I made a point of sitting with Elizabeth the next morning on the bus.
“Why don’t you come over tonight?” I asked her.
“You always go to Pamela’s on Fridays,” she answered.
“Well, I won’t this time. Come on over and we’ll spy on Lester.” I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
“I already told my aunt I’d spend the night there,” she said.
“What do you do at your aunt’s?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Play cards. Make milk shakes. Read mysteries aloud to each other—stuff like that.”
All at once I wanted to visit Elizabeth’s aunt and play cards and make milk shakes and read mysteries out loud. A lot more than I wanted to try on earrings with Pamela, Karen, and Jill. But I hadn’t been invited.
It started to snow around lunchtime. Light flakes at first, then heavier and heavier, and the rumor went around that we were getting off early.
In Maryland, everyone goes nuts when it snows. When snow is forecast in Maryland, people rush to the store to buy fifty pounds of hamburger so they won’t starve if they’re snowbound for a day or two. With only a half-inch of snow on the ground, cars plow into each other, trucks stall, buses skid, and traffic is tied up for two miles on the beltway. And when snow comes unexpectedly, even the federal government closes down and everyone goes home except the president. All he has to do is walk upstairs.
We all cheered when we saw the yellow buses pulling up an hour early. Everyone was shouting and laughing as we ran to our lockers and got our stuff. When we went outside, guys started pelting girls with snowballs. Brian came up, pulled open the neck of my coat, and stuffed a snowball down the inside of my yellow turtleneck. I shrieked, of course, because everyone else was laughing, but the truth was, I was a little sick of Brian right then.
Lester was already home when I got there, and Dad arrived shortly afterward. The snow was really coming down then, and the radio was talking about the number of accidents in the area.
“I figured we wouldn’t have many customers anyway, so I decided to close up shop,” Dad said. “How about if we make soup?”
Lester and I didn’t exactly jump up and down, because we know Dad’s recipe for soup: two cans of chicken broth, one can of V-8, and all the leftovers he can find in the refrigerator, simmered for two hours. This wouldn’t be so bad if he stuck to meat and vegetables. But Lester swears he found some oatmeal floating around on the top of his soup once, and I know for a fact that Dad once scraped off the peanut butter from a half-eaten sandwich and added that to the kettle.
Dad was just starting for the kitchen when someone rang the doorbell and Lester went to answer. He opened the door and in walked Loretta Jenkins. She didn’t even wait to be asked. She just stood there in the hallway with snow all over her hair and the shoulders of her coat, and reminded me of the angel Gabriel, come to tell Mary she was pregnant.
“Hi,” she said, looking right into Lester’s eyes. If she knew Dad and I were there, she didn’t say anything.
“Hello,” Lester said, taking a step backward.
“I’m off to make some soup,” Dad said, escaping to the kitchen.
I didn’t offer to help, because I really wanted to hear what Loretta was going to say, so I went over to the beanbag chair in the living room and turned the TV on low.
“I guess you decided against the priesthood, huh?” Loretta said, getting right to the point.
“What?” Lester stared.
“I saw you with Marilyn Rawley last week,” Loretta said, “and I heard that Crystal Harkins sent you some balloons. She told me.”
Lester blinked.
“Lester,” said Loretta, “I’m going to come right out and say this. I’ve liked you for a long time, though I don’t suppose you’ve noticed. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you have to go after what you want. If Marilyn and Crystal are in the running, you can count me in.”
For once in his life, Lester was speechless.
“I’m inviting you out on Saturday night—a little party with some friends of mine,” Loretta said.
Lester thrust his hands in his pockets. “Loretta,” he said, “we’ve got to talk.”
“Fine.”
“I’m serious about Marilyn Rawley. I can’t help it.”
“And I’m serious about you; I can’t help that, either.”
“What I’m trying to tell you—”
“Look. Do we have to talk here?” Loretta asked. “Can’t we at least walk around the block?”
“Okay,” Lester said. “I’ll get my jacket.”
I followed him upstairs. “Lester, don’t go,” I warned, throwing Sisterhood to the winds. “You know what happened when you went for a walk with Marilyn.”
“Don’t worry,” Lester said. “Loretta couldn’t get a rise out of me if she had ten boobs on her body.”
“You’re going to get her hopes up.”
“I can handle this,” said Lester. He slipped on his jacket.
But I wasn’t so sure. “Thirty minutes, and I’ll send the Saint Bernard,” I told him as he clattered downstairs.
As it happened, he was back in fifteen. I came down to find him sitting in the kitchen, slicing onions for Dad. Already the smell of chicken broth and V-8 filled the kitchen, as well as something else I couldn’t name—sauerkraut, maybe, left over from a week ago Tuesday.
“Well, are you going to Loretta’s party?” I asked him.
“I am not,” said Lester.
“You’re off the hook, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did she say?”
“That if I’m playing the field, she’s up to bat,” Les said morosely.
“What did you tell her?”
Dad answered for him: “That he’s in love with Marilyn, infatuated with Crystal, that he hasn’t the strength or intelligence for any more involvements, and she should place her affections elsewhere.”
I stared at Lester. “You told her that?”
“Not in those words.”
“What did she say, Lester?”
“‘It’s a free country; be prepared.’”
I thought again of the 272 awful, ridiculous things that were waiting to happen to me, and wondered whether some might be headed for Lester instead.
Wouldn’t it be weird, though, if in spite of all this, Lester grew up to be famous? If, when you looked up the Ms in the encyclopedia, there was an entry for McKinley, Lester Paul? And if somewhere in his biography there was a listing for Loretta Jenkins, as a girl who knew him when …?
13
IN BETWEEN
I WAS LOOKING UP MADAME CURIE IN THE encyclopedia later when there was a thud on the window-pane beside my chair. I looked up to see the slushy remains of a snowball go sliding slowly down the glass, and then Patrick, standing out in the yard, motioning me to come out. I jumped up and went for my boots and jacket.
“Fight?” Patrick said when I stepped outside.
“Fight!” I agreed. As soon as I reached the bottom step, he hit me on the legs, and the war was on.
“Alice, want some help?” Elizabeth called from across the street.
“Sure! Come on!”
It was only fifteen minutes before there was a whole bunch of kids in the street. Elizabeth and I were using the lids of garbage cans for shields, and snowballs were flying like crazy.
“Girls against boys!” someone yelled, and Patrick and Mark Stedmeister and some of the others moved behind a fence a few doors down.
It was snowing harder now, and all of us had frosted eyelashes and tufts of white above our foreheads. The crowd had grown to thirteen, seven boys and six girls. We had scouts on each side who sized up the opposition, spies who crept into no-man’s-land, advance troops, rear guards. We agreed to break for supper, then come back later to build a fort.
The crowd was smaller at seven—Elizabeth had gone on to her aunt’s for the night, and Mark had to go somewhere with his parents.
Only boys showed up, in fact, but we rolled huge balls of snow and made a horseshoe-shaped fort in the middle of our front yard. It was five feet high and had narrow windows so we could see out.
“Al,” Dad called from the porch. “Pamela’s on the phone and wants to know when you’re coming over.”
The earring club! The Sisterhood!
“Tell her I can’t come tonight, Dad. I’ll call her tomorrow,” I said, and went on helping to build the last row of the snow fort.
It was there Brian tried to kiss me. Maybe if he had just grabbed me and done it, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it seemed as though wherever I turned, there was Brian, right in my face.
Once I even paused to let him kiss me and get it over with, and he was so close I could smell the wet wool of his cap. But then he lost his nerve and messed up my hair instead. I went to work making another window, and suddenly there was Brian on the other side, looking in.
“Hey, Alice,” he said. “Give me an Eskimo kiss.” The other guys laughed.
“What?” I said.
“Come on,” he said through the narrow window. “An Eskimo kiss.” I guess he wanted me to stick my nose in the slot, but at that moment I was very, very sick of Brian. I picked up a clump of snow from the floor of the fort and pushed it through the window, right into Brian’s face.
You know what he did? He came around the side, pushed me down, and rubbed my face in the snow, just like I was a boy. The other guys looked embarrassed. Brian’s own face was pink. I could see it in the light from the streetlamp. No girl had ever pushed snow in his face before.
“Let’s go home,” he said to the other guys, and after some more teasing and calling back and forth, they all left, Patrick too.
I went in the house, my cheeks fiery red, my fingers stinging. Why isn’t life ever like the movies? Why couldn’t Brian have taken me in his arms in front of all the other boys, even Patrick, and kissed me passionately there in the moonlight, with our snow-covered eyelashes beating time with our hearts? Whenever he teased me, I was supposed to laugh. When I teased him, he got mad. It was humiliating.
I sat blowing on my fingers, trying to shake some life back into them, and Dad mixed a cup of cocoa and gave it to me with a lecture on frostbite.
Lester was over in the corner reading the newspaper, and I remembered his walk in the snow with Loretta, the go-after-what-you-want woman. I guess for Lester it wasn’t like the movies, either. It could have been Marilyn who showed up at the door, and Lester could have proposed under a pine tree or something. But who did he get? Loretta. Does life like to play tricks, or what?
Once I lost the numbness in my fingers and toes, I realized that it was ten o’clock on a Friday night, and I had nothing to do. Lester was in a rotten mood, Dad was finishing up the income tax, Elizabeth was at her aunt’s, and the earring club had met without me. Pamela, Jill, and Karen—three of the most popular girls in seventh grade—had tried on earrings and sweaters and eye shadow, and I had said no, I wasn’t coming. Once you say no, I discovered, you have to be prepared to spend some evenings by yourself. Was I ready for that? I wasn’t sure.
On Saturday, after I’d put in my three hours at the Melody Inn, I discovered the earring club had gone to the mall without me too. And because I wasn’t there to buy anything, they didn’t invite me over on Sunday to try on what I hadn’t bought.
But I was thinking about Loretta. I had talked with her just a little at the Gift Shoppe that morning, and she had a determined look in her eye that made me nervous. She said maybe she didn’t have a ghost of a chance with Lester, but she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t try, and she wanted me to think of all the things he liked to eat, and to give her a list the following Saturday. I told Lester, and he said if I ever told Loretta anything at all about him I could say good-bye to life. I decided that was pretty definite.
But what if she did win out over Marilyn and Crystal? What if Lester did decide that beneath that wild curly hair and those gum-chewing jaws, there was something he just couldn’t live without? I’d already decided that if Lester married Marilyn, the wedding would be held in a meadow, with Marilyn in a long cotton dress and everyone playing guitars. If Lester married Crystal, the wedding would be held in a cathedral, with Crystal in a long satin gown and the organ playing Bach. But I knew in my heart that if Lester married Loretta, it would be before a justice of the peace, and the reception would be in the firehouse with everyone dancing the polka.
These three girls were my three older Sisters of the Sisterhood, and I liked them all. I wanted them to be my friends for life. But Lester had to choose.
By Monday, I had decided to give up the All-Stars Fan Club. I felt uncomfortable around Brian, so I told Pamela that there were other things I wanted to do on Wednesdays (namely, not go to the fan club), and she said okay.
When we got on the bus, she and Jill sat together, wearing matching pink-and-black earrings that looked like tiny marbles. Those earrings would have looked great on me, I decided with a pang. They were the best-looking earrings that Tiddly Winks had carried yet, and Saturday was the day I would have to decide not to go. I slid into the seat with Elizabeth.
“Did you have a good time at your aunt’s?” I asked.
“I always do,” said Elizabeth. “She has this huge two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, and we worked all evening to make the border. Then we made chocolate fondue.”
“What’s that?”
“You melt chocolate and cream in a pot, and then you stick little chunks of pineapple and pound cake and orange slices and stuff in it, and eat it off a fork. It’s delicious.”
I could have been wearing those pink-and-black earrings that looked like marbles, or I could have been swirling orange slices in chocolate. I could have been doing anything at all over the weekend except sitting at home. I wasn’t out of the earring club, but I wasn’t exactly in. I wasn’t enemies with Elizabeth, but I wasn’t her best friend. I wasn’t really Patrick’s one true love, either, and I didn’t know what Brian felt about me. I was just sort of in between everything.
Patrick, Brian, and Mark Stedmeister got on at the next stop. Patrick didn’t look too well, I thought. Instead of going to the back with the other guys as he usually does, he just stood there behind the driver, holding on to the pole, looking strange. The bus started up, Patrick took a few steps down the aisle, then stopped again. And suddenly, without any warning, he leaned over and threw up.
Splat! It sounded like a jar full of chili hitting the floor. Elizabeth gave a shriek. A couple of the other girls were screeching too, and somebody said, “Oh, yuck!”
“Way to go, Patrick!” Brian yelled.
“Breakfast, anybody?” called Mark Stedmeister, and laughed.
The awful thing about vomit is, you don’t want to look, but you do. I looked down and saw this huge puddle that was running in little rivulets down the aisle. Little bits of undigested Cheerios, little flecks of something orange. Brown specks covered Pamela’s white sneakers, and she was frantically wiping at them with a Kleenex.
Patrick started to straighten up, his face white, then leaned over and heaved again.
“Get off!” somebody said to Patrick.
“Barf city!” Brian yelled.
The driver stopped the bus.
“You think you ought to go back home?” he said, and Patrick turned and nodded. The door swung open, Patrick escaped, and the driver picked up a copy of the morning Post by his seat, unfolded it, and came back to spread the open sheets over the mess on the floor.
You could still smell it, though, and once or twice, I found myself gagging. I didn’t want them to, but my eyes kept returning to those newspapers on the floor, knowing what was underneath. And when the bus stopped at last, we all had to step over it to get out. Elizabeth kept one hand over her nose and mouth all the way into the building.
I was thinking of what Lester had told me after I’d embarrassed myself at the talent show—how everyone else was so glad it happe
ned to me and not to them. I realized I felt some of that now. I was grateful it hadn’t happened to me, but I wasn’t at all glad it had happened to Patrick.
Things weren’t the same in World Studies, and it wasn’t because of Patrick. Brian wasn’t rude to me; he simply didn’t pay any attention to me at all. It was as though I’d been quickly, quietly dropped from the Register of Beautiful People. When the bell rang at the end of the period, the others surged out the door, teasing and tickling and laughing their tinkly laughs, but I wasn’t one of the Famous Eight. I don’t think Pamela even noticed I wasn’t along. Maybe none of the others noticed except Brian. Usually, at the end of the period, he herded me over to the door, giving me little pokes in the back and ribs, but on this day, as soon as the bell rang, he was out of there, and I walked through the door by myself.
There were tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t help it. If I’d had Carol there right then, or even Aunt Sally, I probably would have buried my head on her bosom and bawled. Was this the price of being popular—one little mistake and you were out? Whose rules were these, anyway? One part of me wanted to plead with Pamela to talk the others into taking me back, and another part of me said that if Brian pushed his face in mine the way he’d done in our yard, he’d get a snout full of snow all over again, and maybe some down his neck for good measure.
14
THE TEST
LESTER CAME HOME THAT EVENING TO say that he just didn’t know what to tell Crystal. I decided I didn’t want to see Crystal hurt any more than I wanted Marilyn to be hurt, or even Loretta.
“Les,” I said to him, “if you’re in love with Marilyn, why don’t you just tell Crystal you’re sorry, but you know she’ll be happier with someone else, and then tell Loretta she’s not even in the running. Be honest about it.”
For once I think I’d said something intelligent, and Lester actually looked as though he were paying attention. But then I had to ruin it: “Crystal could be the maid of honor at your wedding, and Loretta could be a bridesmaid,” I said. “Then all three would be happy.”