The Secret Language of Girls (4 page)

Kate did not cry. A whole gang of tears had gathered behind her eyeballs, but they weren’t budging. Kate wished she could cry, just so her dad wouldn’t think Tracie loved him more than she did. It seemed to be a law in her life that she cried only when she didn’t want to, like last week when Robbie
Ballard had called her “Kate, Kate, the Big Fat Primate” during a game of red rover.

“Maybe we should let your dad rest, girls,” Kate’s mom said from the doorway. Marylin’s mom, Mrs. McIntosh, stood behind her. Mrs. McIntosh had driven Tracie and Kate to the hospital. She still had a few sewing pins stuck in the sleeve of her blouse. Kate wondered if she had finished making Marylin’s heart.

“It’s the stress that caused it,” Kate’s mom told Mrs. McIntosh in the hospital cafeteria later. “Stress and not enough exercise. And his family has a history of heart problems. Thank God he doesn’t smoke.”

Kate swirled her straw around the bottom of her milk-shake cup. Then she sucked on it as hard as she could, pulling up the last few drops of chocolate shake and making a noise like a really small person burping.

“Gross!” Tracie exclaimed. “How can you
make noises like that when Daddy’s just had a heart attack?”

Kate shrugged. She didn’t see how the two things were connected. What did burping noises have to do with heart attacks? If she drank her shake as quietly as she could, would her dad’s heart perk up and beat good as new? If she pulled on her straw really hard so that her milk-shake cup caved in, would the machine her dad was hooked up to start pinging so loudly it would sound like a marching band?

Mrs. McIntosh looked at her watch. “Why don’t we go upstairs and say good-bye to your dad,” she said to Tracie and Kate. “And then we’ll go back to my house and order a pizza.”

Kate’s mom sighed. “Mel always liked sausage on his pizza. I guess those days are over.”

The tears that had been hiding behind Kate’s eyeballs began to trickle down her
cheeks. Her dad would probably never get to eat another sausage pizza in his life. For some reason, that seemed like the saddest thing Kate had ever heard.

By the time Kate got to school on Monday, everyone in her class knew about her dad’s heart attack. She was late because her mom had taken her and Tracie to see their dad in the hospital first thing that morning. The pinging machine and its tangle of wires had been pushed into a corner. Kate’s dad was sitting up in his bed eating a low-fat corn muffin when his family came in. On the TV mounted on the wall across from his bed, an interviewer was talking to people who were over a hundred years old.

“That will be me in sixty years,” Kate’s dad had said cheerfully, pointing to a hundred-and-one-year-old man on the screen who was chopping wood in his backyard.

In sixty years Kate would be seventy-one. She scrunched up her face and looked in the mirror next to the TV, trying to imagine what she would look like then.

“Are you getting sick?” her mom asked her.

“Nope,” Kate said. “Just old.”

When Kate walked into her classroom, everyone was busy working on their solar-system projects. As soon as they saw her, all the kids in her class stared at Kate as though she were a famous celebrity who had come to visit them. Ms. Cahill came over to Kate as she was taking Pluto and Saturn out of her cubbyhole and patted her on the shoulder.

“You’re a very brave girl,” Ms. Cahill told Kate.

Kate didn’t feel brave. Mostly she just felt like herself, except maybe a little more important. After all, it wasn’t every day a person’s dad had a heart attack and then made a spectacular
recovery. That’s what the doctor who had stopped by her dad’s room that morning had said. A spectacular recovery.

At morning break, a cluster of kids gathered around Kate and asked her about her dad’s heart attack. She told them about seeing the ambulance in her driveway, and how, as the ambulance had passed her on the street, she had seen her dad’s hand wave weakly at her from the window. Her dad hadn’t really waved, but Kate thought it added a nice dramatic touch to her story. She leaned back against the jungle gym and threw out a bunch of big words like
cardialgia
and
coronary thrombosis.
Everyone looked impressed.

“So I guess this means you’re not going trick-or-treating,” Flannery said.

Leave it to Flannery to ruin a perfectly good discussion,
Kate thought. The kids who had been standing around the jungle gym listening to her trickled off to watch the seventh graders
play soccer. Now it was just Kate, Flannery, and Marylin.

“That was really good pizza we had at your house Saturday,” Kate told Marylin, ignoring Flannery.

Flannery rolled her eyes. “I know you spent Saturday night at Marylin’s house, okay? It’s only because your dad had a heart attack, so don’t try to make me jealous.”

Kate shrugged. Who said anything about trying to make anyone jealous?

“So, are you going trick-or-treating or not?” Flannery demanded.

“Of course I am,” Kate said. “My dad’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow. Why wouldn’t I go trick-or-treating?”

Flannery rolled her eyes again. She was the queen of eyeball rolling. “Well, Marylin’s having dinner at my house, so just meet us there at six.” Then she turned to Marylin. “Come on. I need to show you something.”

Kate watched Flannery and Marylin walk toward the school building. She wondered if there was someone in the army she could call to get Flannery’s stepdad transferred.
I hear they need soldiers in Istanbul,
she could say.
And there are a few openings in upper east Romania. At least that’s what I read in the paper.

The idea came to Kate forty-five minutes before she was supposed to meet Marylin and Flannery to go trick-or-treating. She had been sitting on her bed in her leotard and tights trying to figure out what someone dressing up as Cupid was supposed to do with her hair. Kate’s hair was brown and straight, and it hung exactly one and a half inches below her ears. It was not Cupid hair—she knew that much. Cupids had short, blond, curly hair like Marcie Grossman’s in Kate’s reading group.

“I just don’t feel like a Cupid,” she told
Max, who was lying at the foot of her bed. She could tell from Max’s expression that he didn’t think she looked like a Cupid either.

Kate looked around her room. She was searching for inspiration. When she saw her red T-shirt, the original red T-shirt that had given her the idea she and Flannery and Marylin should go trick-or-treating as the Three of Hearts, a brand-new idea came into her head. Kate smiled.

A huge, grimacing jack-o’-lantern was perched on the steps outside Flannery’s house when Kate got there. She thought it looked a lot like Flannery. Before she rang the doorbell, Kate pulled her coat tighter around herself. The night air was cold, but it smelled good, like leaves and dirt and candles. Wearing the coat had been her dad’s idea. You’ll catch pneumonia without your coat, he had told her. We’ve had enough medical emergencies in our family
this week. Then he had hugged her and offered a bite of his low-fat granola bar.

Flannery answered the door. She was dressed in her heart costume. Only she looked more like a tomato than a heart. Marylin stood behind her. Her heart was better, even if it was a little lopsided.
I bet that’s what my dad’s heart looked like after his attack,
Kate thought, looking at Marylin.

“Where’s your bow and arrow?” Flannery asked.

“I didn’t bring them,” Kate said. “I decided not to be Cupid.”

“So what are you going as?” Flannery wanted to know. “A coat?”

Flannery’s mom walked out from the kitchen with a camera. “Let me take a picture of you guys!” she said. “Kate, how’s your dad?”

“He’s great,” Kate said. “He doesn’t have to go back to work for three weeks, so he’s in a very good mood.”

“Wonderful!” Flannery’s mom exclaimed. “Okay, Kate, take off your coat so I can get a picture.”

Before Kate took off her coat, she pulled a diamond tiara from the pocket. She had gotten it from Tracie, who had worn it two years before, trick-or-treating as Glenda the Good Witch of the North. Kate didn’t think the diamonds were real, but she was very careful with the tiara just the same.

“I don’t think Cupid wears a crown,” Flannery said. “You have pretty strange ideas about how Cupid should look.”

“I told you, I’m not going as Cupid,” Kate said, putting the tiara on her head. Then she took off her coat. She was wearing red tights and her red T-shirt, which hung down below her knees. She had drawn a heart with a queen in the middle of it.

“What are you, Kate?” Marylin asked. “A princess?”

Kate smiled. “I am the Queen of Hearts.”

“How adorable!” Flannery’s mom said.

Flannery rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t the plan. You’re supposed to be Cupid.”

“Sometimes things do not go as planned,” Kate told Flannery.

“That’s very true,” Flannery’s mom said. “Okay! Picture time!”

Flannery’s mom ushered Kate, Marylin, and Flannery out to the front steps so she could take their picture by the jack-o’-lantern.

“You stand in the middle, Kate,” she said. “The queen should always stand in the middle.”

Kate edged in between Marylin and Flannery. Then she put an arm around each of their shoulders and squeezed everyone together. She was the Queen of Hearts, after all. Sometimes holding everyone together was just her job.

On the second Wednesday in November Marylin woke up with a stomachache. She always woke up with a stomachache the week before she had a party. Stomachaches were her body’s way of reminding Marylin that having a party was a good way to ruin her life.

If it had been up to Marylin, the party would have been at Kate’s house. Unfortunately Kate’s mom had a law against having sleepovers. Last year, when six girls had stayed over, three of them woke up at 4:00
A.M.
with the flu and spent the rest of the night throwing up.
After that it wasn’t safe to say the word “sleepover” around Mrs. Faber.

So now Marylin had four hundred things to worry about. Even though Marylin and Kate were planning the party together, Marylin would be the one responsible if Brittany Lamb and Elyse Cassill got in a pillow fight and kept clobbering each other until Elyse got a headache and started to cry. It would be her fault if Ashley Greer spilled juice on the couch and ruined the upholstery. “Why do you let these things happen?” Marylin’s mom would ask her, as if Marylin were boss of the universe and could make everyone behave perfectly all the time.