Knights of the Hill Country by Tim Tharp Page A

Sara asked.
    “No, not really,” I said.
    Across the café, Sheryl cranked up the jukebox, a slow country song, one of the rare ones about love that hadn't gone wrong yet. Pretty obvious she didn't pick that one out for Mr. Derryberry.
    I had to admit this place was even better than a converted basement or garage would've been. If I'd got on a couch alone with Sara, I most likely would've started hearing my friends' voices in my head, saying,
Put your arm around her, dumbass. Grab her hand. Kiss her. Reach up under her shirt.
Probably would've been as big a disaster as the time I spilt that chili on Kim Hunt in her white blouse. Here, I couldtake things slow and easy. Be myself more. As long as Jake and Blaine didn't come strolling in next time that bell over the door went to jingling.
    The other big worry I had didn't turn out so bad. This whole time, I was afraid Sara would discover how terrible I really was with textbooks. Not that I had a problem reading. Give me the sports page or something else I'm interested in, and I'd go right to town on it. But studying was a whole different animal. Must have been fourth grade last time Mom or anyone else set down to help me with my homework, and I don't guess my skills had got much better since. If I had a list of terms or names or something like that to look up, everything just seemed to turn into Egyptian hieroglyphics right in front of my eyes. In the study group, I figured Sara just thought I was slower finding the answers than everyone else, but here, one-on-one, she was bound to find out what kind of a real idiot I was.
    A funny thing happened, though, when we got to working on the assignment. Sara showed me how to pick out the most important words or names from out of the worksheet questions and look them up in the index of the book. I hate to admit it, but I didn't even know the book had an index! I'd always scraped by without reading that far back. But just that one little tip was the difference between sinking and swimming right there. I started finding answers so quick, I got to wondering if maybe I wasn't dumb after all. I might even be a little bit smart in my own way.
    By the time we got down towards the last few questions, I was starting to feel kind of like a Civil War expert. If Darnell and Lana Pitt wanted my opinion on the Confederacy now, I was ready. It even crossed my mind that I might order off oneof them Civil War chess sets they show on TV, hang around out in Sara's converted-garage library learning how to play it with her.
    “Did you find the one about Matthew Brady yet?” she asked.
    “Page two thirty-four,” I said.
    She looked up from her paper. “You're really good at this. How come you don't say that much when we're in our study group?”
    “Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn't good at it till you told me I oughta look things up in the index. I'd just set around turning pages, hoping an answer would jump up and bite me, I guess.” It's funny how you can be honest about things like that once you stop worrying about them.
    She laughed. “You weren't that bad.”
    “No, really,” I said. “You oughta be a teacher.”
    “Thanks.” She looked down in her shy way and smiled, and I thought that'd be hard to beat right there, making her smile like that.
    Conversation was smooth sailing after that. She talked about living over in Oklahoma City before moving here, and I told a little about living up in Poynter. We had a good time trading stories about what we was like as little kids, the friends we'd had and left behind when we moved, what kind of games we played, the Halloween costumes we wore, and what kind of trick-or-treat candy was our favorite. All sorts of things. It wasn't nothing like what my buddies told me about them and their girls.
    Talking about the days back in Poynter, I skipped over the serious part—the old sad story about my dad running off— but Sara, she didn't skip over nothing. They had a toughtime back where she used to