretching – not so much from all the homework I was doing, rather from clamping my finger around the pencil as though it were an anchor meant to keep my head from bobbing up and accidentally meeting Kim Kurtz’s stare. Or, more likely, her glare.

I might mention, I had not yet taken a sip of the Sprite. Murder liquid if there ever was.

When I moved to loosen up my tightened muscles, she must have noticed because her eyes caught mine just as I twisted my head to the right, directly in her line of sight. I waved, probably much like I had waved at my mom the first day the school bus carted me off to kindergarten. And. She. Waved. Back.

For a moment, stretching aside, my whole body clenched and I couldn’t move. I may or may not have snapped the pencil I still held in two. Leaning in as if to share some important secret with me, or possibly dodging the wood shards, she whispered, “You like Sprite, too? It’s my favorite.”

Too overwhelmed to reply, but muscles now back under my control, I picked up the can, tipped it in her direction, and took a slug. When the caustic, pseudo-citrus sludge hit my mouth, every inch of tender, pink tissue blossomed in irritation. Third degree burns from a stinking can of pop. The fire excoriated my throat and landed in my stomach with the force of ejected magma plopping down in the middle of the town square.

However, two years of being picked on by upperclassmen had honed my skills, and I no-sold the whole thing cleaner than a wanna-be frat boy getting hazed during rush week.

I contorted my face into a smile, the shock of the lemon-lime assault temporarily pulling my guardrails from their foundations. “It’s the best,” I croaked.

She took a sip and went back to her algebra. Too injured to be horrified at my response, my first thought post-contact was that I would have to drink more of that poison. For verisimilitude, of course.

Study hall happened to be the last period of the day, and by this point I had lost all interest in my German homework. Schwarzy would get the work out of me, just not right now. I kept my head down and feigned immersion in a language close enough to English to be recognizable as a relative but weird enough to be the cousin you slip down the ladies aisle at Walmart to get away from. In another twenty minutes or so, I would see my best friend, Andy Branam, in the parking lot. And did I have a story for him. Most of my energy at this point was directed at how to make me sound suave while retaining as much of the integrity of the story as ego would allow.

As the tale I would tell coalesced in my mind, I reached up to grab the Sprite can, bracing myself for another drink, this time the smallest sip I could manage. Just as I got it to my lips, a hip knocked into my back, sending a ridiculous amount of the liquid down my throat.

I nearly died.

“Sorry there, little buddy,” a deep, manly voice devoid of all wit and intelligence throbbed from behind me. “You need to watch how you’re sitting.”

The voice belonged to Dan Davidson. Football player. Ladies man. Fifth-year senior, or so I had been told. An all-around, all-American fartknocker.

I started to apologize, not so much for sitting in the path of his hip but rather for existing in the same universe as him, but by the time I stopped choking on the Sprite, he had already made it to the other side where he had already firmly ensconced himself next to Kim. His back to the table, legs splayed across the aisle, he rested his elbow on her homework and leaned into her field of view as far as gravity would allow without pulling them both to the floor.

He was an expert whisperer, a talent honed from years of not paying attention in class, I assumed. I couldn’t really hear what he was saying, but his voice hit registers low enough to make Barry White blush. I swear I could pick up the vibrations of the game he was spitting right through the table. Words like “baby,” “Saturday night,” “beer,” and “me” thrummed through the polyurethane-coated particle board, up my arm, and into my head as if Q had equipped me with the latest technology to take down all the whisperers in my high school. I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out those words added up to a proposition sexy enough to destroy any girl’s resistance.

Barry White must have been his idol.

His Unjolly Green Giant of a body blocked my view of Kim, invisible though only feet away. In truth, most of the other side of the cafeteria had disappeared behind him when he sat. Likely, she was scribbling notes on the side of her homework, to be erased later. What time he would pick her up. The location of the party. Ideas for what shoes to wear with which outfit. The names of their future children.

After no more than a couple of minutes, Mrs. Williams noticed Dan had left his seat and joined our table. “Daniel Davidson! You are wearing my patience thin. Get back to your table now or you will lose your cafeteria privileges for a week. Or more!” How she got her raspy voice to carry all the way across the cafeteria, air thick with the breath of forty high school students and sticky with their end-of-the-day odors, I will never know. She was a force of nature, to be sure. Nonetheless, her pipes more than made up for her four-foot, eight-inch frame, and old Five-Year-Plan Dan got up and headed back to his table. With a smirk.

Allowing silence and stability to return to the room, neither Kim nor I said anything about our visitor for some time. As the minutes ticked away and the long hand approached the “11” on the clock, the time when the bell would sound and release us into the wild, I thought this would be the end of one of the more exciting days of my life. If nothing else, I had a heck of a story for Andy.

When we had been well-behaved, and Mrs. Williams didn’t have a knot in her tail, she would allow decorum to break down a bit the last couple of minutes of the period. We could talk at our own tables, so long as we didn’t get out of hand. Apparently, Dan’s disturbance had not been significant enough to cost us this luxury, and at 2:53 pm on Friday, September 10, 1993, Kim Kurtz slid down the length of the table to talk to me.

“Sorry about Danny. He’s an idiot. We almost dated last year. Almost. I keep telling him to leave me alone. He says quitters never win, like he made that up himself. God, I can’t stand him,” she offered to me, all on her own, with no prompting whatsoever.

“It’s okay. He gives me trouble, too,” I said. I think.

“I know. I saw him bump you. What a jerk. Are you okay, Dylan?”

How I did not spit that mouthful of Sprite all over that beautiful girl, I will never know. My gag reflex was already heightened just having to drink it, but I wasn’t going to waste fifty cents and throw away a full can of pop, that’s for sure.

When she said my name.

That’s all.

When she said my name.

How did she even know who I was?

With minimal amounts of the battery acid substitute reaching my lungs, I coughed my way through a nod and sputtered, “Thanks, Kim. I’m fine. Always am.”

“Can you believe the idiot invited me to a party this weekend? I told him I have plans. That I’m busy. I hate to lie like that. I don’t really have anything to do tomorrow night.”

Considering the implication of this confession, I tipped back the last third of my drink, chugging it down. As I swallowed, the bell rang, and Kim remained in her seat across from me looking for all the world like she hoped I would reply.

I considered all of the possibilities. Was this a joke? Was she in on it with Dan? Would they get together tonight and roast my naiveté as they pounded shots of … whatever people take shots of? Or was she the angel I hoped her to be? Was this in earnest? Was this, in all actuality, my chance?

Calculating at speeds Bobby Fischer would envy, I made my decision. I placed my hand on the table, looked her in the eyes, and belched up something so wet and thick and musty it might have had its origins in a 1950s B-horror movie. I could smell it immediately – Sprite and Almond Joy on top of school pizza and milk from lunch. If physics taught us nothing else, one universal law promised that no power in heaven or on earth could stop those fumes from wafting across the table into Kim Kurtz’s perfect face.

As the last wisp of noxious gas passed my lips, the first wave hit her full on. Her eyes widened upon contact with the toxic cloud, then closed. When she opened them (somehow having escaped total annihilation and certain blindness), she looked at me and laughed a laugh so natural and so genuine, like St. Francis, she could have charmed the beasts of the wild.

Something in me moved and I joined her in the moment of my ridiculousness, laughing near her, with her, and at myself. As the noise of the students faded, as Mrs. Williams reminded us to go home, as Andy waited on me at his car, as the minute hand of the clock ticked onward, we, the two of us, oblivious to everything but the edges of a newfound hope, unborn when period eight began, continued to sit across from one another in that almost-empty high school cafeteria, talking about everything and nothing and what might be fun to do on a Saturday night.

– Brian Hawkins

Author’s Note: In my high school, students could sign out to the cafeteria during study hall. While the intention was for students to continue studying, spurred on by sugar and caffeine, a bit more socialization occurred in the slightly less structured environment. I now teach at the same school (for the last 25 years or so), and we have long since done away with the practice. I wrote this story to share with a colleague’s creative writing students both to give them a sense of what their school used to look like and as one more opportunity to relive my high school days as they never actually happened. It is a fairy tale after all.