But those things didn’t happen, so all I was left with were her words: At least you have a date.
I thought and thought about those words, and the more I thought about them, the clearer they became. She was saying a lot more than it seemed at first. She was saying, “I’m alone.” And, “I’m lonely.” And, “I wish I had someone.” And (remember the fingers), “I wish I had someone like you, Greg.”
It all came together for me on the first snow day of the year. The snow was already a foot high when I woke up, and it was still coming down. I turned on my radio. Sure enough, all the city schools were closed, and most of the ones in the suburbs too. Then the announcer started reading off the numbers of the closed schools. First I heard my school’s number called, then Conestoga’s, hers: “eleven fifty-five.” Just hearing her number gave me a warm feeling.
I turned off the radio. I sat on the edge of the bed with my blankets wrapped around me and just stared out the window. The snowflakes fell fat and slow, and I could actually see individual flakes land and collapse on the little curved drift on my windowsill. Were they landing on Jennifer’s windowsill too? Of course. The snow was falling on her house as well as mine, heaping silently upon it, huddling, cuddling, snuggling around it, closing over it, over her…
I jumped up, reached for the J bracelet. It was time. Right now. I found a little box, stuffed some cotton into it, then the bracelet, then a little slip of paper: “From Greg Tofer. No one has to be alone.” I wrapped it, addressed it, got dressed, left the house, and headed for the post office. Hardly anything was plowed or shoveled yet, the snow was up to my boot tops, and the post office was a mile away, but I didn’t care. I would have walked across Siberia.
When I reached the post office, I had to wait ten minutes for them to open up. Then I put the box on the counter. “I want to send this,” I told the postman.
“Okay,” he said, putting it on a scale. “How do you want it to go?”
“By mail,” I said.
His eyes shifted to me. He nodded. “By mail. Okay. How by mail? First class? Third class?”
“First class.”
“First class. Costs more, you know.”
“That’s okay.”
“Insured?”
“Huh?”
“Want it insured?”
“What’s that?”
“If it doesn’t reach its destination, you’re covered.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You get the amount of money it’s insured for.” He took the box from the scale. “What’s it worth?”
How do you answer a question like that? “About a million dollars,” I said.
He grinned. “Wha’d you pay for it?”
“Five dollars.”
“I guess it doesn’t need insurance.” He hit the box twice with a rubber stamp. “Two-ten.”
I gave him the money. He slapped stamps on the box and pitched it into a big, dirty gray sack. All of a sudden I wished I never had brought it to the post office. I wished I were walking the ten miles to Conestoga. Get there by nightfall, slip it into her mailbox. “Say—uh—” I said. He looked up. “Is it gonna get there? I mean for sure?”
He gave a thumbs-up sign. “It’ll get there.” As I was leaving he called, “If I have to carry it myself!”
I charged outside, made sure nobody was looking, and went a little nutso. I whooped and yahooed and flung snow around and just generally made an idiot of myself.
On the way back I picked up Poff and Valducci. In spite of the snow, Homestead Lake wasn’t frozen over yet, so ice hockey was out. That left sledding. Poff didn’t have a sled. Valducci did. His sled was the lid of his neighbor’s metal trash can. He stomped on the handle till it was flat. I picked up my sled too, a red plastic sheet.
We headed for the park, and the best sledding hill around. Sledders were already there, and before long, half the kids in town were zooming down the slope. What a great day! Racing. Hijacking sleds. Snowball fights. Snowball wars. (Somebody got a big cardboard box and made a sled-tank.)
The little kids, the snowman makers, sometimes they’re so dumb. In the early part of the day they made their snowmen at the bottom of the hill. Now, did they really think some big kid sledders would not “accidentally” go plowing through them? So dumb.
So they wised up and started making their snowmen at the top of the hill. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much better—not with Valducci around. Two little kids had just finished making a snowman—I mean a really great snowman, hat and all—when Valducci spotted it. Next thing you know, he’s hugging and kissing it and moaning, “Oh Zoe, my Zoe, why oh why are you so cold to me?” (Zoe is the name of Valducci’s latest. She’s from California, looks like a walking jewelry store, and is only in seventh grade. I keep telling him he’s robbing the cradle. He tells me he’s tired of biting into those tough, gristly old ninth-grade birds.) Then Valducci backed off—“Hey, you’re not Zoe!” He high-kicks the snowman’s hat off, then the carrot nose. Then he karate-chops the arms off, then he punches the head off, then he takes care of the rest with a flying two-legged kick. The sight of that, plus the look on the little kids’ faces—I don’t think I ever saw anything so funny and so pitiful at the same time.
Valducci finally notices the little kids. He jumps up, grabs the snowman hat, puts it on, jams the carrot into his mouth, and stands there trying to look like Frosty. The kids weren’t impressed. Then, as if somebody had given a signal, all three of us started rolling snow, and in ten minutes that snowman was bigger and better than before, and the little kids were laughing again and sailing down the hill on Poff’s back, which is so wide the kids rode on it side by side instead of double-decker.
Plenty of girls were there. Funny thing about girls in the snow: with their hats and scarves and boots and mittens and all, at a distance, through your own snow-breath, almost any one of them can look like whatever girl you want her to be. I swore I saw Jennifer Wade a dozen times—flinging snow, running, screaming. I kept thinking maybe, maybe she’d come back to the hill where she used to sled.
One time, after I’d started back in the trees and flopped on my sled right at the crest of the hill for the longest possible ride down, my breath popped out with a grunt as somebody landed on my back. I barely managed to keep on course. I knew it wasn’t Poff. I figured it was Valducci. Then, about halfway down the hill and really moving, a pair of bright red mittens appeared in front of my face and closed over my eyes. Jennifer! I thought for a split second. Then a voice said, “Guess who, monsieur?” Sara.
She reached out, jerked the front of the sled, and we both lurched into the snow and went rolling down the rest of the hill. We came to a stop at somebody’s feet. Valducci’s.
“Well, well—,” he leered down at us—“looks like we got a coupla holy rollers here.”
I pulled Valducci’s legs from under him; before he hit the ground, Sara was on him with a faceful of snow.
From then on, it was a bunch of us ninth-graders, boys and girls, just generally messing around and going snow-crazy. I guess the funniest part was the double-and triple-and even quadruple-decker plunging sled fights, kind of bumper cars in the snow. Or you might say musical sleds, the way the girls kept switching the boys whose backs they flopped on. Except for Sara. She always seemed to be on me.
Once, after tumbling to a stop at the bottom of the hill, Sara held me as I started to get up. She was giving me a sly grin. “I was wondering whether to forgive you for not giving me a birthday present,” she said. I started stammering out some excuses, but she cut me short. “But then, silly me, I realized you had a birthday present for me all along.” She winked and patted my lips with her mitten. “You were just waiting for the right moment to give it to me, weren’t you?” She pulled up her hood and closed her eyes and tilted her face close to mine.
A thousand questions went through my mind. The loudest was: What if somebody tells Jennifer Wade about this? I got mad thinking about that, mad at Sara. Maybe sh
e didn’t mind people thinking we were tight, but did she ever ask me? She inched closer, her eyes still closed. “Hey,” she whispered, “don’t bother wrapping it.” The sly grin was gone from her lips; they were parted slightly. I had to get out of this, fast. I quick gave her a peck; not even that really—a half-peck. Then I jumped up and slung some snow at her. “Can’t catch me!” I yelled and started running.
“Your sled!” she called.
“Who cares!”
“Okay—you asked for it!” She screamed and scooped up snow and started after me.
I ran up the hill and into the trees. I ran and ran. Through the picnic grove, past the snow-seated swings, sliding board, past the pavilion, the tennis courts, the softball field, the Little League field. I didn’t look back. I could hear her voice, her yelling. I was surprised at how long she stayed close. But then she began to fall back, her voice became fainter, and I could tell, I could tell without even looking, that she couldn’t believe I wasn’t letting her catch me. Finally, when I was out of the park, onto the streets, I stopped and turned around. She was gone.
For the next few days I didn’t have to avoid Sara. She avoided me. I mean, when she saw me in the halls and classrooms she might look at me and give me a puzzled kind of smile, but she didn’t try to talk to me. Until Friday morning. Before homeroom. I was at my locker getting books when I heard behind me, “I was talking to a friend of yours last night.”
Until I turned around I wasn’t sure it was Sara. Her voice was so different. There was something different about her face too. Why was I having trouble swallowing? “Who’s that?” I smiled.
“Jennifer Wade.” She did not smile back.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You know, Jennifer with a J? The kind of J you find on bracelets?”
I turned back to my locker, started looking through some notebooks. The bell rang.
“Creep,” she said.
I heard her walking away.
Megin
IT WAS ONLY a little after noontime on Saturday, so I never expected to find my mother doing her surviving then—and especially not there. But she was.
Sue Ann and I had just done our Christmas shopping, and we were ready to dump our loads in my room. Sue Ann was ahead of me. Just inside the doorway she suddenly stopped and turned. “Your mother,” she whispered. “She’s sleeping on your bed.”
I looked. It was my mother, all right; on her back, straight, hands folded over chest. I pushed Sue Ann into the room. “She’s not sleeping.”
Sue Ann went a couple steps, then froze. She gawked at my mother for a while, then she snapped around to me. Her face was white, her eyes were big as hockey pucks. Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh God! Oh God!”
I started laughing. “She’s not dead, you peanut brain.” I dumped my bags on the bed at my mother’s feet. “She’s just in a trance. I told you how she hypnotizes herself. She’s surviving.”
Sue Ann was petrified. I grabbed her and pulled. She wouldn’t take a step, so I just pulled on her arms and her feet came sliding across the floor on a pair of notebooks. (My room was back to normal.) I dragged her up real close. “Look, now, see? She’s breathing. See her chest move.”
“I don’t see it.”
I sighed. “You’re hopeless.” I grabbed her hand and led her to a chair and sat her down.
I opened my bags and laid out my presents. By the time I was through, my mother was half covered with them. There were things for her (slippers), my father (after-shave lotion), Toddie (Road Runner coloring book), Jackie (earrings), Emilie (leg warmers), and, of course, Sue Ann (mittens). I held up the things for Sue Ann to see (except the mittens). “Who’re they for?” she said when I held up the leg warmers.
“Friend of mine,” I said.
“Who?”
“Emilie.”
“Emilie? Emilie who?”
“Bain.”
“Emilie Bain? Who’s that? She go to our school?”
“Nope.”
“She live around here?”
“Yep.”
“What school does she go to?”
“She doesn’t.”
While Sue Ann was being silently baffled on the chair, I tried putting one of the slippers on my mother’s foot. It fit. “Did it ever occur to you,” I said, “that maybe something could happen in my life that you wouldn’t know about?” I felt rotten as soon as I said that. Sure enough, Sue Ann’s eyes were starting to water up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way. Emilie is eighty-nine years old. She lives at Beechwood Manor.” I pointed to the picture. “That’s her.”
She looked, still baffled. “Is that a real rabbit?”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “it’s real.”
When I finished showing Sue Ann all the presents, she said, “Where’s Greg’s?”
I almost choked. “Grosso’s? You crazy? I don’t get him one.”
“You got Toddie something.”
“That’s different. He’s cute.”
“Does Greg give you something?”
“You kidding? I wouldn’t take it even if he did.”
Then Sue Ann climbed onto her pulpit. “Well,” she said, “that’s not very Christmassy.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, you’re supposed to have goodwill toward all men.”
“Where does it say toward all donkeys?”
I never got an answer. Sue Ann squeaked, her whole body stiffened, her eyes got foggy. I looked behind me—my mother’s eyes were open. Other than that, she hadn’t moved. She’s always like that for the first couple seconds after coming out of it. Looks like a vampire ready to rise. Then I realized: the slippers, they were out! I quick grabbed them and shoved them in a bag, just as my mother blinked and started to look around. When she saw me and Sue Ann, she closed her eyes again.
I shook her. “Mom. C’mon now. You gotta get up.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Mo-om.” I pulled her legs over the side of the bed and sat her up. Her eyes were still shut. I pried them open. “Mom, snap out of it.”
She gave a little smile. “It’s so nice where I was.”
“Yeah, well, it’s nice here too. And anyway, what are you doing surviving now? It’s not even three o’clock. And on my bed?”
“Christmas.”
“Huh?”
“Christmas is one of the worst times. Some days I can’t wait till three.”
I looked at Sue Ann. My eyes said, See? I told you. Her eyes said, Amazing. I pulled my mother to her feet and steered her out of the room.
When Sue Ann left, I wrapped Emilie’s present and went out. Snow flurries were blowing. The air was freezing. I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a french cruller. Jackie wasn’t there, and neither was anybody else who was nice, so I had to pay for one.
Emilie is just like me: no self-control. As soon as she spied the present, she snatched it and tore it open. Even though she made all sorts of surprised and happy noises, I knew she didn’t have the slightest idea of what I’d given her. “They’re leg warmers,” I told her. “You’re gonna need them when we play hockey.”
“Oouuu goody,” she giggled. “Can I wear them now?”
“Sure.” I put them on her.
She pointed to her pillow. A present sat there. “That’s yours,” she said.
I ripped it open. It was a T-shirt. It said:
I AM
A
GRETZKY
GIRL
I shrieked. “Emilie, I love it! Where’d you get it?”
“Oh,” she said, “I sent my brother out for it. I told him to go to one of those places that put the words on.”
I tore my coat off and pulled the shirt on over my sweater. I looked in the mirror. “It’s beautiful. Gorgeous.” I gave her a hug and she kissed me, and then we just sort of strutted around the room for a while, her in her leg warmers, me in my Gretzky shirt, admiring ourselves.
Then we decorated her wheelchai
r. We hung some tinsel from the arms—lots of it. Then we made two red-and-green paper chains and threaded them through the wheel spokes. We tested the chains in the hallway. The faster we went, the neater they looked—a red-green blur.
Emilie had to go to dinner then—“Ugh!” she said—so I waited in her room. “Ugh!” she said when she came back. “I hate that stuff they feed me. You have any more crullers with you?”
“No,” I said.
“Check your pockets.”
I checked. “Sorry.”
“Well then,” she said, “let’s go get some.”
I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. She had me get her coat out of the closet and wrap her in blankets. I put three pairs of socks on her feet, then her warmest slippers. I was glad for the leg warmers. Last of all, I gave her my hat. It’s red-and-white candy-cane stripes with a big fuzzball on top. I pulled it way down over her ears.
Outside, it was even colder than before. “You warm enough?” I asked her, but she wasn’t listening. She was looking, all around, her eyes wide open, like she was seeing the world for the first time. “Look,” she said, “snow!”
“It’s just flurries,” I told her.
“And the lights! Aren’t they beautiful! You didn’t tell me it was so beautiful out here. Let’s go see the lights. All of them.”
I laughed. “Emilie, we can’t see them all. It’s a big town, you know.” But she was already rolling herself down the sidewalk.
She didn’t say another word about donuts. We went up one street and down the next. All along the way, Emilie kept saying, “Look at that one!… Look at that one!” Once or twice each block she would go, “That’s the best one!” And then, a couple houses later: “That’s the best!”
After a while we started singing carols. Emilie is amazing. She knows all the verses of all the songs. She kept getting mad at me because I only knew the first verses. We must have been pretty loud, because every once in a while somebody would come to the front door and smile at us and listen.