Holly in Love (15 page)

Hope turned to Grey. “You can inform Jonathan that it’s just as well he didn’t pursue Holly, Grey. She can’t master speech with an adult, so she turns to kids like Jamie.”

I have to give that old Grey credit. He didn’t actually rebut Hope’s remark, but he did look very uncomfortable about it. He sort of saluted Jamie in embarrassment and scooted back to his car, looking distinctly nonsuave.

“Hope?” said Jamie. “Do you have an ulcer?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if you did I would harass you so much it would start bleeding, and maybe you’d bleed to death,” said Jamie.

At least twenty people heard that and cracked up laughing.

“A little crude, perhaps,” said Kate. “A little lacking in the milk of human compassion, but nevertheless succinct and to the point.”

Everybody broke up laughing again.

Jamie took off for his homeroom.

Kate said to me, “For real, huh?”

I flushed a little. “He’s terrific, Kate. You’ll like him.”

“Okay. I still think you’re crazy. Stein likes you. But if that’s what you want, it’s not my business.”

Such a roaring succession of compliments on the man of my choice. Oh, well. At least Kate’s opinion wasn’t as low as Hope’s.

I walked on down the hall to the pit of my homeroom, catching up, of course, to old Hope herself. Hope spent homeroom telling people about how childish I was, how drastically immature, how painfully young.

Stein said, “Somebody put a leash on her. She’s biting ankles again.”

Hope stopped immediately because the boys all laughed when Stein ordered it. “Stein,” I said, “you’re a prince.”

“True,” he said, and grinned at me. He does like me, I thought, in just the way I like him.

I survived all twelve minutes of homeroom and was relatively intact by the time lunch began.

All my fears piled in on me again. It’s just lunch, I said to myself, it’s nothing but a warm and nasty pimiento cheese sandwich, it is not World War III. Jamie managed to get in line with me, but his whole crowd of junior boys got in with him, laughing and shoving and being thoroughly worthless. Ahead of me were Lydia and Gary and Kate and Susan and Stein. There was no other place than the hot lunch line where those two groups of people would meet.

If only we were in a hot climate.

We could take our trays and walk romantically outside. Sit in the shade of a jacaranda tree. Watch a tennis game. Contemplate our tans.

But it was snowing again, and six degrees with a wind from the northwest. Perfect for ice festivals. A little rough for tête-à-têtes.

Jamie twisted his huge, old muddy shoe around mine, and I twisted my maroon boot around his. We were trying to have a cafeteria-line date in spite of the odds against it, but the enemy won.

“What are you doing?” demanded Lydia. “Going in for wrestling?”

One of Jamie’s classmates laughed insanely. “Leg wrestling first,” he said ominously. “And then—” He made a really obscene suggestion for what came next. I ceased to breathe. Up ahead of me Kate’s shoulders sort of tightened, and Lydia snickered. Susan turned around to stare at Jamie as if debating whether or not that sort of activity really was Jamie’s sort. I couldn’t see what Jamie did but the junior boy said, “All right, all right, don’t get hot, I was just joking.”

We got to the head of the line, and I felt as if my whole life were at stake. I kept telling myself it was nothing but a lunch, a dumb lunch, and all the time I kept wishing either Jamie and I or else everybody else would just disappear.

Gary Beaulieu paused with his loaded tray. He had four meals on there. I knew they were all for him. He and Stein eat like horses when they have a game. “Jamie,” he said, “sit with us? I couldn’t get permission to use the soccer field. We’re going to have to come up with something else. We gotta work out where to put that hot air balloon now.”

I could have kissed old Gary. At least we were over the hump of putting Jamie with the seniors.

We followed Gary to our old table. Gary, still talking, began kicking chairs around with his feet, hooking one from an adjacent table and shoving it in at the end of our table. “…thanks to you,” he said. “Too bad we can’t put advertising on the side of the balloon. Mr. Marchette over at the ski school says he’s seen balloons that advertise magazines, like Forbes Capitalist Tool and the Prune Balloon.”

“I suppose we could hang a sign on the edge of the basket,” said Jamie, “but the silk itself has to be printed like that before it’s sewn together.”

“Where do they make those things?” said Gary.

“My friend got his in North Carolina. The weather down there is a little better for ballooning than it is around here.”

“I’m going to hit up the Edelweiss Shop,” said Gary. “It’s such a good idea we have to capitalize on it. Or maybe Outdoor Traders. Anyway, I ought to be able to sell some kind of advertising for the balloon.”

Jamie was between me and Gary, and on the other side of me was Stein and across from Stein was Kate. An impregnable position. Lydia arrived last. “What have we here?” she said, in her most snide voice.

Kate said, “Holly’s boyfriend. Now shut up and eat your potato chips.”

Susan said, “What I worry about are those husky dogs. Just looking at their crazy blue eyes you know husky dogs are insane. Imagine how they’ll react to that great whoofing noise the hot air balloon makes.

“We’ll just warn Elsa’s sister,” said Jamie. “She raises the dogs, she ought to be able to handle them.”

“She’s probably insane, too,” pointed out Susan, “just being the type to raise them.”

“Let’s not go looking for trouble,” said Stein. “Jamie, what are you buying these days?”

I thought this was the cue for some sort of teasing remark, but Stein seemed to be genuinely interested in whatever Jamie was buying these days. “I had my eye on an antique threshing machine,” said Jamie, “but my parents wouldn’t let me bring it home.”

Stein agreed that parents were a nuisance. “My parents are trying to stop me from playing hockey. How’s
that
for a kick?”

Kate said, “You know what’s the best gift of winter?”

“The best gift of winter,” repeated Susan, smiling. “What?”

“Weather forecast. Perfect temperatures for the ice sculptures, and no wind and no snow predicted to bother the hot air balloon. It’s going to be a fabulous festival.”

They went on chattering.

I felt peaceful. The cafeteria was full of shouting and noise and the clatter of trays and chairs being shoved under tables. My friends were friends after all, and I had not died during lunch, I hadn’t even suffered. After all that agony, it
was
nothing but a few months, nothing but time, that separated Jamie and me.

I nudged Jamie.

“What?” he said, smiling.

“The best gift of winter,” I said, very quietly and privately, my words hidden by the noisy talk of the rest of the table, “is you.”

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning
The Face on the Milk Carton,
about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in
Whatever Happened to Janie?
(1993),
The Voice on the Radio
(1996), and
What Janie Found
(2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book,
Janie Face to Face
, will be released in 2013.

Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the
Mayflower
.

The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

Cooney at age three.

Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.