The Hard Kind of Promise (13 page)

"Hey, Mr. Roche, can we get pizza?" Jason shouted over the din.

Sarah thought Mr. Roche might object or say something to Jason about raising his hand. But he only nodded.

"Excellent idea," he said.

The pizza place was down the street from the college, the only store on the block that was not devoted to computers and electronics. A harried-looking waitress asked Mr. Roche, "How many in your party?" and when Mr. Roche said, "Twenty-three," she rolled her eyes. "I gotta split you up," she said.

They commandeered three tables. Mr. Roche and the two chaperones—Mrs. Worth and Mr. Souza—sat at one. Sarah noticed happily that Robert seemed to be
watching her surreptitiously, waiting for her to take a seat before he committed himself. When she and Lizzie sat down, he grabbed a chair opposite them. Beneath the table, Lizzie pinched her knee. Sarah forced herself not to flinch, for fear of making Lizzie's excitement even more obvious.

"Nothing with olives," Jason said, sliding into the chair next to Robert. "I'm allergic to olives."

"Let's get sausage," Sean said, taking the chair on the other side of Robert. "Sausage is the best."

"Pepperoni's better," Jason said.

"You're an idiot," Sean said.

Robert looked up from his menu and caught Sarah's eye. She smiled, knowing exactly what he meant.

"Quit it, you guys," she said. "We can get more than one pizza."

Lizzie was eyeing Jason with her usual contempt. "You better not get any pepperoni stuck in your beard," she said. "I might throw up if you do."

"It's not a beard," Jason said. "It's a goatee."

"It's disgusting," Lizzie said. "Nobody else our age has one."

"What can I say?" Jason was flushed with what looked to Sarah to be a combination of embarrassment and pride. "I'm highly developed. I'm advanced."

"You're an advanced idiot," Sean said.

"Look who's talking," Lizzie said.

Robert set his menu down and leaned toward Sarah to be heard.

"I can't eat sausage or pepperoni. I'm a vegetarian," he said.

"Wow." She had never known a vegetarian before. "Is it because of your crazy parents?"

"No. They think
I'm
crazy." Robert shrugged his shoulder toward one ear. "My mom says if she'd known how hard it was going to be to feed me, she'd have given me back to the doctor and asked for a different kid. She's kidding, but she really hates the way I eat."

"Why do you do it?" Sarah asked.

"I don't know," he said in a way that made Sarah know that he did.

"It doesn't seem very fair to the animals," she said. "But I really like meat. I don't think I could give it up. Is it hard?"

"In the beginning. But you get used to it."

"I don't know if I could," she said.

She searched his face, trying to see if he looked disappointed. As far as she could tell, he didn't. She was relieved. She didn't want to think that Robert might like her for something that wasn't really a part of who she was.

"Do you like mushrooms?" Robert asked tentatively.

She nodded, happy to be able to give a truthful answer that he would appreciate.

"And onions," she said. "And olives, actually."

"You want to split one?" he asked. Leaning even closer and tilting his head slightly in Jason's direction, he said, "It would be fun to torture him with the olives."

She laughed. It occurred to her for the first time that she liked Robert, really liked him, that his dark hair and twinkly eyes were just an added bonus, that he could be a friend.

As the waitress set their pizzas and sodas before them, Sarah realized that she was starving. She hadn't eaten anything except for the peanuts on the plane since breakfast.

"Olives!" Jason said, seeing what they had ordered. "Gross!"

"Shut up!" Lizzie said, but she watched with interest as he took a paper napkin from the chrome dispenser and gently patted the top of his pepperoni-dotted slice. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Getting rid of the extra grease," he said. "Cheese is greasy."

Lizzie didn't answer, but Sarah noticed that she, too, blotted the top of her slice with a napkin, and Sarah
wondered if Jason's fastidiousness might outweigh the heinousness of his goatee in Lizzie's eyes.

They ate their first bites of pizza in relative silence. Everyone, Sarah realized, was hungry. At other tables, patrons looked to be college students: Sarah didn't see many families. The absence of children made her feel like an adult, as though she had stumbled through a time-space portal and happened on a universe peopled solely by teenagers. Only Mr. Roche and the chaperones were older. Sitting primly at their table, sharing a pitcher of beer, they seemed grossly out of place and maybe even a little nervous, as though they might be asked to leave if they called attention to themselves.

"It must be weird having your dad as a chaperone," she said to Sean.

"Not really," Sean said. "He knows he's supposed to ignore me."

"If my mother was a chaperone, she would have made me sit with her," Lizzie said. "She would have made me sleep in the same room."

"I'm the youngest of five kids. My dad's been chaperoning a long time," Sean said. "He knows about not talking to me and not trying to make a big deal out of being my dad."

"He probably wouldn't let us stay up all night and play poker," Jason said.

"You guys can't stay up all night," Lizzie said. "The competition's tomorrow. Mr. Roche said we have to be asleep by ten."

"Will you shut up?" Sean whispered. "Will you stop telling everybody our business?"

"I'm telling Mr. Roche," Lizzie said.

Sarah nudged Lizzie's thigh with her knee. "Don't," she said.

"Why?" Lizzie fixed Sarah with an incredulous stare. "Don't you want to sound good? Don't you want to win?"

"Well, yes," she said. "But I still don't think you should tell."

Sarah didn't quite know how to say what she felt: that telling Mr. Roche would be a betrayal, that the boys probably wouldn't sing as well if they couldn't play poker, even if it was only out of spite. That keeping their secret would enhance their bond as friends, and that alone would make their singing stronger.

Lizzie turned to the boys. "If you let us play, we won't say anything," she said.

"Do you even know
how
to play?" Sean asked.

"Not really," Sarah said.

"I can play mahjong," Lizzie said. "And hearts."

"Great," Jason said. "I don't even know what mahjong
is.
"

"It's Chinese," Lizzie said. "You play with little tiles. With these really cute drawings on them."

"Well, you play poker with
cards,
" Jason said. "And plastic chips for betting."

"Ooh," Lizzie said. "Chips."

"I only know how to play gin," Sarah said sadly. Betting sounded like fun.

"We'll teach you," Robert said.

"Oh, come
on,
man," Jason groaned. "It's too hard to teach people. It takes too long."

"No, it doesn't," Robert said.

Sarah heard something authoritative in his voice, something the boys heard, too, because his pronouncement seemed to settle the matter.

"Do you even know about the hands?" Jason asked Lizzie.

"What hands?" Lizzie asked.

Jason sighed heavily. "The order? One pair, two pair, three of a kind?"

"Not exactly."

Jason clasped both hands to the sides of his head in outsize despair.

Sean laughed. "This is going to be great," he said. "They don't even know how to play!"

"What's great about that?" Jason moaned.

"Girls? Betting?" Sean raised his eyebrows in a knowing way.

"What about girls and betting?" Sarah asked.

"Girls are stupid about betting," Sean said. "They always bet too much."

She felt resentment rise up in her throat.

"They like playing with the chips," Sean said. He held a pretend chip between his thumb and index finger. "I bet a hundred dollars," he said, affecting a girly voice.

"You're an idiot," Lizzie said.

"A total idiot," Sarah said, which was unlike her: she didn't usually call people names. But it bugged her the way he was talking about all girls. She could tell that he wasn't really talking about betting, that he was used to making generalizations about girls, that he'd heard his father and brothers do it, that he didn't even bother to think about the truth of what he said or whether he might hurt people's feelings.

"We're not going to bet a
lot,
" Robert said.

"It's okay," Sarah said, a little irritated by his nervousness, his need to make everything all right for her. "In fact, I bet we win," she said, looking directly at Sean, who squirmed under her gaze and grabbed another piece of pizza, then tried to stuff it into his mouth all at once.

She recognized the gesture as one of false bravado; for a moment she felt powerful and sure. Lizzie held up her hand for a high-five. But as Sarah finished the last of her slice, she wondered if what Sean said was true. Did girls bet too much?

There was a ring of truth to it, something in her own experience that seemed to confirm her doubt.

AT TEN O'CLOCK Sarah and Lizzie were in bed when they heard the expected knock on the door. In the dark, Sarah leaped from her bed and unlatched the door.

"Everything all right?" Mrs. Worth asked.

"Everything's fine," Sarah whispered. When Mrs. Worth tried to peer over her shoulder into the darkened room, she added, "Lizzie's already asleep."

"Oh," Mrs. Worth whispered back, nodding her head, as though she was pleased to be allowed in on an elaborate joke. "If you need anything, just call my cell."

"We'll be fine," Sarah whispered. "But thanks."

"Sleep well!" Mrs. Worth said, tiptoeing off to check on another room.

Sarah closed the door. Lizzie sat bolt upright and
threw off the covers. She was still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt she had worn to rehearsal.

"Shhh!" Sarah cautioned from the door. "Wait until she goes back to her room!"

"You get dressed," Lizzie said. "Where are my shoes?"

They flipped on the bedside lamp and Sarah fumbled for her clothes. When she was dressed, Lizzie knocked on the wall adjoining the boys' room. Someone knocked back.

"We could get sent home for this, you know," Sarah whispered, but the thumping in her chest was causing pleasurable fear rather than terror. It was thrilling to break rules for once, to take a chance.

"Oh, it's just curfew," Lizzie said. "It's not so bad."

"But Mr. Roche said—"

"Quit worrying!" Lizzie examined herself in a hand-held makeup mirror. "You want some lip-gloss?"

"No, thanks." Sarah took a deep breath, willing herself to relax. "Maybe we should tell them we'll only stay an hour."

Lizzie pursed her lips together to even out the gloss. She snapped her mirror shut.

"Let's not make any rash decisions," she said. "Let's just see how it goes."

Sarah liked for things to be planned. She liked to
know what was coming. But she said "Okay" and thought that if nothing else, she would get the opportunity to show Sean Souza what a moron he was.

They sat in a circle on one of the beds. Jason, wearing a tinted green plastic-billed visor, shuffled the cards.

"Okay, the two players to the left of the dealer are the 'blinds,'" he said. "That's you guys," he added, looking at Sean and Robert. "Sean, you're the little blind, and Robert, you're the big blind. So Sean, you put in one chip, and Robert, you put in two. Just to make sure that there's something in the pot."

Robert and Sean each surrendered their chips. "A chip is worth a penny," Robert explained to Sarah and Lizzie. Sarah couldn't help but notice that he looked just at her when he said it, though.

"Now, I'm going to deal everybody two cards, but you have to leave them face-down. You can look at them," Jason said seriously, as though he were a doctor explaining to a patient how he was going to take out the appendix. "They're called the hole cards."

"Why?" Sarah asked.

Jason sighed. "I don't know. It doesn't make any difference. That's just what they're
called,
" he said.

"Why are you wearing that heinous hat?" Lizzie asked.

"It's not a hat. It's a dealer visor," Jason said. "It's what all the dealers in Las Vegas wear."

"My grandma wears a hat like that when she plays golf," Lizzie said.

"Can we just
play?
" Sean said.

"It's all right," Jason said. "She can ask questions."

"Not fashion questions," Sean said. "Questions about the game."

"Okay," Jason said. "Now we have to bet. Sarah, you start, since you're to the left of the blinds."

"How do we know how much to bet?" Sarah asked.

"Everybody started out with a hundred chips. That's a dollar," Robert said. "Just bet a little bit to start."

She tossed two blue chips into the center of the bed. They clicked against each other in a crisply satisfying way.

"Do I have to bet the same amount Sarah did?" Lizzie asked.

"You can if you want. Or you can raise her bet. That means you add more," Jason explained. "Betting is really complicated. My dad bets on horseraces. He hedges bets, which is kind of like betting on both sides. It's a way to make sure you don't lose too much. A way to protect yourself."

His earnestness made him seem smarter than he usually did in chorus, Sarah thought. He didn't seem
like the same kid who was always losing his place in the music and coming in a full measure ahead of where he was supposed to.

"If you don't want to bet anything, you can fold," he went on. "The only thing you can't do is bet less than Sarah."

"Hmm." Lizzie bit her lip and squinted.

"Oh, come
on!
" Sean said. "Just do it already!"

"Quit yelling at her," Jason said. "Quit acting like you're such a big expert."

Lizzie smiled at him, then pulled two chips from her pile and placed them carefully into the pot.

"Now you've seen her two. That's what you say," Jason explained.

"Thanks," Lizzie said. She beamed as though she had mastered something complicated.