The Secret Language of Girls (3 page)

“Thank you, Petey,” Kate said solemnly. She turned to Marylin. “Is there anything you’d like to say?”

Marylin wasn’t sure. All morning she had been wrapped in quiet, as though all her words had slipped away from her along with the little bird. Marylin had never known anyone who
died before, not even a cat. It made her feel the way she did the day before she got the flu, as though she were floating outside herself. Everything seemed to be happening far off in the distance. The trees shimmered in the late-morning heat, and Marylin wished the little bird’s mother had built her nest in one of them instead of a dumb, low-to-the-ground bush.

Marylin decided she didn’t like funerals and she especially didn’t like things dying.

“That’s okay, Marylin,” Kate said after a few moments. “Sometimes words don’t say what you mean anyway.”

Then Kate lowered the little bird’s shoe box into the hole she had dug earlier and threw a handful of dirt over it. She motioned for Marylin and Petey to do the same.

“Amen,” Kate said, brushing the dirt from her hands.

“Amen,” Marylin and Petey echoed her.

Then Petey went home to watch
Mr. Rogers.

“You want me to show you how to play Parcheesi?” Kate asked Marylin as they walked inside. “My dad taught me the other night. It’s pretty fun.”

“I don’t feel much like playing right now,” Marylin said. She really didn’t think it was the time for games, anyway. Sometimes it was terrible how insensitive Kate could be.

“Me either, I guess,” Kate said. She was quiet for a minute, and then a smile bloomed across her face. “Hey, I know. Let’s go to your house and you can show me how to paint my toenails.”

Marylin was stunned. “You want to paint your toenails?”

Kate shrugged. “Why not? I think it looks sort of nice. It makes your toes look like little seashells.”

That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you.

“Okay,” Marylin said. “Sure. It’s not that hard after you practice awhile. It’s kind of like learning how to color inside the lines.”

Marylin followed Kate out the front door. Birds flew overhead, singing to one another across the wide, blue sky.

“Do you ever think about kissing boys?” Marylin asked suddenly, wondering what other surprises Kate might have tucked away.

“Only movie stars,” Kate said. “I would only kiss a boy if he was a movie star.”

“Yeah, me too.” Marylin nodded, the wind lifting the back of her hair like a wing. “That’s exactly how I feel about it too.”

The hearts had been Kate’s idea.

“The Three of Hearts? Get it? Like in deck of cards?” she’d prodded Marylin and Flannery, hoping to see the tiniest flicker of interest in their eyes.

“I don’t know,” Marylin said, looking to Flannery.

“Dumb idea,” Flannery said matter-of-factly. Flannery always voiced her opinions as though they were facts you could look up in an encyclopedia.

“No, listen, you guys!” Kate protested. “We
each buy a red T-shirt and paint a glow-in-the-dark heart on it. Together we’d be the Three of Hearts!”

Flannery leaned back against her pillows. Teddy bears were scattered around her like adoring fans.

“Together we’d be the three red T-shirts,” she said. “Who wants to go trick-or-treating as a T-shirt? I mean, really, I’m a little old to go trick-or-treating at all, but if I’m going to go, I want to be something good.”

“So what’s your great idea?” Kate asked. She tried to sound sarcastic, but her voice came out watery, like she was about to come down with a cold.

“I say we go as a valentine,” Flannery said. She smiled sweetly at Kate. “See, I don’t have anything against hearts. They just have to be the right kind of hearts.”

As it turned out, the right kind of hearts were made of stuffed red satin, and Flannery
and Marylin would wear them over red bodysuits and red tights. Kate, it was decided by Flannery, would be Cupid.

“What’s so bad about being Cupid?” her mother asked that night at dinner. “I think Cupid is cute.”

“Cupid’s fat,” Kate’s older sister, Tracie, said. “Cherubs are always fat.”

“Then maybe you should be Cupid,” Kate said.

“Speak for yourself, Chipmunk Cheeks.”

Kate’s dad threw his napkin down on his plate. “You know, I listen to people argue all day as part of my job. It would be nice to have a little peace and tranquility when I get home.”

Kate’s dad was the sort of lawyer who tried to get people to settle their differences out of court. Kate thought it was a nice sort of lawyer to be, even if it wasn’t the richest kind.

“Come on, Mel, they’re just squabbling,” said Kate’s mom, who was a window designer at a
store downtown and worked all day with mannequins. “Kids will be kids, et cetera, et cetera.” She took a bite of fettuccine. Kate’s dad stood up.

“No one in this family has any idea of what kind of stress I’m under,” he said. “Absolutely no idea. I’m stressed out and I’m tired and I’m going upstairs to lie down.” With that, he pushed his chair back into place and left the room.

“Mel!” Kate’s mom called after him. She followed him into the hallway. Tracie took her plate out to the kitchen.

“I would have made a great heart,” Kate said to Max.

Max bobbed his head up and down as though he quite agreed.

When Kate woke up Saturday morning, she wondered if all over the country girls clustered in groups of three, and if the third girl always got stuck with the lousy costume, the last
sip from the can of soda, and the comic book no one else wanted to read. She was thinking about starting a revolution for third girls when she grew up. After it was over, the Flannerys of the world would have to go trick-or-treating as Cupid for the rest of their lives.

For now, Kate was the one stuck with finding a bow and arrow. Her dad would probably know how to get archery supplies, but lately it was hard to get a word in edgewise between his yelling and his napping.

Kate grabbed her basketball and dribbled it to Marylin’s house. She hoped Flannery wouldn’t be there. In fact Kate had begun to secretly hope that Flannery’s family would move away soon, even though they’d moved to the neighborhood in August and it was only October now.

It had taken just two months for Flannery to completely disrupt Kate’s life. Before Flannery had showed up, Kate and Marylin
had been best friends, no questions asked. Now Flannery kept edging her way in, inviting Marylin over to her house without asking Kate, making up secret codes for her and Marylin to write notes in. Kate couldn’t figure out why a seventh grader would hang out so much with sixth graders, except to boss them around. Well, she had to admit, you didn’t get much bossier than Flannery.

Frankly it was starting to get on Kate’s nerves.

Maybe the army would give Flannery’s stepdad a promotion and send them overseas,
Kate thought as she walked up to Marylin’s front door. Then Kate and Marylin could go trick-or-treating as a pair of hearts.

Marylin was sitting in front of the television set with a bowl of popcorn perched on her stomach.

“How’s your heart coming along?” Kate asked, sitting down on her basketball and rolling herself toward the TV.

“It’s ruining my entire weekend,” Marylin said. “My mom’s been working on it all morning, and every fifteen minutes she calls me to try on what she’s sewed so far.”

“I bet it looks great.”

Marylin grimaced. “Right now it looks like a fat, red pincushion. I’m beginning to wish we’d done your idea.”

Kate rolled off her basketball and plopped onto the floor. “We still could, if you really wanted to.”

“Flannery thinks it’s dumb,” Marylin said, as if that settled the matter.

“So what?” Kate asked. “Two against one. We live in a democracy, remember?”

Marylin seemed to consider this. She stared thoughtfully into her bowl of popcorn and twirled a strand of hair around her finger.

“Flannery’s not our boss, you know,” Kate said. “We don’t have to do everything just because she says so.”

Marylin gave Kate a long look and shook her head. “We better go as a valentine,” she said. “Petey says you can borrow his bow and arrow if you want.”

“Marylin, come try this on!” Marylin’s mother called from upstairs.

“Back to the drawing board,” Marylin said, standing.

Kate dribbled her basketball back down the street.
Some democracy,
she thought, the ball hitting her foot and careening off of it. Two cardinals startled from the branches of a pine tree, and Kate watched them fly away before running after the basketball, which was headed straight for Mrs. Larch’s rose trellis. Mrs. Larch was the sort of person who would call your mom if your basketball knocked over her trellis. She was a very touchy woman.

Kate had just managed to outrun the basketball and scoop it up when the ambulance lights began flashing in her driveway. Then the
ambulance backed out onto the street and headed toward her.
was written in big block letters above its bumper.

It must have pulled into the wrong driveway, Kate told herself. They should really give those ambulance drivers better directions.

“Kate! Katie! Come quick! Something terrible!” Tracie stood on their front porch waving frantically in Kate’s direction.

What the heck’s wrong with her?
Kate thought. And then she dropped her basketball in Mrs. Larch’s yard and ran so fast, she thought her heart would explode.

The hospital was filled with pinging noises. There was the ping of the elevator as it stopped on the third floor, and pings that came from behind the high counter of the nurses’ station, and the pings pinging on the machine next to Mr. Faber’s bed. The machine and Kate’s dad were connected by
a tangle of wires. Kate was scared to get too close to her dad. She was the sort of person who would trip and cause all the wires to come unattached from her dad’s chest. She thought those wires might be what were keeping him alive.

“I’m fine, really I am,” Kate’s dad was saying to Tracie, who was standing next to his bed and crying so hard, her eyelids had swollen into cherry tomato–size pink puffs. “The doctor says that as far as heart attacks go, mine really wasn’t that bad. It was more like a protest than an attack. Honestly, sweetie, there’s no reason to cry.”