THE LIBERATING SOUND OF THE last school bell of the day had played and Darren had just said goodbye to Nova when he saw Liam. His host brother caught sight of him too.

"Hey, Darren!" he said, walking up to him. "I have practice right now, so I can't take you home." He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at his teammates. "Aimee can take you."

"Where is she?" Darren asked. He looked around, but most people just walked by them to enjoy the freedom of after-school hours. Aimee wasn't one of them.

"She's always a bit slow," Liam said. "Has to talk with the girls, or whatever." He rolled his eyes. "She'll be here in a second, just wait here, okay? She knows she has to pick you up, so she'll be looking for you too."

"Okay," Darren said, the relief audible in his voice. "Good luck in practice."

Liam patted his new brother on the back and ran over to his friends, leaving Darren behind. When he stood in the emptying lot for more than ten seconds, he decided to find a place to sit where he could wait on Aimee. He saw a rock not too far away, which would have been perfect had there not already been someone sitting on it.

Someone from the female species with light, almost white hair.

Hesitantly, he walked up to her. "Dakota?"

She jumped and started coughing. "Darren?" she asked, looking up between coughs.

"... yes."

It was really her, and she looked just like she had on the day of the football game, with her hair loose, her skin pale despite the sun working extra hard, and her outfit bright. Between her fingers, she held a cigarette. "Has anyone ever told you you can't scare someone who's smoking?" she asked. "We're already dying, but we don't need your help by startling us and letting us choke."

Darren took a step back. "Sorry."

She got up and straightened her skin-tight skirt. "No worries," she said. "I'm being dramatic, it's just what I do." She sighed, let her cigarette drop to the floor and put it out with her foot. "How long have you been here? I was waiting for you."

"Not that long," he said. "School is only just out."

"Good," she said.

"Why weren't you in school?" he asked. "You haven't come in today, and you weren't here yesterday." He shared English with Dakota, but her seat had been empty, and Marley had made him aware of her absence the day before.

"Had some stuff to take care off," she said. "It's not that important, really, just a boring story. And I don't want to bore you." She tilted her head. "Why do you look so scared?"

He realized that all his muscles were tense, so he changed his body posture and tried to relax his body. It was just Dakota, the mysterious girl who disappeared for two days but had returned saying she was looking for him, but it was still just Dakota. "I'm not..." he said, but he trailed off.

"Is it because of what happened two days ago?" she asked. "I'm really sorry for that, Darren, I hope you understand that. I didn't mean to let you down."

He bowed his head slightly. "It's okay."

She shook her head. "It's not. I can't let this be your first impression of me – someone who bails on their friends at the last minute. You just caught me on a bad day."

"My first impression of you was the kiss cam," Darren said. He almost whispered the word "kiss".

"That was a bad day too."

He frowned, but didn't say anything.

Dakota put up a smile, and her eyes brightened up with it. "Anyway, I came to make things right," she said. "I was wondering if you were up to doing something. With me. To make up for last time."

"When?" he asked.

"Now."

That took him aback. "As in, right now?"

"That's the only now I know." She laughed.

He thought of Aimee. She was expecting him to be here. "I don't know if I can..."

"Do you have something else to do?" Dakota asked.

He shook his head. Not really, but it did screw with his plans. He wanted to make a headstart on the homework for next week. And he hadn't prepared at all, like he had for their last not-date. He was wearing a polo, the exact thing Aimee and Adelaide had told him not to wear.

But Dakota didn't seem to care. "Well, what are we waiting for, then?"

He gave in. "Let me text someone first." It only took a few seconds to type a message to Aimee saying she wouldn't have to wait on him. "Where are we going?" he asked Dakota.

She smirked. "I have something in mind."

✩

He should've known that when he asked Dakota where they would go, she wouldn't tell him. She was a woman that preferred mystery, after all, and Darren had to admit that the secrecy made the moments he had with her much more exciting.

This time too, she managed to surprise him. After a fifteen-minute drive, she pulled up to a building with screaming neon-lights. She kept looking at Darren, awaiting his reaction. When it didn't come, she asked, "So?"

Darren narrowed his eyes to read the lettering on the building and make sure he was seeing that right. "Are we going bowling?" he asked.

She just smirked.

"Isn't that for, like, seven-year-olds?"

She shrugged. "Seven-year-olds have more fun."

He laughed and looked at the side window while she found a parking spot.

"I'm serious," she said. "They don't have to worry about anything, get pampered by their parents with love, have shorter school days, and get to have fun all the time. I want to be a seven-year-old. It's much better than seventeen."

The car came to a definite halt within the lines of the parking spot and Dakota got out. Darren followed her lead.

"Have you ever been bowling?" she asked him.

"A long time ago," he said, looking up at the building.

"Well, you'll love it," she said. "I promise. Even though it's for seven-year-olds. And if you don't like it, you get a do-over and we'll go somewhere else."

He shook his head. "No, this is fine," he hurried to say. The only issue was that he was terrible at bowling and that he didn't want to fail in front of Dakota, but he comforted himself by thinking that she'd never said she was good either.

"Cool," she said, her voice rising. "Let's go in."

The building was even flashier on the inside. While the neon lights outside had already been headache-inducing, the loud music overwhelmed him the moment the door opened. His eyes had to adjust to the dark room with the circling spotlights in all colors, more than he could recognize. When they walked in, someone behind the counter greeted them with a loud volume to be audible over the music, and Dakota walked up to him to get them a bowling lane.

"Number three is for us," Dakota said once she came back. She walked in the direction of something Darren hadn't seen or thought of until that moment, but it made him aware why he never wanted to go to bowling alleys anymore: he had to wear shoes someone else's sweaty feet had been in.

She didn't seem to have an issue with that and took her size out of the rack. He followed her, albeit more hesitantly.

Once she had her shoes on, she skipped to the lane that would be theirs for the next hour. Even those ugly, disgusting shoes couldn't tame her excitement.

"I'll go first," she said, and she started typing on the giant keyboard to fill in her name – or not, as Darren soon realized.

"What are you doing?" he asked once she'd put down the letters TAH.

She bit her lip playfully while keeping her eyes focused on the keyboard. "Today, I don't want to be Dakota," she said. She typed an L and an I. "What do you think, am I more of a Tahlie or a Tahlia?"

He didn't know what difference it made. "Tahlia, maybe?"

She went with his advice and confirmed on the screen that it was her name. Then, she gave way so Darren could type his name, and he doubted for a second if he should make up a name too, but he couldn't think of anything. He just typed his name and pressed "okay", and that's when he saw he'd made a mistake.

"Dareen," Dakota said as she read his name off the screen. "I like it."

"It was a typo," he mumbled.

"Should we get started?" She picked up a ball. "I have to warn you though, I'm not good at this."

He let out a relieved sigh. "Me neither."

✩

She let herself fall onto the red couch that came with the bowling lane. "I'm tired," she groaned. "I'm not made for sports."

He laughed. "This is only the fourth round."

She stuck out her tongue but didn't reply to the comment. "It's time for something to drink, don't you think?" She raised her back off the couch and only had her legs laying on it, but it still took up the entire space the small couch offered. "Fortunately, this thing comes with lane service."

"Lane service?" He frowned.

"Instead of room service," she clarified. "Just press the bell on the keyboard."

She clearly didn't want to get up from her comfortable position, and since Darren was standing next to the keyboard because he was about to pick up a bowling ball, he took it upon himself to get them lane service.

"Thank you, Darren."

Only then did her earlier words get through to him. "Wait, you don't like sports?"

She shook her head. "Just not my thing. The only marathon I'll ever have is a party marathon."

"Why did you take us here, then?" He couldn't suppress a laugh. She hadn't just taken him out of his comfort zone, but she continued to overstep her own boundaries too.

She shrugged while the corners of her mouth curled up. "I thought it would be fun. Am I wrong?"

He rushed to deny that. "Just... Why would you go to the football game if you don't like sports?" He'd started wondering about that since she'd said that the day of the kiss had been a bad day, but her more recent comment was even more intriguing.

"Oh, that." She bit her lip. "That's a long story." She smiled too, so it wasn't a bad thing. "Do you remember Bennett?"

Her ex-now-boyfriend? "Yes." And from what Marley had told him, he wasn't good news.

"Well, we had had a fight that day," she said. "And we broke up."

Darren snickered. The breakup hadn't even lasted a week, because he knew that Dakota and Bennett were already back together again.

"We had a fight, and it wasn't pretty." She sighed, and Darren realized that as she was saying this, this might be the first time he'd ever seen her without that sparkle of joy in her eyes that seemed to look at the good things in life only.

"I'm sorry," he said softly.

She shook her head. "You had nothing to do with it," she said, "so it's not your fault." She sat up straighter and smoothed out her red skirt that she had paired with a tight, checkered top. Her midriff was on show, and it made Darren feel inappropriate, but she didn't seem to mind it. "Anyway, we had a fight, and I was pretty mad at him, so I called Marley to rant. She told me I needed to blow some steam off, and the only way I knew how was screaming from the top of my lungs." She chuckled. "And a football game is the perfect place to do that without being looked at like you're a weirdo."

He didn't think she'd care about what other people thought. "So..." he said, and when she made clear she didn't know what else he wanted to know, he continued, "you just went to the game because...?"

She raised her shoulders. "Because I could," she said, and she smiled broadly. "What else was I supposed to do, sit at home and wallow?"

That would be out of character for her, so he shook his head. Of course he couldn't expect her to do nothing, but going to a football game wouldn't be his preferred method of coping with a breakup.

She tilted her head. "There's something else you want to ask, isn't there?"

He cast his head down and bit his smiling lips. Even when she seemed to live her life independent of the world uncaring of what other people thought, she'd noticed the hesitating look on his face. "It's not about the breakup," he said, even though he still wanted to know the answer to the question he had in mind.

"You don't have to hold yourself back," she said. "I never do."

But he wasn't like her, and he needed some more time. The words only slowly left his lips. "Why weren't you in school this week?"

While I was writing this chapter, it got so long... So I had to cut it in two, which means I'll have to leave you at this cliffhanger! What do you think -- why wasn't Dakota in school?