The Hard Kind of Promise (6 page)

"It's hot in this thing," Sarah said, fidgeting.

Louellen looked up at her. "Just a few more minutes," she said. She turned back to Marjorie. "And you still want eyestalks, right?"

"Yes. Four. No, six," Marjorie said. "And they should be different lengths. We can attach them all over her head."

"I was thinking pipe cleaners, but with fabric covering them, so it doesn't look tacky," Louellen said.

They were talking as though Sarah weren't even
there. She didn't mind, really. She noticed how Louellen treated Marjorie as someone who knew what she was talking about. To listen to Louellen, you would think that Marjorie had directed hundreds of movies. You would have no idea that they were just sisters, that Louellen had changed her diapers and had once cried when Marjorie spilled a jar of spaghetti sauce on Louellen's ninth grade geometry homework.

Sarah tried to imagine what it must be like to have sisters, and couldn't. To her, family was always just parents and grandparents.

Trying to think about how different Marjorie's life was from hers made her even hotter.

"Come on, you guys," she moaned. "I'm sweating in here."

Immediately Louellen pulled the costume over her head. It made a silky, whooshing sound over Sarah's ears.

"We don't want you fainting," Louellen said soothingly, like a teacher or a mom, like someone used to being the oldest.

Was Louellen weird? Sarah wondered. It was hard to tell. She didn't talk in funny voices or know everything about old movie stars. She had a boyfriend. She was on her college's badminton team. She sewed all her own clothes, which would be considered very weird in seventh grade but maybe was allowed in college.

Bea, the other sister, was a sophomore in high school. Around the house, she pretty much ignored everyone else, which she had been doing since Sarah had known her. She was on the crew team and was vice president of her class. "Is she popular?" Sarah had asked Marjorie once. Marjorie had shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "I just wish she wouldn't leave her towel on the bathroom floor."

Was weirdness something you were born with, like blue eyes or curly hair? If your sister was popular, wouldn't you be, too? Or was it just an accident that had nothing to do with your family or your looks? Was it something that just
happened?

Sarah really wanted to figure it out. If you could just turn out weird for no reason, then maybe you could become weird out of the blue.

The idea absolutely terrified her.

At dinner, Roxie set an elegantly engraved envelope next to Marjorie's plate.

"An invitation to Cotillion. I'm sure you got one, too, Sarah," Roxie said. "Oh, you girls will have a blast. Remember how much fun Louellen and Bea had when they did Cotillion?"

"What is it, anyway?" Marjorie asked.

Sarah took another bite of her chicken mole and
tried not to sigh too loudly. She didn't even have older sisters, and she knew what Cotillion was. "A social dance class. Boys and girls get dressed up and learn how to dance with each other. Old-fashioned dances like the fox trot and the waltz." Sarah swallowed. "It's not like a regular class. You don't have to take it if you don't want to."

But to Sarah's utter astonishment, Marjorie had perked up.

"Really?" she asked. "Can we wear costumes?"

"No," Louellen said. "You have to wear dresses and high heels, though."

"I can't walk in high heels," Marjorie said.

"Not
high
high heels," Bea said wearily. "Kitten heels."

Before Marjorie could ask what kitten heels were, Sarah asked, "What do the boys wear?"

"Suits. And hard shoes," Louellen said.

"They end up wearing their fathers' clothes," Roxie said. "They all look adorable."

Mr. Fingerhut shook his head. "Those poor guys," he said. "I cannot think of anything more miserable for a twelve-year-old boy than having to get dressed in a suit and touch a girl."

"They wear suits to school?" Marjorie shrieked.

"No, honey," Roxie said. "Cotillion meets on Tuesday nights for six weeks. In the gym."

Marjorie shoveled a forkful of rice into her mouth. A few grains got stuck in her hair.

"It sounds like fun," she said.

"Really?" Sarah asked. "You're going to do it?"

Marjorie nodded. "I love dressing up," she said.

At school on Monday, everyone was talking about it.

"The only bad part is that you have to get assigned to different boys," Lizzie said at lunch. "So if the teacher says you have to dance with Jason Webb, then you have to. You can't say no."

"Who's the teacher?" Sarah asked.

"Mrs. Gretch," Carly said.

"Mrs. Gretch?" Marjorie and Sarah said together, then both burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" Carly asked suspiciously.

"Have you ever seen her in the parking lot at lunch?" Marjorie asked.

"No," Carly said. "I have better things to do than spy on the teachers at lunch."

"We weren't spying on her," Sarah said, angry on Marjorie's behalf. Carly wouldn't have said that if Sarah had asked the question. "We just saw her one day. She got in her car and sat there smoking, with the windows closed. I think she smoked ten cigarettes."

"Two," Marjorie said. "She smoked two."

"And the whole car filled up with smoke," Sarah said, irritated, because ten cigarettes made it a better story. "We couldn't believe she could even breathe in there. That there was even any oxygen left."

"She's not supposed to smoke at school," Marjorie said.

Lizzie laughed. "I had to go into her room once and borrow some pencils for Mr. Zedaker," she said. "Her breath is heinous."

"From the cigarettes, I bet," Sarah said.

They all laughed. Sarah thought it was the first time since they'd been having lunch together that they'd all laughed at the same time over the same thing. Maybe, she thought, things were looking up.

"What are you going to wear?" Carly asked. Without waiting for an answer, she said, "My mother is going to get me a little black dress, because that's what you should always have in your closet for emergencies."

"What kind of emergencies?" Marjorie asked.

"Like, if you have to go to a party and you have nothing else to wear," Carly explained. "You can wear a little black dress anywhere."

She had read this in one of her magazines, Sarah knew, but she envied the way Carly said it, as if she had been in just this kind of situation, as if she really had emergencies that could be fixed with a dress.

"My mom says I have to wear my black skirt and my red top." Lizzie took a sip from her mini-can of soda. "She says she just bought them a month ago, and that she's not made of money. My mom is so heinously cheap it isn't even funny."

"I'm going to use the money I've been saving since my birthday to buy a new outfit," Sarah said. "Maybe new shoes, too. The shoes I have to wear for chorus are too flat."

"Get a little black dress," Carly said. "But don't let your mom talk you into one that's too long. It has to be short and sexy."

"Sexy?" Marjorie said. "We're
twelve
."

For once, Sarah agreed with her. She could handle cute, but she wasn't ready for sexy.

"What are
you
wearing? Stretch pants and a T-shirt?" Carly asked Marjorie.

"No," Marjorie said. She smiled in a way that Sarah knew she thought was mysterious but really just made her look cross-eyed.

"I don't believe it," Carly said. "That's what you always wear."

"No, really. I'm wearing something else," Marjorie said. "Something special."

"Oh, great," Carly said. "Look, Marjorie. Don't
wear anything strange. Like, your mom's wedding dress or something with feathers. Really. Don't do it."

For once, she sounded to Sarah as though she was genuinely worried about Marjorie. She wasn't being mean. She was trying to get through to her for her own good.

But Marjorie didn't seem to notice. "Nobody else will be wearing anything like it," she said, as though she expected there to be a contest for who was best dressed, and this fact alone was enough to assure her that she was going to win.

"
That
I believe," Carly said.

After school, Marjorie caught up with Sarah as they headed to the parking lot.

"I have to give you your script!" she said, thrusting a sheaf of crumpled computer paper into Sarah's hands. "I finished it last night. It's so good! I can't wait for you to read it and tell me what you think."

"It's pretty long," Sarah said. "How long until I have to have all this memorized?"

"Can you do it by Saturday?"

"That's only five days away!"

"You don't have that many lines," Marjorie said. "Joey has to say more lines than you."

Sarah had to admit that getting to meet Joey Hooper was part of the reason she was still even slightly interested in being in Marjorie's movie. She really wanted to see what kind of boy would work on a project with Marjorie without asking the teacher to move him to another group.

"You mainly just grunt and squeak a lot," Marjorie said.

"Well, I have to know when to grunt and squeak," Sarah said, scanning the parking lot for Mom's beat-up Subaru station wagon. "And I have chorus practice on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday after school. And Cotillion on Tuesday nights. And homework." Just thinking about everything she had to do made her a little sick. "I need more time."

"Well, not too much more time," Marjorie said. "It's almost Thanksgiving."

Actually, it was still the beginning of November. Halloween had come and gone. Marjorie had mentioned something about trick-or-treating, but Sarah decided that she was too old for pretending to be scared of ghosts and playing along with Roxie's five-pieces-of-candy rule. On Halloween she was at her mom's. They never got any trick-or-treaters there, because kids didn't go to apartments, only houses. Mom put out the plastic pumpkin with the light bulb inside to remind
Sarah of Halloweens when she was a kid, but it just made Sarah sad. After dinner she went into her room and stood at the window watching little bands of dressed-up kids and their parents walk down the sidewalk, heading over to the part of town where the houses were. She was glad for them that it wasn't raining.

Now, though, the clouds were thickening in the sky over the parking lot. A few drops of rain spattered on the cement sidewalk. A flock of seagulls was circling the schoolyard. They were at least thirty miles from the ocean. Grandpa always said the seagulls were a sure sign that a storm was coming. Sarah wished her mom would hurry before she got completely drenched.

"I need at least another week," she said. "I can't even read this until tomorrow. I have too much math."

"Here," Marjorie said, grabbing the script from her hands and turning her around. She unzipped Sarah's backpack. "Put it in here so it doesn't get wet."

Sarah could tell that it was really important to her.

"I'll try to look at it tonight," she said. One of the moms had double-parked her SUV and run into the school office. A bunch of cars behind her were honking. It was giving Sarah a headache.

"Maybe we could just do a walk-through on Saturday," Marjorie said.

"No. I have too much to do. I already said."

"I won't film anything. I just want to see—"

"Marjorie!" Sarah said, shouting a little to be heard over all the horns. "Stop being so pushy!"

Marjorie smiled, the way she always did when someone said something mean to her. But in the split second before she smiled, she looked shocked, as though Sarah had thrown cold water on her or slapped her cheek.

It was just a split second. But Sarah saw it.

"Sorry," she said. "I have a headache."

"That's okay," Marjorie said.

"I always get them in the rain after school," Sarah said. "Especially when all the moms are honking."

"Me, too," Marjorie said, still smiling, but looking a little vague, as though she were really paying attention to something else.

Finally Sarah saw her mom.

"I'll call you tonight," she said, adjusting her backpack on her shoulders and pulling her hoodie over her hair.

She didn't know what made her look back at Marjorie just as she was shoving her backpack into the back seat of Mom's car.

Marjorie was still smiling. But because she stood alone, not talking to anyone in the vast throng of kids waiting for rides, she looked sadder than Sarah had ever seen her.

THAT NIGHT, Grandpa arrived carrying pages of Internet printouts.

"We've got work to do," he said to Sarah, giving Henry a cursory pat on the head.

"What kind of work?" she asked happily. When Grandpa said "work," he meant something fun.

Grandpa set the papers on the coffee table.

"We need some cardboard boxes. Boxes we can cut up. You got any of those?"

"In my closet."

Mom came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel. "I assume this is work that is going to involve an enormous mess," she said.

"We'll clean up," Grandpa said. "Go get those boxes, sweetheart."

When Sarah returned with the boxes, Mom was studying Grandpa's printouts.

"Your grandfather," she said, "is planning on giving Henry an IQ test."

"Standard poodles are very smart," he said. "They're the Einsteins of the dog world."

"I didn't think they were
that
smart." Sarah looked at Henry, who was rubbing his head against the side of the couch as though scratching an itch.

"That's what everyone says," Grandpa said. "The only dogs that are smarter are Border collies."

"Which are the dumbest?" Sarah asked.

"Afghans. They're airheads."

"I don't see how you can tell."

"Well, it's like IQ tests for people. They're not foolproof, but you test their problem-solving skills." Grandpa looked over at Henry, who was still scratching. "I have a feeling ole Henry is going to ace these tests."

"What are the boxes for?" Sarah asked.

"We have to make a barrier. Something he can't see over. We need scissors and tape." Grandpa consulted his notes. "And an old blanket. And some buckets. And some dog treats."