I was proud of myself that I didn’t ask. “I’m sorry I missed it,” I said.
“Yeah, it was great,” he said. “You want to stop by the band room after school tomorrow? Levinson’s going to decide between me and another guy as to who gets to do the drum solo at the winter concert. We both have to audition, and I figure it wouldn’t hurt to have my friends there.”
“What time?”
“Three.”
“Oh, Patrick! I’ve got an editorial meeting for the school newspaper! We get our assignments for the next month. Darn!”
“You can’t skip?”
“If I do, I’ll get stuck with the assignment nobody else wants. I’ve heard it’s really, really important to be at the first meeting of every month.”
“Well, that’s the way the ball bounces,” Patrick said.
“Look. I’ll see if I can’t get my assignment first and come right down to the band room,” I told him.
“Okay. See you,” he said.
I loved being one of the two freshmen roving reporters, and looked forward to the weekly meetings. Sam Mayer was only a freshman, too, but he’d moved right up to photographer. He was so good that he was sent to cover the first football game. The roving reporters got the fluff assignments, we call them, the kind you could either put in or leave out and it wouldn’t make much difference. But some assignments were better than others, and they were fun.
Nick O’Connell, a senior, was editor in chief, and when I got to the meeting, there was a big argument in progress. Sara, the features editor, was complaining that none of her ideas were taken seriously, and that it was obvious to her that guys ran the newspaper, and girls didn’t get much say about the way it was done. In spite of myself, I was about five minutes late coming in, and wasn’t sure what the issue was. But Sara was so upset that her chin quivered, and I knew it sure wasn’t the time to ask if I could choose my assignment and leave.
Some of the kids were taking Nick’s side and some were taking Sara’s, and then somebody brought up an issue that seemed totally unrelated to the problem, and everyone went off on that. By the time Nick got to the assignments, he started with the seniors instead of the freshmen, and finally—the very last—I got mine: I didn’t even get a choice. Something about the “mystery meat” served in the school cafeteria.
Nick said it was okay for me to go then, so I grabbed my coat and book bag and ran down two flights of stairs, then the long corridor to the band room. But everyone had gone. The janitor was sweeping up. I took a city bus home and tried calling Patrick, but no one answered. When I called again around ten, his mom said he’d gone to bed.
Lester had to drive me to school early the next morning because I’d forgotten to pick up the new layout instructions for the school paper. At noon, they served the mystery meat again, and luckily I had my camera ready. There it was, the gray-looking patty swimming in a pool of greasy-looking gravy. I was careful not to take pictures of my friends—the newspaper frowns on cliques taking over the paper, the same kids getting their pictures in again and again. So I spent my lunch period walking around the cafeteria, going up to kids I didn’t know and asking them what they thought they were eating, then photographed them taking a bite.
“Soy delight,” said one girl.
“Squid,” said another.
“Roadkill,” said a guy.
“Skunk au jus.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” said the last girl, and I hoped I got the face she made when she took a bite.
I stopped at a one-hour photo shop on my way home that afternoon, and at least four of the five pictures turned out well. The fifth was a little fuzzy—I think she moved—but I wrote her up, anyway, and did a layout for the paper. It was a lot of fun writing the piece, actually. I started off quoting Lester: “There’s a rumor that the food in the cafeteria is leftover from the prison infirmary… .”
Later, I was just getting ready to take a bath when Jill called.
“What’cha doing?” she asked.
“Something really exciting: getting ready for a bath. Maybe even a pedicure. What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Just resting up. Finished a paper for social studies… . We missed you at lunch.”
“Yeah. I was doing an assignment for The Edge,” I told her.
There was a pause. “You should have been in the band room yesterday,” she said.
“Yeah? How did Patrick do? I haven’t seen him all day.”
“Great. He got the solo. We were cheering like mad.”
“I wish I’d been there! I had a newspaper meeting. Who all came?”
“Penny.”
A panic spread through me, sharper than anything I’d felt so far. “Only you and Penny?” I asked.
“Well, there were a few of us, Alice, but, like I said, you should have been there.”
“What are you saying?”
“Penny went up and hugged him after Levinson said he got the solo.”
“She did?”
“I mean, you could have just called it a friendly hug, but … well, he didn’t push her away, that’s for sure.”
“Well, of course not. Patrick’s not rude,” I told her.
“But she was there for him, Alice! That’s what I’m saying. She was there at the movie the other day, too, and you weren’t.”
“Well, that’s just great! I happened to have a ton of homework then, and it was important I be at that meeting today. There have been plenty of times I’ve wanted to do things with Patrick and he’s been busy. That’s life. We just have to make time for each other when we can.”
“I understand! I understand! I’m just telling you as a friend, that’s all. But things do happen, and I didn’t want you to be the last to know.”
“Well, thanks, but it’s just something Patrick and I have to work out ourselves,” I said.
“I guess I shouldn’t have bothered,” Jill said, and hung up.
Oh, boy. I slid down the wall and sat hugging my knees. I imagined Patrick auditioning for the solo, looking around to see which of his friends had shown up. I imagined Penny hugging him afterward. Patrick not pushing her away. Patrick hugging back. Patrick looking down at her and smiling.
And I wondered if, in the long run, it would have made any difference if I’d been there or not. If I’d been at the movie and the audition both. And for the first time, I sensed Patrick slipping away from me, and felt sick.
8
Heart-to-Heart
I probably sat on the floor without moving for twenty minutes, and then I picked up the phone and called Patrick.
“Oh, hi, Alice,” Mrs. Long said. “Just a minute. He’s practicing.”
I could hear Patrick’s drums going in the background, booming up from the basement. I remembered with a pang the drum lesson he’d given me down there once, the way he’d touched me, the tingle I’d felt, the way I’d wanted him to touch me again. I swallowed.
The drumming stopped. I heard Patrick’s footsteps on the stairs, the fumble of the phone in his hands. “Hello?”
“Hi, Patrick. I’ve been hearing good things about you,” I said.
“Yeah, I got the solo part. I get about four minutes to improvise.”
“That’s wonderful! I really wanted to be there, but there was some big crisis at the meeting and I was the last one to get my assignment. I ran all the way down to the band room afterward, but everyone was gone. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Well, I’ve been really busy.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. Me, too. I wondered if you wanted to come over some night. Just hang out.”
“Tomorrow, maybe. We leave for a band competition Friday afternoon.”
“I know. Tomorrow’s fine.”
We talked about this and that for another twenty minutes. Neither of us mentioned Penny. Maybe when you like a really popular guy you have to get used to groupies—to other girls liking him, too. Maybe it goes with the territory.
Patrick was on the bus the
next morning, joking around with the guys in back like always, and Penny and Jill were sitting together when Elizabeth and I got on. Jill looked the other way when I said, “Hi.” Penny said, “Hi,” and went on talking to Karen, who was hanging over the back of the seat. Pamela and Brian and Mark were all squeezed together in one of the seats. She kept trying to wedge in between them, but they made her sit on their laps.
Elizabeth and I slid in a seat together behind some seniors who were arguing about a movie review.
“What’s with you and Jill?” Elizabeth whispered. “You noticed.”
“Yes. She was, like, ignoring you.”
“I don’t know. I guess you’d have to ask her,” I said.
I was miserable all day, and somehow the thought of seeing Patrick that night didn’t help. I didn’t feel as though he was mine anymore, and even though I knew he didn’t belong to me—he wasn’t a possession—I just didn’t feel special any longer. The Snow Ball—the first formal dance of the year—was coming up in the middle of December, and I wanted to feel that we were that same special couple we used to be, comfortable in knowing we’d be going to it together.
I put on my best jeans and a rust-colored sweater that night, the gold locket that used to belong to my mom, with a little lock of her hair in it, and tiny gold earrings.
“Hello,” Patrick said at the door, and smiled down at me.
I reached up and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Want to come in?”
“The leaves are blowing around like mad, and it’s actually warm out. Let’s walk,” he said. “Have a leaf fight or something. Go get some ice cream.”
I laughed and stepped out on the porch to check the temperature. It was warm for November. I put on my white windbreaker, and we went down the steps.
“Didn’t you ever do that when you were little? Have a leaf fight?” he asked.
“I think I just jumped around in them. No natural aggression,” I said.
“We used to try to stuff them down girls’ necks.”
“Typical,” I said. “Always trying to get in a girl’s shirt.”
He laughed.
We walked out in the street in the gutter where the leaves had piled up, enjoying the crunching sound underfoot. I let him do the talking—the assignment he had to do for physics, his mom’s birthday, the car his dad was going to buy, the sci-fi movie I’d missed, what a blast it had been… . He still, though, didn’t mention Penny, and it began to annoy me that he wouldn’t talk about her, almost as though he had something to hide.
“I hear you had quite a cheering section at your audition,” I said finally, as lightly and casually as I could muster.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Yeah, some of the kids showed. I usually block everyone out when I’m playing, though.”
“And afterward?”
“What?”
“Well, I heard you got quite a hug.”
He smiled faintly. “Penny’s real affectionate,” he said. “It’s just the way she is.”
“I guess so,” I said, hating the flat sound my voice took on. “You must have enjoyed it, though.”
“Why not? I did what any normal guy would do—hugged her back. Something wrong with that?” Now his voice had an edge to it. I didn’t trust myself to respond, and then he added, sort of jokingly, “She likes me! What can I do?”
“What else?” I said.
Patrick wasn’t smiling anymore. “Is this what tonight’s about? You wanted to lecture me about Penny?”
“What I really wanted was just an evening together—we haven’t seen much of each other since school started. But if there’s something I should know …”
“Why do I get the feeling that every time I’m within six feet of Penny I have to report back to you?” Patrick said.
“I don’t know. Conscience, maybe?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I noticed that instead of taking the usual route to the grade school where we often sat on the swings and hand-walked the horizontal bars, we had turned at the next corner as though we were circling the block. As though my feet refused to go in a straight line that would, if we had passed the school and gone three blocks farther, taken us to the ice-cream parlor where Penny may or may not have been working that night. I even wondered if that’s why Patrick had mentioned getting ice cream, just so he could see her.
“I mean that I keep hearing things from other people about you and Penny, but I never hear about them from you. And if she’s just a casual friend, why wouldn’t you mention her along with everyone else? What’s so secret if she’s just another face in the crowd?”
Patrick looked straight ahead. “She’s not just another ‘face.’ She’s a good friend. She’s fun to be with. I expect to have a lot of good friends, male and female, through high school and college, and you should, too. The more the better.”
We walked awhile without speaking. The truth of what he said only cut a little deeper. So did the fact that we seemed to be heading right back to my house, because we turned again at the next corner. As though the relationship, as well as our feet, wasn’t going anywhere.
“So why did I have to find out about that false ‘kiss’ between you and Penny from a photo on our piano? Why did I have to hear from someone else about you sitting beside her at the movie and making her scream? Why did Jill tell me about the way Penny went up and hugged you after your audition, but I didn’t hear it from you?”
“Because Jill’s a gossip, that’s why.”
“But you wouldn’t have told me yourself? Once again, Alice is the last to know.”
“What’s to tell? She likes me, I like her. She’s not you, she’s just different.”
Somehow, the way he said it, cut deepest of all. The last time Patrick had said, She’s not you, Alice, it had made me feel special, as though Penny could never hold the place in his heart that was reserved for me. But now I heard something else: that Penny was different, and he liked that difference. That there were qualities he found in Penny that he didn’t find in me. And while that was only natural and made common sense, it hurt like anything. What it meant to me was that Patrick found Penny fun and cute and full of life, and it made me feel large and unattractive and dull in comparison.
“What I’m hearing, Patrick, is that Penny’s pretty special to you,” I said, but my words came out all breathy.
He glanced over to see, I suppose, if I was going to cry. “But you are, too,” he said in answer.
I imagined Patrick kissing Penny the way he had kissed me; touching her the way he had touched me. “How can we both be special?” I asked angrily.
He shrugged. “You just are. You and I have been going out for two years.”
“Just tell me this: Are we still a couple or not?” I asked, refusing to look at him, my feet plodding on ahead.
Patrick didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “If you mean will we still go out, sure. If you mean I can’t go out with Penny sometimes, then …” He didn’t finish.
My whole body felt like feet. I could feel each one hitting the sidewalk. The more I imagined Patrick and Penny together—petite Penny—the bigger my feet seemed to be. My legs, my hands, my head felt huge, and the more unattractive I felt, the angrier I got. I didn’t want to be walking along beside this red-haired guy who didn’t want me anymore. Not the way he used to.
When we turned again onto my street, I could see our porch six doors down. I didn’t even want to walk past those six houses to get there. I wished I was there already, safe inside.
“Well, maybe if Penny’s so special to you, you should just become a couple,” I snapped.
Patrick stopped walking and stood absolutely still on the sidewalk, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. I’d never seen his face like it looked then. Reserved. Distant. “Are you asking me to choose?” he said.
“Yes,” I told him. “Maybe you should just take her to the Snow Ball.”
“Then, maybe I will,” he said. And he tu
rned and walked slowly off in the other direction.
I caught my breath, wanting to call after him, but I didn’t. I could feel my heart racing, my tongue dry, the blood throbbing in my temples. I turned and walked as fast as I could back home, my eyes starting to close against the tears, my chin wobbling, and then I was running up the steps, crossing the porch, streaking up the stairs to my room, and collapsing on the rug beside my bed.
I don’t know how long I cried. My room was full of Patrick—pictures and postcards and mementos of all the things we’d done. Pamela had even returned the Milky Way wrapper from the first candy bar Patrick ever gave me; I’d given it to her as my prized possession when we thought she was moving to Colorado. Most of my bulletin board was devoted to Patrick.
My memories were Patrick. My kisses were Patrick’s. All my plans for weekends and summers had been built around him, and now there didn’t seem to be anything left—any structure to pin things on. I’d had a boyfriend for so long that I didn’t know what to do without one. How would I act, going everywhere by myself? Being a single in our gang? How did other girls manage this?
There was a light tap on the door. “Al?” said Dad.
I couldn’t answer. “Al?” he said again, louder. “May I come in?”
“Yes.” Even my voice sounded small.
The door opened, and he stood there in his Dockers and flannel shirt, looking down at me. “What happened, honey?” he said, and came over to sit on the edge of my bed.
I turned around and grabbed hold of one of his legs, burying my face in his pant leg, and cried some more.
“Something happen between you and Patrick?”
“I think w-we b-broke up,” I sobbed. “Oh, Dad!”
I felt his hand on my forehead, his fingers brushing back the wet hair that clung to my temples. “Want to tell me about it?” he asked softly.
“It’s just … just … there’s this girl, Penny, and she’s been chasing him, and …” I couldn’t go on. I was putting it all on Penny, I knew. I still couldn’t face the fact that the feeling between her and Patrick was mutual.