Secret Whispers

  It was the magic he had only for me. Only I could see it telegraphed in a movement in his lips, a turn of his eyes. Those words had seemed like over-the-top romantic drivel to me then, but suddenly seemed possible, real, now.

  “I think we should get going so Kelly and Semantha can get to know each other a little before we get to the party, Ethan,” Ellie said sharply.

  He snapped to attention and reached for her hand. Kelly reached for mine.

  “Usually, I don’t believe in blind dates,” he said as we followed Ellie and Ethan out to the car. “Who else but losers need to go on blind dates? But I can’t see you being a loser.”

  I wanted to say thank you, but it seemed dumb, and I heard Cassie whisper, “Ask him what he’s talking about. You’re going on a blind date. I guess that means you’re a loser, then, huh?” Of course, I didn’t say it, but my silence surprised him. He opened the rear door for me and smirked.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “She speaks!” he cried. Only Ellie and he laughed. Ethan looked back at me and started the engine.

  Kelly got in and slid over the seat to be close.

  “Okay, so let’s go through the required questionnaire,” he said. “What’s your favorite subject? What do you want to be when you grow up? What kind of music do you like? Seen any movies lately?”

  “Try not to be yourself tonight, idiot,” Ethan said.

  Kelly laughed. “Just kidding,” he said. “You like this school?” he asked, looking back and jerking his right thumb at the campus.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “She hates it. We all do,” Ellie said. “All it needs is bars on the windows. Graduation will feel more like parole.”

  The boys laughed. Because of his closeness to me, I could smell the whiskey on Kelly’s breath.

  “Well, forget about it,” he told Ellie. “We’ll have a great time tonight and make up for the week or weeks or months. Okay, Semantha?”

  “Even a great New Year’s Eve couldn’t make up for all of that,” I said. This time, only Ethan laughed.

  “Well, the night’s young,” Kelly offered, sounding as if I had wounded his ego. “And you haven’t given me a chance to show you a good time. I don’t get many complaints from the girls I date.”

  I gave him a small, courteous smile. Then he began to talk about himself, how he had decided to go into the navy after he graduated from college and how that was driving his father nuts. He said his father had pushed him into going to college. He had told his father he wasn’t going to be a lawyer or a doctor or even go into business with him, but his father had insisted he give college a chance. I quickly understood that he was just barely passing his subjects. I didn’t know much at all about Ethan, but I began to suspect that he wasn’t really best friends with Kelly, and later, at the fraternity house, Ethan confessed that he had asked him to double-date only because Ellie had told him there was no other way she could get out.

  “My roommate is practically engaged, so I couldn’t ask him,” he said.

  By now, it was pretty clear that Kelly wasn’t having a good time with me. I danced with him, but I wouldn’t drink his liquor or pop any of his Ecstasy. He carried the pills in what was supposedly a pack of gum. His bragging about himself began to bore me, too, and he eventually began drifting off, spending more time with other boys, and even flirting with other girls right in front of me. So far, I wasn’t that impressed with a college fraternity party. I think Ethan saw that more than either Ellie or Kelly did. Whenever Ethan had an opportunity to step away from Ellie and come to me, he did. At the moment, she was with some other girls.

  “Sorry about Kelly,” he said. “Ellie was so desperate to get out and made it sound as though you were just doing her a favor and didn’t care who your date was. She made you sound as if . . .”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have any interest in boys.”

  “Did she? I suppose she really believes that, but I’m not what she’s making me out to be.”

  He smiled. “I had a feeling she didn’t know what she was talking about, but I can see you’re not a happy camper here, and you’re not the sort of girl who doesn’t care who she’s with as long as she can get out.”

  “She wouldn’t take no for an answer, but it’s not important,” I said.

  “It is to me. I don’t like doing things like this, especially to someone I can see is quite nice.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He smiled, and when he did, to me it looked as if he tilted his head just slightly, just the way the character in my romance novel said her lover tilted his head.

  “I’ll find a way to make it up to you,” he added quickly as Ellie approached.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, pulling her lips back tightly and showing her teeth like some snarling alley cat.

  “Far as I can see, not much,” Ethan said, nodding toward Kelly, who was practically slobbering over a girl in a tight knit dress. “Or nothing unexpected, I should say. I was just apologizing to Semantha.”

  “Well, your party isn’t as exciting as I had hoped,” Ellie muttered. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”

  “Where would we go, Ellie? We’re taking a big enough chance as it is coming here,” I said quickly. “We have to indicate our destination before we leave the campus, and we’ve already lied about that,” I explained to Ethan.

  “Oh, brother. Relax, Semantha. I’m sure Mrs. Hathaway didn’t follow us,” Ellie said.

  “Why make her feel any more uncomfortable than she is?” Ethan asked.

  She looked at him and then at me and shook her head. “You don’t have to feel so sorry for her, Ethan. She’s not a baby or something. She can handle it.”

  “You don’t have to be a baby or something to be unhappy with this situation, Ellie.” Again, he nodded in Kelly’s direction.

  She glanced at him and shrugged. “Right,” she said. “I guess I’ll just have to make the best of it.”

  For the rest of the evening, Ellie spent most of her time with other girls and some other young men, and Ethan spent most of his time talking to me. He even asked me to take a walk with him outside. I looked toward Ellie, but she seemed quite distracted, so I agreed, and we went out.

  Ethan had a soft, gentle manner about him that helped me relax. I wondered how much of what Ellie had told me about him was true. He didn’t seem to be the sort of boy who, in Ellie’s words, practically stalked her. I was beginning to get the feeling it was Ellie who had been stalking him.

  “Ellie’s okay,” he said when our conversation drifted to how she and he had met, “but she has a way of making me feel like I’m more of an escort than a date, if you know what I mean. I always feel she’s looking at everyone else to be sure no one’s ahead of her. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I can see you’re not comfortable talking about her behind her back. It’s not important,” he said. “I doubt that I’ll see her much after tonight.”

  I was pleased to hear it, but I didn’t say so. He talked about himself, his interest in getting into business, the excitement of developing a company. He envied the young men who had been so successful with dot-com companies, but he said he liked more traditional business enterprises because he liked contact with people, all sorts of people. He assured me he wasn’t going to put himself into any office where he was shut away from the world. I envied him for his interest in people, in being social. From my answers to some of his questions, he quickly gathered that I was more like a hermit. He thought it was just my shyness.

  “There are ways to overcome shyness,” he said. “It’s like anything else. You have to get your feet wet, push a little, maybe, but in the end, you’ll see how easy it is. You have nothing to be shy about, anyway, Semantha. You’re a very attractive young woman, and I’m sure you’re as bright as, if not brighter than, most people.”

  Before I could thank him, Ellie appeared. It was clear she was really
angry now. She had what Cassie would call “the gunslinger eyes.”

  “Who’s your date tonight, Ethan, or did you forget?”

  “You seemed pretty occupied,” he said in a quick defense. “And Kelly’s practically deserted Semantha. I feel bad about bringing him along.”

  “I feel bad about being here, period,” Ellie said. She wobbled a bit, and we could both see she had drunk too much of the vodka I had seen being passed around. “Let’s get out of here, Semantha,” she told me.

  I looked at my watch. “We’ve got to get back anyway,” I told Ethan.

  He nodded. “I’ll go look for Kelly,” he said, and hurried off.

  “Well, you’re doing all right for someone who had to be talked into going out with college boys,” Ellie told me. “Ethan looks quite smitten with you, which was just the way he looked at me the first time. College boys,” she said disdainfully. “They’re not very dependable.”

  “He’s just being nice, Ellie.”

  “Right,” she said. “Looks like I dressed you up too well,” she added bitterly, and went back inside.

  I followed, and we met Ethan, who said Kelly was too drunk to put in his car.

  “I don’t want him along, if you don’t mind, Semantha.”

  “Why should she mind?” Ellie said sharply. “She’s been well occupied.”

  We left the party, and Ethan drove us back to the campus. I saw that he didn’t even kiss Ellie good night on the cheek. She was sullen and sulked the whole trip back and hurried out when we stopped, not even waiting to walk in with me.

  “Sorry about the night,” he told me, looking after her. “I’ll make it up to you.” He smiled and got back into his car.

  Reluctantly, I followed Ellie to our room. I wished I had somewhere else to sleep tonight. I wasn’t in the mood to hear her ranting. Whenever she drank, she had a runaway tongue. To my surprise, this time, she was simply sulking.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her after a while.

  She sat on her bed staring at the floor. “Nothing.”

  “Why did you spend so much time away from Ethan? I thought you were dying to be with him?”

  “He turned out to be boring,” she said. “I really didn’t know him that well, Semantha. I think you got to know him better than I know him, in fact.”

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door. I could hear that she had definitely drunk too much alcohol.

  “What did I tell you?” Cassie whispered. “Gunslinger. All girls resent each other, except for us. We’re sisters, real sisters.”

  Ellie went right to sleep without saying much else. In the days that followed, she spent more time away from the room than she did in it. On Thursday night, Ethan called, and I happened to be alone in the room. I thought he was calling for Ellie, maybe to apologize, and immediately told him she wasn’t there.

  “I’m not calling to speak with her,” he said. “I’m calling to see if you would like to go to dinner with me tomorrow night. I’ll come by about six-thirty. What sort of food do you like?” he asked even before I had answered. I could tell he was very nervous and was just trying to get it all said. I was too embarrassed to explain that we weren’t permitted to go on dates with college-age boys unless we had special permission from our parents. Thinking that suddenly gave me the idea.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” he said, laughing. “What do you say?”

  “Give me your phone number, and I’ll call you back to let you know.”

  “Sure,” he said, and gave it to me.

  As soon as he hung up, I called my father. Mrs. Dobson said he was out to dinner, but she would give him the message to call me. I waited an hour and then grew too impatient and called his cell phone. When he answered, I could hear he was in a busy restaurant.

  “Semantha? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Daddy. I want to go out with a boy who is in college, and Mrs. Hathaway wouldn’t approve of that without your approval first, so if you can call her . . .”

  “A college boy?”

  “Yes, Daddy. He’s very nice.”

  From the muffled sound, I realized he was putting his hand over the mouthpiece and talking to someone.

  “Where are you going with this college boy?” he asked.

  “To dinner, Daddy. It’s a dinner date.”

  “I see. Well, I’m sure you now know to be careful, Semantha.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “I’ll call Mrs. Hathaway first thing in the morning.”

  “Please don’t forget,” I said.

  “I don’t think I forget things yet, Semantha,” he said, more for whomever he was with than for me, I thought. I heard a woman’s laughter.

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “Right. Take care,” he said.

  After he hung up, I called Ethan and told him I would go out with him. Ellie wasn’t talking about him anymore, and pleasing her didn’t matter to me much anymore, either.

  “I guess I like Italian food the best when I go to restaurants,” I said. Cassie never had. She’d always thought the food was too blah or too spicy.

  “Perfect. I have just the place. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

  “Yes, me too,” I said.

  Even though I didn’t care about Ellie becoming upset, I didn’t want to tell her about my date just yet. I was happy that Ethan had ended the call before she returned. When she did, I said nothing. She was talking now about a different boy she had met at the fraternity party, but she wasn’t sure how she was going to get out this weekend. She couldn’t use me again as an excuse, and as it turned out, her teachers had complained to Mrs. Hathaway even more about her grades. I could see the writing on the wall as Friday drew near. I held back as long as I could, and then on Friday afternoon, I announced my date and said I didn’t have to be deceitful about it, either.

  She stood there staring at me for a long moment in shock.

  “You had your father call Mrs. Hathaway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Now she’s going to wonder how you met him, and she might figure out that we violated her rules.”

  “I don’t think she’ll want to do anything to discourage my socializing, Ellie. Remember how she called you into her office to discuss me?”

  She bit down on her lower lip and nodded. I had always known she was lying about it or at least exaggerating.

  “Why would you want to go out with him? You saw what a dull boy he is.”

  “I didn’t find him dull. I thought he was very nice,” I said.

  She shrugged. “If that’s what makes you happy, go for it.”

  She tried to make it seem as though she didn’t care, but when I began to dress and fix my hair, she left in a huff and slammed the door.

  When I looked back at myself in the mirror, I saw Cassie standing behind me. She wore that Cassie look of self-satisfaction.

  “Well? Have I ever given you bad advice?”

  I tried to ignore her. I finished fixing my hair and doing my makeup, and then I rose and went to my closet. I was determined to wear something a lot more conservative than the dress I let Ellie put on me last time.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Semantha,” Cassie said when I took one last look at myself in the mirror. “When he finds out about you, he’ll disappear faster than I do.”

  I took a deep breath and went to the door. Ethan would be arriving any moment. I opened the door and looked back. I could see her in the mirror.

  “Do me a favor, Cassie,” I whispered. “Stay here.”

  I walked out and closed the door behind me. Down the hallway, I could see Ellie holding court with a few of the girls. They all looked my way and were silent. I waved to her, but she didn’t wave back. She turned away to start talking again. At least she has a new audience, I thought, but only for a little while. After school ended, she was going home, and I knew how unhappy she was there. For the first time, I actually felt sorrier for her than
I did for myself.

  Ethan was right on time.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said. “These people who run this restaurant feed their customers as if they were members of their immediate family.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Don’t worry. There’s no way you can do badly with me.” He took my hand, and I held his tightly, something I hadn’t done since I was in public school. He smiled as if he knew, and we were off.

  The restaurant was small and family-run. Because he went there so often, everyone knew Ethan. The husband and wife who cooked and oversaw the place greeted us as if we really were members of their family. Almost before we sat down, a basket of fresh homemade Italian garlic rolls was brought to the table. Ethan introduced me, and they talked about their grandson, who was attending Yale. They said they had heard of my family’s department stores. They asked me about Kentucky and how I liked New York. I told them what I really felt. Kentucky was just in my blood. I couldn’t imagine anyplace else ever being home. Then they described their specials for the evening, and Ethan ordered for us both.

  “I can see they really like you,” I said.

  “They’re good businesspeople. They know how to stroke their customers.”

  “I didn’t feel anything phony about them,” I said.

  “Oh, no. I don’t mean that. I just mean they know how to run a business. Restaurants are the most difficult, I think. So many fail. My father is an accountant and handles many big restaurants where we live,” Ethan explained. “It’s through him that I became interested in business. By the way, I loved the way you described your family’s department stores. You made it sound more like an institution than a business.”

  “I suppose it is, in Kentucky. As my father says, there’s a lot of history. If you saw what was in our house, you’d think it was some kind of museum.” I described the portraits, the old books, and the awards my family had won from business organizations, chambers of commerce, and the like. “There are plaques everywhere you look, practically,” I said, and then suddenly realized how much I had been talking. During the last five minutes or so, I probably had said more than I had at school in a month. He sat with a faint smile on his face.