Raising Hope (3 page)

I lower my voice and say, “Listen! Do you want to hear something funny that Mamie said to me today?” Mamie is Sara Lynn’s mother, who lives with us. She’s like my grandmother, except I’m not related to her by blood.

I clear my throat, pausing a little for dramatic effect. “She asked me if, since I was twelve years old, I had got ‘the curse’ yet.”

“The curse?” Ruth laughs, slapping her palm to her forehead. “She called it the curse?”

“At least she gave it a name.” Sara Lynn rolls her eyes. “When I was growing up, it wasn’t even mentioned.”

I’m getting that warm, satisfied feeling that comes over me when I’ve made Ruth and Sara Lynn laugh. I just laugh along with them, acting like it’s nothing but a big, fat joke. Little do they know how much I’m dying to get my period, how I keep checking my underpants every chance I get, just waiting to see blood.

“Hey, Ruth,” Jim McPherson calls from a counter stool. “Can I settle up with you here? I gotta get back to work.”

“I’m coming.” Ruth hauls herself out of the booth and hustles over to the counter. “Keep your pants on.”

Ruth is busy today. She rings the cash register for Mr. McPherson, telling him not to spend all his change in one place. Then she serves cherry pie to two police officers sitting at the booth closest to the door. When our food comes up, she brings it over. It seems she never gets a rest from wiping tables, taking orders, and bringing out food.

When we’re ready to leave, Ruth won’t take Sara Lynn’s money for lunch. It’s a little dance they do, where Sara Lynn puts down money to pay and Ruth ends up practically throwing it back at her.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Sara Lynn says as she shakes her head and puts her money back in her purse.

“I’ve always thought of you as the ridiculous one,” Ruth shoots back. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and asks me, “What’s on the agenda for this afternoon?”

“Swimming at the club,” I tell her.

“No mall?” Ruth asks, throwing up her hands and acting like she’s amazed.

“Nah.” I wrinkle my nose. “It’s such a nice day that I want to be outside.”

“Sara Lynn, she looks just like you when she does that, when she squinches up her nose.” Ruth touches Sara Lynn’s arm.

Sara Lynn smiles slowly, her eyes widening, like Ruth just gave her a present. Now, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that I look like Ruth. But it makes me so happy that Sara Lynn would want for me to look like her and that Ruth tries to make Sara Lynn feel good. It makes me feel like my heart is growing big inside me, and I want everything to stop right here so I’ll always be just this happy and bighearted. I want to burst out with all my love for Ruth and Sara Lynn, but that would be beyond stupid, so I just say, “See you at home for my party tonight, and don’t forget I want yellow cake with chocolate icing.”

Yellow cake with chocolate icing; yellow cake with chocolate icing. I’m humming a little birthday tune in my head as Sara Lynn and I walk into the country club. I’d skip if I weren’t too old. That’s how much I love my birthday.

“I want you to wait a half hour before you swim, Hope,” Sara Lynn reminds me, shifting her tennis bag on her shoulder. “You did just eat.”

I sort of nod and shake my head at the same time, my way of getting her off my back but really saying, “I’ll do what I want, thanks anyhow.” I’m going to jump in the pool the second she takes her eyes off me and goes over to the tennis courts. What does she think, that I’m going to drown on my birthday?

When we get to the locker room, I shimmy out of my shorts—as much as a person can shimmy when they don’t have any hips—and I happen to look over at Sara Lynn. As she’s pulling her sundress over her head, my eyes can’t help but notice how her body curves so softly and prettily in just the right places. I step into my red tank swimsuit and wish the bottom weren’t pilling so much.

“Put your sunscreen on,” Sara Lynn orders. She’s standing in front of her locker in her white tennis dress, rubbing thick, gooey lotion onto her arms.

“I don’t know where mine is,” I lie, picturing it in the third drawer of my bathroom cabinet at home. “And besides, I’m tanning.”

“Here.” She squeezes some of her lotion onto her fingers and rubs it into my cheeks, like I’m a little kid.

“I’ll do it.” I scowl, grabbing the bottle from her hand and halfheartedly rubbing the sunscreen into my skin. “Satisfied?” I ask as I hand the bottle back to her.

“You’ll thank me when you’re older,” she tells me, putting the sunscreen in her locker and shutting the door firmly.

I guess.

When we walk out to the pool, Sara Lynn disappears behind the row of high shrubs dividing the pool from the tennis courts. I make sure she’s gone and then run to the pool’s edge, hold my nose, and jump in. Ow! It’s cold as I hit the water, but that’s the only way to do it. None of this sticking in a toe, and then a foot, and then an ankle. I come up to the surface and, still chilly, swim the length of the pool.

When I hop out, I wrap myself in one of the club’s fluffy white towels and lay myself out on a lounge chair, closing my eyes. I shiver deliciously because I know it’ll only be a minute before the sun warms me up. I’m sort of thinking about nothing, only that thinking about nothing is one of the finest feelings there is, and also that being really cold and then lying out in the hot sun must feel like being a slice of bread slowly getting cooked in the toaster.

“Hey, Hope.” I crack open an eye and raise a hand to my forehead to shade out the sun. Pop! Toast is up!

“Ginny!” I scramble up so I’m sitting, still holding the towel around my shoulders. It’s Ginny Stevens, my friend from school. Well, to be honest, she’s more like just my summer friend because she’s popular in school and I’m just regular. Since none of the popular girls from my class belong to the country club, though, she’s stuck with me. Sometimes I feel kind of like an understudy in a show, waiting for my big break. If I act cool enough around Ginny in the summer, then maybe I’ll move up from regular to popular in the fall. I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for this, though, because I’ve been the understudy for lots of summers and here I am. Still not a star. Still the same old me.

Ginny sits on the chaise longue beside me, smoothing the little pink skirt of her bikini as she stretches her legs out in front of her.

“You want to swim?” I ask. Even when the water’s freezing, it always feels warmer when there’s someone to swim with.

Ginny gets this little smile on her face, looking like a Mona Lisa wannabe. “Can’t,” she says, all mysterious.

“Why not?”

“Cramps,” she says under her breath, barely stopping herself from jumping up and down about it. “I have my period.”

“Oh.” I try to nod like I know exactly what she’s talking about, when inside I just feel left behind, like she’s on a train speeding down the track and I’m at the station holding a sign that reads, “Have a Nice Trip.”

She sighs and stretches her arms over her head. “I really wish I could take a swim today.” If she weren’t so popular, I’d tell her exactly how annoying she’s being, bragging and sticking out her puny chest like she has something to show.

“So just wear a tampon,” I say, trying to be cool.

“I’m scared to,” she says. She leans in close to me and whispers, “Don’t you have to have had, like, sex to use those?”

“No,” I scoff, bluffing a little but pretty sure I’m right on this one. “That’s a myth.”

“Are you sure?” Ginny asks. She’s looking at me like I’m the one on the train to womanhood now and she’s the one saying sayonara. It sure feels good to be the one sitting up high and going somewhere.

“Positive. Cross my heart. They just slide right up there. Really.” I swear, at this rate I’ll be the
leader
of the popular girls.

Ginny looks at me wide-eyed. “Do you use them?”

“Sure,” I say. Oh, I’m riding that train right out of the station. Pretty soon Ginny’s just going to be a little speck receding in the distance. “I use them all the time.”

“Can you bring one of yours to show me sometime?” she asks, twirling a strand of her long brown hair. “My mom is so lame; she won’t let me or my sister use them, and I just want to look at one and see if I could dare to put it in.”

“Actually,” I say slowly, watching my fantasy train crash right off the track, “I used them all up last time. I don’t have any more.”

Ginny puckers her lips together in a puzzled frown. “Well, you’ll need some for next time, right?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I need to get some more.” The bug bites on my legs are suddenly pretty interesting to me, and I bend over and scratch them. “These mosquito bites are killing me,” I say, standing up quick. “I gotta go in the pool to make them stop itching.” I walk to the pool’s edge and jump in and under the water. The understudy is under the water. Ha! Story of my life. I hold my breath until I feel ready to burst, swimming underwater practically all the way across the length of the pool. When I can’t stand it another second, I swim up and break through the blue surface to gulp in a few big breaths.

By the time I swim back over to Ginny, Kim Anderson and Kelly Jacobs are putting their swim bags down, sliding off their sandals, and sitting on
my
chaise. Ick. Double ick, in fact. Kelly and Kim are a grade ahead of Ginny and me. They think they’re so great just because they’re thirteen and real teenagers. They’re sometimes nice to Ginny, even though she’s a whole year younger, just because she’s popular. They don’t give me the time of day.

I swim over to them, gritting my teeth through a fake, plastered-on smile. Did I mention that Kim and Kelly are best friends and call themselves the KKs? Yes, that’s right—the KKs. As in, “KK, do you want to swim?” “No, KK, I’d rather sit out just now.” Add their special nicknames for each other to the fact that they dress alike, talk alike, and look alike, and it’s no wonder that, in my head, I don’t call them the KKs; I call them the psycho twins from hell.

I hoist myself up at the pool’s edge and climb out, looking down at the wet footprints I make as I walk back to
my
seat. Ginny and the KKs are in the middle of talking about something, and I shake my head back and forth, flicking water from my wet hair on them.

“Ick!”

“Gross!”

“You’re not a dog, Hope.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Ha, ha,” I say, plopping down in a chair a little bit separate from the huddle the other girls are in. Looking in from the outside, you might not think I’m so far apart, but trust me, from where I’m sitting, I am.

“Anyway,” Kim says to Ginny, “my mom can pick you up at six-thirty. KK and I have been sooo dying to see this movie.”

Ginny bites her lip and glances at me before turning back to Kim and Kelly. She says, “Maybe Hope would like to come, too?” She says it all tentative, like she needs their permission.

Well, I don’t need the KKs’ permission to do anything. Besides, I have a birthday party to go to tonight. “I have plans,” I say from my chair just outside the circle.

“Plans?” Kelly sneers. “What kind of plans do
you
have?”

“There’s a party for my birthday,” I say, sticking out my chin. “My family’s counting on my being home for it.”

Kelly leans back on the chaise, using her feet to practically push Kim off. “What’s the story with your family, anyhow?” she asks, and her eyes look glittery and mean. “I mean, you don’t really have one, right? Like, you don’t have a mom and dad.”

Everybody’s looking at me, waiting for an answer. Ginny finally puts her head down to pick at her fingernail polish.

“My mother is dead,” I say in a tiny voice. There’s a lonely, hollowed-out feeling that starts in my heart and spreads up to my throat and down to my stomach, and it takes me by surprise. I mean, my mother’s been dead forever. I never even knew her, for crying out loud, so what’s the big deal? I mean, sure, I feel sad about it sometimes. But not like this, not like I’m going to put my head between my knees and cry.

“And isn’t your father an alcoholic who can’t take care of you?” presses Kim. She pushes Kelly’s legs out of the way and scoots back up on the chaise.

“Cut it out!” Kelly snaps.

“My father?” It’s funny how those two words can barely squeeze out of my throat. The whole idea of him hurts so bad that I have to make up a story on the spot, just to try to put a Band-Aid on the pain. I sit up straight and flip my wet hair back over my shoulders. I squint at the pool as I say, “He’s in California because of his job. But he talks to me all the time on the phone and writes me the nicest letters. Ruth and Sara Lynn just take care of me for him.”

“Are they lezzies?” asks Kelly, and she and Kim and even Ginny giggle at the thought of Sara Lynn and Ruth being intimate. It feels like they’re drawing their chairs in closer and closer just with the words they say and the looks they give one another. I may as well be on another continent. Greenland, maybe. Oh, that’s a country. Antarctica, then. I may as well be in Antarctica.

I push back my chair and stand up. Exiling myself even farther into the Arctic tundra, I smile meanly and say, “Actually, there are all these rumors that you two are hot and heavy with each other. Same clothes, same hair, all those sleepovers at each other’s houses, your special little pet names for each other . . . everyone’s talking about it.”

“Bitch,” they hiss.

As I walk away, I hear them ask Ginny in their squealing little popular-girl voices, “Ohmygod, who’s saying that about us?”

Don’t cry, Hope,
I warn myself, taking big steps toward the locker room.
Don’t let them see you cry. Think birthday, presents, yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
But thinking about happy things just makes me sadder.

I barely make it to the locker room before my shoulders start shaking and my eyes spill over. I run to a bathroom stall, lock the door, and plop down on the closed toilet seat, drowning in my tears and wondering how my life would have turned out if my mother hadn’t died and my father hadn’t left, running away from me as fast and as far as he could.

Chapter 3

H
ope is chattering away as we drive home from the club, her voice a pleasant hum in my ear. My goodness, that girl’s moods are changeable. A prelude of the teen years ahead of us, I suppose. Not that I know a thing about being a normal teenager. I didn’t rebel until my twenties, and even then my mother reined me in with a firm hand.