What Would Emma Do? (3 page)

Joann sat down with her tray and yanked up her knee-highs. As long as I’ve known Joann she’s had this bizarre problem with elastic in her socks. She’s the Bermuda Triangle of sock elastic. She can pull on a pair of new socks, and within ten minutes the socks will lie limp and saggy around her ankles. This wouldn’t be a tragic affliction except for the fact that we go to a school that has a uniform that includes plaid skirts and knee-highs. Joann pushed the sauerkraut to the far side of her tray with her fork and gave the ham slice a tentative poke.

“Do you want part of my sandwich?” I asked, holding out my lunch as a peace offering.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, no problem.” I tore my sandwich in half and gave her the larger piece. Joann took it and carefully parted the bread to check the contents before taking a bite. I’ve been known to like some odd combinations like mayo and dill pickle on rye. Of course, in Wheaton anything outside of bologna and mustard is considered odd.

“I didn’t know you got a dress already,” I said.

“Yeah. We went last weekend.”

“That’s cool.”

I waited to see if she would describe it, but she didn’t say a word. We sat in silence. I looked around. Colin was across the room at the jock table. He and a couple of other guys from the football team were laughing and pretending to hold each other up with a few sad-looking bananas filling in as guns. Suddenly I became aware that Joann was watching me. I knew she could tell I had been looking at Colin, and I felt as guilty as if I had been undressing him with my eyes instead of watching him act like a dork.

“Hey.”

Both Joann and I looked up to see Todd Seaver standing there. He had his hands jammed deep in his pants pockets. Todd is one of those kids who looks like he was created with a home Frankenstein kit. His legs are super-long, and he looks like he never knows what to do with his hands. His eyes are this amazing bright green, and then he has these thick eyebrows. His face has sharp lines, as if someone a bit dangerous drew him. He isn’t ugly and he isn’t hot, but he doesn’t look like he belongs together. My mother would say he needs to grow into his looks.

“Nice call with the king and queen thing,” Todd said. We stared at him. This was the most I’d heard from Todd ever in the entire time we’d gone to school together. I paused to see if he was going to say something deeply meaningful. You would think since he had been silent for so long he would have been saving up to say something profound, but it didn’t look like it.

“Thanks,” I said. We nodded at each other, apparently having run out of things to say. Our heads kept bopping up and down like we were listening to music.

“Cool, then.” Todd wandered off.

“This is your ally against Darci?” Joann asked.

“Darci and I aren’t at war.”

“You should tell her that. Haven’t you learned by now that any questioning of the status quo is a declaration of war?” Joann pulled up her socks again. “Making fun of Darci is one thing, but getting in her way is another.”

“I wasn’t trying to get in her way, I swear. I asked one little question about the dance.” I held my finger and thumb close together to show just how small a question.

“That dance is a sacred ritual as far as she’s concerned.”

“Once in a while someone has to stand up and point out if the status quo is full of it.”

“Your funeral. Are you going to the Barn tonight?”

“Maybe. Depends who goes. How about you?”

“I can’t, my parents are on the family night kick again.” We rolled our eyes in tandem. Family night was the idea of Reverend Evers, who decided the decline of civilization was due to the fact that parents didn’t play enough board games with their kids. Poverty, pestilence, rising greenhouse gases—all could be cured with a few rounds of Clue. Terrorism? Well then, it must have been Colonel Mustard in the library with a pipe bomb.

“Why do your parents want to do family night on a Friday? Can’t it be on a Tuesday or something?”

“My dad bowls on Tuesdays.” Joann shrugged. She isn’t the kind to cause a lot of trouble at home. She doesn’t even hang posters in her room, because her dad worries about holes in the wall or the tape ruining the paint. Even before the whole kissing Colin thing, I’m pretty sure her parents didn’t like me. I have bad influence written all over me as far as they’re concerned.

“You should come over,” Joann offered suddenly.

“For family night?”

“It will be fun.”

“Playing Candy Land will be fun? Your sister cheats.”

“She’s five.”

“Uh-huh. Make excuses for her if you want. This is how people start down the road to ruin, excuses and excuses.”

Joann gave me a shove. Her kid sister is, if possible, even better behaved than Joann. At five she already says please and thank you. I think I was still chewing on the furniture when I was her age.

“Well, if you don’t want to come over, you could rent a movie and just chill. I mean, you probably want to take it easy. You’ve got a track meet tomorrow.”

“Why the sudden concern over my social life?”

“I’m not concerned. You’re the one who’s all rabid about your track times this year and how that will determine the size of your scholarship.”

Joann started to tidy up her tray, folding the paper napkins into smaller and smaller pieces.

“Do you not want me to go out for some reason?” I asked.

“No.” Joann tossed her hair and looked out the window. She stood up and picked up her tray like she was ready to leave, and then sat back down. She was chewing on her lower lip. “Okay, yes. I don’t want you to go to the Barn.”

“Colin’s going, huh?”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, I’m just guessing that’s why you don’t want me to go.”

“I don’t like you guys hanging out.”

“We used to hang out all the time and it never bothered you.”

“That was before you kissed him.”

That pretty much killed the conversation. She was right. I balled up the trash and stuck it in my lunch bag.

“Don’t be mad,” she said.

“I’m not mad, but you have to know I would never do anything like that again. Ever.”

“I never thought you would do it in the first place.”

“I said I was sorry.” My voice came out tight. I was getting the idea that no matter how many times I said I was sorry, no matter how many ways I said I was sorry, it was never going to be better. I was always going to be the friend who kissed her boyfriend. God, I suck.

“If you want to go, go ahead,” Joann said suddenly.

“I don’t want to go.”

“No, seriously, I’m being an idiot. You should go.”

“I don’t want to. Hanging out in an empty barn? Boring.”

“It’ll be fun. It’s the first time anyone is going out there this year. You should go for both of us.”

“No, you were right; I’ve got track tomorrow.”

Joann opened her mouth to beg me to go again, and suddenly we both started to laugh. When I really get laughing, I snort, so the next thing you know I was snorting away, which just made Joann laugh more. The bell rang and we had to run to class, but she shot me a smile as we went into the room, and suddenly I had hope that it was going to work out. Then again, I’ve been wrong before.

5

God, I know that my mom used to be young. I’ve seen pictures of her at my age, so I know she wasn’t born a forty-year-old mom. So what happened that caused her to completely forget what it was like? It’s like she has teenage amnesia. Will it happen to me when I get old? Actually, come to think of it, there are plenty of things I wouldn’t mind forgetting ever happened.

My mom and I used to get along great. We liked the same foods: Italian, anything with cheese, chocolate, and toast done really toasty and bordering on burnt. We hated the same things: overripe bananas, reality TV shows, control top pantyhose, and country music. We liked doing the same things: running, watching old movies, and reading fashion magazines. I even look a lot like my mom; we have the same brown hair (boring middle brown—not chestnut, not nearly blond, but Crayola crayon brown), green eyes (best feature hands down), and whippet-thin bodies. I know it’s annoying when people say, “I can eat anything I want,” but I can. It doesn’t hurt that I run all the time, but my mom doesn’t run that much and she’s still thin. It may cut the envy to know I have no boobs whatsoever. Seriously, I am breast stunted. I have seen small male children with more of a bosom than I have. I have this theory that I was exposed to pesticides as a child. My mom used to let me run around on my grandparents’ farm even after they had the crops dusted. Clearly they used some kind of breast-inhibiting chemical. You hear about stuff like this all the time on
Dateline
. I guess I should consider myself lucky that I don’t have a third arm growing out of the middle of my forehead.

About a year ago, despite all we have in common, my mom and I started to get on each other’s nerves. She says I developed an attitude. I’m fairly sure it’s the same attitude I always had. If I had to guess, I’d say the problem is Wheaton. My mom loves this town. I hate it. My mom grew up in Wheaton and feels that moving away was
the biggest mistake of her life
. She thinks I have “rose-colored glasses” on when I talk about wanting to live in the city and that “the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.” After all, “Small towns have big hearts.” When my mom is upset, she talks in clichés. If you really want to tick her off, be sure to mention it. Because moving away didn’t go well for my mom (and if you ask me, it wasn’t moving away, it was making some tragically poor dating decisions), she’s convinced it won’t go well for me. Lately it feels like we’re speaking different languages and anything can turn into a fight.

“I wanted to ask you something,” my mom said, sitting down across from me on the sofa. She had on her serious mom face. Great. So much for my quiet, relaxing night before the track meet.

“Okay,” I said, sitting up and waiting to hear what new thing she’s discovered is wrong with my attitude.

“I found something in your room.”

“What were you doing in my room?” My voice came out high and a bit screechy. It’s not like I was hiding drugs or porn in there, but there was plenty of other stuff I would rather my mom didn’t get her hands on.

“Can you explain this?” My mom pulled out a calendar from behind her back like she was starring in an episode of
Law & Order
. I had made it at the beginning of the school year. It showed each month between the first day and graduation. Each day I crossed off with a big black Sharpie marker.

“It’s a calendar,” I offered taking a deep breath. Here I had been worried she had found the stuff I had hidden under the bed. The calendar was nothing. Maybe she thought I was using the paper to roll cigarettes or something. She gave a sigh.

“I do not understand your hatred for this town.”

“Whenever I try to explain it to you, you get mad.”

“I get mad because you’re building castles in the air and don’t have your feet on the ground.”

“Castles in the air?” I asked. Great, now she was starting to sound like the weird seventies ballads she loves. Soon she’d start talking about nights in white satin and horses named Wildfire.

“I know you’ve got your heart set on Northwestern. And I’m thrilled you got in—it’s quite an accomplishment—but we don’t have the money for out-of-state tuition. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars every year. Even if you get some assistance, I don’t see how we could afford it. I don’t want you to set your heart on something that isn’t going to happen.”

“That’s why I’m going to get a full-ride scholarship. You might have noticed I’ve been doing this running thing?”

“Attitude.”

I caught myself just before I rolled my eyes. I managed to look down instead without saying anything. If she knew the whole story, she would freak out. The only place I’d applied was Northwestern. I have a bunch of other college applications, all filled out, stuffed under my mattress. If finding the calendar freaked her out, I could only imagine how she would feel if she found those. I know it’s crazy to “put all my eggs in one basket,” as my mom would say, but applying to other places felt like cheating on Northwestern. It’s risky counting on them giving me a full ride for track, but it felt like I should take the risk, since I’m asking them to take a risk on me. Not to mention that I’ve been training like mad and plan to impress the hell out of them with my times. Somehow I knew my mom wouldn’t see the logic in this plan.

“You know most of your friends will go to the Purdue extension campus in Fort Wayne,” she hinted, as if that was a huge draw.

“If the rest of my friends jumped off a bridge, would you want me to?”

My mom’s eyes narrowed. Okay, that last part might have had a bit of attitude, but honestly, aren’t parents supposed to want you to reach for the stars? Isn’t it like cheating for them to encourage you to settle?

“I am not going to have this discussion with you,” she said.

“You were the one who sat down and said you wanted to talk with me. What’s the big deal? I don’t even know what you want from me anymore.”

“What I want is for you to stop making this town into the enemy.”

“I don’t think it’s the enemy, I think it’s boring. I think nothing happens here. I want to live someplace where everyone doesn’t know me. Where not everyone thinks they have a right to have an opinion on my life. I want to live someplace where there are restaurants that would never even consider having meat loaf on the menu. I want to live someplace where things happen.”

“Oh, things happen in the city, all right. You just assume everything that happens will be good and exciting. There’s something to be said for living someplace where people are concerned about you. Where you can count on someone looking out for you.”

“Looking out for me or sticking their nose in my business?”

“Is this about what happened between you and Colin?”

“Mom!” I buried my head in my hands and wished I had never told her what happened. Somehow the kiss controversy had stayed a secret, but it wouldn’t if my mom kept insisting on bringing it up.