Authors: Celeste Conway
Tags: #History, #Fiction, #General, #Travel, #New York (N.Y.), #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Family, #United States, #School & Education, #Family & Relationships, #State & Local, #Friendship, #Girls & Women, #Northeast, #Middle Atlantic, #Best Friends
The Goodbye Time
The Goodbye Time
Contents
To Peg and Chris,
the roses around the thorn
Chapter One
Kendra was talking about the dress again. The one she had gotten for fifth-grade graduation which came from France, according to her, and was made of something called white “pee-kay.” We’d heard about it at least fifty times. But I guess she needed to tell us again. Then Nancy Palmer started in on
her
dress. The dress she was
going to
get, that is, at some showroom that her mother knew where designers sold their latest stuff.
“Your mom knows designers?” Kendra said, flipping back her smooth black hair.
Nancy nodded. “Lots of them.”
“Wow, you’re lucky. I bet you can get your dress half price.”
That was when my best friend, Katy, gave me a signal with her eyes and I knew we were going to leave them all—all our friends walking down the hall at school on a Friday afternoon in May. We were right at the place where the kindergarten artwork hung—potato prints and fingerpaints—and I looked at Katy and nodded. And just like that, we weren’t there. Oh, our bodies were there, still a little sweaty from gym class, but
we
were gone, because now we were being someone else.
We did it almost all the time. We sort of couldn’t stop ourselves, though sometimes I think we wanted to. We knew it was weird. Worse than weird—abnormal. And we’d both have just
died
if anyone had known. No one did. People would have worried. Even our families probably would have thought it was unhealthy.
The three o’clock schoolyard bustled with activity as we stepped outside. Nannies and moms were picking up kids, and our friends were going on and on about graduation dresses, but Katy and I were far away. We were in our own world, the one we went into by ourselves, pretending to be our characters. It was our favorite thing to do.
It had only been a few months ago, when I turned eleven, that my parents started letting me walk home from school alone. Up until then this high school girl, Miranda, who lives in my building, would get ten dollars for walking me two blocks from Seventy-eighth Street to Eightieth Street and another three blocks over to Riverside Drive, which is where I live in Manhattan, New York City. And actually, I’m still not allowed to walk home alone; I have to be with Katy.
Katy used to come home with me a lot: She lives uptown, and her apartment wasn’t that great back then. I mean, it wasn’t terrible, but she has a little brother, Sam, who has something wrong with him called profound intellectual and developmental disability, and he would make a mess, throwing things and sometimes doing certain stuff I wouldn’t want to mention here. Also, she had to share a room with her older sister, who she called Bug Eye and who was very mean and was always telling us not to touch anything in her big fairy collection. Like anyone would
want
to fool around with her creepy fairy dolls. Bug Eye only cared about two things in life: fairies and soccer.
When we reached the corner of Broadway, everyone started splitting up. Kendra and Nancy headed south, while Tyesha went north and Yolanda east. Then, at last, Katy and I were by ourselves. As we walked toward my building near Riverside Park, we started to play for real—that’s what we called it, playing, talking the way we did in our English accents.
Chapter Two
The one person on this whole planet who would’ve understood our game and not thought we were crazy was my brother, Tom. Tom was fifteen and was going away to college at the end of the summer. My mom was both happy and sad about this. That was what she said: “I’m so happy and so sad,” like a confused person. Tom is gifted in the brain department, but although he’s a genius who has skipped a few grades, he’s not snobby about how smart he is. Actually, he says it’s a burden being brainy, like having a big rock tied to his head.
The reason I say Tom understood the thing Katy and I did is because when he was younger, he had this thing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the thirty-second President of the United States, and Tom was just crazy about the guy. He read everything ever written about FDR’s life and about his wife, Eleanor, and sometimes he’d go around pretending to
be
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On his eighth birthday, when my mom took him to the bakery to pick out his cake, he made the lady write
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANKLIN
on it. That’s how crazy Tom was about him. And that’s why I just think he would have gotten it and not made fun of us or told us we were weird.
When we got to my building, the doorman, Larry, said hi and gave me a huge envelope that hadn’t fit in our mailbox. It was from Harvard University, the big famous college my brother was going to attend in the fall. They had probably sent some more papers for him to fill out.
When Katy and I first went into my apartment, we thought no one was home. But then we smelled grilled cheese, which was a sure sign that Tom was there.
“Do you think he’ll make us some?” Katy asked in her English accent as we dropped our hundred-pound backpacks on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Uncle George is a bit of a lout these days.” Uncle George, by the way, wasn’t one of our regular characters. But sometimes when we were playing, we had to give other people parts. They, of course, didn’t know, like Tom didn’t know he was Uncle George as he came into the kitchen quietly in his big white socks. He was carrying a plate that still had half of a grilled cheese sandwich on it.
“Hi, you two,” he said to us. He looked like he’d just gotten out of bed, with his rumpled hair and his wrinkled pants and T-shirt.
“Hey, bloke,” I said. “Mind making us some sandwiches?” He was used to me calling him things like bloke and mate, so he didn’t think anything of it. I knew he didn’t feel like making us anything and had probably been trying to sneak back into the kitchen before we got home. But he’s a pretty nice guy, and I think he realized how much he was going to miss me when he went away to school.
“All right,” he said, “but I’m not serving tea or anything like that.”
“Jolly good,” I answered. Then Johnny and I (Johnny was Katy’s character) started pulling out the teacups and the fancy pot and sugar bowl. I took out my special sugar cubes too, which had tiny flowers painted on them with edible paint and came from some fancy store in England. After that we sat down at the table and watched Uncle George make the sandwiches.
“Don’t be telling Uncle Georgie about me bad grades,” Johnny said in a voice so low I could hardly hear him.
“I’ll think about that,” I replied in a stern voice. Then: “If you think you’ll be going out on a date this weekend with Clarissa with grades like that, you’re blooming daft.” At that, Johnny looked like he wanted to yell at me, but instead he bit his lip and lowered his head, really mad but holding it in.
“I’ll be putting the water on, then,” I said. I got up to fill the teakettle, but Uncle George told me to stay out of his way, that he’d do it, so I went back to the table and rolled my eyes at Johnny.
“Ever since he lost his job down at the fish-and-chips plant, he’s been like that.”
“Blarky?” suggested Johnny.
“More like wormy.” Sometimes we made up words that we thought sounded British, even though we’d never heard any English people use them on TV, which they call the telly.
“You can’t keep me from seeing Clarissa,” Johnny muttered through his teeth.
“Shall I have a chat with your uncle about that?” I said, all threatening. Johnny shot a hateful glance at Uncle George, but luckily, George was too busy flipping grilled cheese sandwiches onto our plates to notice. They smelled really good and we couldn’t wait to taste them, even though it was
American,
not English, cheese dripping out of the Wonder Bread.
“Looks bloody yummy,” I said.
“I’m bloody glad,” Uncle George answered. Then he turned off the screaming teakettle and ended up making our tea after all. He flipped out his own second or maybe third grilled cheese sandwich, then shuffled out of the kitchen to get back to his beloved computer.
Johnny gazed after him. Then he said, “Doesn’t Uncle George have any clothes? I mean, clothes that aren’t wrinkled that he could wear into Liverpool?”
“Don’t be criticizing your uncle,” I snapped. “You don’t look so great yourself in those leather pants with those chains hanging off ya and those spikes in your tongue, laddie.” Which shut Johnny up for a while. Plus we were busy eating our sandwiches now. Tom could have gotten a scholarship to Harvard just based on what a genius he is at making grilled cheese sandwiches. We washed them down with the tea, which we had actually begun to like.
Chapter Three
By now you’ve probably figured out who we were when we played. Unless, of course, you don’t own a telly and don’t watch
Wild Star,
which comes on every Friday night between
Treeville Place
and
Mystic Girls
and is about the life of a struggling English rock star named Johnny. He plays guitar and sings in his band, Riot. My mom says it seems like the life story of the dead Beatle John Lennon, because he was orphaned too and raised by his aunt, whose name also happened to be Mimi, like the aunt on
Wild Star.
But I can tell you, our Johnny doesn’t look at all like a dead Beatle. He’s gorgeous.
First of all, he’s kind of skinny. A little hungry-looking, I mean, like he could use about a week’s worth of my brother’s grilled cheese. And he looks sort of sad, like a puppy, and hardly ever smiles—so that when he
does
smile, well, it just about makes you keel over, it’s so cute. He has longish hair that’s all wild but not dirty or knotty. He wears black leather pants all the time, or once in a blue moon, jeans with holes all over them. And he has pierced ears and a pierced eyebrow and tongue, which is the only thing I wish Johnny didn’t have. The pierced tongue, I mean. I like the eyebrow, though, because it makes you really notice his eyes. And his eyes, well, wow. They’re green with some golden specks swirled into them. And then there’s his mouth, which is pink and soft like the mouth of a girl. But the rest of his face is like a boy’s, so it makes the mouth very special, sort of like a rose.
I think I know Johnny’s face better than any other face on earth. I used to have pictures of him all over my room. Sometimes I’d pretend that the life-sized poster over my bed was the real Johnny. I’d climb on the bed in front of it and pretend we were outside a fish-and-chips joint in Liverpool, where Johnny lives. It would be nighttime, and I’d be an American visiting England. I’d tell him thanks a lot for the dinner, that I’m barmy about fish-and-chips. Then all of a sudden he’d be kissing me (I’d press my mouth against the poster lips) and telling me what a bloody beautiful Yank I was. I did that a lot in my spare time. Once I told Katy that I did it, and she started to do it too. Katy couldn’t do stuff like that in her room because Bug Eye was always there, and also there was no space on the walls for a poster of Johnny, what with all the weird little pictures of fairies taped up there.
After our grilled cheese, Johnny and I cleaned up the dishes and went into my room, which we called the parlor when we were playing. We brought our teacups with us, which my mom wasn’t wild about, since they’re real English bone china, whatever that means. But she sort of liked how we were into what she thought were tea parties, so she let us, even though we might have broken the cups. We were pretty careful. If Tom/Uncle George had ever taken a teacup into his crazy room, it would have been broken in about five seconds.
In the parlor Johnny started moaning about how important Clarissa was to him (that’s Johnny’s girlfriend on the TV show) and how Aunt Mimi couldn’t keep them apart. I told Johnny he was too blooming young to get so serious about a girl. And then I told him it was probably time we had a chat about the Facts of Life.
He looked all embarrassed, like he wanted to die, and muttered, “Crikey, Auntie, leave me be. I know all that stuff.” And then I told him to stop saying crikey and get out of the parlor and go to his room to cool off. And Johnny said “Crikey!” again and stormed away to some far corner of my bedroom, where he sulked and kicked the wall and looked all depressed like Johnny on the TV show. On the show this is usually when Johnny’s sadness inspires him to take out his guitar and start singing a heartbreaking song, like “It’s All Nothing Without You” or “Clarissa the Sky,” but since Katy can’t sing to save herself, she just pretended to strum a guitar in the saddest way possible.
So I put down my teacup and went over to the door of Johnny’s room. Knock, knock. I knocked on the air as if there was an actual door there. For a while he didn’t answer: then, finally, he said, “Yo?” That didn’t sound too English, but I went in anyway and pretended to perch at the edge of his bed.
“I wish I was a man,” I said softly. “A man should really chat with a lad.” I don’t know why we liked doing this, but Aunt Mimi talked a lot to Johnny about this subject.
“I miss my dad,” Johnny said heartbreakingly, on the verge of tears.
“It’s okay to cry,” I told him. But of course, Johnny cleared his throat and wiped his eyes and didn’t cry, even though his father was dead, because that would have been wimpy like a nancy boy. But I knew he was crying inside.
It was like in real life, when the father of this boy in our class, Michael Trefaro, died. This was in January. Michael is really nice and everyone likes him a lot. Our whole class went to the funeral, which was in a Catholic church and was really sad. All the girls were crying, but the boys weren’t, except for Matt Harris, who’s a nancy boy for sure. Everyone, especially the girls, wanted to see if Michael would cry. But he didn’t. He was walking down the aisle of the church with all the sad music playing, with his head down, looking at the floor like all the men, with the women crying and his sisters—his
older
sisters—holding on to him. As if he had become one of them—the men—overnight. After that his mother took the whole family to New Jersey to be near her brother for a couple of months, though they were supposed to come back again so that Michael could graduate with us.
“I know you miss him,” I said to Johnny. “Sometimes you remind me a lot of him with your shenanigans. Listen, Johnny, it’s important to know the facts of life.”
“Knock it off, Auntie,” Johnny said, cringing. But I didn’t knock it off. For about the hundredth time, I started telling him the facts of life. As if he was a kid in lower school. As if he was
us
in health class, where Mrs. Klein separated us from the boys and talked about menstruation and how it was going to happen any minute now and, in fact, had already happened to certain people—such as Diana Robeson, who’s large for her age, and Tyesha and a lot of others, we knew, though not us yet, Katy and me, the two late bloomers of grade five B.
Johnny looked embarrassed, which we somehow enjoyed, and then I went on to tell him how you make a baby. As if Johnny, a sixteen-year-old rock star with a pierced tongue, didn’t know.
“I know all this stuff,” moaned Johnny.
“Good,” I told him. “And don’t be doing any of it. You and Clarissa are way too young.”
“Bosh,” he said, all miserable.
After a few hours it started to get dark outside. I mean dusky, because it was May and was daylight savings time. Katy and I usually got exhausted from playing around that time, after we’d acted out all the scenes about the facts of life and Johnny’s father’s death. We just got overdone. Kind of like when you’ve eaten too many chocolate Easter eggs or a whole shopping bag full of Halloween stuff.
Around six my mom got home from her job at the publishing company where she works designing picture books. She came into my room and found us sitting there looking at catalogs with dresses in them. She noticed the teacups and probably thought we’d been having one of our tea parties and talking about graduation dresses all afternoon, instead of talking about uteruses and sperm and Johnny.
“Hi, girls!” she said, and we said hi in our normal American accents, which aren’t really accents, I guess. I mean, not if you’re American, which we are. My mom is what they call high energy and is almost always cheerful. Unlike Katy’s mom, who is low energy, probably because she’s divorced and has no husband to help her and doesn’t have an interesting job looking at children’s books all day like my mom. Katy’s mom works part-time in a hospital but isn’t a doctor or a nurse. The rest of the time she was at home with Sam, who is disabled, as I said, and sometimes gets a little wild.
I know it sounds mean, but my mom is prettier than Katy’s mom. She looks like one of the ladies in the J. Jill catalog, where she buys some of her clothes. She has blond hair that’s cut really even at her shoulders. She’s not fat either, like Katy’s mom is, and always wears nice clothes and pretty shoes. My mom told me once that Katy’s mom has a hard life compared to hers. Maybe that’s why she’s too tired to worry much about how she looks.
“Find anything nice?” my mom asked us, meaning a graduation dress.
Katy said, “A lot of ’em look like curtains. Maybe we need to go to France.”
“Kendra,” I said to explain, and my mom nodded because she knows all about Kendra and how she’s always bragging about people buying her things from Paris. She slipped out of her work shoes and set them on top of the pile of picture books she was carrying.
“Maybe I can take off a little early on Friday and we can hit a few stores. How would that be?” she asked. We told her that would be great, and then, as usual, she asked if Katy would like to stay for dinner. And as usual Katy said she would. She ate at our house almost every night. It was a lot nicer than eating at the tiny table in her kitchen with her stressed-out, low-energy mom and weird, mean sister. Not to mention her brother, who didn’t really know how to eat and sometimes got mad and threw the food around. I wished Katy could just move in with us, but when I made the suggestion one time, my mom acted sort of shocked and said, “Why, Anna, don’t be silly. Katy has a family that loves her very much.” Maybe it was true. But her mother was so tired all the time she didn’t really say too much to Katy, and her sister was always yelling at her and didn’t act like she loved her. I don’t know if her brother loved anybody.