Keeper of Dreams (54 page)

And on a whim, she reached into her purse, and there in the counselors’ hallway, she made her cellphone ring.

He wouldn’t be on it. There’d be nobody there. But she could
pretend
to be taking a call from an imaginary lover and see what Ms. Reymondo made of
that
.

Ms. Reymondo came out of her office and saw her just as she pulled the phone out of her purse. Deliberately Deeny turned her back and spoke softly into the phone. “Oh, right, like you call me
now
,” she said. “I’m taking so much crap because of you.”

The phone wasn’t beeping.

“Nothing to say?” she said.

“I thought you wanted it this way,” said the man.

The same man, sounding manlier than ever. And while his words might be the kind of whiny and apologetic thing you’d get from the kind of guy Ms. Reymondo would probably date, his tone was teasing so she knew he wasn’t really asking for validation or something.

“I was waiting for you to call,” said Deeny.

“You’re the one with the buttons to push,” said the man. And then, when Deeny didn’t answer, he said what she was waiting for him to say. “I wish I were there to push them,” he said, laughing at himself just a little. “Touch them, anyway. With my fingers, maybe. Or maybe not.”

Deeny blushed and giggled, wondering what buttons he meant, knowing perfectly well, or hoping she knew, or . . . something. This was what love felt like, this confusion, wasn’t it? Especially knowing that if Ms. Reymondo could hear the other side of this conversation she’d spot her knickers.

“Legal age is sixteen,” she whispered, “and I’m seventeen, so what’s stopping you?”

“There’s a limit to what I can do over the phone,” he said.

“My point exactly.”

“It’s a limit we have to live with,” he said.

“So you’re all talk, is that it?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it.” And then the line went silent.

Deeny couldn’t believe it. Here she was, practically begging him to show up at her door naked, and he just blows her off and
hangs up
?

Ms. Reymondo was standing across the corridor from her when Deeny put the phone back in her purse.

“Legal age is eighteen,” she said.

“I’m not talking about drinking,” said Deeny.

“Drinking age is twenty-one,” said Ms. Reymondo. “The legal age of consent is eighteen in this state.”

“My father’s a lawyer,” said Deeny. “And you don’t know squat.”

“It’s my job to know squat,” said Ms. Reymondo. “So if this guy is trying to get in your pants, it’s really not up to you to say yes to him. And, by the way, I happen to know your father is definitely
not
a lawyer. Don’t lie to a counselor who has studied your file.”

“I guess that means you know everything about me. All the yearnings
of a teenage heart. You really ‘get’ the youth of today, Ms. Reymondo. We have no secrets from
you
, because as our
friend
, you’ve got our files.”

Ms. Reymondo glared at her and walked away, maybe—just maybe—swinging her butt a little bit more than usual. We’re getting a bit
huffy
, Ms. Reymondo. I don’t think that’s very
professional
, Ms. Reymondo.

I am such a bitch. This phone is doing bad things to me. All these years, the only thing keeping me from complete bitchery has been my shyness. With cellphone in hand, the real me comes out and shows that I suck worse than the Nazis have ever thought.

He doesn’t want to be with me. He only wants to talk to me on the phone.

All that week, there was buzz about her at school. And then the next week, there wasn’t. She’d been moved from one slot to another—from dweebish Jewgirl to whore-of-older-men—but now that she was safely slotted again, she could be ignored. Even Ms. Reymondo seemed to be taking screw you for an answer. It was just . . . over.

The phone had done all it was supposed to do, and the change in her life amounted to nada. Unless you counted the monthly phone bill.

I’ll cancel and give the phone back.

But she didn’t do it. Couldn’t. Because even though she hadn’t pressed
TALK
since Monday, she didn’t want to cut herself off from the possibility of talking to him again.

All week she’d had so many ups and downs it scared her a little. She actually had to look up bipolar disorder in order to make sure she didn’t fit their list of symptoms. One minute she’s thinking, He’ll change his mind, he’ll come to me, or he’ll tell me where he is and I’ll go to
him
. The next minute, He won’t come here because he’s seen me and he could never pretend to be aroused by my body
in person
. It’s like those phone-sex fakes, where it’s some fat fifty-year-old woman in her kitchen cooing in her little sixteen-year-old vixen voice to fifty-year-old men who are paying through the nose to a 900 number to live out their fantasy of having sex with women so young it was almost illegal. Wouldn’t they just gag if they could see who was talking to them.

He’s just a phone-sex line.

Why would I want a guy like that touching me anyway? His hands
creeping around on my body like big fat spiders. His lips slobbering on me and he calls it “kissing” like I wouldn’t just puke on his bald spot.

He’s not like that. He loves me, and he’s not
old
, he’s just older than me.

Older than me, and doesn’t want to
be
with me.

Now everybody thinks I’m a whore, and I don’t even get laid.

On Saturday she was so angry and hurt and confused and ashamed that she actually got up and went to temple with Mother. Treadmarks didn’t even say anything snide as they went—probably because he knew that Mother was feeling triumphant and he didn’t want the fight that would happen if he said something disparaging about religion. But all that happened was, Deeny felt like the worst kind of hypocrite because the reason she was depressed was because she couldn’t commit adultery, and she was busy coveting her neighbor, but couldn’t get him to come over and live up to his promises of sin. What kind of blasphemy was it for her to even be there?

All the time she was there, and all the way home, she kept looking at every guy and thinking, is it him? Are you the one? And the more ludicrous they were, the better. She almost wanted to go up to a couple of them—the ones who glanced at her a little bit more than the others—and say, “Have you been calling me?” But of course she didn’t, not with her mother there, not with a little shred of sanity still hanging around somewhere in her head, saying, “Oh, right,” to all her wackier notions.

On Monday, she left the cellphone in her drawer. A whole week without it. And Lex and Becky didn’t even notice, or if they did they said nothing about it. It was all over. Just like that.

Only not really. Because she
was
in that different slot.

It was on the bus. Jake Wu, a guy who rode it sometimes and sometimes didn’t. Half Chinese and kind of cute, thin and looked great in clothes, but hey, he was on the bus, so he couldn’t actually be cool, right? And he always hung out with a different crowd, the chess-club types, the math-club types, sort of the stereotypical oriental-American, intellectual and college-bound and probably going to be an electrical engineer or a physicist.

And he sat down beside her.

“I hear you been dating an older guy,” he said.

Like that, no preamble, no hi, not even a decent interval like he had to work up the courage.

“It’s over,” she said. And when she said it, she realized it was true and it made her sad but it also relieved her because it meant she had made the decision and she knew it was the right one.

“Are you still broken up about it? So I should act, like, sad? Because I’d be faking it.”

Faking it, which would mean he wasn’t sad it was over with her older guy. Too cool. “You don’t have to fake anything,” she said.

“Cool,” he said. “So you want to go out with a really mature high school senior?”

“Why, do you know any?” she asked.

She could see it right then in his eyes that she’d stung him with that. And it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t the only person on the planet who felt rejected and was scared all the time whenever she had to face somebody of the opposite sex. And unlike her,
he
had the guts to do something in spite of being scared.

Though come to think of it, she
had
done something, hadn’t she. Even if it
was
over.

“I was kidding,” she said. “I’d like to go out with a mature high school senior, if you mean you.”

“I meant me,” he said.

“My schedule’s not real crowded right now,” said Deeny. “So if you kind of pick a day, I’ll choose a different day to wash my hair and walk the dog.”

He grinned. “Heck, I was hoping that’s what we could do on our date.”

“Which? Hair or dog?”

“You got a dog?” he asked.

“No.”

“Me neither,” he said. “My mother has fish but she frowns on me washing them. So . . . your hair or mine?”

She made a show of examining his hair. “Yours is thick and straight and probably looks like this no matter what you do. Whereas mine is a challenge, real problem hair, a complete bitch to deal with. So we’ll wash yours.”

“I see you like to do things the easy way.”

“If that’s an assumption,” she said, “my knee knows where your balls are.”

“I assume nothing,” he said. “Whereas you assume I’ve
got
balls.”

“I know you do,” she said.

“Jeans that tight?”

“It took balls to sit here,” she said. “What with me being a leper.”

“Leper hell,” he said. “Everybody just figured you were out of reach.”

“I didn’t notice anybody reaching.”

“Cause guys don’t like to fail, so if they thought they’d fail with you, they wouldn’t try.”

“And you’re different?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I asked.”

And here’s the funny thing. He really did pick her up, take her over to his house, where his mother and father looked on as if they had only just discovered that their teenage son was strange, while Deeny washed his hair, then ratted it into a fright wig, and then washed it and combed it out again, with all the snarls and screaming that such an operation entailed.

“What do you want to know, I’ll tell you everything, only stop the torture!” he cried.

“I can leave your hair like this.”

“I’m going to shave it all off if you do,” he said.

But she didn’t leave it like that, and he didn’t shave it off, and while she was quite sure that his parents still did not have any place for a Jewess in their plans for their number-one son, she could also tell that they kind of liked it that he had actually had fun.

It was, in fact, great. Not great for a first date. Just flat-out great.

Best thing was, next morning Lex and Becky were actually happy for her instead of criticizing him and picking him apart the way the three of them had always picked apart every guy that any other girl was dating. Who knew that they’d be so sensitive when it was one of
them
who was dating the guy? None of them had ever put it to the test before.

The only teasing was when Becky said, “Wouldn’t you know, the one without boobs gets the first date.”

“With a Chinese guy,” said Lex. “Chinese women don’t have boobs,
either, so he probably thinks women who got ’em are, like, alien.” That was as close to disparaging as either of them ever got.

She’d gone on a couple more dates with Jake Wu and her life was actually looking livable when there was another pep rally and she ducked out of it after making sure she’d been seen by the attendance people and instead of going out to the grove, she went around by the buses. It was way early for that, the drivers were still over in a group chatting and smoking and whatever else it was drivers did. But when she got on the bus it didn’t actually register with her that she was alone.

Not until a couple of Nazis got on and it was obvious that it wasn’t an accident, they had gotten on this particular bus at this particular time because they knew she was there and they knew she was alone.

“Hey, Deeny,” said Truman Hunter. With a name like that he should have been manly, but instead he had kind of a receding chin but everybody knew his folks had a
lot
of money and it made him cool by default.

“Hey,” said Deeny. And made an instant decision. She stood up. “I guess Becky and Lex are running late so I’m going to . . .”

Truman got right in her face, his body up against hers. Either she had to let him press against her, or sit back down.

She sat.

“She changed her mind,” said Ryan Wacker. The kind of guy who scared offensive linemen on opposing football teams. Ryan knelt on the seat in front of hers as Truman sat down beside her, pressing her against the wall of the bus.

“Leave me alone, asshole,” she said fiercely.

“We were just curious about what it was some old guy found so fascinating. We just wanted a look, you know? The magical mystery tour.”

And while he was talking, like they had planned it out—or done it before—Ryan Wacker’s hands flashed out and caught her wrists and pinned them against the back of her seat, while Truman got his hands under her sweater and pushed it up, snagging her bra on the way and pushing it up, too, so her chest was bare in front of them and Truman said, “Well, it can’t have been the boobs, unless she’s got another pair stashed somewhere, cause these are for shit,” and Ryan laughed, and Deeny didn’t even think of screaming because she didn’t want anybody to see her like this, to know she had been so humiliated, that it had been so
easy
to humiliate her. She just wanted them to finish whatever they were going to do and go away.