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Her denim-covered legs were a bit cramped in the space. She felt heat rising from her shirt to her neck and throat. Afraid she’d break into a sweat, she rolled the window down a bit. She was used to comments on her height, but he was taller than her. Maybe he spoke from experience. She was pretty sure that, even with heels, she still wouldn’t be at eye level with him.
“So, who makes fun of you and the band?” he suddenly asked.
“What?” She looked at him again. “Um … No one.” Eric Hays.
“You said before that …”
“Oh, I was just kidding.” She wasn’t. But she was trying to shrug these things off, having learned from an early age that not everyone liked her or her choices. Nevertheless, she had no intention of telling Finn Brennen about it. She’d just met him.
They began meeting twice weekly in the library after school hours to go over the material, his homework, plan his papers, and prepare for exams. He drove her home after. In the second semester, they took Elective English together.
“I’m named after her,” she told him when they read Pride And Prejudice. Or, more accurately, she read and he studied from her notes.
“Oh, wow! Jane for Jane Austen. Cool.”
“I’m glad you think so.” She chuckled. Eric Hays had started calling her “Plain Jane” just weeks before, and a few others had adopted it. “My middle name is after my mom’s favorite Austen heroine, Anne.” Ironically, Anne in Persuasion was considered rather plain. Great job, Mom, she thought.
“Anne’s great, too, but I love Jane more. I don’t have a middle name.”
She faked a gasp. “And you lived to tell?”
Finn laughed. “Barely.”
A few weeks later, when they reached that part of the curriculum, he said, “I like Dorothy Parker. She reminds me of you.” He looked at her. They were sitting at what had become “their table” at the library.
She looked at Dorothy Parker’s picture in her textbook. Dorothy, who wasn’t known for her beauty but her wit. “Remind you how?”
“Her sarcasm, how she says things as they are, and you both make me laugh.”
“Me? Sarcastic?” Maybe she was. Earlier that morning, she had told Eric Hays, who had hurled another Plain Jane at her, “I guess we both earned our nicknames, Douchebag Eric.” Looking in the mirror, she couldn’t deny she was rather plain. She had the type of face that would be lost in a crowd, if only she didn’t tower over most girls and some of the boys.
Now she just smiled at Finn.
He smiled back then looked at the textbook. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” he read aloud. “I don’t think it’s hard to analyze this one.”
“But you do have to provide your opinion about it,” she said, reading from their paper instructions.
“My opinion is that they’re idiots.” He raised his eyes from the book and looked at her.
She wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a pass at her or what. She wasn’t wearing glasses. Besides, this was Finn Brennen and, while he didn’t have a girlfriend at the moment, he had had one for a few months and was surrounded by clamoring candidates.
“Very eloquent. Let’s write that and see if it gets us an A,” she said with a smile.
Before one of the bigger exams, they studied until the library closed. He then drove them to his house to continue.
That night, after they had finished, he walked her back home. They both needed to breathe, and the ocean breeze was perfect after hours of cramming. He told her then that he never knew who his father was. His mother had never married and had him when she had worked as an administrator in a hospital in Los Angeles. She never talked about it, and he suspected he was the result of an extramarital affair on his father’s side. “I’ve never told this to anyone. I trust you to not say anything to anyone.”
“Of course,” she replied. “Your secret will die with me. Probably from exhaustion.”
Finn laughed. “You’re a good friend, Jane.”
It was the first time he had termed her his friend. She was glad. While he had many, she had few.
“Don’t worry about the exam tomorrow,” she said when they parted. “You’ll do swimmingly.”
She loved the sound of his laughter.
Sometime after, they studied at her house. It was the first time he had been in her room. She was aware of how envious some girls would be to know that Finn Brennen was in her bedroom. She had developed a little crush on him—it was hard not to—but they were so different and belonged to completely different spheres that she refused to fall in love with him. Like her, he had solid dreams, plans, and took his studies seriously, but their lives were going in different directions. Besides, he knew everyone, got along with everyone, had many friends, while she kept mostly to herself. If she fell for him, it’d be almost like falling for a Hollywood star, and she was too level-headed for that.
