Keeper of Dreams (53 page)

“How did you get my number?”

He laughed. “Deeny, you called
me
, remember?”

“Lex called you. My friend Lex. She pushed the button. And how do you know my name, anyway? Do you work for the cellphone company?”

“I know your name because you whispered it to me in my dream,” he said. “I know your name because I whispered it myself as I slid your shirt up your body and kissed you all the way down your—”

Deeny mashed the end button and cast the phone down onto the pine needles.

One of the nearby smokers laughed. “Oooh, lovers’ quarrel,” he said.

“None of your effin’ business,” said Deeny.

“If my business was effin’, you’d be the first one I’d eff,” said the smoker, and his buddies laughed.

Deeny picked up the phone. “I don’t have time for little boys.”

But as she walked away, she was thinking, This is the first time any boy at this school ever made a rude sexual comment about
me
. And he did it because of the phone.

The damn thing works.

Too well, that’s how it works. This was supposed to be a game of let’s pretend. So who was the guy on the other end?

She pushed
TALK
.

The display showed her home phone number. It rang. Beep. Beep. Beep. No answer. No man’s voice.

She turned to the couple who were kissing and touching and pressing
up against each other next to the big oak tree at the center of the grove.

“Lovers are so fickle,” she said. “One minute taking your shirt off, the next minute not even answering the phone.”

They broke their kiss long enough to turn and look at her, gap-lipped, for a long moment.

“As you were,” she said.

They returned to their kiss, his hands moving along the bare skin between her jeans and her top, her hands playing with his pockets, with his butt. Deeny wanted to scream, it made her so jealous, it made her so angry. It made her want so much to press talk and have somebody really be there. Somebody who wanted her so much he couldn’t keep his hands off her. And with any luck, maybe it would be somebody who didn’t say things like “If my business was effin’, you’d be the first one I’d eff.”

She remembered the voice on the phone, the impossible voice, the unknown phone number. The thought of him made her shiver. And as she walked toward the buses, she wondered whether shivering was one of the early warning signs of love.

She did not use the phone over the weekend.

On Saturday Mother went to temple and Treadmarks went outside and squatted by the lawn mower, pretending to have some understanding of mechanical things, but actually half-mooning the neighborhood with his butt crack. Thus he offended the God of Israel two ways, by working on the Sabbath and by making it so embarrassing to believe that man had been made in his image.

Deeny showed her faith by not working, and her freethinking by not going to temple. Basically she sat around and tried to read three different books and a magazine and couldn’t keep her mind on any one of them because she kept thinking of what it might be like for a man—not a boy, a man—to slide his hands under her shirt and lift it upward and then kiss her naked flesh. Since her naked flesh would include her flabby belly, it kind of interfered with the fantasy, and she kept switching between imagining that he preferred bodies with a little loose flesh and imagining that her flesh was somehow magically tightened over the smooth hard muscles of a girl who uses the ab roller fifty reps every day.

She told herself that there was no point in picking up the phone because who would see her do it?

And on Sunday, Deeny managed not to pull the cellphone out of her purse all morning. She didn’t touch it till Mother offered to take her to the mall, and even then it was only because her father called out to her as they were heading out the door.

“Aren’t you taking your phone? In case loverboy calls?”

Deeny wondered for one panicked moment how Treadmarks could possibly know about the guy on the phone. Until Mother answered him. “Dear, I think ‘Bill’ was just made up.”

“Oh, yes, Bill,” said Father. “Aren’t you afraid he might call?”

Deeny thought back to Thursday and remembered that she had said she was trying to avoid Bill’s calls. “I don’t want to talk to him even if he does,” she said.

“Then leave the phone with me,” said Father. “If he calls, I’ll get rid of him for you.”

Deeny reached into her purse, lifted up the phone, and dropped it back inside. “No thanks,” she said.

“So you
want
him to call.”

Mother sighed. “He doesn’t exist, dear.”

“That is my fondest wish, Mother,” said Deeny, “but alas it has not yet come true.” And they were out the door.

It was such a weird confrontation. Treadmarks mocking her by pretending that he believed some guy was trying to call her. Mother defending Deeny by calling her a liar. Which she was, of course, except that even though Bill was a lie, there really
was
a guy on the phone. Or at least there had been. And now she was afraid to push the
TALK
button, for fear he would be there, and for fear that he would not.

When Monday came around, the phone weighed heavy in her purse, and she toyed with the idea of simply leaving it home. She even decided to do that, for a few minutes, but after breakfast she went back to her room for no other reason than to take it out of her drawer and put it in her purse. She told herself it was so that Treadmarks wouldn’t find it and do something sickening like getting her cellphone number and calling it and leaving fake messages on her voicemail. Which he was not above doing. Though it did sound like more work than he was wont to attempt on his own.

So there she was on the bus again, phone in her purse, and just like Thursday and Friday, she switched it on and set it to test the current ringing sound when she pressed the
OK
button. All the time telling herself she wasn’t actually going to push it. She was just going to forget she even had a phone in her purse.

Unless it just . . . rang. Unless somebody called her.

Nobody called.

But something else was going on.

Word had spread, apparently. She was getting looked at by kids who usually glanced past her as if she had no more existence than gum on the sidewalk—to be stepped around, lest she stick to their shoe, but otherwise ignored. Today, though, they fell silent in their conversations and glanced at her, some of them covertly, but others quite openly, as if she had forgotten to wear pants. And one time she overheard the words “older guy” and she realized that either Becky or Lex had been indiscreet.

Wasn’t that what she wanted, though? She could hardly be mad at them for making her, if not famous, then notorious. And maybe it wasn’t them at all, maybe it was one of the other kids at the pep rally. It’s not as if they had had any privacy there in the bleachers in the gym.

They were talking about her. Holding her in awe. Or maybe not, maybe they disapproved—that’s what it looked like in that group where she heard the words “older guy,” no doubt the very next words from somebody else were those little “tsk-tsk” clicks or even the more direct “what a whore.” Well, disapproval from shmucks like that was like an Oscar and the Nobel Prize combined, minus the statue and the cash, of course.

And by lunchtime, Lex and Becky had far more to report. After she had assured them that he had
not
called again and no, she had never slept with him, they were full of news about what everybody was saying. “They are so sure he’s from the college and he’s some big brain from the physics department.”

“Big brain, I like that,” said Deeny.

“So he isn’t?” asked Becky.

“College is in his past, not his present, and definitely not his future,” said Deeny. As if she knew. But he sounded like a college kind of guy. Clear-sounding, confident, and he didn’t have to hunt for words, they
were just there, whatever words he needed. Not that he had said that many of them.

“And what
I
heard,” said Lex, “is that he’s a married man older than your dad and it’s like some kind of electric complex—”

“Electra,” said Deeny, “as in Mourning Becomes.”

Lex rolled her eyes. “Puh-leeeeeze, like I wasn’t the first one to discover the psych book and tell you both about all the weird sex crap back in sixth grade.”

“You just take so much pride in being smarter than everybody, Deeny,” said Becky. “It’s your worst feature.”

“But at least I’ve got no tits, so you still look real sexy when you stand next to me.”

Lex did her build-a-wall pantomime between them, saying, as she always did, “Please don’t fight, girls, it will worry the children.”

“So everybody’s talking,” said Deeny. “What can I do about that?” Except enjoy it.

“Amazingly enough,” said Lex, “none of the stories reflect any credit on
you
.”

“Like we expected anything else?” said Deeny. “But at least they notice me.”

“So . . . what’ll you do if the school counselor calls you in?” said Lex.

“Why would a counselor want to see me?”

What a stupid question. She hadn’t even finished lunch when Ms. Reymondo walked by and said, “Come see me, would you, Deeny?”

“When?”

“Anytime,” she said.

“Cool,” said Deeny. “How about July?”

“How about now?” said Ms. Reymondo, with her sweet-as-nails smile.

“I’m still digesting,” said Deeny.

“She farts a lot when she’s doing that,” said Lex.

“And people have been known to puke when she farts, especially after cole slaw,” said Becky. “Do you have a big solid wastebasket in your office, Ms. Reymondo? The kind with holes don’t do much good when you’re puking.”

Ms. Reymondo faked a chilly little laugh. “You girls are so clever, I
just can’t keep up with you. I always envied the smart girls when I was in high school.”

That was enough to get Deeny out of her chair, because she knew it would only be moments before Lex did something really offensive, like fake-puking on her lunch tray or blowing milk out her nose, which she could do at will. “I’ll come now, Ms. Reymondo.”

And sure enough, it was about the rumors. “Deeny, I hope you know that if you are in some kind of . . . inappropriate relationship, you can always speak to me in strictest confidence.”

“So you don’t obey the law?” said Deeny.

“What?”

“The law that says that if there is some kind of child abuse, you have to report it to the appropriate authorities.”

“So there
is
abuse?” She looked so eager.

“No, there’s no abuse. I’m doing just fine. Nobody’s boffing me or even feeling me up, which is more than half the girls in this school can say.”

“I don’t see why you’re being so hostile.”

“Oh, no, that’s all wrong, Ms. Reymondo. You sound defensive. You’re supposed to say, ‘And how does it make you feel, to talk about other girls having sex and getting felt up?’ ”

“I know how it makes you feel,” said Ms. Reymondo. “It makes you feel like you’ve somehow struck a blow against authority and aren’t you cool. Only I’m not any kind of authority, God knows, and what you’re doing now is blowing smoke up the ass of a person who is only trying to help you.”

“Help me what?”

“Help you get out of a situation that might be getting out of control.”

“The only thing out of my control,” said Deeny, “is getting called in to your office and losing half my lunch period just so I can hear you discuss your ass and whether you’re getting any smoke blown up it.”

“You’re free to go,” said Ms. Reymondo. “But I hope you remember how you treated a person who only wanted to be your friend.”

Deeny paused at the door. “
Friends
aren’t paid by the state or the county or whatever, and
friends
don’t have the power to order me to their office.”

“When you’re in trouble, friends are the people who can help you, whether they’re getting paid for it or being treated like shit by bratty little girls who think they’re so smart they can handle relationships with older men.”

For a moment, Deeny wanted to say she was sorry. After all, if she really were dating some older man and it started getting weird or something, maybe she would need to turn to somebody and maybe it would be . . .

No, it would never be Ms. Reymondo, whose answer to everything was that the Anglo patriarchy took what they wanted and therefore equality for women and people of color was nothing but a joke. It irritated Deeny that Ms. Reymondo always included Jews in her “people of color” classification, an idea whose wrongness could be verified by the naked eye. Not to mention Ms. Reymondo herself, who looked like she had just stepped off the boat from northern Spain and had about as much color as your average Frenchman.

So Deeny didn’t apologize, she just fled, telling herself that no doubt Ms. Reymondo had been treated more rudely by other students. And then thinking, maybe not. Maybe I’m the worst kid she’s ever faced. And why would I talk that way? Why am I suddenly so defiant? I’ve spent my whole time in high school mousing around and only talking big when I’m alone and safe with my friends. And now I’m talking to school counselors like I was some kind of hardened hoodlum. Stuff I used to think to myself and tell Lex and Beck about later, I said out loud, and I didn’t get killed.