Staying Together (5 page)

Robby was also exceptionally good at memorizing and had memorized a whole book of baseball facts, which was probably something the mean kid couldn't have done. But Robby wasn't sure how to say that, so he had just stood there until Margaret Malone had come along and picked up his books and smiled at him and walked him to his classroom.

Robby wished Margaret were going to the dance at Mountain View, but she was not. She was at work at her new after-school job, and in the fall she was going to college.

“Robby?” called his mother from downstairs.

Robby drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “Coming!”

On the drive to Mountain View, which was exactly twenty-six minutes long, Robby's mother said to him, “I'll be right next door in the lounge, having coffee with Daniel's mother, if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you remember how to ask someone to dance with you?”

Robby nodded. “Yes. I say, ‘Would you like to dance?' and if she says no, then I say, ‘That's okay,' and I don't push things. But if she says yes, then I take her to the dance floor and we dance but we don't touch.”

“You can put your arm around her waist,” said his mother.

“No. That's okay.”

Mrs. Edwards smiled. “All right. And when the music stops, what do you do?”

“I say, ‘Thank you for the dance.'”

“Perfect. And maybe then you ask her if she'd like some refreshments.”

“Okay.” Robby closed his eyes. Then he opened them suddenly and exclaimed, “Mom, I've been waiting for this day my whole life!”

“Look, Robby!” said his mother as they pulled up in front of Mountain View.

A banner with the words
SPRING FLING
in pink and yellow and green letters had been strung over the front doors of the building.

“Excellent!” cried Robby.

His mother parked the car and they walked across the gravel lot to the wooden building that Robby always thought looked like a giant cabin. As they approached the front doors, Robby saw two girls wearing dresses that came down to their ankles, shawls draped across their shoulders.

“Very sparkly,” Robby whispered to his mother. And then he added, “I think one of them has Down syndrome like me.”

Robby and his mother followed the girls into the building. The lobby was crowded with young men in suits and young women in gowns and parents holding cups of coffee. Robby peeked into the room where the dance was to be held.

“Whoa, Mom,” he said in a low voice. “You have to look in there. Just
look
, don't go in, because you're my mom and I don't want anyone to see.”

Mountain View's largest room had been transformed. Enormous paper flowers decorated the walls and brilliant paper butterflies hung, fluttering, from the ceiling. A mirrored globe had been placed among the butterflies and pinpoints of light shot around the darkened room. Robby could see a refreshment table along one wall. A young girl handed him a glowing necklace. That was when Robby realized that there were glowing ice cubes in a bucket on the table and strings of bumblebee and flower lights everywhere. The entire room sparkled and shimmered and shone.

“Hi, Robby,” said the girl who was handing out the necklaces, and Robby realized it was his friend Rachel.

“Rachel! I never saw you in a dress before,” he said. “You look nice.”

“And you look nice with just plain hair and no baseball cap.”

“Thanks,” replied Robby. He turned back to his mother.

“I'll be right over there,” she told him, pointing in the direction of the lounge. “Have fun.”

Robby stepped into the room alone. He glanced back once at Rachel, but she was busy handing glow necklaces to the two girls Robby had noticed earlier. Robby took another step forward. All around him kids were standing in groups, talking and eating. He didn't know any of them. Where was Daniel?

Robby heard music begin to play. Some of the kids started to dance. Robby looked toward the doors. His mother wasn't far away. Maybe he should find her and they should just go home.

“Excuse me, do you want to dance?”

“What?” said Robby.

A girl wearing a long yellow dress and silver sandals had put her hand on Robby's elbow. “Do you want to dance?”

“Um …”

“My name is Sarah.”

“I'm Robby. I've never been to a dance before.”

“Me, neither. Do you want to dance?”

“Okay.”

This wasn't going the way Robby's parents had said it should go. Sarah had asked Robby to dance, not the other way around. But maybe it didn't matter. Sarah put one arm on Robby's shoulder and the other on his waist and he found that he didn't mind at all. He looked into her eyes, and she looked back at him, and they smiled at each other.

They began to dance. They danced four dances in a row and then they took a break for punch with glowing ice cubes in it. After that, they sat at a small table and Sarah said that she had graduated from high school the year before.

“Me, too!” said Robby. “From Camden Falls Central High School.”

“I went to Kingston High. I have a job,” added Sarah. “I work in the cafeteria. At my old school.”

“I work at a store,” said Robby.

He had about a million other questions to ask Sarah, such as what TV shows she liked to watch and whether her parents had said she could have an iPod, but Sarah said, “Let's dance again.”

So they did. They danced and danced and had some more refreshments.

Robby could hardly believe it when the director of Mountain View stepped into the center of the room and announced that the dance was over. “Oh, no,” said Robby. “We have to go.”

“Will you call me?” asked Sarah. “I'll give you my phone number.”

“Okay. I'll give you mine.”

Later, when Robby was sitting in the car with his mother and they were pulling out of the parking lot, he fingered the slip of paper in his pocket and remembered Sarah's face as she'd said, “Bye, Robby. We'll talk soon, okay?”

Robby planned to call Sarah that very night. He would say “Thank you” and “I had fun” and “I hope we can see each other again soon.” Maybe he would even buy Sarah a present the next time he was working at Sincerely Yours. He wondered what he should get for his very first girlfriend.

“What kind of changes?” Olivia asked as she and her parents and brothers sat around the dinner table one evening.

It was Friday night and lights were on in most of the Row Houses. Two doors away, Robby Edwards was whistling up the front walk with his mother, saying, “My first girlfriend, Mom!” At the other end of the row, the Morris kids were trying to convince their parents that they should go out for dinner. Couldn't they
please
go to the mall and eat at McDonald's? Next door, Flora, Ruby, and Min were in the kitchen. Min was stirring something on the stove, and Flora and Ruby had turned their backs on each other.

“Not big changes, honey,” Olivia's mother replied.

“Is the store in trouble?” Olivia wanted to know. Please don't let Sincerely Yours be in trouble, she thought. It hasn't even been open for a year. We haven't given it a chance.

“It isn't in any immediate danger,” Mr. Walter told her.

“The Nelsons might have to close the diner,” Olivia's brother Jack spoke up. “Spencer said so.”

“Well, we do not have to close Sincerely Yours,” said Mrs. Walter.

“You said you have to make some changes, though,” Olivia reminded her.

“That's true. We need to think very carefully about our overhead —”

“Oh,” groaned Henry. “Not
overhead
. Don't use business words. I never understand what you're talking about when you use business words.”

“All right. We need to be very careful about the money we have to spend in order to run the store. That's all. Tighten the store's belt a little,” said Mr. Walter.

“How do you tighten its belt?” asked Olivia. “You're not going to fire anyone, are you?”

“No. We said we would make small changes, and that's what we mean.”

Olivia believed her parents. But the thought that the store was in any kind of trouble at all disturbed her, and by Saturday morning she felt she needed some sort of fun distraction — something to take her mind off of inflation and recession and foreclosures and the economy and struggling people everywhere.

“A Saturday adventure! That's what we should have today,” Olivia said aloud, and the very thought of it made her hop out of bed and snap up the shade to see whether the morning was sunny. It was. Aiken Avenue sparkled in sunshine, and Olivia could see that across the street two of her neighbors were already working in their flower beds.

Excellent. Now — what kind of adventure should she and Nikki and Flora and Ruby plan?

Their Saturday adventures had begun the summer before when a nameless someone had arranged for the girls to be members of a secret book club. Every few weeks each girl received a copy of a book from an anonymous sender, and after they had read the book they were sent on a surprise adventure. Long after the book club had ended and the identity of the nameless someone had been revealed, the girls had continued the tradition of Saturday adventures, only now they arranged them on their own.

What could they do today? Olivia wondered. The adventure didn't have to be elaborate, and it would be a good thing if it weren't expensive, either. Just something fun. An afternoon at the movies? A trip to the mall, even if they didn't buy anything?

Olivia, still in her nightgown, brought the cordless phone into her room, closed her door softly, and punched in Nikki's number.

“Hi, Olivia!” cried Mae's voice. “I saw ‘Walter' on the caller ID. That's how I knew it was you. Are you coming over today?” Before Olivia could answer, Mae continued, “You know what? I'm making macaroni jewelry. Would you like a necklace? Or a bracelet? I haven't figured out how to make earrings yet.”

“Oh. Well, let's see. I would love a bracelet. That would be very nice.”

“Great. Bracelets are two dollars each. You can give the money to Nikki the next time you see her.”

“Um, okay.”

“I'll get right to work on the bracelet. Bye!”

“Wait, Mae! Don't hang up. I need to talk to Nikki.”

“Okay. Just a second.”

When Nikki got on the phone, she said, “Did Mae make you order any of her jewelry?”

“Well, she offered to make me a bracelet and then she said it would cost two dollars.”

Nikki laughed. “Don't worry, I'll talk to her. Don't you think she'll make a good salesperson someday, though?”

“I think she'll make a sneaky one. Listen, Nikki, I was thinking. Why don't we have a Saturday adventure today? We don't have much weekend homework and an adventure would be really fun. We haven't gone on one in a while.”

“That's a great idea! What should we do?”

“I'm not sure. We'll all have to decide together. Maybe go to the movies? Or to the mall if we can find someone to drive us there? Or, I know! How about lunch at College Pizza? That wouldn't cost too much.”

“I like that idea. And guess what. Mom isn't working today. She was about to go into town to run errands with Mae, so she can drop me at your house first.”

“Perfect. While you're on your way over here, I'll call Flora and Ruby.”

Olivia clicked off the phone, threw on some clothes, dashed to the kitchen, where she slurped up a bowl of cereal, and then returned to her bedroom with the phone. She dialed Flora's number and, as she often did, immediately put her ear to her bedroom wall and listened to the phone ringing next door.

“Hello?”

“Hi … Ruby?”

“Hi, Olivia.”

“Guess what. Nikki is on her way over. We thought we should have a Saturday adventure today.”

“The four of us?”

“Of course.”

“As in you and Nikki and me and
Flora
?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope.”

“What do you mean, nope?”

“I mean I'm not going on any Saturday adventure if Flora is going, too.”

“But that's what a Saturday adventure
is
. The four of us doing something fun together.”

“Believe me,” said Ruby, “if Flora goes along, then the adventure will not be fun for me.”

Olivia let out a long, loud sigh. “We are not,” she said firmly, “leaving Flora out of an adventure. We've never left any one of us out.”

“Then I'm not going.”

“Ruby!” exclaimed Olivia in frustration. Then she lowered her voice. “Put Flora on the phone, will you, please?”

Olivia heard Ruby set the phone down. Then she heard her call “Flora!” in an unnecessarily loud voice. And then, “FLORA!”

“WHAT?” answered Flora in an equally loud voice.

“PHONE!”