Gabrielle's Bully (Young Adult Romance) (10 page)

“Well, Gabrielle, it looks like this is it,” he said.

“I guess so. Heath, I’d ask you to come in for a minute, but my father would only give you the third degree, and anyway it’s late. You’d better be going.”

“I quite agree that your father and I have seen enough of each other for a while,” Heath said dryly. I smiled to myself. He sounded so adult sometimes, in the way he talked, the words he chose. It was easy to see that he hadn’t been exposed much to the easy informality of a public high school. But that difference that others might find unusual was only one of the things I loved about him. Carbon copies of Jeff and Mike and the other guys were thick on the ground. Heath was unique.

We walked slowly up the path to the door, trying to prolong it as much as possible. When we reached the porch, I looked up at him, waiting for him to kiss me. Instead he pulled me against his chest in a tight, warm hug, his arms close and secure about me. I closed my eyes and pressed my face into his shoulder, the rough cloth of his coat tickling my skin.

“Good night, Gaby,” he said, above my head. I felt his lips brush my temple as he turned away, and then he was running down the steps to his car. I let myself in as he was pulling away.

I found my mother in the kitchen, sitting at the table, reading the mythology book Heath had given me. I could hear Craig and my father in the den. Craig was allowed to stay up as late as he wanted on Saturday night, but he usually gave up and crashed in bed at ten or ten-thirty. This was a late night for him.

“Ah, back I see,” my mother greeted me. “Want some hot chocolate?”

That sounded good, so I put the water on to boil for the instant kind. “See if your father wants any,” my mother added.

My father and Craig were playing chess, which explained Craig’s alertness at this hour. It would be more accurate to say that my father was playing chess and Craig was irritating him; Craig’s grasp of the game wasn’t too good and they usually spent most of their time wrangling over Craig’s mistakes. Nothing had changed. When I entered the room my father was wearing that look of exaggerated patience that meant he was correcting one of Craig’s strategy errors in martyr like fashion, trying to keep his cool while explaining the same thing for the tenth time. I could never understand why Craig kept at it. He didn’t seem to mind the constant rehashing of his moves, which I knew would have driven me up a wall.

They both declined a drink, and when I returned to the kitchen my mother commented, “This book is very interesting. It isn’t yours, is it?”

“It’s Heath’s.”

“Oh, I see.” She extended the book to me. “There’s a page turned down at the corner.”

I took it from her and opened the book to the folded page. At the bottom was the illustration of Hippolyta that Heath had mentioned. She was pictured wearing a hip length tunic with one shoulder exposed, barefoot, with a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows slung on her back. The figure was slim, reedy, but graceful, with a gold belt clasped around her narrow waist, and gold bracelets on her wrists and upper arms. Her hair was my color, abundant, falling in loose waves about her face.

I stared at the picture, absorbed. Did I really look like this to Heath?

I handed the book back to my mother. “Look at the illustration at the bottom of the page,” I said. “Heath thinks she looks like me, or I look like her, whichever.”

My mother got up to turn off the whistling kettle, and sat again with the book in her hands. I got the cups and made the chocolate.

“Why, yes,” she said, “I do see the resemblance.” She took a mug from me and watched me as I sat across from her at the table. “He’s a fanciful boy, isn’t he?”

“Fanciful?” I asked, not sure of what she meant.

“Given to flights of imagination, romantic ideas,” she clarified.

I thought of Heath’s dreamy expression as he talked about the snow story, and the look on his face after I recited Frost’s poem. “Yes, I guess he is.”

“Lonely, too, I think,” she added.

I looked my mother in the eye. “Not anymore,” I said meaningfully.

She sipped her drink thoughtfully, not saying anything for a few moments, and then cautioned, “Be careful, Gaby. Don’t take this boy up like a cause. You can’t be mother and father, sister and brother to him all at once. You can’t wipe out the hurt he’s suffered in the past or shield him from any that’s coming in the future.”

I looked at her, speechless. It was more apparent every day that nothing much got past my mother.

She read my expression and laughed wearily. “Oh, you kids amaze me. You think when something happens to you that it’s the first time it has ever happened to anyone in the entire world.”

“You knew someone like Heath?”

She nodded slowly, her eyes unseeing, focused on the past. “Yes, a long time ago, before I met your father.”

I thought that over. The concept of my mother with a life apart from my father’s was always strange to me, though I knew that she had met him at college and had lived almost twenty years before she ever saw him.

“What happened to him?”

She blinked and came back to the present. “Oh, he went into the army and was killed in the war.”

“What war?”

She drained her cup and set it down with a clink. “Does it matter?” she said with a faint trace of bitterness. “There’s always a war.”

“Did you love him?”

“Very much,” she said softly.

“But you love daddy now,” I said anxiously, not wanting to think of my father as second runner-up for her affections.

She glanced at me, and smiled. “Of course I love your daddy now. Life goes on, things change, and there are many different types of love.” She stood and shook out her skirt, as if to dismiss the past with the motion. “Would you like to see a picture of him?”

I nodded silently, afraid to say anything to disturb her reminiscent mood. She hardly ever talked about her girlhood, maybe because it was too painful. I couldn’t believe she was telling me this, even now, but I knew it was because she felt I had reached some sort of turning point and was old enough, or mature enough, to hear about it.

She went to the living room, to the cherry desk in the corner, and returned with a carefully preserved photograph in a wooden frame. It was a portrait study, like a shot taken for a high school yearbook, of a boy about eighteen or nineteen. He had wavy dark hair and a full mouth, and clear, direct eyes.

I sat with it in my hand, staring at it, thinking that my mother had once loved this boy, as I loved Heath now.

“What was his name?” I asked.

“Craig,” my mother said. “His name was Craig.”

My eyes flashed to her face.

“It was Daddy’s idea to name your brother after him,” she said. “He was your father’s friend.”

I handed the picture back to her. There was nothing to say.

She looked at the photo for a moment, and then returned it to the drawer. When she came back she said, “It’s funny how he’s always that age in my mind, because that’s how I remember him. We’ve all gone on to grow older, but he will always be nineteen.” She brushed her hand across her eyes. “You never forget the first one, Gaby. You never do.”

I was sure that I never would.

We put the cups in the sink and went upstairs to bed, leaving Craig and my father to tear up the chessboard in the den.

Once in my room, I undressed and put on my pajamas, but I couldn’t settle down to sleep. I roamed restlessly about the room, staring out the window at the cloudy night sky, picking things up from my dresser and then putting them back down in the same place. I knew what was bothering me. It was crazy, but I needed to be reassured that Heath was all right, not dead and lost forever like my mother’s Craig.

No matter how hard I tried to put the notion out of my mind, it would not go away. Finally I put on my terry bathrobe and tiptoed out to the hall.

My mother’s door was closed, and no light showed under it. From downstairs I could hear the low voices from the den. They were still at it.

I had memorized Heath’s home telephone number, and before I could talk myself out of it I punched the numbers quickly, praying that Heath would answer the phone.

Roger answered the phone, his voice foggy with sleep.

“This is Gabrielle Dexter,” I said in a low, shaky tone. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I wonder if I could talk to Heath.”

There was a long pause, during which I pictured Roger yawning and staring at the receiver, and then he said smoothly, “Please hold, Miss Dexter. I will tell Mr. Lindsay.”

An eternity later Heath came on the line, his voice concerned. “Gaby? Are you okay? Is anything wrong?”

I closed my eyes in relief. “No. Everything’s fine. I just needed to talk to you.”

He sounded amused, as he realized that I was all right. “You just were talking to me. Did something happen?”

“In a way.”

“What?”

“My mother said something that got me worried, that’s all.”

His breathy chuckle came over the line. “Gabrielle, you’re not making much sense.”

“I know,” I said unhappily.

His tone changed when he heard mine. “Hey. Don’t worry about it. You don’t need an excuse to call me. Are you feeling better now?”

“Much.”

“I’m glad.” He hesitated, and then said, “So what’s new?”

I started to laugh, and he joined in on the other end. “You must think I’m out of my mind,” I said.

“Not at all.”

“Well, Roger does. I don’t think he’s used to demented phone calls from teenage girls in the middle of the night.”

“You’re not demented, and it’s not the middle of the night. Believe me, with my family Roger’s experienced it all. He’ll get over it, I promise you.”

“I’ll let you go so you can get some sleep,” I said.

“Okay. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You couldn’t possibly bother me. Now get off the phone and go to bed before your father catches you.”

That galvanized me into action. “Good night.”

“Good night, Gaby.” He paused. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He’d said what I most wanted to hear. I hung up happily, and was asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

Chapter 6

Barbara and I had our first basketball game that Wednesday. It was away, and we spent the bus trip there and back dissecting my relationship with Heath and her relationship with Mike.

It added a new dimension to our friendship to be able to discuss boys, not in the abstract, as was always the case with me before Heath, but in reality, since I was now dating someone too. Barbara wanted Heath and me to go on a double date with her and Mike, but I wasn’t sure that was such a great idea, for several reasons. The most important was that I wanted to keep Heath to myself and not have to share him with anybody. The second was that Mike was a friend of Jeff’s, and I didn’t want to cause friction again. And the last was that I had my doubts about Mike’s ability to understand Heath and accept him for what he was. Mike seemed to be a nice enough guy, but he was definitely a macho man, not overly bright, and winning the big game was the driving force in his life. I could just picture his reaction if Heath started talking about stories with people imagining snow in the living room. I didn’t mind Heath’s whimsies, to me they were part of his charm, but they would certainly be over Mike’s head.

The more I thought about it, though, I realized that I wasn’t giving Heath enough credit. I began to observe him closely when he was around the other guys, and I saw that he said almost nothing. In short, he knew when to keep his mouth shut. I had thought that after a while he would begin to relax, as he had with me, and talk more freely, but it didn’t happen. He continued to be a stranger in a strange land.

This state of affairs continued until the boys’ first varsity game, which was held at home on a Saturday afternoon. I could tell that Heath was nervous about it.
 
I saw him the night before the game and he was exceedingly quiet, a sure indication of his preoccupation.

My parents had gone to a dinner and had given permission for Heath to visit since I was staying with Craig, and they trusted his abilities as a chaperone. He took this job very seriously, sitting in the room with us and peering into our faces, asking for an explanation of every comment either one of us made. After about ten minutes I was ready to tie him to a tree.

“Craig, why don’t you go downstairs and work on your models?” I suggested.

“Nah, I need a new kit and the glue is all dried up for the one I have.”

“Well, don’t you have some homework?” I asked, trying again.

“It’s Friday night, Gaby,” Craig said disgustedly. “I have the whole weekend.”

No, he didn’t, because I was going to kill him tonight as soon as Heath left.

Craig turned to Heath and said, puzzled, “Your name is Heath?”

“That’s right.”

“What kind of a name is Heath? Sounds sorta dumb to me.”

Oh, ho, bang, zoom. Right to the moon. “Craig,” I said in a dangerously sweet voice, “you’re being rude. I don’t think you’ll want me to give Dad a bad report when he gets home.”