The Girl Who Invented Romance (11 page)

I liked Megan again. My mother was smiling. Nervously, but smiling.

“You’ll make a real splash, Mom,” I told her. “I love it.”

Mother looked hopeful.

“Now you need a really good necklace,” said Megan authoritatively. “Something that makes a statement.”

Mother looked helpless.

“That enormous silver violet on the silver rope Daddy gave you years ago,” I suggested. “The one you thought was too big to wear and you let me wear it on Halloween when I was a Gypsy.”

My mother made a face. “It’s way too large.”

“Not with this dress.”

“I think I don’t have it anymore,” said my mother hopefully.

“Forget it. I know just where it is.” I raced to my parents’ bedroom. All Fox Meadow houses have walk-in closets—two per master bedroom. Mother’s flows over into Daddy’s and she keeps the presents she doesn’t know what to do with in their gift boxes tucked in the corners. Megan went with me because she loves to snoop. “When is the reunion?” she wanted to know. “Tomorrow?”

“Of course not. It’s a whole month away. In this household we like to leave lots of time for panicking.” I unearthed a vast silver violet.

“Ouch,” said Megan. “Well, let’s try it.”

We went back and draped it around Mom’s neck. “It is large,” admitted Megan, “but the effect is awesome. Wear
it. Well, I have to run. Places to go, boys to see.” She smiled brilliantly and raced out of the room, narrowly missing Parker coming up. The house was a thoroughfare.

“I wish I had someplace to go that made me so happy,” said Park, glancing after Megan. “Listen, Mom, do we have anything good to eat in this house?”

“Yes. And if you’ll eat every bit of it, then I won’t. Deal?”

“Deal. Awesome dress, Mom,” said Park.

I was stunned. Wendy had accomplished something worthy. Parker was aware of women’s clothing and knew enough to say so. Way to go, Wendy.

They went downstairs companionably while I fished out my board game and the boy cards I’d crunched up and thrown in the wastebasket. Nothing was wrinkled beyond repair. I got out my iron and ironed the papers, which worked quite well. Then I erased every fourth or fifth Good Thing on the board and stuck in terrible, painful, agonizing, inexplicable stuff instead. That was much easier to think up than Good Things.

I erased
Sunshine
. I wrote:
He never calls; you never know why. Lose one turn
.

I erased a
Delirium of Love
square. I wrote
Abandonment
.

I got rid of
Crazy with Happiness
and tossed in
Depression
. Then I replaced
Depression
with
Melancholia
. That sounded
really
depressed.

The phone rang.

I picked it up absently.

“Hi, Kelly. It’s Will.”

If I was surprised the first time, I was astounded the second time. “Hi, Will.”

“You do your sociology yet?” he asked.

“I breezed through the chapter. It was the English assignment that killed me. William Faulkner. I haven’t understood a word since page one but somehow I’ve arrived at page seventy-three.”

That was my stable marriage score, I thought. It’s got to be significant.

“That’s a lot to plow through,” said Will. “We’ve been spared Faulkner in my English class.” He began discussing a particular law of physics that was giving him problems for an upcoming exam.

“And what about Megan turning you down?” I said, before I thought.

Oh, what’s the matter with tongues? Why aren’t they securely latched to minds? Now he’d know that we had gossiped about it and that Megan had told everybody.

Into the silent phone I babbled, “It was mean of her, Will, but it didn’t have anything to do with you. It was about Jimmy. She’s still mad at him for dumping her. It made her feel good to take it out on a boy. Any boy.”

The silence continued.

I had run out of babble.

Will said, “I think you are the first girl I’ve ever run into who says things honestly. Truth and all that. You are remarkable, Kelly.”

Forget remarkable, I thought. Tell me sexy and beautiful.

We began talking. For almost an hour we talked. We covered girls, dates, Megan, Jimmy, truth, lies, Ms. Simms, Wendy’s soap. I loved it. I could have talked all night. The more Will talked, the more I liked him. The less conceited he sounded. The more my crush came back.

Do I want it back? I thought.

Do I have any choice? I thought five minutes later.

“It’s pretty late,” said Will finally. “And I haven’t actually started my homework yet. I’d better go.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I had more to say.”

“Me too. See you tomorrow, Kelly. Thanks for listening.”

I held my cell phone after he hung up as if he were still part of it, as if the little black oblong contained some of him and some of me. Then I went into my bathroom to look at myself in strong light and see if there was a girl in the mirror whom Will Reed could have a crush on.

There were two ways to read “See you tomorrow, Kelly.”

One: We shared fourth and sixth periods and at some point his eyes would naturally focus in my direction and he would see me.

Two: He could hardly wait for the next day to come so he could see me, Kelly Williams, good listener.

I wasn’t sure I liked that closing line of Will’s. “Thanks for listening” sounded sisterly. I had friends; I was a sister. I wanted dates.

I wandered back to my room to find Parker lying on my bed, holding my board game over his head, reading the squares and laughing like a maniac.

“You rotten worthless brother. You spy. Get up off my bed. Stop reading that. Stop laughing at me. That’s private, Parker. I hate you.”

Parker merely swung the game out of my reach and kept laughing. “Kelly, the game is terrific. It’s so funny. I love it.”

I didn’t want it to be funny. I wanted it to show the sweet side and the bleak side of romance.

“But, Kell,” he said, sitting up and crossing his ankles and spreading the game before him, “you’ve designed it so that only girls can play. Revise it. Make it so boys can play as well. Girl cards and girl pronouns and girl names as well as boy names and stuff.”

“How can I do that? That’s too hard. Anyway, name me a single boy on the face of the earth who would be caught playing The Game of Romance.”

Parker ignored this. “Your sentences read
He loves you
and
He brings you flowers
. Change those to
Your date loves you. Your date brings you flowers
.”

It wouldn’t take much except to erase. I could even redo the game on fresh paper.

“He takes you to Europe,”
read Parker. “
He brings you a dozen red roses. He teaches you to water-ski
.” Parker frowned. “You’re sexist, making the boy do everything.”

“I am not sexist. This is my game. For me. What am I supposed to put
—He or she brings you a dozen red roses
?”

Parker began erasing. He put
Your date brings you
. He was a very careful eraser. As he erased, I rewrote. It was kind of pleasant to be a team.

“Furthermore,” said Parker, “exactly how old and exactly how rich are these dates of yours? Instead of skiing in Switzerland or a cruise in the Caribbean you should share milk shakes or go bowling.”

Eraser specks flew. He took out really good ones like
Explore a coral reef together in your new scuba equipment
and wrote
You run into each other at the delicatessen
.

“Now we need some really crummy boring rotten dates,” said Park, warming up like a baseball pitcher and getting mean.

I watched him add crummy boring rotten dates.

“I don’t want that much reality,” I protested. “This is a romance game. The way you’re setting it up, a person could have a flat tire and the dog gets carsick and you miss the movie and you lose your credit cards and then the person you love moves away and never writes. What’s romantic about that?”

Parker just blew eraser specks away. They dusted my face. “Park?” I said. “Do you think Wendy planned to break up with you? Was she just waiting for the moment she could blame the end of your romance on you? So she could script it the way she wanted it? Rescue by Jeep from the clutches of Park?”

Park erased quite a few squares we hadn’t discussed yet. I memorized them as they vanished so I could write them back in later.

Parker straightened up, stretched his legs, tucked them back and began sorting through my boy cards. “These are
good,” he said in surprise. “Here you’ve got reality. Some boys are funny, some are fat. Some are rich and some have eight hundred zits.” He read each card slowly.

I really ought to have the opinions of boys on my boy cards, I thought.

I could not quite imagine myself inviting Will and Jeep and Angie over to study my romance game and give me a few hints.

“When she was leaving with Jeep,” said Park, “Wendy told me it was all an act. She never loved me. She kept tapping me with her purse instead of touching me with her hands.”

Wendy carried a teeny lime green purse, square, on a long thin leather loop. The purse had exactly enough room for her driver’s license and some cash. Her cell phone fit into a little pocket on the exterior and her pencils and pens she clipped to her notebook. Faith said once that there wasn’t room in that purse for Tampax. We decided Wendy didn’t have periods. They weren’t romantic enough.

I could just see Wendy giving Parker little miniature bruises with her little miniature purse. But the bruises were enormous and real.

“Her voice breaking on the phone with you?” I said. “Her hugging you and leaning on your shoulder? An act? I think we should go after her with a shotgun. Queen of Romance? Parker, she was Queen Bitch.”

The poster slid off the bed and landed softly on my carpet, the huge hearts sideways, and then it flipped over so the hearts were hidden.

“Don’t say things like that,” said my brother.

He still loves her, I thought. She could be a rabid dog and he would still love her. How awful love is. Or how awful Wendy is.

I put my arm around Park.

Not all love is romantic. Some is brother/sister love.

Love is also comfort.

I
was sound asleep on top of the covers. School had exhausted me. I had not even undressed, but was sprawled over my homework and had a pencil poking me in the side. I answered the phone groggily.

“This is important,” said Megan. “You’re going to get a call at ten o’clock, Kelly, and you and I have to sort out the details so you don’t screw up. Do you remember Blaize?”

Nobody named Blaize came to mind.

“I dated him in eighth grade,” said Megan, as one referring to ancient civilization. “He’s from Prospect Hill. There’s a big dance Saturday night and his girlfriend broke up with him and he called and asked me to go with him but I can’t—I’m far too busy—so I gave him your number. I promised Blaize
that you are good company, a great date, pretty, slender, interested in sports.”

“I’m slender, anyway.”

“Do you have a formal gown or do you need to borrow one of mine?” Megan sounded so crisp. Perhaps she had a checklist in front of her. Steps to Take When Fixing Up Your Friend with Blaize.

“I need to borrow one of yours,” I admitted. Megan has been to so many formal dances, she has a wardrobe of gowns the way I have a wardrobe of T-shirts.

“Fine. Tomorrow after school we’ll do the dress part. Now. On this date. Be sure to joke a lot. He’s a bad dancer, so don’t force him to dance. Be very relaxed. He’s into sports but he didn’t make varsity in basketball so don’t mention basketball.” Megan went on and on. I was dazed. How could I be relaxed when I had to memorize a forty-point checklist?

“Blaize is good stuff, Kelly. You don’t want to mess up.”

My hands were sweaty and my cheeks were feverish and I hadn’t even talked to Blaize yet. I promised Megan that I would be slender, pretty, interested in sports (except basketball) and full of jokes.

A person needs a snack to consider this kind of thing. I headed for the kitchen and was immediately joined by Mom in her robe and Parker in his pajama bottoms. The sound of one person opening the refrigerator always brings the rest of us.

“What did Megan want?” said Mom.

“She’s fixing me up with her old friend Blaize, who needs a Saturday night formal dance date because his girlfriend walked out on him.”

“Perfect for your romance game!” cried my mother. “Can’t you see a whole life together built on the coincidence of Blaize’s girlfriend dumping him and you appearing in his life that very week?”

It sounded pretty darn similar to the coincidence of Ellen, Dad and Mom. “How do you know about my board game?” I said.

“I vacuum in there. You leave it out.”

“You snoop,” I said indignantly.

“She isn’t a snoop, Kelly,” said Parker. “You’re messy. And there is nothing romantic about the dance. This poor guy Blaize gets dumped. He feels lower than low. He calls the only other girl he can think of and what does Megan do? Passes him on to a stranger like a helping of mashed potatoes at the table. What’s so romantic about that?”