Dial Me Beautiful

...a few months later

It was Halloween night, 1996.  I was sixteen and in the middle of my nightly I-wanna-be-a-Noxema-girl routine.  My dad knocked on the bathroom door.  "Alanna, phone...it's a boy."

So I go out to the dinning room and pick up the phone.  "Hello?"  Who would be calling?  It was after ten.

"Hi.  It's Scott."

"Hi."  We'd just seen each other twenty minutes earlier when he'd dropped me off in his parents blue Geo after the youth group party.  Why was he calling now?

"I just wanted to tell you that you looked really beautiful tonight."

And I'm standing there, face a white, tingly mask of minty cream, wearing a flannelette nightgown my grandma had made me, barefoot and shocked.  "Oh.  Thank you."

"Sleep good."

"You, too."

"Bye."

"Bye."

We were dating by Christmas.