Boy Meets Girl

"What's her sister look like?" Dave Newell asked his brother.

"You've seen Steph. They're sisters."

Stephanie Johnson was a hottie, no doubt about that, Dave thought. Still, that didn't necessarily mean that her sister would be a looker. If Stephanie were from Venus, her sister could be from Uranus. Besides, he resented the last-minute's notice and the fact that Brad had told Stephanie that he'd date her kid sister without having bothered to ask him first whether he was interested in going out with the girl. He shook his head. "I should say no," he said.

Brad's hopeful countenance remained hopeful.

"But I won't."

Brad clapped him on the upper arm. "Thanks, Dave! I knew you wouldn't let me down!"

It was all set. Stephanie had made her acceptance of Brad's invitation to a dinner and a movie (and, hopefully, to a make-out session along the unpaved road that meandered through the copse atop the steep hill that the kids called Moonlight Drive) conditional upon Brad's finding a date for her sister, Jenny. For one of the few moments in their lives, Brad was glad he had a younger brother. Thanks to Dave's agreement to double with him and Stephanie, he'd be able to go out with one of the hottest recent grads of Baxter Prep, the arch rival of Brad's former alta mater, Delmar High, which Dave still attended, if only for the last few weeks of his senior year, just as Jenny was a senior at her sister's one-time school.

When Dave saw his date, he felt like the lecherous wolf in the old cartoons when the animal spies a curvy female character: his mouth seemed to gape as he drooled uncontrollably and his eyes seemed to launch from their sockets like spherical missiles attached to elastic nerves and muscles before springing back into place. He thought he might need to manually close his dropped jaw, the way the cartoon wolf did. Fortunately, he did none of these things. What he did do, instead, was stammer like an idiot as he introduced himself.