The Girl Who Invented Romance (4 page)

“Just giving Kelly back her die,” said Will.

“Oh,” said Ms. Simms.

“I want to do chocolate,” said Faith quickly. “My quiz will establish how many of us cannot get through a day without chocolate. My theory is that it will be ninety-five percent of us.”

“I want every quiz to have twenty questions,” said Ms. Simms. “Faith, limiting yourself to chocolate could pose problems. Perhaps you could expand your questionnaire to include, say, food allergies.”

Angie clutched his chest and patted his heart with excitement. “That does sound intriguing, Ms. Simms. I can hardly wait to find out who gets hives.”

Faith lowered her lashes at him. “I do. Every time I think about you, Angie, I get a rash.”

The class howled with laughter.

Wendy was writing it all down. Before long, we would hear this dialogue over the public-address system. Not everybody in class would recognize themselves, because Wendy is pretty clever at disguising lines. But her soap
opera would not really be original. That’s the sort of thing I comfort myself with when I think that Wendy is about four hundred times more creative than I am, and probably I should give up right now.

This time I rolled my die very very very gently, and I quickly lowered my arms to make little walls to catch the die if it tried anything sneaky.

It was a five.

I glanced at vertical row five.

Kenny, Will, Angie, Margaret and Susan.

If I rolled a six next, I’d have to start over. There was no sixth seat.

If I rolled a four or five, I’d have to start over. I was not going to play my indoor game of romance with a girl. Even though I quite like Margaret, and Susan has a nice car.

The other three were a good representation of the class. Kenny: totally disgusting. Will: totally conceited. Angie: a perfect person with whom my best friend was going to have lunch. Just like life.

I rolled again.

For a moment, I didn’t want to look at the dots that were showing. I giggled softly to myself instead. It’s a habit I’m aware of, and I try to stop myself because I know how odd I must look: Kelly, entertained by nothing at all. Laughing into thin air like somebody due for a long stay on a psych ward.

I looked around to see if anybody had spotted me laughing.
Everybody but Will was still laughing over Angie and Faith and the rash.

Will, however, was staring at me as if he rarely came across a human being so peculiar. I smiled. He looked away.

Now I lowered my eyes and saw the die, and there staring back at me were two little black dots.

Two.

Will was two.

Impossible not to laugh again. Impossible not to look at Will, who was so unlikely ever to have a romance with me. So I smiled once more, realizing even as the smile touched my lips that that was square one of my own game design. Smile at him.

Will smiled back. A real smile. As if he was a real person and not just a tall thin piece of cardboard labeled
CONCEIT
.

I ducked my head. My hair fell forward, slippery and straight, hiding me from everyone including Will.

You’re turning chicken, I told myself. Hiding is not one of the squares. The rules are notice him, talk to him, sit next to him.

But in the grand old tradition of school, I was saved by the bell. Basketball players charged out as if they were on the court.

Wendy said, in a high, attention-getting voice, “I think that’s at least two episodes, don’t you?”

In study hall, I thought about Ms. Simms’s assignment. Food allergy quizzes. Child abuse quizzes. Boring.

Let them have their rashes and bruises. I would undertake love. I would do a romance quiz. After all, I hadn’t thought of anything except romance since I folded up my Monopoly game and began drawing interlocking hearts on the poster board I had finally located behind my computer desk.

So far, I had a Start Heart, three Dating Hearts and a Happily Ever After Heart.

At first I tried to define Happily Ever After, but I gave up. Who knows what Happily Ever After means to somebody else? A father for your children? A cocaptain for your yacht? A partner for earning your first million? A companion with whom to wander in flowery meadows?

I would have to leave Happily Ever After blank.

Okay. A romance quiz. Get on it, Kelly, I ordered myself. How about pairs? Circle which is more romantic: roses or dandelions. Satin or denim. Horse-drawn carriages or escalators.

But that was as dull as food allergies. Anybody would check off
satin
before
denim
. I needed a quiz that would force people to think. I began listing words and phrases.

Stars. Snuggling. Earrings. Perfume. Midnight blue. City skyline. Dark eyes.

Those seemed fairly romantic. Words for the cover of a thick historical novel or the backdrop of a slick magazine advertisement.

Now some words that were not romantic.

Smoking. Tacos. Compost.

And words that weren’t much of anything.

Clock. Envelope. Kneecap.

Maybe the quiz taker would give each word a numerical rating, one to ten. Which words were most likely to make a person think of romance? And the person taking the quiz would have to check off boy or girl because maybe some words meant more to boys than to girls, although personally I had seen little sign that boys had any words on their romance list.

My last class of the day is American history. It was January, so we had passed the Civil War and were steaming on toward the Last Frontier. I had not read the chapter. Once my mother told me that if I put one-tenth the effort into school that I put into complaining about not knowing any boys, I’d at least be able to go to a good college where there are lots of good boys to put an effort into. She’s right, of course. The thing is, I can’t seem to get into studying. It lacks a certain something.

Boys, I guess.

I know I could study with some terrific boy sharing the desk.

Oh well.

Faith sat down next to me. She was so deep in her crush on Angie, she could hardly focus. Toothpaste was never marketed by a wider, whiter smile than Faith gave me as she dropped her history text onto the desk. “Kelly,” she whispered.

“Yes, Faith.” I have sat with her through many an agonizing crush. I estimate that Faith runs about four serious crushes a year. Each one hurts her. It’s so unfair that love, of all things, can be so painful.

“Do you think he’ll ask me out, Kelly? Lunch was just great. We laughed steadily. I mean, he’d have to want to do that again, wouldn’t he?”

Fluffy brown hair circled her eager face. She has a face that makes the rest of us happy. A smile you have to reflect with one of your own. A sweet person, a good person. Had Angie seen this?

Faith shook her head twice, denying the possibility, and then nodded twice, believing that it might really happen.

“Got a twitch, Faith?” said Will, striding to his seat without waiting for an answer. We didn’t answer him either. From experience we knew he wouldn’t be looking our way again, because he didn’t intend to talk to us anyhow. He just meant to demonstrate his superiority with a wisecrack and then ignore us.

What if Angie does ask Faith out? I thought. I will be the very last girl without a boyfriend. Like gym when they’re picking teams. I’ll be the one still sitting on the floor while everybody pities me and nobody wants me.

“The sun is in my eyes,” I croaked. “I’m changing seats.”

There was in fact a faint glint over by the windows. But I was moving to get control of myself before jealousy lodged in my heart. I refuse to feel jealousy toward my best friend. I slid into an empty seat.

Will looked up, startled.

Without planning, I had arrived at square four. Sit next to him.

I looked quickly away. Mrs. Weston wasn’t saying anything interesting, so I opened my latest magazine underneath my textbook and flipped it open to the quiz. (I don’t bother with a magazine unless it has quizzes. I love to fill things out.)

Test your intimacy quotient
, it said.

Oh good. I always wondered what my intimacy quotient was.

I’d never give any answer suggested for question number one. But every answer for question number two and question number three was possible.

I concentrated. I decided Geoff and I would make fudge.

Mrs. Weston continued talking. I calculated my intimacy quotient when I had struggled through all twenty questions. My score was forty-seven. I flipped to the back of the magazine and looked up the meaning of the result.

Under 50
, it said.
You have real problems relating to boys. Perhaps you should consider counseling
.

Counseling! I didn’t need a mental health expert. I needed a boy to love me.

But even though I knew the quiz was stupid and the questions were stupid and the score was stupid and even though I was in public, I started crying.

Inside myself I froze, turning the tears solid, getting very still. I won’t cry, I won’t cry, I won’t cry. I stopped, but not before a few tears trickled down my cheeks.

A large hand with freakishly long fingers landed on my magazine. Surely Mrs. Weston didn’t have hands that big. Surely—

But it was Will, curling the magazine into a cylinder and removing it to his desk. Without unwrapping the magazine, he read the quiz, turning the roll like an axle to read the columns.

“What’s your score?” he breathed.

I considered lying. I considered not answering. But Will was not worth it. “Forty-seven,” I admitted.

Will grinned ear to ear. He didn’t bother to face me. I only saw the grin in profile.

That’s right, you bum, I thought. Laugh at me. I bet you got a thirty-three. The only thing you’ve ever been intimate with is a basketball.

A low intimacy quotient. What a thing to have in common.

The need to cry vanished. I felt thick and dull. The smile faded from Will’s face. He returned the magazine. He didn’t tell me his score and I didn’t ask. I swiveled in my chair to see what Faith was making of my exchanges with Will.

Faith had not noticed. She had written
Faith Bennett Angelotti
six times in different scripts.

Feminist commentators may think that we girls are beyond this kind of thing, but they’re wrong. We’re still here shading our writing with our hands so nobody can see that we’re trying out a boy’s last name in case we get married.