Holly in Love (6 page)

“Hope,” I said, deleting all the words my father would not want me to say, “dry up and blow away.”

She laughed. “Holly, for your own good, look at what you’re doing. You don’t want to bother getting out and meeting new people. You’re too lazy to socialize with the rest of us. Therefore, you settle for a kid who poses no difficulties for you, and you—”

It was either walk away or kick her in the shins, and because I did not wish to be grounded any longer than necessary I chose walking away. I will not lose my temper, I told myself. I don’t care about Hope Martin’s opinions. I signed up to try for fifty dollars for Christmas money. I am not trying to get to know Jamie Winter better. Nor am I a lazy clod who won’t socialize with acceptable people and settles for kids!

I stomped home, crushing Hope with every crackle of ice.

“You?” said Christopher, laughing heartily. “Beat a lie detector?”

“I might.”

“Not a chance. You’re like Abraham Lincoln. You’d walk five miles to return the odd penny.”

“I told Dad I was going to play Monopoly when I was really going to a movie.”

“That’s true,” said Christopher, “but it was a fluke. You were riddled with guilt doing that. Mom and Dad would have seen it if they hadn’t been watching the news when you told them about the Monopoly game. Look at the way you enjoy being grounded.”

Enjoy being grounded. Showed what he knew.

All week I thought about the best way to tell lies. I didn’t know how a lie detector worked, so it was hard to come up with a plan to beat it. Instead, I planned the spending of the fifty dollars.

Of course, on Sunday my father’s sermon was about Christmas giving. We were collecting for migrant workers in the Southwest. “Sometimes,” said my father in a slow, sad voice, “these families live in windowless shacks for weeks at a time.” He surveyed an unwilling congregation until they all began to fidget. “What would it be like to have no windows? No electrical appliances?” People began reading the backs of their service leaflets, to get away from the sermon. He was going to ask for money again, and nobody wanted to hear about it. “If all of us gave a dollar for every window, bed, clean sheet, and new toy in our houses, how we could help the poor!” said my father.

Two hundred people shifted guiltily in their pews.

I thought of the oriental rug I’d been yearning to put in my dollhouse parlor, and I thought of skinny children hanging in the doorways of their shacks and how my fifty dollars could put sturdy shoes on their cold little feet. The trouble is, I thought, I’m so shallow and worthless that I would rather have the oriental rug.

Maybe it would be best not to win the fifty dollars. Then I wouldn’t have all these wrenching financial decisions to make.

I
N HOMEROOM, WHEN I
had finally peeled off all the layers required to protect my fragile flesh from a temperature hovering at ten degrees and a wind that howled through every scrap of fabric, Hope said timidly, “Holly?”

I thought she had laryngitis. “What?” I felt very strong. I was even prepared to be nice to Hope that day. I had decided that if I won the fifty dollars I would give half to the migrant workers. Nobody could expect more of me than that, and I could still afford the miniature oriental rug and the tiny electrified wall sconces.

“Do you remember a few weeks ago when Grey came to pick me up after school in a silver Corvette?”

Vividly. The silver Corvette had been absolutely beautiful. Just to be mean I wanted to say, no, I can’t remember, how boring. “Yes,” I said. I thought, Come
on
, Holly, practice
lying
.

“It wasn’t Grey’s car, you know. He has a Chevrolet.”

It was not like Hope to make Grey sound ordinary. Perhaps Hope was breaking up with Grey in order to date the silver Corvette.

“The guy with the Corvette is a fraternity brother of Grey’s,” said Hope. “A really gorgeous man. His name is Jonathan Byerly.”

“Oh.” So now Hope had
two
handsome, rich college men on her string. Really, it was depressing. How come nobody ever wanted old Holly Carroll? I had lots of fine qualities, I was sure of it. Untapped gold mine, that’s me, I told myself, and congratulated myself on finally telling a good lie.

“Jonathan noticed you at the bus stop,” said Hope, her voice getting timid again. “He thought you had beautiful hair. You were wearing it in one very long French braid that day, down the middle of your back, and Jonathan said it reflected red highlights in the sun. He wondered who you were, and I told him a little bit about you.”

I thanked God that Hope knew nothing of my dollhouse. I hadn’t worn the single long braid since Christopher said it made me look like Heidi and all I needed were a mountain, some goats, and a cheese.

“Jonathan,” said Hope, “would like to date you. He wanted to know if I would fix it up.”

If she had thrown herself down the nonexistent stairs of her ranch house, she couldn’t have surprised me more. I looked at her searchingly. She had a new expression on her face. Not superior but hesitant.

“Jonathan said you sounded like the first interesting girl he’d heard of in this town,” said Hope.

I could not imagine what Hope had said to make Jonathan think that. Clearly, Hope could not imagine what she had said either.

“Jonathan’s on a full scholarship in the premed program,” said Hope. “He hates northern New Hampshire but he has to be here.”

Jonathan was a brilliant premed student who hated cold climates and drove a silver Corvette? Had I asked only the day before for perfection?

“I told him I’d fix it up,” said Hope, and then I understood her timidity. She was afraid I’d refuse and then this Jonathan and her Grey would be annoyed with her. Refuse? I thought. Am I crazy?

I considered Jonathan. “If he’s on scholarship, how come he can afford a Corvette?”

“He can’t. That’s his aunt’s. His aunt is Dr. Chambliss, you know. In the physics department. The lady who won that prize last year for whatever it was.”

I remembered. My mother spoke of Dr. Chambliss with awe and respect. Dr. Cham-bliss was the kind of woman my mother would like me to become. It seemed unlikely. “Jonathan wants to date me,” I said. It was so impossible I couldn’t even get excited about it.

“He does,” said Hope, finding it difficult to believe. “He wants to meet you in the Pewter Pot after school.”

The Pewter Pot serves fifty kinds of muffins, bagels, and doughnuts with coffee, hot chocolate, or milkshakes. It’s a very crowded, very hot little hole in the wall that is a college tradition. All the alums hang out there when they come for reunions. You don’t go to the Pew without a date, and usually you don’t go there at all unless you’re in college or an alum. The Pew is silently acknowledged to be off limits to high school kids.

The Pew.

With Jonathan the brilliant premed student and his silver Corvette.

But I was grounded. I maintained silence and tried to think of a way around this problem.

“Jonathan is a super person,” said Hope. “I’m not kidding, Holly. He’s fantastic.”

Hope had very high standards in men. If she said he was fantastic, he was fantastic.

“What year is he in school?” I said, stalling. I absolutely hated discussing my father and our family rules with a person like Hope, who seemed to have neither family nor rules.

“A junior. Like Grey. He’s twenty-one.”

My father would go up in smoke. His daughter? Dating a twenty-one-year-old college man with a silver Corvette? Even being Dr. Chambliss’s nephew would not make up for being twenty-one.

And I had to admit that twenty-one sounded pretty old even to me. I didn’t like Grey, cute and suave though he was. Why would I like his pal Jonathan? On the other hand, a man whose heart began to churn at the mere sight of sunlight on my brown braid was not a man to be discarded lightly.

“Holly,” wailed Hope, “I promised Jonathan I would arrange it.”

I had always wanted to be in the position of depriving Hope of something she wanted. Now I was there, and it didn’t turn out to be as much fun as I’d anticipated.

All day long I thought about Jonathan instead of classwork.

He sounded like an illustration for a magazine article on eligible men. Maybe Hope had made him up and this was an intricate plot to humiliate me.

For this Jonathan, I actually flunked a Spanish quiz. Me, Holly Carroll, who gets straight 100s in Spanish. The teacher wanted to know if I was ill. She even offered, rather anxiously, to give me a make-up. I just smiled at her weakly and tried to look ill and deserving of a make-up without actually lying about it.

My week was too full of lies.

“Okay,” I said to Hope. “I can miss the bus and not be too late. I’ll meet Jonathan on the steps after school. That way he can drive me home and we can talk, and he can see if he wants to approach my father.”

“Approach your father!” snorted Hope. “You make it sound like
Jane Eyre
or something. Bringing your father in is crazy. You know he’ll say no, so why even get him involved in this?”

Every girl except me seemed to be able to run her own life without bothering about parental approval. It really was beginning to get to me. College, I thought grimly. In less than a year I’ll be away at college and I can make my own decisions.

I wondered what Jonathan would be like. He’d have to like my shining hair an awful lot to face a minister and beg to be allowed to date his daughter. I pictured that.

A suitor on bended knee. Neat.

J
ONATHAN.

Well, there turned out to be only one adjective to apply to Jonathan, and it was not one of Hope’s.

Yes, he was handsome. Yes, he was definitely driving a silver Corvette. Yes, I knew by the books piled in the backseat that he was a premed student.

But he was also old.

He looked as if I could babysit for his children. Maybe he was only twenty-one, but if so, he was a very mature twenty-one. He made me feel like a Brownie Scout with my camp director. I could accept a ride home with the man, but a
date
! I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Lord, let me think of the right things to say, I prayed. Let me get out of this without calling him Mr. Byerly.

“What’s the matter with you?” hissed Hope in my ear. “Holly, he’s a dream to look at.”

This was true. A full-color poster of Jonathan and his Corvette would be nice to have on my bedroom wall, just to daydream over. But in real life, dark and smooth and fashionable…Jonathan looked like someone my
mother
would want a poster of.

“Hello, Holly,” said Jonathan Byerly in a middle-aged voice. “What a pleasure to meet you at last.”

It was going to be impossible to call him Jonathan. What he was, was Mr. Byerly. “Hi,” I said. I blushed. I had never in my whole life felt so
young.
I even had ribbons in my hair. I still had braces on my lower jaw where you couldn’t see them, but they marked me “Kid—still getting repairs for adulthood.”

“We can get acquainted while I drive you home,” said Jonathan. He made getting acquainted sound like an act requiring a cup of tea and a butler. “Hope was telling me about your father. He sounds quite medieval.”

I could hardly tell Jonathan that I thought he sounded pretty medieval himself. I smiled in a sickly fashion, and Hope sort of shoveled me into my side of the Corvette and glared at me very quickly when Jonathan was getting in the other side, just so I’d know I’d better shape up, and fast.

Shape up? I thought hysterically. Into what? An old lady?

We pulled away from the curb, and I tried to think of one thing to say to a man who seemed the right age to be the principal of the school. Nothing whatsoever came to mind.

Jonathan gave me a lovely smile—he, too, had worn braces at some time in the distant, foggy past; it was a perfect smile—and launched into a long description of the nasty weather we’d been experiencing…in Spanish.

Now, after four years and straight A’s, I am pretty fluent. But he sounded so
affected
. I could not bring myself to respond in Spanish. Lamely, feeling utterly stupid, I said—in English—“Yes, it is pretty cold.”

He looked at me in surprise. “Thought you were a Spanish wizard,” he said.

“Oh. Well, I guess I do get good grades. I, ah, I guess I don’t chat much in Spanish, though.”

We had driven one block, and I felt as if I had been in the front seat of that car forever. My cheeks were burning and my stomach was clenched.

“Where do you live?” he said.

I gave him the worst directions imaginable. I said, “Well, you know, off by the church. You know, where, um, the red light is? Except it’s green now. Well, yellow. Turn there. Turn left, I mean. Yes, there, right.”

Bad enough to be seventeen with this guy. I
sounded
about three.

Jonathan cleared his throat. “I hear you’re not much of a sports fan.”

“No,” I said and scoured my brain for something to add, but since I wasn’t a sports fan I had nothing to say about it.

Jonathan tried again. “Given much thought to where you’ll go to college next year?”

“Uh, well, yes, I guess I have. As long as it’s hot, you know. I mean, I don’t care about the college. As long as I’m warm, you know.” I struggled to make myself sound sensible. “I get cold easily,” I said.

“You’re picking a college based on whether you can get warm there?” said Jonathan.

It sounded insane, when he summarized it for me. “Well,” I said. I found myself playing with my braid. I haven’t done
that
since elementary school when I used to suck on the tips.

By now we were at my house. Jonathan rolled very slowly up to the curb and let the motor idle for a moment, as though he were trying to decide whether he should park or not. Finally he turned the motor off. Don’t let him come in, I thought. Don’t let him talk to my father. I’d rather be struck by lightning.

Jonathan handed out yet another topic of conversation. I took a deep breath and tried to sound interesting and logical and sounded stupid and empty instead. I prayed to God to let me think of something to say, but evidently He was off feeding the poor.