Our Song (12 page)

I opened my mouth to protest, but I didn't have the energy. I slumped as I admitted, “You're right. I'm a total carnivore. And I've never been so hungry in my life. Is it that obvious?”

“Only on fried chicken night,” Jacob said with a grin.

A clatter at the dining room window made us jump. Two tall stacks of plates had just arrived.

Painfully, I re-covered the chicken leg.

“No, no,” Jacob said. “You eat, I'll start the dishes.”

“Jacob,” I said, “you
know
I'm not going to eat meat in front of you. Not after the whole Sally thing.”

“What if I promise to eat something you don't like in front of you?” Jacob bargained.

“Already done,” I said. “It doesn't get any grosser than radish salad.”

“Hey, I heard that!” Ms. Betty squawked, glaring at me over her sticky scone dough.

Clang!

A bowl full of clattery silverware appeared in the window. Jacob pointed at the screened door that led to a patio behind the dining hall.

“Listen,” he said. “I promise you, being a vegetarian is my thing. I honestly don't care what anybody else does. So, go.”

I stared down at the plate in my hands.

And I went.

Outside, I sat on a bench looking out at an empty, grassy field. A breeze seemed to amplify the scent of the fried chicken, making it officially irresistible.

I took a bite.

It was so delicious, I had to suppress a groan. With each successive mouthful, I felt happier—and not just because I felt truly full for the first time all week.

When I returned to the kitchen, the Hobart was beeping insistently. I whipped the tray out and began cheerfully stacking hot, clean dishes.

“Thank you,” I said to Jacob on the other side of the Hobart. “And thanks for being non-judgey about the whole carnivore thing.”

“I'm really not,” Jacob assured me, nodding his head emphatically. “But I am kind of curious . . .”

“About why I'm a completely fraudulent vegetarian?” I said. “At the time, I didn't really think about what I was doing. I guess I just wanted to do something, anything, unexpected. And not just surprising to Nanny or the rest of my family, but to
me
. So I became a vegetarian blacksmith. I guess I didn't completely think it through, though. That this would be my
life
for the next thirty days.”

“So how does it feel now?” Jacob asked.

“It feels . . . well, surprising, for sure!” I said with a laugh. “I barely recognize myself, especially now.”

I flicked at one of my curls with a fingertip.

Of course, I didn't tell him the biggest surprise of all—how I felt about him. He made me both swoony and wary, ambivalent and obsessed. I barely knew him, and yet half the time, I could have sworn I knew what he was thinking.

Of course, the other half, I had
no
idea what he was thinking. Particularly, what he was thinking about
me
.

Part of me wanted to retreat into the blacksmithing barn, where the only hurts I risked were burns and bruises.

But the other part of me—most of me—was dying to see what would happen next between me and Jacob.

Chapter
Twelve

T
o say I was nervous
the next night—our last night in the kitchen—would be an understatement. Twenty-four hours after the Drumstick, I still didn't know how to feel.

Was I relieved that our punishment was almost over? And that somehow over the past two nights, I'd managed to evade Nanny's detection? (It helped that teachers never cleared dishes, an honor strictly enforced at Camden.)

Or was I bereft about saying good-bye to these evenings with Jacob?

As he and I walked together from the dining hall to the kitchen door, we were both quiet. Too quiet.

So, of course, I had to go fill the awkward silence with even more awkward small talk.

“So . . . have you had a nightmare about Hobart yet? Heh, heh.”

I turned my head so he wouldn't see me roll my eyes at my own lameness.

But Jacob just shook his head.

“Hobart's not so bad,” he said. “As long as you respect the beast, right?”

I looked at him in surprise.

“That's so funny, that's what we say in blacksmithing,” I said. “About the forge.”

Now Jacob looked a little squirmy.

“Oh, um, yeah, I knew that,” he said. “I ran into Clint earlier. We were talking about blacksmithing . . . and stuff.”

“Oh,” I said, pushing open the kitchen door. “What kind of stu—”

Before I could say anything else, Ms. Betty's voice rang out, practically making my eyeballs rattle.

“That's it!” she cried. “#$&%ing Martha Stewart!”

“Whoa,” I whispered to Jacob. “That's something
else
we say in blacksmithing. Minus the Martha Stewart part.”

While Jacob laughed, I headed for Ms. Betty.

“What happened?”

But as soon as I reached her, the answer was evident. She was staring at a half-sheet pan that she'd clearly tossed onto the worktable. It was covered with three-cornered lumps, walnut brown and puckered. They resembled the gravel in the parking lot more than baked goods.

“Fig balsamic scones,” Ms. Betty said with a curled lip.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, maybe you could tr—”

“I'm making cinnamon rolls instead, durn it!” Ms. Betty screeched. As she began slamming around measuring cups, I retreated to the dishwasher.

“Hobart seems absolutely tame,” I whispered to Jacob, “now that I've experienced the wrath of Ms. Betty.”

He laughed again as he shoved the first tray of dishes into the churning washer.

“Don't let Hobart hear you say that,” he said. “You don't want him to get revenge.”

I giggled as we settled into the now-comfortable rhythm of ferrying dishes to and fro, of spraying and stacking and pulling and unloading.

Behind us, Ms. Betty seemed to take about three minutes to whip up her cinnamon roll dough. As she began to knead, she turned up the radio, which was tuned to an oldies station.

A moment later, though? “Respect” came on—and Ms. Betty started dancing.

Now, Ms. Betty was not a small woman. In fact, she was probably about the same size as Aretha Franklin, who was singing the song. So even though Ms. Betty didn't jump while she danced, all her body parts
did
.

“Ooh, I'm jiggling like a jelly doughnut over here,” she whooped.

My effort to suppress a laugh was desperate and futile. The
laugh happened and it happened big, accompanied by a tremendous snort.

Then Jacob started laughing. I don't know if it was my snort that got to him or Ms. Betty's bounce.

Luckily, Ms. Betty laughed along with us.

“Oh, I know I should lose a few pounds, she admitted. “Okay, fifty. But I'm so much happier when I can
eat
.”

“Amen, Ms. Betty!” I said, holding my wet, soapy hand out for a high five.

Instead she grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the sink. She propelled me into a spin, and before I knew it, we were bumping hips and whooping it up.

“Shake what you got, girl, even if you don't got much!” Ms. Betty hollered.

I would have blushed at her comment about my non-figure, but I was having too much fun. So I just rolled my eyes at Ms. Betty and kept dancing, doing a simultaneous heel spin and head bobble.

By the time I finished my twirl, Ms. Betty had yanked
Jacob
away from the dishes. Then, with our hands still in hers, she turned us toward each other and sashayed backward, extricating herself from our little dance party.

For a moment, we froze. Jacob looked a little panicked, and I'm sure I did too.

“Dance,” Ms. Betty ordered us.

We danced.

At first we did it with irony, exchanging a silent we're-just humoring-our-elder-and-nobody-shall-know-of-this promise.

But then Aretha started chanting, “
R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. R-E-S-P-EEEE-C-T . . .”

And, well, I defy anyone not to go wild when you get to that part of the song.

I threw my arms over my head and swiveled like a corkscrew. Jacob started pogoing.

A moment later we were singing along: “
Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me!
” and dancing together. We quickly found a rhythm. When I swayed backward, he swayed forward, and vice versa. Our faces moved so close together that I could see tiny beads of sweat on Jacob's upper lip and I could smell the sharp, clean scent of his skin.

That's when I stopped singing. I couldn't inhale Jacob's wonderful smell and shout “
Sock it to me
” at the same time.

But I didn't stop dancing, not until the last note thrummed out of the radio. When it did, Jacob and I landed with thuds, breathing hard, our cheeks flushed. I giggled while Jacob swiped at his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve.

Only then did we realize that Ms. Betty had disappeared into the big walk-in pantry on the other side of the kitchen.

We were alone.

And our faces were still very, very close together.

This was the moment when we should have pulled away from each other, laughing and rolling our eyes at our own goofiness.
But the moment passed and we didn't move. We remained eye to eye.

I couldn't catch my breath, and it wasn't from the singing and dancing.

Just when I felt my lips tingle in anticipation, just when my eyelids began to flutter closed, just when I thought that something momentous was about to happen between Jacob's mouth and mine, the kitchen door slammed open.

Jacob and I jumped apart. Then we spun around to find Mrs. Teagle standing in the doorway, one shocked hand on her mama-bird chest. She looked from us to the floor beneath our feet to our dishwashing station.

I looked around too, noticing for the first time the chaos that our little dance party had wrought. There were puddles of soapy water on the floor and a pile of unrinsed dishes congealing in the sink. The Hobart's green light indicated that a tray of dishes was long finished and waiting to be unloaded. I guess I hadn't heard the beep over the loud music.

“My lord!” Ms. Teagle said, turning the radio off. “What's been going on here? You can hear the noise almost up to the great hall!”

“Oh, Mrs. Teagle,” I gasped. “Um . . . what's going on is . . .”

I looked pleadingly at Jacob for help.

“We were moved by the music, ma'am,” Jacob said seriously. “We started dancing.
You
can understand, can't you? I mean, as director of a school that's all about music and art?”

I had to bite my lip hard to keep from laughing.

“I understand that you don't seem to be taking your punishment very seriously,” Mrs. Teagle said with a frown. “I'm of a mind to give you kids another night of dish duty to teach you a lesson about finishing what you've started.”

I gave Jacob a quick glance, looking for the telltale neck splotches he got when he was upset.

They weren't there.

But when I looked at his eyes to see what other emotional intel I could glean, his glasses were too soap-speckled and steam-fogged to see anything.

As we waited for Mrs. Teagle to pronounce our fate, I felt something like hope. It seemed I
did
want to spend another night with pruney fingers, scalded skin, hat-head . . . and Jacob.

But Mrs. Teagle shrugged.

“Just get the dishes finished and clean up the rest of this mess,” she said with a tight smile, “and we'll call it even. I think it's time for everyone to get back to their normal schedules anyway.”

She peered around the kitchen, and only when it was clear that Ms. Betty wasn't within earshot, added, “I've gotten a few complaints about the scones. They're too fancy! It's time for Ms. Betty to give up on that Yankee.”

“You mean Martha Stewart?” I squeaked. “
That
Yankee?” Having to hold in so much laughter was making my stomach muscles hurt!

“No worries, Mrs. Teagle,” Jacob said. He pointed at the
baking counter, where a couple of deep steel pans held Ms. Betty's expanding yeast dough. “Those are going to be cinnamon rolls in the morning.”

“Mmm, Betty's cinnamon rolls,” Mrs. Teagle purred, a dreamy smile on her face. “Now that's more like it.”

She looked at her watch.

“Shame you'll miss the sing-along tonight,” she said. “It's over in twenty minutes. But I would like to see you there tomorrow.”

She glared at us, and her voice went sharp again.

“Am I clear?” she said.

“Yes, ma'am,” Jacob and I said automatically.

“All righty, then,” Mrs. Teagle burbled. Like so many Southern ladies, she was an expert at turning charm into menace and back again. “Good night, darlings.”