“Stop! Stop! I’m burning up already!” Pamela cried, clutching her heart. And then, singing, “I’m in the moooood for love.”
Gwen laughed. “Puh-lease! Not a summer romance.”
“Why not? That’s how you and Austin met, isn’t it?”
“Austin’s here! We can see each other as much as we want.”
“Well, remember what happened to Liz and Ross,” I said, thinking about the great guy she had met when we were camp counselors, the summer after our freshman year.
“I still miss him,” Liz said in a small voice. How any guy could keep his distance from Liz, with her long dark hair and creamy complexion, was beyond my understanding.
“You never hear from him?” Gwen asked.
“We text now and then. But he’s got his life to live there in Pennsylvania. We just decided it wouldn’t work.”
“But you have Keeno!” Pamela chirped, hoping to get us back in a happier mood. Liz and Keeno really had seemed to be hitting it off in recent months.
But Liz gave a little shrug. “I like him. He makes me laugh. But I don’t like like him, know what I mean?”
“Aha! Somebody else is looking for love!” Pamela crooned. “Go ahead and get the applications, Gwen. I’m in.”
“Me too,” I said. “Sounds like a great summer. At least Patrick’s coming for the prom.”
“You’ve got the best of all possible worlds, Alice,” Liz said, breaking a huge cookie in half and holding up one piece. Gwen and I grabbed for it at once. Gwen won. “He’s in Chicago, you’re here, he comes back for the big stuff. Meanwhile, you’re free to date other guys…. There’s a long-distance romance that’s working.”
“He’s only been gone for six months,” I reminded her. “And now that his parents have moved to Wisconsin … Well, I don’t even want to think about it. No, I do want to think about it. We’ve got this understanding that we’re special to each other, but …”
This time nobody jumped in with assurances. No one made a joke.
“It’s rough,” said Gwen. She broke off one bite of the cookie half and handed the rest to me, like a sympathy card, and I accepted. “This is make-each-moment-count time, everybody, because who knows where we’ll be a year from now?”
That was to be our motto, I guess. Make each moment count. I remembered that a long time ago, when my brother and I were quarreling a lot, I’d decided to live each day as though it were the last time I’d ever see him, and it worked. It stopped the quarreling, but it got so real that I was always imagining Les choking on a chicken bone or something. There had to be some kind of balance here, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
And I wondered why, just as in physics, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction; for every new thing I looked forward to after high school, there seemed to be some opposite feeling I could hardly describe. Anxiety? Sadness? Don’t be a basket case, I told myself, and meant it.
It was Phil’s idea. Phil—as in editor in chief of our school paper, The Edge. Phil—as in tall, once-gangly, now-square-shouldered head honcho.
“Let me handle the neo-Nazi stuff if it keeps kicking around,” he told me that afternoon. “With all that’s happened at our school, we—and you in particular—need some R and R.”
He was talking about the death of two students last summer, the white supremacy stuff, the prejudice against our Sudanese student, Daniel Bul Dau, and Amy Sheldon’s molestation by a substitute teacher. That was a lot for any of us to handle, but I wasn’t sure what Phil was getting at.
“You want me to do R and R as in … writing about spring fashions? Healthier food in the cafeteria? The summer plans of graduating seniors? Serious fluff?”
“Get off it, Alice,” Phil said, giving me that you-know-what-I-mean look. “Write anything at all, something people can sink their teeth into, but different from all the Sturm und Drang of last semester.”
I did know what he meant, and I did need a break. I’d think of something, I figured. In the meantime, I checked the school calendar for coming events. Last year we did a girls’ choice dance. This year we were going to put on a 1950s-style sock hop, and when I got all the details, I wrote it up:
February 11—Save the Date!
Ask Gram for those poodle skirts, those Elvis wigs, those 45s, those glow bracelets, ’cause this school is gonna rock!
Last year we did Sadie Hawkins, but this year it’s Sock Hop. We’re going to go back sixty years and have a dance marathon. We’re gonna have root beer floats at a drive-in. There will be inflatable instruments, a jukebox, a balloon drop, pizza, pom-poms, pastel pearls, and bouffant hairdos galore.
Get a photo of you and your friends in a ’57 Chevy. Leave your shoes at the door and buy a pair of bobby socks for charity. Watch The Edge for more details.
“This fluffy enough for you?” I asked Phil, handing him my copy.
“Perfect!” He grinned. “Now go find a poodle skirt to show your heart is in it.”
I did better than that. I assigned one of our senior reporters to write up instructions for making your own circle skirt out of a piece of felt. I asked another to research places where people could buy an Elvis wig, rent a guitar, learn to jitterbug, make their own pom-poms, and we had all our girl reporters do up their hair beehive-style so that Sam could take a picture of it for the paper.
“You guys are rockin’!” Miss Ames told us. “Good show!”
Patrick called me that evening.
“So how was your first week back?” he asked.
I lay on a heap of pillows, cell phone to my ear. “Interesting,” I told him. “Remember the white supremacist guy I told you about, Curtis Butler? The one who was writing those letters to The Edge last semester? He transferred to another school.”
“Well, that should make life easier for you,” Patrick said.
“And worse for the school that got him, probably,” I said. “But … in other news … Jill says she and Justin ‘have big plans’—I’m betting they’ll elope; Gwen wants us to get jobs on a cruise ship this summer; and the school’s having a sock hop.”
“Whoa,” said Patrick. “What cruise ship? To where?”
“The Chesapeake Seascape, cruising the Bay. A new line. Gwen thinks it would be fun.”
I was about to ask if he wanted to apply too when he said, “So you’ll be on the Bay and I’ll be in Barcelona.”
It took a moment to sink in. “Spain?” I gasped.
“Yeah. This professor I’m working for—he wants to go get settled before the fall class he’ll be teaching there, and he’s offered to take me with him. He wants to finish his book this summer—that’s mostly what I’m researching for him. And … here’s the really big news … only you won’t like it …”
“Oh, Patrick!”
“He’s going to see if he can arrange for me to do my study abroad in my sophomore year instead of my junior, so I can stay on in Spain when the fall quarter begins. I’ll be living with a bunch of students all the while.”
Why was I not surprised? Why didn’t I know I couldn’t fence Patrick in? And why did I realize that even if I could, I shouldn’t? Patrick had the whole world ahead of him.
“I … I guess I didn’t know you wanted to do a year abroad.”
“I have to. Part of my major. But here’s another way to look at it: The sooner I put in that year abroad, the sooner I’ll be back.”
That was comforting in a strange sort of way. It seemed to mean that Patrick was looking ahead. Way ahead. That the two of us had plans.
“I want the best for you, Patrick—you know that,” I said. “But I’m not sure I can stand it.”
He chuckled. “I think you’ll stand it very well on a cruise ship with a lot of hunks around.”
“You won’t be jealous?”
“Of course I’ll be jealous. You could fall for the first mate and get married on Smith Island and be raising a little deckhand by the time I get back.”
“I’m not laughing,” I sai
d.
“It’s not like I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told me. “There’s still your prom.”
“You will be here for that?”
“I’ll be there.”
That was reassuring, but … Spain? For a whole year? Still, after we’d talked and I put my cell phone back on my nightstand, I wondered why I didn’t feel worse. Maybe I felt safer with Patrick in Spain for a year than on the University of Chicago campus, surrounded by all those free-thinking college girls. Now that there was no home here to come back to, I had wondered how he’d spend his summer. And since I’d be on a cruise ship …
Okay, I told myself. Make the most of it. Quit worrying. When I made new friends at college and they asked, I’d be able to say, Oh, yeah. I have a boyfriend in Spain.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice in Charge
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