***
Our Sunday School teacher was late again. If he didn’t hurry, he was going to miss our regular opening discussion – the one where my classmates went over the highlights of the latest Upton Rockets high school football game.
It was still strange for me the way so many people in my new town took an interest in high school sports. Even people who didn’t have any children on the teams would go to the games and keep on talking about them even when they were over.
Or maybe I just had the wrong impression. Maybe my Sunday School class was a special case. After all, our teacher did volunteer as one of the assistant football coaches and both of the boys in my class played on the team. The girls in my class were Tawny and Melanie. And I was never really sure if they were just being polite or if they were sincerely as captivated by the Upton Rockets as they seemed to be when talking to the boys.
While the kids in my class talked about yards and plays I sat by the window, opening and closing the latch, wondering if this would be one of the weeks when our teacher wouldn’t come at all. On days like this, the Sunday School president would usually open the door, toss a copy of the Church magazine meant for teenagers into the room, and tell us to read it to each other for the next half hour. I was still thinking about it as the Sunday School president finally appeared.
“No teacher today?”
“Nope,” Tawny answered.
The Sunday School president did a quick head count. “Okay, you can all come with me this time.”
He led me, the football team, and their cheering section out into the hallway. “We’ll put you with the seventeen-year-old class for now. A lot of folks have gone away for American Thanksgiving so there’s plenty of room in their class today.”
The class we were meeting with was Jeff’s class. Outside their door, I smiled at the idea of sitting with someone who cared as little about football as I did. The Sunday School president opened the door and there they were: Jeff, the pretty blonde girl I knew to be currently reigning as Miss Upton High School, and Ben Jones.
There was a flurry of setting up folding metal chairs as we stepped into the room. The football team took care of themselves while Ben Jones and the Sunday School president began racing to set up chairs for the three new girls in the room. I guess they meant it to be chivalrous, or something. But it was actually kind of embarrassing when I laid my hand on a chair and Ben Jones snatched it away from me and set it up himself. He glanced at me with his polite, solar eclipse manner when he was finished. He saw me long enough to know I was standing there, my hand still formed into the shape of an invisible chair-back, looking a little stunned. Then he was embarrassed too.
“Here,” he said, nudging the chair into line with the others. “This is for you, Parakeet – if you want it.”
And then he took a seat beside the empty chair he’d assigned to me. Parakeet? I didn’t have turquoise wings or scaly, pink feet like his family’s pet bird. Why would Ben Jones call me ‘parakeet’?
I wanted to ask him. But all I said as I sat down was, “Thanks.”
The Sunday School president was about to start teaching us in the place of his missing teachers with American husbands and wives who’d traveled south to start their holiday seasons. He was just opening the lesson manual when he paused to ask one the football players about the Rockets’ chances in the regional championships. And I knew the classroom conversation was doomed to be lost in football for a few minutes more.
Ben Jones knew it too and he sat back in his seat, sighing noisily. “So you’ve missed the last two Mutual activities,” he said to me.
Actually, I had missed the last three activities. I cleared my throat. “Yeah. But I didn’t miss them because of work,” I hurried to explain, as if it was important. “I was at home studying. I’m still trying to figure out my new math class and salvage my grades. That’s important too, right?”
Ben Jones shrugged. “I guess. Still, it’s not healthy for you to do nothing with your time but work and school, is it?”
I was about to argue that I’d just gone to a zombie movie with friends in the city a few weeks before. Then I decided it would just make the need for me to go to Mutual activities more glaring. It was true. I did need to make time for more than just earning money and fixing my grades. Everyone knew that – Mum, Dad, Jeff, Ben Jones – even I knew that. I needed a more balanced life – one with time set aside for difficult but necessary things like crafting some sort of social life in the town where I lived.
“Oh, I know,” I confessed, a little sardonically. “I know I should tear myself away from work and school and go have big fun at Mutual with all its sewing machines and hot glue guns.”
Ben Jones laughed. “There were no sewing machines here last week. It was a social dancing lesson.”
I cringed. “Let me guess: they assigned dance partners by lining everyone up according to height.”
He frowned as he tried to remember. “Right–”
“Which means,” I interrupted, “that I would have ended up paired with some poor, embarrassed, sweaty-palmed, twelve year old boy for the whole evening.”
Ben Jones laughed again.
“It’s not funny. And I’m right,” I said. “It would have been nothing but awkward. Trust me. When it comes to attracting awkwardness, I’m actually quite talented.”
“Oh, come on,” Ben Jones argued. “You could have made it work. And if you don’t come to stuff like that, how are you ever going to learn to two-step?”
“Two-step? What’s that?”
“It’s a partnered dance done to country music. You know – slow, slow, quick, quick…”
I had no idea what he meant. “Slow, slow?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty standard around here.”
“Yuck.”
“Come on, Parakeet. Play nicely. I know it’s painful. But stop fighting everything all the time—“
“Fighting? Parakeet? Quick, quick? Jones, what are you—“
But the Sunday School president was talking over our voices now. “Okay, okay,” he was saying as if Ben Jones and I were holding up the class with a lot of useless chatter, “this week we’re learning about marriage.” He looked around the room, surveying the class. “Look at you guys, sitting boy-girl-boy-girl already. That’s the right attitude.”
There was some jittery laughter. I looked down at my hands. How did adults know how to make the topic of marriage seem so dang uncomfortable all the time? Beside me, Ben Jones was still grinning, just a little, as he examined the end of his necktie.
The lesson went on, moving away from the scripture references and prophets’ quotes in the lesson manual and into the Sunday School president’s own nostalgia and sense of romance. The lesson was heading straight into that awkward territory for which I had such a natural affinity.
Our time in the class was almost over when the Sunday School president said, “When the moment comes to choose your companion, you’ll just know. One day, you’ll be with someone special and you’ll turn and look deep into their eyes and – you’ll just know.”
I’m not sure how it happened. I really have no idea. But just as the Sunday School president gave us this weird, vague advice, I started to laugh – just a tiny bit. It was rude and I was trying to hide it so the laugh came out as more of a breathy smirk. And for some reason, as I started to crack up, I turned my head, lifted my eyes and looked right at Ben Jones – Jeff’s brainy math buddy, the serious boy from my school, the guy acknowledged as unattainable and un-dateable, the one everyone agreed didn’t even bother to flirt with girls.
I looked at him right on the Sunday School president’s cue. And the strangest thing about it was that when I raised my eyes, Ben Jones was looking back at me. He wasn’t peeking at me with his peripheral vision, the way he usually looked at me. He was staring right into my face. And he was smiling too. We’d just been given some very odd courtship advice. We
both knew it. And to bring home how silly it was, we were acting it out together, spontaneously. Just like we’d been told to do, Ben Jones and I turned and looked deeply into each other’s eyes.
It was supposed to be funny – and for an instant, I guess it was. But once I was actually looking into Ben Jones’s eyes I forgot for a moment how to exhale properly. Even from behind his glasses, I could tell his eyes were large for his thin, pale face. They were shiny and brown – brown and lit up like the brook we used to hike along in the trees above our house back on the east coast.
It was too much. I bowed my head and finally remembered to let out my breath. I sat fidgeting in my chair and snickering a little too loudly.
“Heather?” the Sunday School president asked. “You want to add something?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry, it’s nothing. Sorry.”
For the rest of the class, Ben Jones and I did not look at each other again. We sat on our cold, metal chairs looking straight ahead, like we were passengers riding a bus together.
After church, I sat in the back of my parents’ car on the way home, squashed between my sisters. In my lap, I held out my index finger pointed sideways, like it was a perch meant for a tiny bird with warm, pink feet. I tipped my head back, looking up at the upholstery on the car’s ceiling, mouthing a word to myself. It was the word Ben Jones had called me by twice that afternoon. I didn’t understand why he’d done it – but I was pretty sure I liked it anyway.
“Parakeet.”