Taffy Sinclair 004 - Taffy Sinclair and the Romance Machine Disaster Read Free

his name out loud I thought I would explode. " Hi, Randy, " she said in her icky sweet voice.
    I think I heard him say hi back to her, but my heart was pounding so loudly in my ears by then that I couldn ' t be sure. Then Taffy turned around the other way and looked over her shoulder at me. I thought I ' d die. She was giving me the worst poison-dart look I had ever seen. It wasn ' t just her standard " drop dead " poison-dart look. It was an " I ' ll get even with you " look, if I ever saw one.
    I scrunched down in my seat and hid behind my notebook, wondering how she planned to get even with me. I had never seen her looking so mad. Maybe letting Beth call her on the phone and disguise her voice to tell her about my date hadn ' t been such a good idea after all.
    I peeked over my notebook at Randy to see if he was looking at me, too, but he wasn ' t. Not at first, anyway. But then he turned a little bit in his seat until he was looking in my direction. I thought that he mig ht be looking out the window, whi ch was also in my direction, and I tried to look away. I didn ' t want him to catch me staring at him and think I was a nerd. But suddenly he was looking at me—with both big blue eyes—and he was smiling that 1,000-watt smile that always makes my heart turn flip-flops. I tried to smile back, but my mouth had turned to Silly Putty, and I wasn ' t sure if the corners were pointing up or down. It didn ' t matter. What did matter was that he was smiling at me and not at Taffy Sinclair. I was so happy I thought I ' d die .
     
    The crowd was already gathering when my friends and I got to the football field behind the junior high school the next afternoon. There were a lot of kids from Mark Twain Elementary in the bleachers on our side of the field, especially girls who came to watch all the cute boys play football. And there was Curtis Trowbridge pacing up and down the sidelines carrying a notebook and pencil and wearing a hand-lettered sign saying PRESS stuck to the front of his ski hat. Of course there was Taffy Sinclair prancing around by the concession stand, flirting with some boys from the other school and acting conceited the way she always does. But mostly there were parents. I had seen Randy ' s parents a couple of times, so I glanced across the crowd, trying to look as casual as possible, to see if I could spot them.
    " Look, Jana! There are Randy ' s parents! " Melanie shouted. She was standing so close to me that she nearly blew my left ear right off.
    I gave her a poison-dart look. " Shut up, Melanie, " I growled. " They ' ll hear you and think it was me. "
    Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Kirwan had stopped to talk to some other parents and didn ' t hear Melanie. I tried not to stare at them as we followed Katie up the center stairs to the seats where most of the sixth-grade girls sat.
    I looked up just as our team ran out onto the field wearing all-white uniforms. His num ber was twenty- two, and with his dark hair and eyes, Randy looked so handsome I thought I ' d die. When they lined up in the middle of the field to warm up Randy looked over at the crowd in the bleachers and grinned when he saw me looking back. I smiled at him, too, and it felt as if my smile was stretching so big that it wrapped around behind my ears.
    All through his warm-up Randy kept doing little eyeball maneuvers in my direction. I was just about to burst with happiness, and I sat there wondering if I could possibly live through the entire game. After a while I checked my tongue. It was still okay. So far, so good.
    I watched more of that football game than all of the other ones I ' d seen in my life put together. At first it scared me when Randy got tackled. What if he was hurt? What if he couldn ' t get up? What if I lost my chance to be the first girl in sixth grade to have a date? But after a while I started to relax, and just before the half Randy caught a pass and ran all the way to the end zone for a touchdown. The crowd went crazy,