On Friday I woke up with a slight headache and an uneasy stomach. “You should stay home,” Sharon said, even though the thermometer showed a normal temperature. “You’ve been through a stressful time. You could probably use a rest.”
I had no tests that day, so I agreed. “I feel a little guilty,” I said as I climbed back into bed. “I could probably go.”
“I don’t want you getting sicker,” she said. “I have to go to work, though. Will you be all right here alone?”
“Sure,” I replied. Sharon brought me tea and toast and then left for work.
I went back to sleep. Soon I was dreaming that I was dressed in a wedding gown. Logan and I were walking up the aisle of a church together. All the while, Logan was talking to me. “I told you to wear a different gown,” he said. I tore off the bottom quarter of the gown.
“Why did you have to put on so much makeup?” I used my veil to wipe the makeup from my face.
“Your heels are too high.” I stopped and took off my shoes, tossing them over my shoulder.
“Those earrings are too bright,” he continued.
“Stop!” I screamed at him. “Stop telling me what to do! Stop! Stop!” I began shaking.
Slowly, my eyes opened.
I was still shaking.
Only instead of Logan, I was looking at my father. “Mary Anne, wake up,” he said, gently shaking me. “You’re having a bad dream.”
“Dad,” I said, still half asleep. “What are you doing here?”
“I have an appointment downtown this afternoon,” he explained, “so I figured I’d come home for lunch and see how you were doing. Sharon called me at the office to say you were home.”
Dad’s a lawyer and he often has appointments out of his office.
He smiled and tossed a rolled-up paper on my bed. “Good news,” he told me. “The building inspector approved our plans this morning. We can go ahead and begin work on the new house.”
“Really?” I cried, now fully awake.
Dad and Sharon had spent weeks working with an architect on plans to renovate the barn that’s on the property where our old house had stood. Then they’d had to submit the plans to the town building department for approval.
I couldn’t believe that eventually we’d be living in our barn, but Dad and Sharon had shown me the designs, and I had decided we were going to have one extremely cool house (and I don’t mean drafty).
“I called the building contractors right away,” he told me. “I’m going to meet them at the site tomorrow. Want to come? If you’re feeling better, of course.”
I frowned, thinking. There was a big football game the next day. It would mean seeing Logan, since he was on the team. Did I want to go to it?
Suddenly it seemed a lot easier to meet the contractors with Dad.
“I’ll go,” I told him.
He smiled at me. “How’s your stomach? Want some lunch?”
I realized I was hungry. My headache was gone too. “Sure,” I said, climbing out of bed.
* * *
On Saturday, at about ten, I walked toward Burnt Hill Road with Sharon and Dad. We passed kids going toward the game, some dressed in SMS jackets.
Dad and Sharon glanced at each other. “Sure you don’t want to go to the game?” Sharon asked.
“There’ll be others,” I replied.
Dad squeezed my shoulder affectionately.
When we arrived at the burned-out place where our house had been, a man and woman were waiting there for us. “There are Ellice and Bob, our contractors,” Dad told me.
“Hi,” Ellice greeted us, smiling. “This place really smells like its name.”
“It sure does,” Sharon agreed.
I got it. Burnt Hill Road. Ha-ha.
“The first thing we’ll have to do is bring in a Dumpster and a cleanup crew to haul away the debris,” Bob said.
Good, I thought. Get rid of all this old burned stuff. Start fresh. The idea made me happy — which surprised me. Usually I like things to stay the way they are. And up until now all I’d felt when we talked about the new house was a sadness and longing for the old house. But here I was, eager for everything to be fresh and clean and brand-new.
It seemed I really was changing.
“When will it be ready to move into?” I asked.
Dad and Sharon looked to the contractors to answer that.
“Depends on the weather,” Bob said. “If we don’t have too much snow or rain, maybe by the new year.”
I crossed my fingers and raised them to the sky, hoping the breezy but warm fall weather would continue. I couldn’t wait to move.
Dad and Sharon walked around the property with Bob, leaving me behind with Ellice. She was barely aware of me. She seemed to be concentrating on something.
Finally I said, “What are you thinking about?”
She jumped a little. “Oh, sorry,” she said with a light laugh. “I’m also a landscaper. I did that before I got into contracting. I was imagining a garden.”
“A garden?” I repeated.
“Your parents want me to do the landscaping once the house is finished. I was thinking about what plants would do best in this kind of soil and with this light. I think perhaps azalea bushes around the porch, maybe patches of daisies and wild heather toward the front, and a lamppost with hollyhocks wound around it.” She pointed and gestured as she spoke, making it all seem so real.
I couldn’t quite envision it because I wasn’t sure what all the plants she had mentioned look like. It sounded beautiful, though.
“Is it hard to imagine a garden?” I asked.
“At first it was, but now it’s easy. Once I learned about what could grow where, and with what kind of light, I just had to practice playing with the possibilities.” She smiled at me. “It’s sort of like life.”
I must have appeared puzzled, because she explained, “In life, some choices are limited by circumstance. I probably couldn’t be a sumo wrestler, for instance. And I’m already too old to start training as a ballet dancer. But there are a lot of opportunities still open to me. If I concentrate on those, the possibilities become nearly endless. The trick is not to box in your thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t limit your thinking to what you already know. If I believe that only ferns and hostas will grow in low light, then that’s all I’ll ever plant in shade. On the other hand, if I explore other plants, and experiment, I might end up with some amazing results. If I thought of myself as only a landscaper, I wouldn’t have started the contracting company with Bob.”
Dad, Sharon, and Bob returned then. “Richard will come back to the office with us to work out the cleanup-crew details,” Bob told Ellice, nodding to Dad.
“I’ll head back with you,” Sharon said to me. We said good-bye and began walking toward our rental house.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ellice had said. It made so much sense. I’d kept myself in a box. I had thought of myself as shy, quiet Mary Anne, Logan’s girlfriend. But now I’d taken myself out of that box. Even though it felt scary, maybe it was a good thing.
“You’re quiet,” Sharon noted as we walked. “What’s on your mind?”
“Do you like change?” I asked her.
“I used to think I did,” she replied. “Now I’m not as sure. Some changes in my life have been great, like marrying your dad. Others — Dawn and Jeff moving so far away, for instance — are not so good.”
I nodded. “Lately, I want things to change.”
“What things?” she asked.
“Our house,” I said. “I wanted my relationship with Logan to change too. I guess that’s why I broke it off.”
Sharon smiled softly. “You’re getting older,” she said. “At your age, things have to change so you can see what the possibilities are.”
Possibilities. There was that word again.
All that afternoon I wondered what my possibilities were.
On Sunday, Kristy phoned
at about ten in the morning. “Mom and Watson are taking us apple and pumpkin picking. Want to come?”
I was still feeling a little weird about Kristy. Our Friday BSC meeting had been really strange. Claudia and Stacey still were not speaking to each other, and I wasn’t saying much to Kristy. (I think everyone just assumed I wasn’t feeling well since I’d been out of school that day.) There had been long, silent stretches of time. That almost never happens.
But I wanted everything to be okay between Kristy and me. And I love apple and pumpkin picking. “Sure,” I replied.
I told my parents about Kristy’s invitation, and Dad put in an order for Red Delicious apples. Sharon said whatever I brought home would be great. I dashed upstairs, dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, and an orange fleece pullover, and was ready to go.
At about eleven o’clock a van arrived, driven by Watson, Kristy’s stepfather. Kristy’s two older brothers, Sam and Charlie, weren’t there, but the younger members of her household — Karen, Andrew, David Michael, and Emily Michelle — were all belted in.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t a sitting job,” Kristy said with a smile as I climbed in. “Mom and Watson are in charge.”
I said hi to everyone and buckled up. Watson pulled out of the driveway, heading for the highway. “Why weren’t you at the game yesterday?” Kristy asked me.
I didn’t feel like discussing it in front of Kristy’s family. “I wanted to see the contractors with my parents,” I said instead. “We’re about to start renovating the barn.”
Watson and Kristy’s mom had a million questions about the construction. Some I could answer, others not.
Their questions made the trip go quickly, and we were soon at the apple orchard, which was pretty crowded. Even though it wasn’t a sitting job, Kristy and I helped watch the kids.
We stood in a line waiting for a hay wagon to take us out to the apple trees. “Kristy told us you broke up with Logan,” said Karen, who is seven.
“Yeah, she says you’re crazy,” added Andrew, who’s four.
I looked sharply at Kristy.
“Andrew!” Kristy exclaimed.
“But that’s what you said.”
Kristy looked at me. “You know I didn’t think you should do it,” she explained.
“Thanks for calling me crazy,” I muttered.
She rolled her eyes. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
The line suddenly moved forward, so I didn’t have to answer her. A bunch of empty horse-drawn hay wagons pulled up, and we were able to fit our group onto one of them. By the time everyone was seated, Kristy was on one side, and I was on the other, with all the kids and Kristy’s parents in between.
The ride through the orchard was bumpy but beautiful. The trees were heavy with apples of different kinds, some bright red, others green, and still others speckled with yellow. I could smell them from the wagon.
The wagon left us at a station where we bought bags to fill with apples. Watson put down a deposit for an apple picker, a long pole with tonglike grabbers that opened and closed. It would help snag apples too high up to reach by hand.
“This way, straight ahead,” Kristy’s mom said, studying a map of the orchard. “Let’s start with the Macintosh apples over here, then we can move farther in for Granny Smiths. I want some Rome apples for pies too.”
We headed into the orchard. In seconds, David Michael, who is seven, was up a tree, tossing apples down to Karen and Andrew.
Some branches were so heavy they dipped to the ground. Emily Michelle, Kristy’s littlest sister, was able to pull fruit from those and fill her bag.
I found a tree and began picking. Kristy joined me. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. Finally Kristy turned to me. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “You know I understand why you and Logan broke up. But I do think Logan’s a great guy.”
Even though I was upset, I had to smile. I turned to pluck a low-growing apple so she wouldn’t see my face.
“I know. It’s just that our relationship was becoming boring.” This was partly true.
“When you know someone a long time, things can’t always be super-exciting,” said Kristy, dropping an apple into her bag. “You get to know what he’s going to do and say.”
“It didn’t feel right anymore.”
“I guess you can’t do anything about that,” she admitted. “I’m sorry I called you crazy. I suppose I was feeling sorry for Logan when I said it.”
We moved on to another tree. My bag was getting heavy already.
“Don’t eat them all,” I heard Kristy’s mom warn the kids from a few trees over. “You’ll get stomachaches.”
“Karen is stuck in the tree!” Andrew cried.
“I’m coming,” Watson called.
Kristy and I began picking side by side again. “How is Logan?” I asked.
“Not so great. But he’ll survive.”
“You would know.”
Kristy turned to me. “What does that mean?”
“I saw you talking to him.” I’d meant to say that very calmly. Instead, I said it fiercely, as if it were an accusation.
“So what? Now I’m not allowed to talk to him?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “I mean, you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I can’t believe you just said that! Why do I have to take sides? Haven’t you been wishing kids wouldn’t do that?”
“Are you two going to the dance together?” The question just popped out of my mouth.
“What if we are?”
My jaw dropped. Was she admitting it? Tears sprang to my eyes. I turned so she wouldn’t see them.
One tear spilled over. I ran off and ducked under another tree. I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t going to stand there in front of Kristy, crying.
I raised my hand to my eyes and let the tears soak the sleeve of my pullover.
How could Kristy go to the dance with Logan? How could she?
I couldn’t care less if it didn’t make sense, or if she had every right to date him. A real friend wouldn’t. She’d care more about my feelings than about Logan.
After about five minutes, Karen found me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Just tired,” I said.
“We’re all going to the pumpkin patch now,” she reported.
I lowered myself from the branch. “Thanks. I’m coming.”
Kristy walked ahead with her parents and Emily Michelle. I hung back with David Michael, Karen, and Andrew. “Are you mad at Kristy?” Karen asked.
“A little,” I admitted, trying to sound less upset than I felt.
She turned sharply to Andrew. “I told you. It’s your fault for saying she was crazy.”
“But Kristy said that,” Andrew replied indignantly.
“It’s okay,” I told them. “Don’t blame Andrew. He didn’t realize.”
“He realized,” Karen muttered.
We continued walking until we came to a huge field filled with pumpkins. We laid our apple bags down in a pile. “Don’t pick more pumpkins than you can carry,” Watson warned us. “I’m not the pumpkin carrier.”
We wandered into the pumpkin patch. Kristy and I headed in opposite directions. It was a peaceful place, despite all the people walking around. Everyone seemed wrapped up in his or her own thoughts as they tried to select the perfect pumpkin.
I thought more about Kristy and Logan. When I broke up with Logan, I knew he’d eventually go out with someone else. And what right did I have to say that Kristy couldn’t be friends with Logan anymore? I still wanted to be friends with him myself.
I realized I had to tell her these things. I hadn’t been fair to her. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. Turning, I faced Kristy.
“I’m not going to the Fall Fling with Logan,” she said. “He didn’t ask me. And even if he had, I wouldn’t have gone.”
“It would be all right if you did,” I replied. “I wouldn’t like it, but I’d try to understand.”
“I don??
?t feel that way about Logan,” said Kristy. “I just didn’t want you telling me what to do or not do. It was silly. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.”
We smiled at each other and hugged. Then we sat down on two huge pumpkins growing side by side.
“Are you going to the dance with Dave Griffin?” Kristy asked me. “Logan thinks you are.”
“No. I guess he saw us talking together and jumped to that conclusion.”
“I know someone else who did something like that,” she reminded me.
“You’re right. Would you mind telling Logan I’m not going with Dave?”
“So now you want me to talk to him?”
“Sure. All you like.”
“All right, then I’ll tell him.”
“You know,” I said, “when I broke up with Logan, I thought it would be only between him and me. It seems, though, that it’s affected everyone around us too.”
I had to face the fact that I’d shaken up my entire world.
The next week went along a lot like the week before. Some kids still acted strange around me. Mostly it was Logan’s friends who gave me dark looks.
Other kids, though, already seemed to be forgetting what had happened. The week before it had been a super-big deal. This week, most kids were talking about Cokie Mason, who was dating a new guy. I was old news.
Logan would say a quick hello to me anytime we met. Then he’d look away. It was hard even to catch his eye. I couldn’t say two words to him before he would dash off.
That should have made things easier, or at least less complicated. But I had realized something. I missed talking to him. I wished we could still shoot ideas back and forth, laugh, and exchange opinions — as friends.
Stacey sighed when I told her Pete had asked me to the dance but I’d said no. “You’re hopeless,” she commented. “You’re staying loyal to a boy you’ve already broken up with. It makes no sense.”
“I know.”
She sighed again. “Tell me you’re at least going to the dance, even if you don’t go with someone.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you might dance with someone new and something might come from that.”