Among Friends (9 page)

Now the guys are really fascinated. Anybody who’ll fight back a half dozen of them, and then win a round with Dr. Sykes—it must be some secret he’s protecting.

I want to pound their faces in.

The CIA. Spies.

Give me a break. Do they think I like living like this? Do they think I want secrets in my life? I hate this! I want my life normal and boring and routine like other people’s.

And if I tell them the “secret” (secret? It’s my
life
, not a secret!) they’d be disappointed. They want it to be romantic.

Romantic’s a funny word. It means adventure, and thrills, and heart-stopping journeys: fast cars and small planes and wild beasts: spies and cold wars, dead bodies and codes.

My life?

Hah.

My life is a sister I could kill.

My life is a mother who has collapsed. I get to be the one who will put her in an institution. That should be romantic, huh?

Okay, okay. Take a deep breath. One more day until vacation.

It won’t be a vacation for me. Just no school. Home all day long? How am I going to make it?

Lonely has a temperature.

Cold.

Paul Classified doesn’t even look at me now.

It hurts so much!

I feel as if it’s a lesson from God. I thought I could have everything, so God picked out something I can’t have, and every minute of every day, He puts Paul in front of me so I have to gaze at what I can’t have.

The Awesome Threesome is gone. Now there is a twosome. Emily and Hillary. I think it’s still awesome. Friendship itself is awesome. Wonderful—miraculous—to be wanted for your company.

Nobody wants mine, and I’m shedding some pretty awesome tears about it, too. But I have no awesome solutions. I have no solutions at all.

Don’t tell, Paul begged me.

We’re standing there at the emergency room door and he takes my hand—like he’s my subject, I’m his lord—and pleads with me. “Don’t tell, Emily.” I try to reason with him. I try to explain that people can help, that he’ll do better, feel better, end up better, if people know.

But he’s standing there: his 170 pounds, his six feet, his broad shoulders, his thick dark hair, his fingers twice as wide as mine—and he’s fragile. He could break.

So I promise.

“I won’t tell,” I whisper back.

He leans against the wall, kind of puffing out his breath in little gasps, as if he’d just run a great distance.

I said, “But what will you do? You can’t live alone.”

“Easier than living together,” said Paul shortly.

He looked at me with terrible tension—all the wires in him stretched taut—and I promised again not to tell.

I’m not even writing it down. I just realized that a diary is very exposed. You may think there is privacy in one, but there isn’t, and now it’s not my life I’m talking about—it’s Paul’s.

If I am admired as one who achieves, Ansley and Jared are admired simply because they exist. To go to their parties is to have a front-row seat in the auditorium of life.

“You’re coming to my New Year’s party, of course,” said Jared. He put his arm around me. I like affection as much as the next girl, but Jared’s embrace never means affection; it’s just part of his stance, as if we’re about to be photographed.

But oh, how glad I was to be invited. I, Jennie Quint, top of the mountain, top of the pile, cream of the crop—I almost wept because someone wanted my company.

“Bring a date,” said Jared. “Who are you going out with right now, Jennie?”

Nobody. But I want to be with Paul Classified. Paul’s arms around me, Paul’s kiss on my lips. I would have to catch him in class. If only there were a time and a place when I could talk privately to Paul. But P.C. is crafty: he can protect his secrets best in a crowd.

Ansley sauntered down the hall toward us. Ansley has a wonderful walk: she never hurries and yet she always gets places faster than anybody else. I’ve tried a hundred times to imitate that walk and can’t. Ansley tossed her hair: thick pale yellow hair. Ansley had it cut so that it would fall over her left eye, and Ansley could fling it back. Slowly, it would slither down over the eye again. Very effective. Sexy.

“Coming to our party, darling?” said Ansley.

You have to live in a certain place and your parents have to have a certain income to be Ansley’s darling. Jared never calls anybody “darling.” Except maybe himself. “You inviting Hill and Emily?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Hill and Em just aren’t very exciting, you know what I mean?”

I came to their defense as if there were still an Awesome Threesome. “So what’s your idea of excitement? All you ever do is buy clothes, Ansley. Is excitement the January sales?”

But Ansley just laughed.

Fifth period, incredibly, I managed to be alone with Paul Classified. He actually agreed to abandon language lab for the library. Sitting in one of the carrels, we were supposedly working on German together. German poets of the nineteenth century. In German. I can only assume I signed up for this course when I was insane. Paul, in fact,
was
working on his German. I was working on Paul. “Ansley and Jared are giving a party,” I said casually.

Paul Classified’s face moved slightly: not really a smile, but maybe it was meant to be. “I forget sometimes you live in the Yuppie Yard with all that crowd. You’re so different from them, Jennie.” He shook his head, as though the difference were so vast you would have to shade your eyes in the sun to see across the gap.

“I never heard anybody call it the Yuppie Yard before.”

Paul was amazed. “That’s the nickname for all those ritzy little lanes off Talcott Hill,” he said.

“Where do you live, anyhow?”

“Downtown.” He flipped through the index in the German book without looking anything up. “The pageant went well, Jennie. I was impressed.”

I forgave him for not telling where he lived. “What night did you come?”

The pageant ran three nights. Standing ovations all three nights. Talk of Young Composer of the Year Award. Talk of scholarships to a conservatory like Juilliard, or having the music published.

But no talk with Emily or Hillary.

There was a momentary pause. Hardly unusual for Paul. But the answer—
oh, the answer
! That was unusual. “All three nights,” he said. He was not looking at me. He was staring into the German book index. Paul drew in a deep breath, and his fingers tightened on his pencil. Paul who never fidgeted bit his lips and wet them with his tongue and did not look my way.

All three nights? Paul Classified, who did not play sports, did not go to assemblies, did not attend concerts, did not go to parties—Paul went all three nights to my Christmas pageant? Plus the dress rehearsal?

My heart was pounding harder than language lab could ever make it do. I wanted to take a break from flirting with him and race through the halls and find Emily and Hill and tell them all the details.

And then I remembered. The last thing Emily and Hillary wanted to know was that I had triumphed yet again.

Paul and I went back to the German. We translated another paragraph. When we flipped to the back of the book to check an unknown word, my hand brushed against Paul Classified’s.

I took a deep breath. I had not known how scary it would be actually to ask the question. “Would you like to go with me to Jared and Ansley’s party, Paul?”

His eyes stayed on the index. His hand lay flat on the pages. His face went back to its shuttered look: the one where I no longer know if he’s handsome or plain, interesting or dull. “I’m sorry, Jennie,” he said. “My family
has plans. I can’t make it. But thank you for asking me.”

How do you know they have plans? I didn’t tell you what day the party is
.

Paul Classified went on translating, as if it mattered.

How could he have turned me down?

How could he have wanted to hear my pageant three times but not want to go out with me?

The pounding in my heart got worse because I wanted to run away. But I had to sit there, being exactly like Paul R. Smith. Being nothing important to anyone.

I can’t tell Em and Hill about the good things in my life. I have too many. They’re jealous. But I can share the bad things. They’d like that. I can tell them Paul Classified turned me down, and that will make them happy.

But what a price to pay!

Is that what life requires?

You can have two friends again, kid, as long as you agree not to get Paul
.

McDonald’s.

Now if that isn’t a normal everyday unthreatening place, what is? You wouldn’t think your life could collapse at a McDonald’s. I even chose the one in Stamford so we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew.

Wrong. Emily has a job there. Emily got our order.

Of course Mom could not have looked worse. She went to her new job today, but she didn’t dress right, and
there are terrible circles under her eyes, and I couldn’t talk her into putting on makeup or brushing her hair. I wanted to tell Emily—Mom didn’t used to look like this! She used to be pretty and she used to laugh.

Emily was all bright and cheerful, of course: partly McDonald’s behavior to customers, and partly Emily. She beamed at us. Her hair was pretty: soft, cloudy. I thought that after I paid for the hamburgers I would tell her that. Emily said, “Hi, Paul. Is this your Mom? Hi, Mrs. Smith.”

My mother started crying.

Right there at the McDonald’s.

Patrons six deep at five lines, and my mother is sobbing on the counter.

Emily looked at my mother in horror, and then at me.

I closed my eyes for a minute to get strength. I didn’t get any. “Mom, pull yourself together,” I whispered. Please God, please let her stop crying. I can’t even take this at home, how can I take it in front of fifty people at McDonald’s?

My mother just shook her head and kept on sobbing. She didn’t make a whole lot of noise, but she went limp, as if she planned to take a nap on top of the brown tray where Emily had put a Christmas placemat.

We had to get out of there. “Mom, let’s go back to the car,” I said, trying not to scream, because if Mom panicked it would just get worse.