Enthusiasm (5 page)

Feeling weak and trembly, I breathed, “Samantha, who was that Masked Man?”

“Some guy from Zach’s dojo,” she answered. “I don’t remember his name. I think they might have had kendo together.”

“Kendo?”

“Japanese sword fighting. I was considering trying it myself, but Zach thinks I’d like aikido better.”

Shyness prevented me from asking Samantha any more questions about the Stranger. She continued to weigh the relative merits of the various martial arts, but I can’t tell you what she said. Indeed, the rest of the afternoon passed as in a dream, those turquoise eyes always before my inner eyes. All the way home Ashleigh called seagulls eagles to her heart’s content while Sam entertained my stepmother with details of team uniforms, without any interference from me.

Chapter 4

Tenth Grade
~
Extracurriculars
~
A Sonnet.

T
he dream faded soon enough, however, and I awoke to the cold, hard knowledge that summer was over. I speak metaphorically, of course. Actually it was still pretty hot out, especially in my attic bedroom. Mom is always promising to redo the insulation if business ever picks up.

Monday morning Mom made me my traditional back-to-school breakfast: whole-wheat buttermilk waffles with maple syrup and homemade sour cherry jam. (Ashleigh’s candy-making phase had a strong jam component.) For an extra treat, Mom set the table downstairs in the front parlor, at a claw-footed oak table that’s been on sale for several years. If it ever does sell, I’ll miss it terribly.

I brushed my hair quickly, put on my lucky thumb ring, and came downstairs. I was wearing some of the clothes my stepmother had provided, and I worried a little that my mother would notice and ask where they had come from. Indeed, she looked me up and down appraisingly. All she said, though, was, “How nice you look, honey.”

At school, Ash and I were disappointed to find we had different homerooms. She drew Frau Riechstoff-Murphy, the German teacher, and I landed the notorious math teacher Mr. Klamp.

Mr. Klamp laid down the law. No tardiness, no talking above 40 decibels, no untied shoelaces, no visible undergarments, no eating, no chewing gum, no chewing tobacco, no chewing betel nuts, no chewing coca leaves, no chewing out students (unless Mr. Klamp was doing the chewing out), no chewing out teachers (unless ditto), no unnecessary displays of temper (unless ditto), no unnecessary displays of affection (no exceptions), no pets over one ounce or under one ton, and no singing, except in Bulgarian. I began to think Mr. Klamp wouldn’t be so bad—which was lucky, since I had him for math as well.

This year, the social highlights of my homeroom included three of the grade’s five Seths; Tall Alex and Mad Alex; Michelle Jeffries; Cordelia Nixon; and one of the Gerard twins—Yolanda or Yvette.

The Y girls are identical twins: the same light-footed roundness, tapered fingers, smooth, dark skin, and elegantly swooping nostrils. Like many identical twins, they like to confuse people by playing games with their clothes and hairstyles. One favorite trick involves gradually trading the colored beads at the ends of their braids, so that, for example, Yolanda will start off with nothing but yellow and Yvette with nothing but green. By the end of the week they’ll both be fifty-fifty yellow and green. Then comes the tricky part. One twin will gradually acquire all the yellow beads and the other all the green—but is the green twin Yolanda, taking over her sister’s look, or is it Yvette, returning to her original color?

Fortunately—or unfortunately, I guess, if you’re a Gerard twin—there’s a simple way for those in the know to tell whether someone is Yolanda or Yvette. Just stand near her and wait. If the twin in question starts to talk, there’s a good chance it’s Yolanda. If she goes on talking for three or four sentences, the good chance becomes a certainty. Yolanda once told me in confidence that in her elementary school, they used to call her Yoyo Mouth.

“Julie Lefkowitz! Look at you! You got so tall! Are you taking physics this year? Let’s see your schedule. Look, we’re in gym together. And English—Ms. Nettleton, ig. No fair! I heard we were supposed to get Ms. Muchnick, everybody says she’s loudly crisp, but she had to go get pregnant. Why would she want a baby when she could have had
us
? Hey, did you do the summer reading? They love
Lord of the Flies
, don’t they? We had it in eighth grade at Sacred Heart, and the next summer in Enrichment. If I have to read it one more time, I’m going to go throw myself off a cliff. They call that book realistic? If you ask me, not even boys would act that way. Speaking of boys, here comes Seth Young! Hey, Seth Young! Where’ve you been all summer? Let’s see your schedule. Did you hear about Muchnick?” Diagnosis: Yolanda.

For the first few days, school had an air of embarrassed festivity. Everyone had come back from their vacations taller, stronger, gawkier, slimmed down or curvier, with their hair grown past their shoulders or newly cropped and sticking out funny. The lawyers’ sons had deep tans from their wilderness adventures, the hippie farmers’ daughters from their long days working outdoors. The cliques shimmered like a mirage, and for a moment it seemed as if a former nerd might cross unharmed into the crisp crowd. Then the walls firmed up again and the moment passed.

“Julie, it’s time for you to start thinking seriously about college,” said my father one Tuesday evening. “Your grades are good, but that’s not enough. Admissions officers are going to want to see strong extracurriculars too. I know you like to write. Have you thought about joining the school newspaper? Or what about the literary magazine?”

I groaned silently. The editors of the
Byzantine Bugle
publish enthusiastic little stories about pep rallies and food drives. Everything has to pass the scrutiny of the administration; the result is loudly dull. The literary magazine,
Sailing to Byzantium
, isn’t so bad—at least, it wasn’t so bad last year, when Ms. Muchnick was the adviser. With the Much on maternity leave, though, Ms. Nettleton had taken over. Three periods a week of
her
was quite enough for
me
.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “I’m pretty busy with school, plus there’s my job at Conehead’s.” (I decided not to tell him that, due to a weather-linked decrease in the demand for frozen treats, Conehead’s had let me go for the winter.) “Anyway, I’m just not into the whole newspaper/magazine thing so much.”

“You know I wish you’d give up that job,” said Dad. “Cone-head’s isn’t exactly the most impressive credential to have on your record. What about student government or science club? That might be even better than the newspaper. The admissions officers like to see well-rounded students.”

Well rounded! I glanced ruefully at my bony knees. Which, I wondered, would be worse: to tell my father that a midlevel nobody like me had no chance whatsoever of winning a school government election—essentially a popularity contest—or to express distaste for science, his favorite subject and the basis of his career? For the thousandth time, I envied girls whose fathers had a clue about their interests and personalities. Banking two imaginary dollars in the Familial Restraint Fund, I told Dad I would think about it.

And I did. What I thought was this: If there were justice in the world, the hours I spent with Ashleigh would count as an extracurricular activity. Science Club, History Club, and Future Candy Makers of America, all smushed together and laid out to dry like a Fruit Roll-Up.

Autumn blew in cold and clear the next week. As the days grew shorter and their hours grew longer, we settled down in earnest to tenth grade.

In Mrs. Marlin’s class, Charlemagne advanced across Europe (or do I mean retreated?), followed (or perhaps preceded) by his ancestors, descendants, henchmen, or enemies, Clovis, Childeric, and Pepin the Short. (History was never my thing. Unlike English, where you can make things up, or math, where you can figure things out, history depends on happening to know what happens to have happened. Where’s the sense in
that
?)

In English, the only class I had with Ashleigh, the vicious children of Summer Reading—I refer to the characters in
Lord of the Flies
, not my classmates—made way for Shakespeare’s unfortunate lovers.

“How do we know that Romeo and Juliet are in love?” asked Ms. Nettleton one rainy third period. “Yes, Julie?”

“Shakespeare tells us in the prologue. He calls them ‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers’ and talks about ’The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,’ ” I said.

You’d think any teacher would be thrilled to have evidence that a student had read and understood the homework. Not Ms. Nettleton. When she asks a question, she doesn’t want just any answer; she’s interested only in the one
she’d
give.

“Yes, but what clues does Shakespeare give in the dialogue itself? Anyone? Not you, Seth, I know you know. Peter?”

“When Juliet goes, ‘Romeo, Romeo, oh, wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ ” said Peter the Short.

Ms. Nettleton squinted at him mistrustfully. That line doesn’t appear until the next week’s reading, and Peter is not the type to read ahead. She clearly suspected him of winging it. “Before that. At the dance—the Capulet party, where Romeo and Juliet meet. Did anyone notice anything special about the first words they say to each other?”

“They’re kind of flirting,” said Yolanda. “They’re kissing each other’s hands and things.”

“Yes, but what about the
form
of the lines? Did anything look familiar from our unit last year on poetry? Anyone? All right, Seth, tell the class.”

“They speak in rhyme and meter,” said Seth Young. “In fact, the first part of their conversation takes the form of a sonnet.”

“Thank you, Seth,” said Ms. Nettleton. She wrote
sonnet
on the blackboard and started explaining in words as dull as they were informative. From rhyme schemes she proceeded to iambic pentameter, fourteen lines, final couplets. The bell rang before we got back to Romeo’s feelings for Juliet, or vice versa.

“Who
cares
if it’s a sonnet?” said Yolanda as we made our way to the cafeteria. “That whole love-at-first-sight thing is a pile of crock, anyway. Okay, it’s better than
Lord of the Flies
, but not much. Romeo’s already in love before he meets Juliet—with that Rosalind person, who’s her
cousin
, mega-ig. Then he sees Juliet and he’s all ‘Let me kiss your hand, I really mean it this time, you know I do ’cause I’m telling you in a
sonnet
.’ And Juliet’s not even
fourteen
yet. He’s going to kill himself over an eighth grader? Yeah, right.”

Ashleigh disagreed. While not every pair of lovers understood the true nature of their attachment at the moment of their first meeting, she maintained, some did. She gave as an example of the former type, Elizabeth Bennet and her Mr. Darcy; of the latter type, Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her Mr. Bingley. Finding that Yolanda had not yet read
Pride and Prejudice
, she jumped at the chance to describe it.

In the meantime I chewed my egg salad in silence, thinking about the nature of love.

Two people could know each other for years, I reflected, and promise to love each other forever, yet find their hearts and interests at odds. That was certainly the case with my parents. However, the example of the Drs. Liu suggested that lasting love did sometimes blossom from the first encounter. Samantha’s parents met in a singing group—Haichang has a baritone voice, Lily a sweet mezzo-soprano—and they still put their cheeks together and croon in harmony whenever they think nobody’s around.

What, I wondered, would be
my
fate in love?

If Ashleigh was right, I would find out soon enough. Only a week remained until the Forefield Columbus Cotillion. We had rehearsed our dance steps until we could confidently hop through three flavors of quadrille, a minuet, and the Sir Roger de Coverly, as well as the fox trot, the waltz, and some simple swing. We had even practiced wiggling freestyle. I felt we were as ready as we ever would be.