“I’d have to be a nutcase to hang out with you!” I said, reaching over to mess up his hair.
And so we kept on jabbing at each other and kidding around, the way we always did when we were together, and it wasn’t long before we had both forgotten about Julia completely.
The movie was a good one. We ran into Carolyn there with her boyfriend, Rick, and we all went out afterward to Frank’s Diner to eat, so it was eleven thirty or so by the time we pulled up in front of the house and parked to say good night.
The house was dark, and when Mike switched off his headlights everything was black for a few minutes. Then slowly things became visible once more—the maple tree in the front yard, the brick planter, Bobby’s bike leaning against the side of the garage. The curve of the half-moon looked as though it were caught in the branches of the maple, and the sweet breath of early summer came softly through the open windows. Then Mike put his arm around me and pulled me over and kissed me.
“Why didn’t we start doing this sooner?” he whispered.
“At the movie?”
“No, you nut. Last year. Or the year before. How long did we know each other before I ever got around to kissing you?”
“I’ll figure it out sometime,” I said. “After all, we’ve known each other since we were on tricycles. You never even used to notice me except to tease me about my freckles.”
“Well, there wasn’t that much to notice,” Mike said. “Let’s face it, there’ve been some changes in the past year, in all the right places.”
“You’re such a jerk!” I exclaimed, not meaning it at all. I lifted my face so he could kiss me again, and he was just about to when there was a squeak and a click from the direction of the house. We both stiffened and the moment was gone.
“That was the screen door,” Mike said. “Was somebody sitting out on your porch?”
“I don’t know who,” I said. “It’s too late for my parents to be up, and all the lights are off inside.”
We got out of the car and walked together across the yard, Mike with his arm around my shoulders, and as we approached the porch we saw that there was indeed someone there. It was Peter.
“Hi,” he said. “How was the movie?”
“Pretty good,” Mike said. “Did you have rehearsal tonight?”
“Nope. Stayed home.”
“What are you doing out here?” I asked. “Waiting for us?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Then what?”
“Enjoying the moonlight. Is there any rule that says a guy can’t sit on his own porch?”
“None at all.”
I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but there was something strange about his voice. Pete usually had a sort of deadpan voice, the kind that can tell jokes, and you don’t even know they’re jokes until you think about them for a while. But tonight there was a different note, a sort of lift in his voice.
“Have you been out here long?” I asked.
“Not too long. Why?”
“We thought we heard the screen door close.”
“That was Julia,” Pete said. “She went inside as you drove up.”
“She was out here with you?”
“Obviously. How else could she go inside?” He sounded defensive. “What is this anyway, the third degree?”
“Hey, you two, cut it out,” Mike said. “Somebody might think you were brother and sister.” He tightened his arm around my shoulders in what would have been a hug if Pete hadn’t been there. “See you tomorrow, Carrottop.”
“Good night, Mike,” I said, wishing Pete would go in ahead of me. But he didn’t, so Mike went striding off across the lawn to his own house. As he came out on the far side of the shadow of the maple tree, the moonlight tumbled into his hair, making it look like a tangle of silver.
He turned once and waved back at us and crossed on into his own yard. I went up the steps and across the porch and put my hand out for the door. I realized suddenly that Peter wasn’t coming behind me.
I stopped and turned back. He was still sitting there on the porch swing, gazing out at the moon in the tree branches.
“Hey, Peter,” I said. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“In a few minutes,” he said. “It’s nice out here. I want to sit and think awhile.”
That tone was back in his voice again, soft and happy. I stood there wondering, and then thought, Well, let him sit if he wants to. What’s the difference?
So I said, “Good night.”
“Good night,” Pete said, and then, just as I was going inside, he said, “Rae, you were wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Dead wrong.” He didn’t turn his head. “You said she wasn’t pretty.”
“You think she is?” I asked in surprise.
“She’s more than pretty,” Peter said very softly. “She’s beautiful.”
What happened that night out there in the moonlight between Peter and Julia, I’ll never know. Peter didn’t tell me, and when I reached my room upstairs I found the lights out. In the thin stream of moonlight from the open window I could see a dark form stretched out on my bed.
“Julia?” I said softly.
There was no answer.
It seemed impossible that she could have gone to bed and fallen asleep so quickly. Still, I figured she’d certainly had a long and emotionally exhausting day. I was tempted to turn on the light in order to look at her again. Peter had called her “beautiful”—Peter, who had never called a girl beautiful before—and I wanted to see why.
But people just don’t turn on lights in rooms where someone else is sleeping, or pretending to sleep, and so I undressed in the dark, groping through two different dresser drawers for my pajamas because I couldn’t remember how I’d arranged things, and crawled into the other twin bed.
I’ll look at her in the morning, I told myself.
The thought must have stayed with me through the night, because the moment I woke up I turned over to stare at the girl in the opposite bed, and I saw at once that something had changed.
Julia was already awake, lying on her back with her hands under her head, gazing at the ceiling. Her thick, black hair was spread out across the pillow like a frame for the thin, high-boned face. The thing that was different was the expression. She no longer had the nervous, half-frightened look from the day before. Her face was relaxed and her lips were curved in a slight smile.
“Rachel,” she said without turning her head, “will you go with me today to buy some clothes?”
I jumped at the sound of her voice. “How did you know I was awake?” I asked her.
“I felt your eyes open.” She turned then, stretching lazily like a cat and lifting herself up on one elbow so that she faced me. Her eyes seemed lighter than the day before, softer, less penetrating. “Will you?”
“Sure,” I said. I had no plans for the day. “What kind of clothes do you want to shop for?”
“Jeans like yours. The tight kind. What do you call them?”
“Skinny jeans?”
“Yeah, skinny jeans. And some shirts like the one you had on yesterday when we got here. And—oh, a lot of things. I need almost everything.”
“How come?” I asked. “Did you wear uniforms at your school?”
Julia hesitated and then nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t even bother to bring them with me. I want to dress like you do, to wear the kinds of things that you wear here.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll get you fixed up so you’ll look like a member of the gaggle.”
“Of what?”
“The gaggle—that’s what Mike calls my friend Carolyn and me when we get together. It’s sort of a joke because he says we talk so much.”
“Oh.” She didn’t laugh, but the little half smile remained on her lips. “Mike seems nice.”
“He is,” I said. “He kids around a lot, but he’s a cool guy.”
“He’s really cute.”
“I think so too.” I thought
, Now is the time to ask her about last night and Peter, but I couldn’t seem to make myself do it. So instead I said, “We’d better get up. I smell bacon cooking,” and got out of bed.
The workday at the laboratories was pushed ahead an hour in the summertime, so Dad had already left by the time we reached the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, drinking her coffee and reading a celebrity weekly, and Pete and Bobby were both scarfing down eggs and bacon.
“Morning,” I said, and Mom looked up from the paper and smiled and said, “Good morning, girls. Did you sleep well?” and Peter flushed pink under his freckles and said, “Hi there,” not looking at me but at Julia.
“We’re going shopping today,” I said. “Julia wants to get some summer clothes.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mom said. “In fact, I was going to suggest it myself. The things girls wear at boarding school are sure to be different from what they wear around a place like Albuquerque. I’d go with you, except that I have to print those snow scenes and get them into the mail.”
“I think I’ll call Carolyn,” I said. “She loves shopping, and it will be a chance for Julia to meet her. Maybe Mrs. Baker will run us over to the mall.”
“I’ll drive you over,” Peter offered. “I can be a couple of minutes late for work.”
It was so out of character for Peter that both Mom and I turned to him with our mouths hanging open, and Bobby nearly dropped his toast.
“Man!” he exclaimed. “Now I’ve heard everything! Pete Bryant offering to take a bunch of girls shopping and nobody even asked him!”
“Cut it out,” Pete said, looking embarrassed. “The mall’s right on my way to work.”
“I’ll give you the credit card,” Mom said. “For heaven’s sake, don’t lose it.”
I called Carolyn, who wanted to come, of course, since she was dying to get a look at Julia. We stopped at her house to pick her up, and then Peter dropped us off at the mall, and Carolyn and I took Julia through the stores. I was worried at first about how Carolyn and Julia would get along. Julia was so different from all our school friends that I still felt sort of awkward with her myself. But I didn’t have anything to worry about. She seemed to take to Carolyn immediately, and though she didn’t talk much, she smiled a lot, and she listened to all of Carolyn’s and my suggestions as we swept her along from store to store.
“What about House of Fabrics?” I suggested after we had bought jeans and a bunch of T-shirts and an India print blouse. “Mom says there’s a sale there. I want to make a dress to wear to the summer dance at the Coronado Club on the fifteenth.”
“That’s a cool idea,” Carolyn said enthusiastically. “Rick’s seen everything I own at least a hundred times. I’d like to surprise him for once and show up in something different.”
So we went to House of Fabrics and picked out patterns and material. Carolyn got a pale blue with a white design going through it, and I went wild and got hot pink. “At least I can be sure no other redhead will be wearing it,” I said, laughing. “Julia, what are you getting?”
“I don’t sew,” Julia said. “Besides, I don’t need a dress. I have my yellow one.”
“Yes,” I said, “but still—” I struggled to think of a way to say politely that although the dress was lovely, it was not a dress that was becoming to Julia. It belonged on someone else, someone with lighter hair and complexion—someone—but who? The question of the night before leapt back into my mind, tugging at the edges of my memory in irritating little jerks. Where in the world was it that I had seen a dress like Julia’s, and who was it who had been wearing it?
“Do you have a swimsuit, Julia?” Carolyn asked, unaware of my mental conflict. “If not, you’ll need one. We all spend a lot of time at the pool out at the club.”
So we went back to the store where we had purchased the shirts and took a look at the bikinis.
Julia picked out a couple and went into the dressing room to try them on.
“What do you think of my cousin?” I asked Carolyn as we waited.
“I like her,” she said immediately. “She’s sort of exotic, isn’t she, with those big, dark eyes? And she has such an interesting way of talking, as though she’s always looking for just the right word to express her meaning. I love the way she says ‘yeller’—like a hillbilly—one minute and sounds just as refined as anybody else the next.”
“Peter has a crush on her,” I confided.
“You’re kidding! Peter?” Carolyn widened her eyes incredulously. “Woman-hating Peter with a crush—and on his own cousin! Well . . . I guess he could take her to the dance since she doesn’t have a date.”
“I think his band is playing for the dance,” I said. “But we could take Julia and he could meet us afterward. I don’t know how he’d feel about that or whether Julia likes dances or if she’d want to go out anywhere so soon after a family tragedy. But I can ask them and—”
I let the sentence drop because Julia was sticking her head out from behind the curtain of the dressing room.
“Come see what you think,” she called.
Carolyn and I went over, and Julia pulled back the curtain a little way so we could see her in the suit. I think I made some sort of gasping sound. It wasn’t polite, I knew, but I was so stunned I couldn’t help it, for in that swimsuit Julia was—well—incredible.
Although all of us wore bikinis, you rarely saw anybody built exactly right for one. By the time a girl got enough on top to fill one out properly, she usually had too much down below. Julia was the exception. She didn’t look like a girl, but like a woman. Now I could understand why the top of the yellow dress had looked so tight. She had the kind of figure I had always dreamed of having someday, maybe when I was about twenty. Her waist was small and her stomach absolutely flat and she curved softly in all the right places, and her legs were long and slim but full enough through the calves so no one would ever call them skinny.
“Wow!” Carolyn expressed it for both of us. “You look awesome! That’s totally your suit!”
“Do you think the color’s right?” Julia asked, frowning a little.
“Perfect,” I said, although until then I hadn’t even noticed the color. It was a light pink. With it for contrast, Julia’s skin no longer appeared sallow but creamy and rich-looking.
“It’s amazing,” I said. “It couldn’t be better, Julia, really!”
I paid for the suit with Mom’s credit card and we stopped at Walgreens for Cokes and then caught the bus home. We all crammed into one seat, and Carolyn started telling us about her adventures in wall cleaning. Carolyn is made for storytelling; she has one of those rubber faces that can go into a hundred different expressions, and by the time she was halfway through I was laughing so hard I was crying.
Julia was laughing too. I hadn’t seen her laugh before. She was a little stiff about it, as though she wasn’t used to laughing much, or as if she didn’t quite know why the story was funny but wanted to be part of things anyway.
Carolyn must have seen this, because when we got off the bus at the corner of our block she slipped her arm through Julia’s and fell into step beside her as though they had been friends for a long time. It was a kind thing to do, and I felt pleased that she liked my cousin and was making such an effort to be nice to her. At the same time I felt sort of funny walking behind them, because the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for three unless somebody walked in the gutter.
It was one o’clock by this time, and the sun was high and pleasantly warm, although not hot the way it would be in a couple of weeks. In the yard before the Gallaghers’, Professor Jarvis was kneeling in the grass, putting in a line of petunias along the edge of the driveway. The professor was retired now, but until two years ago he had taught with the sociology department at the University of New Mexico.
As we came up to the yard, he looked up and smiled and raised a grubby hand by way of greeting. We stopped, and I introduced Julia.
“This is my cousin, Julia Grant,” I told him,
“from Lost Ridge, Missouri. She’s living with us now.”
“Lost Ridge?” The professor nodded appreciatively. “That’s in the heart of the Ozarks, isn’t it? An interesting area, the bed of a lot of intriguing folklore.”
“I’m not really from there,” Julia said. “I mean, it was my parents who lived there. I was away at school most of the time.”
“My uncle was a writer,” I said. “He moved to the mountains to write a novel. He and my aunt were killed in a car accident last week.”
“How sad,” the professor said. And to Julia, “I’m so sorry, my dear. I wish your move to Albuquerque were under happier circumstances.”
“Thank you,” Julia said. “I—I wish so too.” It was apparent that the conversation made her uncomfortable. She gave Carolyn’s arm a little tug, as though to urge her forward. “It was nice meeting you.”
“You feel free to drop over,” Professor Jarvis said kindly. “I enjoy chatting with young people. I spent most of my life teaching them and I miss the contact. When you lose touch with youth, you grow old fast.”
“You’ll never be old,” I told him fondly and meant it. The face beneath the thatch of white hair was as bright with life as the flowers he was planting. As Carolyn and Julia moved on, I hung back to watch him place the last of the plants carefully into the trench he had prepared for it and smooth the earth gently over its roots.
“What’s Peter doing these days?” he asked me. “He graduated, didn’t he? I hope he’s planning on college.”
“He is,” I said. “He’s planning to major in music. You know Peter; what else could he do?”
We chatted a few minutes about colleges—and summertime—and the growing habits of petunias. Then the professor got to his feet and gathered up the cartons the plants had come in and carried them into the garage, and I strolled on past the Gallaghers’ toward my own house.
I was just turning into the front yard when I heard it—a low rumbling sound, followed by a yelp and a stifled shriek. Then a woman’s voice rose in a cry of rage:
“You vicious, rat-fanged varmint! I’ll thrash you good for that!”
It was a moment before I realized that the words had come from Julia.