Among Friends (14 page)

If I did not have to write this down, I could pretend it’s not true.

But it is true.

I have not been a friend.

I asked Mom the scary, scary question.

The one I’ve wanted to ask for two years now.

“Are you jealous, too? Do you want a daughter like Jennie?”

You’re not supposed to say things like that out loud. Because what if they’re true?

“Not true,” said Mom, hugging me hard. “I adore you the way you are.” She let go of the hug after a while, and added slowly, almost sadly, “But I guess that nobody can help wanting to glisten and gleam the way Jennie does.”

I was really taken aback. “You mean
you
would like to be like Jennie?”

Mom kind of shrugged and laughed at herself. “Sixteen and doing things I haven’t done yet at forty? A person can feel old and dumb in a hurry next to Jennie Quint. I wonder how her teachers can stand it.”

If Mom felt jealous, too, jealousy seemed almost okay.

“Boy, do I feel good,” I said. “Let’s go out for dinner. Let’s try that new Mexican restaurant on Route One.” I was really in the mood for something hot and spicy and demanding. “You know what jealousy looks like?” I asked my mother.

“What?”

“It looks like a rat. Not a cute little white laboratory rat. A hideous evil city slum rat. Biting you.”

We both screamed.

Then my mother giggled. “The magazines say you
should have meaningful conversations with your teenager, but I must say a meaningful conversation with you can wipe a mother out, Hill. Let’s go out for that Mexican dinner with dad and talk strictly about nonmeaningful things.”

I am so lucky to have my mother. What if I had Jennie’s mother? Then she’d always be disappointed in me. What could be worse than a mother who doesn’t think much of you?

This Mr. Lowe shows up out of nowhere, saying he’s got a son my age and he wants to help.

I know he has a son my age. He has a son my age I despise from the bottom of my heart. (Such as my heart is.)

And you know—I almost did talk.

I wanted to talk so bad it was like starvation. I could taste it. I had a hard time breathing. Made me think of Jennie, and how her lungs collapse when she laughs. Great, I thought, I’m having a nervous breakdown. Two in one family. Wonderful success rate at coping.

“Why not talk?” said Mr. Lowe.

I actually answered him. I said, “I might burst.”

Mr. Lowe is rather heavy, not as tall as I am, wearing a dark suit and a heavy city-type coat. He doesn’t look one bit like Jared. Jared is thin and preppy, Mr. Lowe is old and tired. And in his speech, he pauses, just the way I do,
thinking before he says anything out loud. “Like a dam?” he said slowly. “Too much pressure behind it?”

But I had already said too much. I didn’t add to it.

Mr. Lowe was looking at my sleeves. It was a parent look. Good grief, does this mean I have to get you yet another wardrobe? Didn’t I just buy you all new clothes? When are you going to stop growing? My mother used to say things like that all the time, but laughing, and then Candy and I would back up against the wall in our last house, and measure how much we’d grown, and when Dad came home, we’d show him how high the new marks were.

I looked at Mr. Lowe’s shoes. Expensive, shiny shoes that commuters wear, not high-school kids. I’m down to one pair: high-tops I’m going to have to slit the toes on before long.

“I’d like you to live with us, Paul,” said Mr. Lowe. “Until things are straightened out.”

Me? Live with Little Yuppie Jared? Watch the Prep Couple of the Decade on their pin-striped couch together? Me—drive around in Jared’s little red Porsche, and help him fasten his little Rolex on his wrist?

I walked away from Mr. Lowe.

He’s a little more gracious than his son. He didn’t follow me.

The school is providing Jennie Quint with a special tutor for the math section of the Star Student Examination. I could spit. Where do they get off, grooming her like some gymnastics star for the Olympics? Jennie’s family has tons of money, they can afford their own tutor! I absolutely cannot stand it that the school has already decided Jennie deserves more than the rest of us. I wanted to organize a protest, but everybody else said No, let Jennie hang herself. It’s about time anyway.

Even I could not believe it, and I am definitely used to Jennie by now.

I rank seventeenth in a class of 310, and I’m pretty involved. I’m the diving team captain and associate editor of the monthly paper. I’ve been in charge of the student Bloodmobile and the Student Art Museum.

We get back from vacation, pretty much ready to be nice and kind and generous of heart—you know, all that Christmas stuff—and there’s Dr. Sykes telling the entire
school that junior Jennie Quint is going to outclass every senior and every junior in the state of Connecticut, and set records, and be her own display case in the lobby.

Jennie didn’t look at anybody else when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. I guess she figured there was nobody worth looking at.

“If there were letters for academic and musical achievement,” said Dr. Sykes, “we would retire Jennie Quint’s number!”

I’ve never been mad at Jennie for being Jennie.

I’ve always been proud of me for being me.

But where do they get off—making Jennie so special? And where does
she
get off—doing it?

And in every single class I share with Jennie, the teachers announce their pride in her! In English, in physics, the teacher stands up and says proudly, “Isn’t it exciting?”

No.

It isn’t exciting.

Every single kid here would like to kick Jennie Quint in the shins.

The cafeteria was a mob again. Very different from the mob Paul faced. This was a mob against Jennie, and it was verbal, not physical, and it was girls, not boys.

I could feel the mob forming and I just stayed out of it.

I didn’t want to be part of that again.

The top seniors are absolutely seething with rage. Going up to Hartford for two days for Star Student is a real prize. They take you out of class—it’s a Thursday and Friday, and you stay at the Sheraton, and you’re with another 150 of the finest Connecticut has to offer, and you put this on your college applications, and all—and a junior is going to outshine them. They know perfectly well they can’t win against Jennie.

Amanda Hodges was maddest of all. “This is for seniors,” she snaps. Amanda is first in the class, but that’s all she does. She can’t win and we all know it. Amanda’s never even
met
the other kids in the class, let alone worked with them—she’s always home studying. “But when I went in to Dr. Sykes to complain, do you know what he said to me, Jennie Quint?”

Jennie stared at her without speaking.

“Dr. Sykes explained to me that dear Jennie is very precocious.” Her voice was thin and enraged and sliced across the room. Jennie flinched as if Amanda’s voice had actually hit her. “The school system, he explained to me, makes exceptions for quality students.” Amanda’s hatred could have been put on a plate and served. I suppose normal cafeteria food would taste pretty terrific after a portion of Amanda’s jealousy.

Jennie was pale and shaken. “Star Student wasn’t my idea,” she protested.

“Fine,” said Amanda. “Then why don’t you wait ’til next year? Several of us in the senior class have an excellent chance, and you know that each high school can have only one winner.”

Paul Classified looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to rescue her.” I said, “She’ll have to rescue herself, Paul. The only thing she can do is agree to drop out of the running.”

Jennie was thinking about it—you could tell—but Amanda went wrong. Raising her voice so that nobody in the entire cafeteria could possibly not hear, she said, “We’re just plain old ordinary seniors.
Jennie
, of course, is
special
. How stupid of us to think we could be special when
Jennie
is around.”

Jennie’s chin tilted up and I knew right away that Amanda’s tactics were wrong. Attacking Jennie in public was dumb; Jennie wouldn’t be defeated in front of us. She would rather be dead.

“The rest of us are only around for show,” said Amanda fiercely. “Dr. Sykes believes you have it all sewn up.”

Jennie stood up and narrowed her eyes. Very softly, Jennie said, “Amanda, we’re all taking the same examinations, and we all fill out the same applications. Either you’re a star student or you’re not.”

Paul whistled.

I sighed.

It was going to be war now.

And I know Jennie doesn’t want war. She wants friends.

Well, she chose it. She can’t pretend otherwise.