The Secret Language of Girls (15 page)

“Put your hands up, Kate! Play some defense!”

Kate narrowed her eyes and raised her hands over her head. She knew she couldn’t outjump her dad, but maybe she could intimidate him into losing the ball.

“Yow-eeee!” Kate’s yell bounced off the walls of the gym as her dad dribbled the ball down the court. He feigned left, then pivoted right. Kate charged him, slapping the ball away in mid-bounce. She turned, dribbled twice, then arched the ball into the air.

“She shoots! She scores! She is the champion of the world!”

“All right, Katie!” Kate’s dad trotted over to her and they slapped high fives. All around them the gym echoed with the sound of basketballs hitting the wood floor and bouncing off backboards and rims. Most of the players were teenage boys and middle-aged men. Being around so many guys had made Kate feel shy when she’d first started coming to the gym with her dad to help him with his exercise-to-beat-stress program his doctor had put him on. But after a while she realized they were too busy playing ball to pay attention to her, so she stopped paying attention to them.

Kate’s dad checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven, which means Men’s League practice is about to start,” he said. “That’s too bad, actually, because I was just about to make my big comeback.”

“Says you,” Kate said, tossing the basketball at her dad.

“Think fast, Kate,” a voice called from behind her. She turned to see Andrew O’Shea lobbing a basketball in her direction. She caught it without even trying. Andrew was wearing baggy shorts like the ones the pros wore, and huge shoes that made the rest of his legs seem skinny as pencils. He looked completely different from the way he looked at school. At school Andrew usually wore tan pants and checkered shirts and deck shoes. Marcie Grossman said he dressed like his mom still picked out his clothes.

“Hey, Andrew,” Kate greeted him when he walked over to where she and her dad were standing.

“Andrew?” Kate’s dad whispered. “Who’s this Andrew, huh?”

Kate shushed him. Then she turned to Andrew and said, “This is my dad. Don’t pay attention to anything he says.”

Kate’s dad stuck out his hand for Andrew to shake. “Mel Faber,” he said, introducing himself. “It’s nice to meet you, Andrew. You here shooting some hoops with your dad?”

“Nah,” Andrew said. “I’m here playing with my brothers.” He pointed to a group of teenagers on the other side of the gym, two of whom had the same blond hair as Andrew and the same gold-framed glasses. “Except now they’ve got practice, so I’m just watching.” He turned to Kate. “You could hang out and watch with me, if you want. We can give you a ride home later.”

Kate looked at her dad, who shrugged and said, “It’s up to you, sweetheart.”

Kate hated it when her dad said stuff like “It’s up to you, sweetheart.” Didn’t he know that parental guidance was necessary when it came to a girl her age watching basketball with a boy who was admittedly sort of cute but also goofy? A boy she had never thought
about in a romantic way, but who might become a romantic prospect if she sat next to him in the gym? Did Kate even want a romantic prospect? She had no idea.

“Okay,” Kate said finally, not knowing what else to say. “I guess I’ll stay.”

Kate followed Andrew over to the bleachers near where his brothers’ team was practicing.
Maybe they’ll notice me and ask me if I want to play,
she thought.
Maybe they’ll put me on their team.
Yeah, we know she’s only eleven,
she could hear Andrew’s brothers saying to the men’s league officials.
But she’s almost twelve, and she’s got the best two-handed layup we’ve ever seen in our lives.

“So what’s this thing with you and Andrew O’Shea?” Marcie Grossman asked Kate in the bathroom after lunch on Monday. “Why do you guys keep looking at each other that way?”

“What way?” Kate asked. She could see
splotches of red blooming across her cheeks in the mirror.

“You know what way I mean!” Marcie said, punching Kate on the shoulder. “Like you’re in love with each other or something.”

Kate splashed some water on her face, then dried it off with a paper towel. “You’re crazy, Marcie. Andrew and I are friends. We both like basketball.”

“You both like each other! Wait until I tell everyone!”

“I don’t care,” Kate said. “You can tell people whatever you want. Go ahead. No one will believe you.”

By two thirty-five that afternoon everyone in the sixth grade had heard that Kate and Andrew O’Shea were a couple.

“You should tell Andrew to get contacts,” Flannery said, sliding into the seat next to Kate on the bus. “He might be cute if he didn’t wear those stupid-looking glasses.”

“Do you have to sit here?” Kate asked, looking straight ahead. “There are a thousand other places you could sit on this bus.”

“It’s a free country,” Flannery replied in a singsong voice.

Kate glanced at Flannery out of the corner of her eye. At the beginning of April, Flannery had cut her hair as short as a boy’s and dyed it red. It actually looked pretty good—not that Kate would ever tell Flannery that. She tried to say as little as possible to Flannery now that the only time she saw her was on the bus. After Marylin became a cheerleader, Flannery made friends with two eighth-grade girls who spent most of their time in the girls’ room experimenting with lip gloss and purple eye shadow.

Flannery jabbed Kate with her elbow. “So have you kissed him yet?”

Kate glared at her. “That’s none of your business!”

“That means yes!” Flannery crowed. “Kate, I never knew you were so mature!”

Kate ignored Flannery for the rest of the ride home. Of course she hadn’t kissed Andrew! She didn’t even know if she liked him. Okay, maybe she liked him a little. She liked talking to him, anyway. Saturday Kate and Andrew had watched basketball practice for two hours. They talked about school and how Mrs. Watson, their math and social studies teacher, should chew breath mints so that you didn’t practically faint every time she breathed on you. They talked about how they missed Paisley Clark now that she was at a school for accelerated children, and discussed what Jason Frey could do to stop being so shy. Kate talked about her dad’s heart attack last fall, and Andrew talked about his parents’ divorce when he was seven. By the time basketball practice was over, Kate and Andrew had talked so much, their voices had grown ragged and raspy.

“Kissy-kissy,” Flannery said to Kate as she got off the bus. “Don’t let your lips get too chapped!”

When Kate stomped into her house a few minutes later, the phone was ringing. Melinda, the baby-sitter, picked it up. Turning to Kate, she whispered, “It’s for you! It’s a boy!”

“Give me that!” Kate said, grabbing the receiver from Melinda.

“Was that your mom?” Andrew O’Shea asked. Kate could tell it was him, although his voice sounded kind of funny over the phone.

“My baby-sitter,” Kate told him. “She’s nineteen going on eight.”

Melinda made a pouty face at Kate from the kitchen table. Kate took the phone into the hall closet.

“So I hear we’re an item,” Andrew said. “Marcie Grossman has been telling everyone.”

Kate felt her face grow hot. “I didn’t say a
word to Marcie. Marcie just likes to make stuff up.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you said something,” Andrew said, sounding disappointed. “I mean, it’s okay if you did.”

“You wouldn’t care?”

Andrew laughed. “Of course I wouldn’t care! I think it’s sort of neat. I mean, what do you think? About us, like, going together or something?”

“Or something?”

“About us going together,” Andrew said more firmly. “I mean, do you want to?”

“Okay,” Kate said, surprising herself with how quickly she answered. “I guess so. Sure.”

“Great!” Andrew said.

“Great!” Kate replied.

Then neither of them said anything for a few minutes. Kate’s legs started itching. Her stomach growled so loudly, she was sure Andrew could hear it. Finally she said, “Listen,
the baby-sitter says I have to go clean my room. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

Then she walked out of the closet. Melinda beamed at her. “Is it true love?” she asked.

Kate didn’t bother answering. Why everyone suddenly found her life so fascinating was beyond her.

When Kate got off the bus Tuesday morning, she saw Andrew getting off his bus at the other end of the drop-off lane. Panic grabbed her around the middle. It occurred to her that since she and Andrew were now officially going together, he might want to hold hands with her in front of everyone.

This idea terrified Kate so much that she ducked around the corner of the school before Andrew could see her and ran to the gym’s back entrance. Inside, the before-school program kids were playing Hacky Sack and shooting baskets. Kate scooped up a ball from under the
bleachers and dribbled over to where a handful of boys played a listless game of horse.

“You guys know how to play around the world?” Kate asked, twirling the ball expertly on her index finger.

Five minutes later, after Kate had circled the globe once and was halfway around again, Andrew walked into the gym. He smiled at Kate when he saw her but stopped for a minute to kick around the Hacky Sack with some seventh graders before ambling over.

“How about a game of one-on-one?” he asked casually.

Having a boyfriend’s not so bad,
Kate thought as she took the ball left, faking Andrew out, then shot neatly for an easy two points. For the next five minutes, until the bell rang, she and Andrew charged at each other, swiped the ball out of each other’s hands, and tried long, impossible shots from half-court.

“Good game,” Andrew said, patting Kate on the back as they walked from the gym to their first-period math class. “You ought to come over to my house one afternoon, and we can take on my brothers.”

Kate was just about to agree to this when she looked up to see that she and Andrew were surrounded. Mrs. Watson hadn’t unlocked her room yet, and all of Kate and Andrew’s classmates were waiting outside the door, leaning against lockers and batting wads of paper at one another across the hall.

“Oooooh, look at the lovebirds,” someone crooned. Immediately a whole chorus of
ooooh
s started up. Kate saw Andrew’s face grow red, but he smiled and shrugged his shoulders as though his classmates had caught him stealing from a cookie jar. She quickly walked over to where Marcie stood with Amber and Timma.

“You’ve got a big mouth,” she said to Marcie.

“I wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true,” Marcie insisted. “You guys just proved it. Anyway, what’s the big deal?”

Kate honestly didn’t know. She looked to where Andrew was now standing with Jason Frey and Trevor Parlier. He really was halfway cute, she told herself, and he was a pretty good basketball player, even if he did have a bad habit of double dribbling when he got frustrated.

“Sorry I’m late, folks.” Mrs. Watson walked through the crowd of kids, jangling her keys. Kate trailed Marcie and Amber into the classroom. She heard Mazie Calloway squeal, “Quit it, Robbie!” behind her.

Mazie Calloway would never want Andrew for a boyfriend—Kate knew that much. Neither would Ashley Greer or Ruby Santiago or Caitlin Moore. Or Marylin. None of the middle school cheerleaders ever had boyfriends whose moms still dressed them or who brought
Thermoses of milk to drink with their lunches instead of Cokes or sports drinks.