He gazed around the room as though checking out the invisible party. “So, do you like to dance?”
“Yes. Have you ever ridden a horse?”
He cocked his head at me. “What kind of answer is that? Are you purposely trying to throw me off?”
“No. I just think you’d look great on a horse.”
He took a final step toward me. We were now so close if I reached out my hands just a little, I could touch him. With my gaze I traced the line his cheekbones made against his face.
His voice was low. “That isn’t what you’d say to a guy you’d just met.”
“I might,” I said. “If the guy was hot.”
He took hold of my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. “What else would you say?”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to say things. You’re Romeo.”
“Right.” He pulled me closer to him, almost into an embrace, then whispered into my ear, “As soon as I met you, I could tell there was something special about you. I’m glad we’re together right now.” He bent down and kissed me, and I kissed him back.
Because I was Juliet.
Because I was helping Jordan with acting, which he’d apparently mastered really fast.
Because I wanted to.
Finally I pulled away from him, breathed deeply, and ran a hand through my hair. “See, once you get into character, you don’t really have to worry about body language. It’s, you know, finding the right motivation that’s the key.”
He cocked his head and smiled at me. “Jessica, I wasn’t acting.” Then the smile dropped from his lips. “Were you?”
“No, but—” At that moment I saw Kate’s face, not Brendan’s: Kate, who had spent the entire day telling me how wonderful Jordan was. Kate, who’d been trying to find a way to go up and talk to him. Kate, who trusted me.
“I do like you,” I said softly, “but Kate likes you too. I actually encouraged her to like you. I can’t just take you away now.”
His eyebrows raised. He looked at me, then beyond me as though searching for answers somewhere in the room. “If you like me, why would you encourage your best friend to like me?”
“Because . . .” I was stupid, blind, and had convinced myself I wanted revenge on Lauren and affirmation from Brendan. Because I was trying to do something nice for my best friend.
I plopped down on the couch. “I thought Kate was more your type. I want to be an actress, and you don’t like the profession. She’s a liberal, and you’re from California. Besides, Kate thinks everything good always happens to me. It just seemed to be her turn to have the new guy like her.”
He tilted his head at me like he couldn’t quite follow my logic. “I didn’t know girls took turns having guys like them. And what does living in California have to do with which political party you belong to?”
“You’re not a liberal?”
“No.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “Well, you should have told me that before I gave you to Kate.”
“You gave me to Kate?” he repeated.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The doorbell rang. I waited for someone else to get it, then remembered I was the only one of the family around. I stood up, annoyed at the interruption, and strode out of the room. “This will just take a second,” I told Jordan’s back because he was still staring at the couch in disbelief.
I walked from the family room, through the living room, and flung open the door. Brendan stood on the porch step with a half smile plastered on his face. “Hi, Jessica.”
I blinked at him for a moment, not realizing why he stood at my door. Then I remembered. “Oh, your book,” I said. I hadn’t expected him until much later. “Why aren’t you at football practice?”
“I got off early and knew you wanted me to come over and talk.”
I clutched the doorknob and stared at him. “Oh?”
He nodded, as though pleased at himself for figuring me out. “Otherwise you would have just brought the book to school and put it in my locker. After all, you know my combination.”
“Oh,” I said for the third time because apparently it is the only word I can retrieve from my vocabulary when I’m flustered. “I don’t. I mean, I know your locker combination, but I don’t have to talk to you about anything.” The words didn’t make much sense, but I didn’t clarify myself. I just wanted to return to Jordan. “I’ll go get your book.”
Even though I hadn’t invited him in, Brendan walked through the door. “Are those chocolate chip cookies I smell?” He gave me a knowing smile.
I’m over you, I wanted to tell him. As of this moment I don’t care if you and Lauren elope. Jordan was standing in the family room processing every stupid thing I’d said to him. I needed to get back to him so we could finish our conversation. “Your book is in my room. I’ll go get it.”
Taking the stairs two at a time, I ran to my room, grabbed the book from my dresser, and dashed back downstairs. I put it in Brendan’s hands, breathlessly. “There you go. Well, see you around.”
He tucked the book under his arm and tilted his head at me, questioningly. “That’s all you wanted to say to me?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Good-bye.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “Jessica, you don’t have to be this way.”
“What way?”
“You can tell me whatever it is you wanted to say to me.”
I held out my hands in front of me and shook my head. “I don’t have anything to say.”
Then Brendan looked beyond me, and his eyes narrowed. I turned and saw that Jordan had walked out of the family room and into the living room. He stood a few feet back, arms folded, watching the two of us.
The muscles on the side of Brendan’s mouth twitched, but he managed to pull off a stiff smile. “Is this your new boyfriend?”
Jordan walked the rest of the distance to us. “No, I’m not Jessica’s boyfriend. I’m the guy she likes but is giving to Kate because it’s her best friend’s turn to have a boyfriend.”
“Jordan . . .” I said.
“What?” Brendan asked.
Jordan held up his hand, a gesture of disbelief. “You didn’t know girls could give guys away either? Apparently they have an entire system set up that we don’t know about. Just think of all the effort we could have saved ourselves if we had known.”
I put a hand on my hip. “There is no need to be sarcastic about this.” Then to Brendan I said, “This is really not a good time for me to talk with you, but . . . um . . . you have your book and good luck on your history test.” Then I smiled my please-leave-now smile, and he finally got the message.
“Great. Good-bye,” he said tightly. Then he turned around, strode out the door, and slammed it shut. Which I thought was entirely uncalled for. I mean, what did he have to be mad about?
Jordan walked back into the family room and picked up his backpack. “Maybe I should leave too.”
I followed him, then stood in front of him blocking his way. A knot the size of a soccer ball formed in my stomach. I’d done everything wrong. I hadn’t explained things the way I should have. “No, Jordan, don’t go.”
He didn’t try to push his way around me, just stood there staring into my eyes like he could squeeze the truth out of them. “Why should I stay, Jessica?”
I looked at my shoes. I looked at his shoes. I took a step toward him. He didn’t move. The question hung in the air like mist on a rainy day.
“I’ll explain it to Kate,” I said, then took both of his hands in mine. “Maybe I want to keep you after all.”
He smiled, and with that one gesture the tenseness between us evaporated. He pulled me into a hug. It felt so right to lean up against him, to hear his heart beat through the shirt I’d picked out for him.
Jordan and I didn’t work on drama much that night, but we did go out to dinner and a movie. Afterward Jordan told me personal tidbits about the actors in the film, like who gave out full-si
ze candy bars at Halloween and who stiffed little kids with miniature Tootsie Rolls.
I let Jordan kiss me good night on the doorstep despite my personal rule of never kissing a guy on the first date. I mean, since we’d already kissed in my family room, it somehow didn’t seem like that rule should apply. Besides, how can you not kiss a guy good night when he’s perfect for you? And Jordan was perfect for me.
I’d just have to explain it to Kate.
Six
I’d never dreaded seeing Kate before. The next day at school, every time I thought about her, my stomach did this weird clenching thing, like a spring had broken in the vicinity of my belly button. I knew I’d have to tread softly to spare her feelings. I’d have to point out she’d only liked Jordan because I’d hyped him up. She didn’t really know him. She’d find someone else. These things happened.
Still, I couldn’t look at her when she walked up to the lunch table.
“Guess what Mrs. Shale told us about the play?” She set her tray down with a hurried clank. Two tomatoes rolled off the top of her salad.
“What?”
“We’re not doing Romeo and Juliet after all. We’re doing West Side Story.”
For the first time since school started my mind momentarily left What-do-I-tell-Kate-about-Jordan mode and concentrated on acting. “West Side Story? Isn’t that a musical?”
“Yep.”
“So are we going to have to sing at tryouts?” I can sing, but reading music is a mysterious art form, like calligraphy, and unicycling, which I’m incapable of. I need to hear a song, several times, before I can even attempt to sing it. Then I need to sing it several more times until I’ve memorized all the hard parts and know how to get around them. If I don’t have enough breath left during the high parts—well, let’s just say my sister uncharitably nicknamed me the shrieking Madonna after a particularly disastrous Christmas pageant five years ago. Or as a couple of the shepherds put it: “‘Silent Night’ could have used a little more silence.”
Kate shrugged her shoulders. “Mrs. Shale didn’t say anything about singing, but that doesn’t mean she won’t make us.”
“She should have given us a little bit of warning.” I took out my sandwich and laid it on top of its plastic bag. “I bet Mary knows how to read music.”
“Mary hardly knows how to read English. Mrs. Shale only gives her parts because of her father’s job.”
“And her looks,” I said. Mary had a damsel-in-distress beauty that guys loved, not to mention a bra size whose letter is considerably closer to Z than mine.
“You’re pretty too, so you have nothing to worry about,” Kate said. “Besides, it’s just a play.”
People who say, “It’s just a play,” don’t understand. There’s no point in trying to explain it to them. So instead, Kate and I pooled all of our knowledge about West Side Story. It was loosely based on the idea of Romeo and Juliet, but set in some inner city in the fifties. Instead of feuding families, rival gangs called the Sharks and the Jets fought over street turf. A girl named Maria from one group fell in love with a guy named Tony from the other, and like Romeo and Juliet, they wanted to stay out of the fighting but got dragged into it by everyone else. Tony went to stop a rumble and ended up accidentally killing Maria’s brother, Bernardo. In the end, one of Bernardo’s friends shot Tony.
All that, with peppy little song and dance numbers added.
“Do you think she’ll make us dance at tryouts?” I asked.
“I don’t know why you’re so worried.” Kate nibbled on a piece of broccoli from her salad. “Mrs. Shale knows you can sing and dance, but she’s only seen me be a dead person in Our Town. Jordan and I are going to be the ones at a disadvantage.”
Jordan. His name immediately brought me back to the problem at hand.
I looked at my watch. We only had ten more minutes until our next classes. It wasn’t enough time. I’d put it off till later. I’d tell her while we were waiting for tryouts.
Only that was mean. You didn’t want to be thinking about news like that when you had to concentrate on song and dance numbers. I had to tell her now.
I took a breath. I cleared my throat and fiddled with my lunch sack. “About Jordan . . .” I started. “You see, I talked to him after school yesterday . . .”
Kate studied my face for a moment, then let out a sigh. “He likes someone else, doesn’t he?”
“Well, yes.”
“Figures.” She dropped her fork onto her plate. “He was too cute to stay single for long. Which of the Three Forks flirts got her talons into him?”
More fiddling with my lunch sack. How should I put this?
Kate’s gaze grew hard as she looked at me. My expressive face was getting me in trouble again. “Is it you?” she demanded.
“I didn’t try to like him,” I said. “I was all set to try and win Brendan back, but then I realized you were right about Brendan. He is arrogant and untrustworthy. See, I’m doing what you’ve always told me to do. I’m raising my standards where guys are concerned.”
She didn’t crack a smile at my joke, but I hadn’t expected her to. I just hurried on with my explanation. “I know you liked him too, but you never really got to know him. He’s much more my type than yours. It turns out he’s not a liberal, or a vegetarian.” I knew this last bit because he’d ordered chicken Parmesan at Applebee’s. “And he thinks guys should always pay for dates.” I knew this because I’d offered to pay for the movie, since he’d paid for dinner. “You think everything should be equal between the sexes, so that would be one more thing you’d have to argue about.”
Kate tapped her hands against the table. Her lips drew into a tight line. “Don’t pretend you did this for me,” she said. “You saw what you wanted and took it, just like you take everything. You’ve never had to do without anything your whole life, have you, Jessica?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She picked up her lunch tray and walked off. I watched her go, my cheeks stinging as though they’d been slapped. I had anticipated disappointment, but I’d never expected this much anger. It isn’t fair to act this way, I wanted to yell after her, when you only liked him for two days.
Instead, I said nothing at all. It took all of my effort to talk myself out of crying. I couldn’t cry now. I only had five minutes to get to my next class.
Jordan met me at the drama room after school, and we walked together to the auditorium for tryouts. This was particularly nice, since I’d avoided talking to everybody else since lunch. Despite my acting ambitions, I knew I couldn’t pull off acting like me—the normal me that is. The me that was happy. I kept on thinking of the things I wanted to say to Kate—like: This isn’t about Jordan, is it? This is about jealousy. What do you want me to do, fail at things to make you feel better?
Despite her barbs now and again about my charmed life, I’d always thought she was happy for my successes. How long had her resentment been at the breaking point?
I half expected she wouldn’t come to audition at all, but when Jordan and I walked in, she was already sitting in one of the plastic audience chairs—along with about one hundred other kids, most of them girls. Some talked with their friends, but a couple dozen read over sheets of stapled paper.
We hardly ever have this many people come to watch the productions, let alone try out for them.
I walked to the stage with Jordan, wondering what other club was meeting here now and why Mrs. Shale hadn’t told them to leave. When we reached the stage, I looked for a stack of paper with the tryout lines, but the only thing sitting on the stage was Mrs. Shale’s purse and jacket. She stood by the piano talking with Mrs. Cluff, the music teacher, then saw us and strode over. A big smile spread across her face—a smile directed toward Jordan, since she never even glanced at me.
“How nice to see you here,” she said. “We’ll start in a minute.”
“Where are the papers with the tryout lines?” I asked.
“I ran out.” Her gaze swept over the au
dience. “It’s a wonderful turnout, isn’t it? We’ve never had this much interest before. Mary is in the copy room right now, running off some more sheets.” She sighed happily, and then turned her gaze back to Jordan. “As usual, we have more girls than guys here. I hope you don’t mind doing multiple readings.”
He shrugged. “Whatever you need me to do.”
Her smile took on a hungry look. She took a step closer to him. “I can see you as Tony . . . or maybe Bernardo … Do you sing?”
“Not much.”
“The music teacher can work with you.” Another smile. His mother probably didn’t smile at him this much. “Well, I’d better get things started.”
Jordan and I found two seats in the back. I looked at all the heads in front of me. Tryouts were going to take forever. Why in the world had all these girls shown up, and more importantly, could any of them act?
I had considered Mary my only real competition, but now . . .
Three rows ahead of me, Lauren and her cheerleading squad sat giggling about something. Didn’t they have practice after school? What were they doing here?
Mrs. Shale called a couple of people who already had papers to come up and perform part of a scene. I watched for a little bit of each read, just long enough to reassure myself I could still do a better job. Then I talked with Jordan. He told me more people had come up today to introduce themselves to him than in all of his previous life put together.
“That’s because small-town folk are friendly,” I told him.
“Or just really bored,” he said.
Mary came back to the auditorium carrying papers. She handed out stacks to each person who sat at the end of the row so that person could pass them down the aisle. Except for our aisle. She scooted past three people just to give Jordan one.
“Here’s a script,” she said.
He took it and laid it on his lap. “Thanks.”
“Good luck on your reading.” She tilted her head so her brown hair brushed against her shoulders. Her lips fell half open into a seductive pout. I wanted to smack her. Instead, I held out my hand. “Hey, Mary, can I get a script too?”