Holly in Love (9 page)

My parents arrived about five and Jamie and I were still talking away. “Well, hi,” he said to my parents, obviously pleased to see them.

“How are you?” said my father. He meant it.

“I’m surviving,” said Jamie, and they smiled at each other and I was eaten up with curiosity. What had Jamie survived, and how had my father helped him? Jamie seemed so relaxed and sane to me, as if he could not possibly live in a world with problems.

My mother asked how his Aunt Eunice was doing with her cancer chemotherapy treatments. The hospital aides brought in my tray (they eat impossibly early in a hospital; it’s enough to make anyone swear off injury and illness), and Jamie said, looking at my meal, “That stuff is greasy enough to lubricate a truck.”

We began a series of wisecracks about cafeteria food. He’s so good-looking, I thought, staring into his wide, sweet grin. But I can’t fall for him. Not for a
junior
.

“Well, I have to go.” Jamie got up reluctantly. I loved it—his slowness to get up, the way he still had things to say and jokes to crack. “I guess I’ll stop worrying about you, Holl,” said Jamie. “For a desperately injured girl, you look pretty terrific.”

There was a pause, and I thought if my parents had not been there, Jamie would have bent over the bed and kissed me. I thought if my parents had not been there I might have caught Jamie’s hand and
made
him bend over and kiss me—but they were there, and we just looked at each other silently and swallowed and said good-bye uncertainly.

“Mother,” I said when he was gone, “this food is not fit for human consumption. I’m going to die of malnutrition. Can you bring me a Big Mac and some French fries?”

I think my mother might have commented on Jamie, or asked if there were any boys I liked these days, or something equally subtle, but my father of course sprang into his lecture about pitiful human beings who really don’t have anything to eat, and how I should be grateful even for food greasy enough to lubricate a truck.

Jamie spun around in my head, and his laugh and his jokes ricocheted off the hospital room walls.

I lay in bed that night telling myself that age mattered not at all. That Jamie and I would be the perfect couple and be totally happy together.

But I kept seeing the cafeteria, with its table for seniors and its table for juniors, and how nobody ever crossed, except a few girls who were next-door neighbors and best friends, and even they didn’t do it much.

“W
INTER MIST,” SAID KATE.

I looked at her in confusion, and out at the crowded cafeteria, trying to see something that resembled Winter Mist.

“Lipstick name,” she explained. “How do you like it?”

I had sworn off cold weather comments. “Mmmm,” I said.

“Ugh,” said Lydia. “What color would it actually turn out to be, once you got it on your lips? Slush gray? Sleet white?”

“True,” said Kate. “It doesn’t exactly grip you with the desire to have your lips that shade. I’m still trying to plan a line of lipsticks for winter. Shades that make you think of lovely lips on ski slopes.”

I could not possibly care what color my lips, or anybody else’s, were when I had taken my life in my hands to whip down treacherous slopes at insane speeds. Now a ski
lodge
lipstick, that I could imagine.

“Perhaps Winter Apricot,” said Kate. “Or Frozen Burgundy.”

I could see a shriveled fruit hanging off an ice-killed tree. “Kate,” I said, “I think Winter Apricot would be a real seller.”

Kate was happy. “Here,” she said. “I’ll dump your books at this table. You sit on the outside seat so you can sprawl your cast in the aisle and other people can trip over it and have their own personal chance to break bones.”

“How neighborly,” I said.

Lydia offered to get my lunch tray for me.

“Oh, thanks!” I said. I must say, a lot of friendly service went along with having a foot in a cast. It almost compensated for the deep and painful path the crutches were wearing under my arms. “I’ll have the sandwich,” I said.

“Holly,” said Lydia, in the voice of doom, “it’s pimiento cheese.”

We contemplated the damp and warm pimiento cheese sandwiches slapped together by our cafeteria staff, a group of overweight sadists who must surely eat somewhere else. Lydia shuddered. “Better have soup and salad. At least the soup comes out of cans.”

“They can even ruin that,” said Kate glumly. “Add twice as much water so all you get is vegetable-flavored bilge.”

In the end I went up to the line myself, so as to be able to choose the least loathsome of the day’s selections. Somehow, due to my slowness and their hunger, Kate and Lydia got separated from me in the cafeteria line. When I got a gentle poke in the ribs, I thought it must be Kate telling me to pay attention, the line was moving, pick up those crutches and hobble on…but it was Jamie.

I turned and looked at him, and a warm spot of pleasure started in my chest and spread through me. He gave me a one-quarter grin that said a very private
I’m glad to see you
. I gave him the same grin back, and his fingers moved over my ribs again. Half tickle, half caress.

“Carry your tray for you?” he said. Anybody listening would have thought Jamie bored. Merely courteous to some strange girl in difficulties.

“That would be lovely.”

He was warm and solid and male, standing behind me in his jeans, the sagging sleeve of his old pullover sweater brushing down my arm, his fingers lightly at my waist. I wanted to say
forget the tray
—
carry me
!

Lydia, separated from me by two other kids, told them to pass her because she had to be next to me. “It’s okay, Lyd,” I said. “Someone else volunteered.”

She looked once, to see who that might be, and when her eyes found Jamie she lifted one eyebrow at us both. Is that all she’s going to say! I thought. I can handle that. Lydia turned her attention to finding the best piece of lemon meringue pie on the dessert rack. I twined my fingers through the handle grip of the wooden crutches and caught Jamie’s finger. He drew a snowflake pattern on my palm of my hand and put a soup bowl on my tray with the other hand. “Rolls?” he said.

“Please,” I said.

He added ten pats of butter to the single roll on his own tray.

“Uh, Jamie?” I said. “Is that perhaps a little more butter than absolutely necessary?”

“I butter everything,” he said, putting a salad on the tray.

“Including lettuce?” I said.

He regarded his salad thoughtfully. “I haven’t tried that,” he conceded. “But I’m willing to consider it.”

My stomach shivered with laughter, but we were conspirators, having a tiny cafeteria-line date, and I didn’t want to be trespassed upon. I kept the laughter silent. The line closed in, everybody squeezing to reach a good dessert. I refused one, thinking of buttered lettuce instead, and wishing Jamie and I could spend the afternoon at the Pew where the butter was easy to slather on. When I looked back at him, he was not studying the desserts. Or even getting more butter. He was studying me.

The laughter inside me turned almost to a cramp. Oh, Jamie! I thought
Gosh, I like you
.

We were at the cash register. I fumbled for my wallet and change and had a hard time balancing. Jamie’s huge shoe pushed against the base of the crutches, stabilizing me. I looked down at the shoe and he waved the huge toe of the shoe at me. I had one bare toe protruding from my cast. I waved it back, and I felt Jamie tremble with laughter beside me.

My daydream with my filigree earrings flooded me, and it was Jamie who swirled out with me onto the dance floor. I handed the cafeteria checker my four quarters and wondered what Jamie looked like dressed up. Had I ever even seen him in decent clothes? I tried to remember what he had worn to church two years ago, but two years ago I didn’t have a crush on Jamie Winter. The memory was impossible to retrieve. Have to build some memories, I thought. Have to do things with Jamie.

I wanted to look at Jamie so much that I couldn’t look at him. I would have cried out or giggled idiotically or blushed a permanent red.

“My, my,” said Lydia, in a cool, probing voice. “Starting off the New Year with younger men, eh, Hollyberry?”

The two girls between Lydia and me, a few feet away now with their loaded trays, turned to look at us. They were juniors. I didn’t even know their names, but they certainly knew Jamie. They looked at him, interpreted Lydia’s remark, and burst out into evil snickers, jabbing each other with sharp elbows before they pranced off for the junior side of the cafeteria.

“Looks heavy,” said Lydia, smirking at us.

I wanted to laugh. To say, “You’ve got it, Lyd old girl. Can’t slip anything past you, can we?”

But I didn’t.

I said, “Don’t be silly, Lydia. He’s just carrying the tray.”

I could not believe I had said that. I could have bitten off my tongue.
That was no private, special cafeteria-line date, Lydia, that was just a young servant I ordered around. He has no meaning in my life whatsoever.

Lydia turned, amused, and walked toward our usual table. “Jamie,” I whispered, trying to find a sentence to excuse inexcusable words…but Jamie was gone. Following Lydia. Carrying my tray. His back was to me.

Gary Beaulieu had come to sit with Kate, who was beaming with delight, and Gary patted the table where he expected Jamie to set my tray. Gary didn’t so much as break off his conversation to speak to Jamie, but simply got up to hold a chair out for me, elbowing Jamie away from the table. I looked at Jamie, mutely begging forgiveness, but Jamie wasn’t looking at me. He was steering around Gary, his eyes angry and his cheeks taut and red. I wished his shoe would wave at me, forgive me, butter a little lettuce for me, anything at all. But the shoe walked away. I had blown it.

Gary propped my crutches safely out of the way.

I could run after him, I thought wildly. Except I can’t run. He could sit here, I thought. Except all eight seats are filled, with seniors.

Jamie was gone. I had not even thanked him for carrying the tray. Tears stung my eyes.

I’d spent an entire week thinking about Jamie and looking forward to seeing him again. First sign of teasing among my friends—or acquaintances, as I would have to term Lydia—and I backed off. What’s the matter with me? I thought. Why can’t I be honest and be me?

I would never be able to eat lunch. My entire abdomen was knotted like a piece of macramé.

“Holly?” said Gary Beaulieu. “You okay?”

I stared at him through a mist of tears. “Yes. Sure. Thanks.”

“You look as if your ankle hurts. The nurse could give you aspirin, you know. Not that aspirin probably does much for broken bones.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. I began slurping my soup, which was tomato and excellent. Thanks to Campbell’s, not the cafeteria.

I burned my tongue on it and was rather glad. I deserved punishment for not standing up for the way I felt about Jamie. Weak, I said to myself. You’re weak. Limp. Worthless.

Everybody had cold weather tales to tell. How the thermometer had dipped to twenty-six below at their place. How they’d been forced to spend New Year’s Eve trying to get some ski visitor’s car started. How their pipes had burst in spite of the new insulation.

And they accuse
me
of thinking too much about winter weather, I thought. I was glad I had missed the bitter cold of the New Year, being laid up in the hospital.

Across the cafeteria I located Jamie. He was sitting with his back to me. I know him from the back, I thought. The thought was very strange. As if I’d been thinking so much about Jamie that even the back of his head was already familiar to me.

He and his junior classmates were eating like hogs and generally behaving like children. Sixteen, I thought. He’s only sixteen.

I wondered when his birthday was. When we’d both be seventeen.

Pete Stein tapped my shoulder.

“Hi, Pete,” said Gary.

“Hi, Pete,” I said. I saw that he had survived yet another few weeks with his front teeth intact. When a person is a hockey goalie, he has to worry about these things. Pete was wearing his ski vest over his oxford shirt, which was the only clothing he ever wore, in school or out. We had chemistry together next period, and I thought he must need to glance at my book for some reason.

“It’s two floors up to chemistry,” said Stein. “I was thinking what a hard time you’d have getting up the stairs during passing period with a million kids shoving, and I thought maybe we could go on up now and I’ll carry your books for you.”

“Why, Stein!” I said, surprised. “That’s terrific of you.”

Stein nodded, agreeing that terrific moments were not unusual for a jock as superior as he.

Gary handed over the crutches, and I was just planning how to haul myself upright without looking totally awkward and clunky when Stein put his hands around my waist and simply lifted me to my feet. I felt like a piece of sports equipment being set in its proper position. Stein straightened me out to his satisfaction. Kate and Lydia made several remarks about how Stein shouldn’t stop with that—he should get to know old Hollyberry better in a number of other ways. Fortunately Stein was not listening to them (I don’t think he listens much to anybody except his coaches), and after he restacked my books on top of his, we set off for chemistry.

Half the cafeteria was watching us.

Because we were seniors? And seniors are always interesting to freshmen and sophomores and juniors? Because of Kate’s and Lydia’s wisecracks that had set several tables laughing? Because of my crutches? Or because Stein was a sports hero and everything he did was interesting?

My eyes caught Jamie’s, but Jamie looked away so fast the only message I got was lost in transit. Angry, I thought, of course he’s angry. My chest hurt, hating myself for being so small and stupid. What does Jamie think of Stein lifting me up? I wondered. Does he know it was simply to speed the progress toward chemistry? Does he think I like Stein better? Does he
care
?

Pete Stein told me all about how he and his uncle and his two cousins had gone camping over Christmas. “Camping?” I said numbly. “But Stein! The temperature at night was close to thirty below zero. And the wind! The wind-chill factor must have brought it to fifty below.”