Holly in Love (14 page)

I pictured Monday.

There would be a lot of moments when, if Jamie and I were together, the entire school would trespass on us. Just getting to school. The whole bus. And homeroom. Hope and Stein and Zaweicki and the rest. Lunch. Especially lunch. Nobody in the history of our school has stepped over the invisible lines dividing one class from another in that cafeteria.

If I went to sit with Jamie and the juniors, I’d be a total alien, with not one word to say to them, and not one word for them to say to me. They’d tease Jamie unmercifully, and once we’d started it we’d have to keep it up or endure another whole subject of teasing.

If Jamie sat with me—well, he couldn’t. There was no extra chair at my usual table. As for taking another table, the cafeteria was so crowded! I’d be shoving out people who usually sat there, and they’d have to displace other people, and every single person in the cafeteria would be aware of, and irritated by, Jamie Winter and Holly Carroll for disrupting things.

Which meant eating in the hall. Propping ourselves up against the walls by the vending machines. Facing all
that
traffic. Being twice as awkward because now we couldn’t even sit down to eat.

Or we could just ignore each other during lunch.

But the teasers, the Lydias and the junior boys—they wouldn’t ignore it.

I sighed.

“We ought to get it over with,” said Jamie.

“Declare ourselves?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him. Last year he’d been nothing. A little pesky jerk of a sophomore, tall but mentally shrimpy, like my rotten little brother Christopher. This year he was everything. I said, “I can if you can.”

“Such enthusiasm.”

“It’ll be awful. A hundred people having their say. Being part of us. Saying things and thinking things and implying things.”

Jamie shrugged. “You want to pretend we don’t know each other, that’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. We both knew it.

“No,” I said firmly. “We’ll do it. Eventually they’ll get bored and tease somebody else. Or, at the very least, summer will finally come and we won’t have a cafeteria to contend with.”

Jamie drove with one hand and held mine briefly. Then ice appeared, and he had to grip the wheel again. We lost traction for a moment and I held my breath, but we came out fine, without the slightest slipping on the ice.

Jamie muttered vile things about winter and how he hated it. But it wasn’t really winter that was our problem right now. Oh, well, I thought. There’s a whole two days of weekend ahead. By Monday I’ll be so cemented to Jamie that nobody else’s opinion will matter. I won’t even hear Lydia, or see Kate, or notice Zaweicki.

Believe it.

T
HERE IS NO REST
for the worried.

Saturday morning I woke up remembering the festival executive meeting. At ten
A.M.
we were meeting at the high school to produce whatever each of us had accomplished. We had to set up schedules, arrange advertising, be sure of ticket printing, decide on the cash and change needed at each booth, that sort of stuff.

Jamie’s father needed the car. I told Jamie I would pick him up instead, and he said fine. Christopher put up a good fight to get our car, but my mother said that I had a better reason.

“Meaning Jamie?” said Christopher in great scorn. “Jamie’s a wimp, not a reason.”

“Shut up,” I said, getting ready to crush a box of Rice Krispies in his face.

“You got any idea what kind of teasing I have to go through?” yelled Christopher. “You can’t go out with Stein. No. You can’t date a guy a guy could be proud of. Forget Stein. You have to date Jamie. A dumb
junior
. Who’s just as weird as you are.”

I threw the cereal at him, and Rice Krispies covered the kitchen floor.

“Defending your man with sugar cereal,” said Christopher. “It suits. You two probably sit in some hot little corner somewhere talking about—”

My father said, “What are you, Christopher? Three years old? Four? Stop this. Holly, sweep the floor. Christopher, apologize.”

“For what?” said Christopher sullenly. “She goes and embarrasses me all over the school and it’s my fault?”

So I was not in the best of moods when I drove to Jamie’s. It didn’t help one little bit that he didn’t come out to the car and I had to go ring the bell to get him. “Hello, Mr. Winter,” I said, struggling to be cheerful. “Is Jamie ready?”

Mr. Winter just stared at me. “He’s getting picked up by a girl?” said Jamie’s father, as if he hadn’t known women could vote, let alone drive.

“Yes, sir. I’m Holly Carroll, remember me from church? How are you, Mr. Winter?” I was determined to be courteous.

“Come on in. He isn’t ready. Doing something for his mother.”

We went into the living room, and Mr. Winter sat down and looked at me. I perched on the edge of the sofa and prayed for Jamie to finish his chores in ten seconds or less.

“So, how old are you these days, Holly?” said Mr. Winter. “Eighteen? Something like that?”

“Seventeen,” I said.

“Must be a senior, huh? You go to that movie with Jamie last night?”

“Yes. It was very interesting. I’d never seen a silent movie before.”

“At least he took you to the movies. I thought he’d probably want to show off his tractor.”

Mr. Winter had a mean look in his eyes, like my eight-grade science teacher, who liked to spear people with his sarcasm. I said, “I’d like to see the tractor sometime, too.”

“Jamie’s still doing the stuff he did when he was a little boy,” said Mr. Winter. “Hasn’t grown up much. Toys. Steam engines. Makes you feel old, doesn’t it, Holly?” He laughed.

Sometimes I got irritated with my father, what with his preaching and praying and hangups about labels on jeans and so forth, but my father would never,
never
ridicule me in front of my friends. Or in private, either. I shivered with anger at Jamie’s father. He couldn’t seem to get off the topic of Jamie. With each sentence he got more and more unpleasant.

Jamie came into the room behind his father. I could actually see the anger in him. Jamie had to look away and calm himself with a deep, slow breath. His mother actually moved between her son and her husband, as though they required her presence to prevent them from coming to blows.

“Let’s get going,” I said to Jamie, mustering a smile. “We’re going to be late.”

“Sounds just like your mother,” observed Mr. Winter, making that sound like a criminal offense.

Jamie pulled on his gloves so roughly he might have been getting ready for a fight in the ring. I wanted to tell Mr. Winter what a creepy, crawly excuse for a human being he was, but instead I said, trying to be a peacemaker like my mother—like all mothers, I thought, glancing at Mrs. Winter—“Nice to talk to you, Mr. Winter,” and got Jamie out the door ahead of me.

We got into the car, and I could feel Jamie hating that it was my car, that I was driving, and he had had to be picked up, and I had this prickle of fear that one year between our ages really
could
ruin things. I said, “You want to drive?”

He looked at me with flat, hooded eyes. “No.”

That was the wrong thing to say, I thought. It won’t help one bit to pretend that I’m the one who’s younger and he’s the one who’s older. We are what we are, and we’ll have to deal with what other people think of that, too. Jamie’s right. It’s my car, so I drive.

We didn’t speak again.

When we walked into the meeting we were together and we were friends, but he was still rigid with his tension and I with mine.

Elsa danced over, as lovely and spritelike as ever. “Hi, Jamie!” she cried.

Jamie smiled at her. “Hi, Elsa,” he said courteously. He took my hand and we sat down in the back, behind a row of seniors. They turned and looked at us, and we looked back at them and I smiled and said hello and everybody made a real point of looking hard at Jamie, and our hands, and
then
saying hello.

I hated them.

I hated them all.

It was nothing but time, nothing but months, nothing but age. It had nothing to do with whether Jamie was a terrific person or I was an interesting girl. It was stupid and pointless, and I hated them for it.

I have to get past this, I thought, drowning in loathing for the entire room, for Jamie’s family, for Christopher. I can’t go on feeling so full of anger toward people. I’ll turn to acid.

And then I remembered that I was not in this alone. I was in it with—and because of—Jamie.

I looked over at him. Stupid, worthless Mr. Hastings was babbling on about the need to keep proper records of all cash transactions (as if we were all planning to keep improper records), and I held Jamie’s hand and smiled at him and he looked back at me and immediately we both relaxed. I felt pleasure welling up in me again. The hatred was gone. The other kids were annoying, that was all. Kate turned around to ask something about my booth and I liked her again: she was still my best friend and somehow she would get used to Jamie and Jamie would get used to her.

Our hands lay soft on each other, his larger than mine, rougher, with blackened marks on the pads of his fingers where he had not quite gotten off all the grease from the last time he’d worked on his steam engines.

The meeting ended, and people drifted out. Several people made remarks or looked askance at us, but it didn’t bother me terribly. I hoped Jamie felt the same way. We found ourselves walking automatically toward the Pewter Pot, for food and privacy. Remarkable how much privacy there can be in a place jammed with strangers.

“Is your father always like that?” I said.

He shrugged. “If you think he was hard on you, or me, you should hear him lace into my mother. A few years ago I even talked to your father about it.”

So that was it.

“Your father’s a pretty decent person, you know,” said Jamie. He was sort of shy about saying it, as if my father might be my private property and I might not want Jamie having any of him. “I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask, anyhow.”

“Ask what?” I said.

“Basically, why Mom didn’t just leave my father. I mean, why on earth would she want to stay and put up with that? All the time jeering and taunting. I didn’t want to stay with him, see. I wanted to leave, and that meant she had to leave, too. And you know what your father said?”

“No.” I tried to picture them. Jamie telling my father how rotten his family was; my father answering.

“He said never to overlook the possibility that my mother really loves my father. Meanness and all.” Jamie shook his head.

“You’ll be out of it in a year and a half,” I said.

“No. You never really get out of it. It’s my family. He’ll always be my father and she’ll always be my mother, and he’ll always be cruel and she’ll always take it.”

Jamie had not turned out in the least like either of them. “You survive awfully well,” I said. I remembered that indeed that was just how he had answered my father.
I’m surviving
. “I sure am glad I don’t have any problems like that.”

“If you ask me, Christopher could be as bad to live with as my dad.”

I laughed. “How come you two don’t like each other?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to stand him.”

“He’s improved in the last few years,” I said, offering a defense.

“Not measurably.”

I laughed again. “In years past, I just steered around old Christopher, and I guess I can get back into it. But really, I think he’ll get used to us and just ignore us.”

“At home, maybe,” said Jamie. “You should hear him in math.”

“To you?”

“To the class. About me.”

“Perhaps we could murder him,” I suggested.

Jamie grinned. “A fine example of sisterly feeling.”

“My familial love comes and goes.”

All of a sudden we were kissing across the table. The waitress said, “I like smooching, too, kids, but we don’t rent the table for that. You gonna order or you gonna leave?”

“We gonna order,” said Jamie, and we laughed, and wrapped our ankles around each other’s, hugging our feet, and ordered.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in six weeks I rode the bus to school Monday morning. There were so many congratulations and jokes to be made on the ankle that bent normally and the ragged cast that was finally off that hardly anyone even noticed Jamie grinning at me through the crush. But when we got on the bus, Kate headed for our usual seat. “Gosh, I’m glad you’re back on the bus,” she said. “I hated sitting alone. Come look at my new list of lipstick names. I’ve had some super-beautiful ideas.”

She was sliding over into her seat at the same moment that Jamie, one row back, was sliding into his. I literally didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, staring helplessly at the two vacant seats.

“Siddown!” yelled the driver. “I can’t drive with you kids standing up. Now siddown!”

I sat down. With Jamie. “Kate?” I whispered through the seats. “Kate, can I look at your lipstick list during English?”

Kate stared at me. Emotions fluttered over her face like little birds. I could see her thinking,
Jamie’s that serious! And I didn’t know. My best friend didn’t share that with me. She’d rather sit with him than with me. Jamie!
Kate swallowed and said, “Sure, Holl.” She turned around and sat very still, facing the front of the bus, ignoring us.

Jamie said, “You could ride backward and show it to us both now. I still feel hurt that you don’t want to use my suggestions.”

“What suggestions?” said Kate, her back to us.

“Isopropyl Lanolate was one,” said Jamie.

Kate giggled. “Don’t you remember I told you that lacks rhythm, Jamie? You have to think of things like Bronzeberry Glacier, or Snow and Honey. Or Maple Syrup Icicle.”

“Get your homemade Vermont Farm Lipsticks here,” said Jamie.

Kate turned around now and frowned at us over the seat top. “What’s the matter? You don’t think those names are sophisticated enough?”

“Just Maple Syrup Icicle,” I said. “That one doesn’t fly.”

We talked lipstick names all the way to school, with Kate twisted up in the seat to talk backward to us. We got off the bus together, and Hope and Grey pulled up behind us and began their usual passionate departure for the day. I tried to get indoors before Hope saw me with Jamie, but I failed. “Why, Holly Carroll,” said Hope, as if I were the last person she would expect to find in high school. “And Jamie.” As if Jamie were my little boy with the runny nose.