Then she howled with laughter.
“Kip!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Kip Elliott! You stayed out past your bedtime! Your brothers have come to take you home!”
Chapter 13
“OKAY, OKAY, I UNDERSTAND all your arguments. You don’t have to go through them again.”
Emily had never put a knife into anybody before.
My parents were so mean to me, she thought, and I never was mean back. But Matt—Matt who loves me, Matt that I love—I put a knife in him.
He was like a popped balloon.
All sag, no air.
She said, “I love you. I do.”
He nodded. He was very pale. He stood out against his own black jacket like a white painting.
She said, “It’s best this way, Matt.”
He nodded. Slowly, as if moving his head had become a difficult task.
She said, “Hug me, Matt. Please hug me and keep on loving me.”
He looked at her strangely.
“You can still love me, can’t you, Matt?”
“Yes, Emily.” A voice that had been popped, too. None of his crazy tumbling thoughts. A voice that just spoke lying down, whipped.
She wanted desperately to go on up to the party. They could dance it off: fling themselves into music and stomping feet, jerking arm muscles and pounding hearts. A few hours of hard, hard dancing, and all this dreadful painful wrenching emotion would be gone.
She had never felt this way around Matt, and she didn’t think he had ever felt this way in his life. The emotion was shredding them both like cabbage for salad.
She started to talk about the party and didn’t. His proposal of marriage had just been refused, and she was going to ask him to dance? As if nothing had happened?
“So now what do we do, Emily?” he asked her. He had stopped staring at the ring, at least. Put it back in his pocket. She could see it in his shirt pocket: a tiny lump at the bottom.
She said, “We could join the others.”
They could hear a lot of partying: one big group in the cocktail lounge and another crowd whose noise and music wafted down the hall from a rented banquet room.
“I don’t think I’m in the party mood, Emily.”
He’ll never call me M&M again. Or taffy, or chocolate chip or Nutty Buddy. From now on I’ll be Emily: the one who didn’t want him.
She said, “Matt, if we got married at seventeen—”
“Emily, okay. No more explanations. I’ve got the picture.” He stood up. He stared at the windows. They were slabs of black, reflecting everything. Then a snow plow came down the road, and its headlights threw yellow into the glass.
She said, “Let’s go on up to the party, Matt.”
“I don’t feel like a New Year.”
“Funny. You don’t look like one either,” she tried to joke.
He just sighed.
“We’re kids,” she said desperately. “Kids. So we ought to introduce the new year that way. Like kids.”
He turned away, running his finger over the pocket where the ring lay. It was an unbearable gesture for both of them. She took his hand to stop him from doing it again. “Matt, it’s because I love you that—”
“Emily, don’t. I hate people who say they’re hurting me because they love me.”
She hung onto his hand anyway. He just submitted to it, not holding her hand back. When she cried again, and the tears fell on his hand, he sighed and gave in. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go to the dance. I think it’ll be torture. What are we going to say to everybody? But if that’s what you want….”
She might as well have kicked him.
“We don’t have to say anything about it to anybody,” she said.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Have the whole episode vanish.”
They got in the elevator. Twenty-two floors of silence. It was like being trapped in a coffin together.
“We don’t have to,” she said. “We could go home.”
“You don’t have a home. That was the point, Emily. I was going to give you one.”
She took a breath so deep it was a good thing the velvet dress was cut full. “You don’t want to be married, Matt, you just want to rescue me,” she burst out. “I don’t want a marriage that’s a rescue operation in disguise! If you want to rescue people, then go join the Ambulance Squad!”
Kip did not think she could bear it.
Look at them.
Look at their clothes.
People would think they didn’t have anything clean or decent to their names. People would think they routinely ran around cities barging in on parties. People would think nobody ever washed Jamie’s glasses, or made Kevin shower after clay class. And their shoes! They were wearing their mud shoes: sneakers they were supposed to put on only when going out in bad weather so it would be okay to ruin them.
Attention that had gone first to Gwynnie, and then to the phantom Jade, and then to the resolutions, turned to three strange looking little boys.
Kip closed her eyes.
She would have to take them home.
Her New Year’s Eve party would be swallowed up in driving her brothers back home and putting them to bed.
Mike said, “I cannot believe it! They followed us here? They’re here? Can’t you Elliotts control yourselves for one single night?”
Kip would gladly have committed three homicides. But they were her brothers. If somebody killed them, she would do it. “I guess they really wanted to see me,” she said. “Come on, let’s get this straightened out.” She started for the entrance.
Mike said, “I cannot believe I have to cope with your stupid little brothers on New Year’s Eve of all nights. Do you know what I paid for the tickets to this dance? Do you know what it cost to rent this tuxedo? Do you know what the flowers came to? Do you know—”
Kip ran a tongue over her lips. Control, she reminded herself. Maturity is not smacking your boyfriend just because he deserves it.
Kip walked around Mike to get to her brothers.
Mike caught her arm. “Listen,” he said angrily.
She peeled his fingers away. “No.”
He grabbed her again. “Listen.”
“No!”
“Kip! Your brothers—”
“Mike, I see them. I’m going to handle it. I can’t handle it from this side of the ballroom, can I?”
“She’s going to handle it,” Mike intoned, as if he were a news commentator at eleven o’clock. “Miss Katharine Elliott steps into the crisis with her usual aplomb. Sometimes when there is no crisis, she manufactures one to suit, so she can demonstrate her crisis-handling ability. But tonight, America, as three filthy little urchins crash a New Year’s Eve dance, we see Miss Katharine Elliott—”
“At her most violent,” Kip muttered, wrenching away from him. She did not kick him, although it was tempting, but stormed toward the boys.
She thought, I hate boys.
I hate the ones I date, I hate the ones who are related to me. I hate the cute ones who date other girls, and I hate the crummy ones who date other girls.
I hate boys.
I hate New Year’s Eve.
She arrived in front of her brothers. Hands on her peach-pink hips, face fixed in a terrible glare, she said, “Well? What is it you have to see me about?”
“Nothing,” said Kevin. “We came to see Lee.”
Molly wondered if she was going to have to give up on Anne.
Anne and Con were not dancing so much as swaying. When they were not staring into each other’s eyes they were kissing, and when they were not kissing they were whispering.
Molly swayed with Christopher. “I hate slow dances,” he complained. “Let’s go see what’s happening over at the door where everybody is.”
Molly nuzzled his throat. “Aw, Chrissie, dance with me.” She steered him toward Anne and Con. Anne and Con would not have seen the President and the First Lady if they’d been dancing there. The littl
e envelope full of talc was as exciting to her as if it really had been drugs: she was high on the thought of revenge. She could not wait to slide the last envelope into place, and telephone the police and see Anne humbled, and Kip crying, and Beth Rose whining. Listen to them crying No, No, Not me! Listen to them saying, I don’t know anything about it, I didn’t put it there!
And most of all, watching other kids’ faces. Seeing Anne fall from her pedestal that even an illegitimate baby could not knock her from. Seeing Kip afraid, Kip who thought she could control the world. Seeing at last Gary looking in contempt at a weeping, wailing druggie of a Beth Rose.
Con said quite audibly, “Oh, Anne, I still love you so much.”
Anne was weeping. Con kept both his large hands on her cheeks and with his thumbs he dried her cheeks, kissed her, and dried her cheeks again.
Molly hated them.
She wanted that kind of love and attention.
She thought, I’ll get you, Anne.
She moved closer.
Christopher didn’t follow her. “Come on, Moll,” he said. “Let’s see what’s happening.”
“Christopher, nobody cares,” she said sharply. “Dance over here.”
She was wrong about Con and Anne. They heard her clearly. And with distaste and dislike, they walked away.
You’ll pay, she thought.
Both of you.
Kevin stood in his clay-dusty sweater and his hand-me-down ski jacket. The big kids awed him. So tall and shiny. So old.
We shouldn’t have come, Kevin thought. Kip’s gonna kill us. After she kills us, Mom and Dad are going to kill us.
He swallowed hard, trying to figure out how they could escape now.
Pete always ate when he was nervous. He reached into his pocket for the Oreo cookies, and they had become a mass of crumbs, so he licked Oreo crumbs out of his hands.
Jamie patted his cummerbund. He was dressed just like the big boys. That made him feel good. Jamie tilted his head to he could see through his splotchy glasses. “Lee!” he cried. “Hi, Lee!”
He darted past his sister, between two long flowing evening gowns of girls he didn’t know and held out his arms to Lee.
Lee scooped him up. Jamie was little enough and Lee was strong enough that he could hold Jamie high in the air and jiggle him. Jamie’s glasses slid down his nose and he giggled. “We miss you,” Jamie told him.
Lights twinkled in a formal ballroom.
Long gowns rustled, and the scent of flowers filled the air.
The band played softly, romantically.
Kevin and Pete decided it was safer next to Lee than next to Kip. They ran over to Lee in time to catch Jamie’s baseball cap when it slid off his head.
“Oh,” wailed a girl in yellow, “I’m going to cry. That is so sweet.”
“Sweet!” Mike Robinson repeated. “Sweet!”
Kip said, “I can’t believe you guys did this to me.”
Kevin and Pete and Jamie stared at her. Their little eyes were rimmed with exhaustion.
“Akshully,” Jamie confided, leaning down from Lee’s shoulder, “we didn’t do it to you, Kippie. We did it to Lee.”
“And Lee,” said Lee, grinning from ear to ear, “is not mad.”
Molly walked over to Con and Anne.
They stopped dancing.
They were afraid of her, she could tell.
Afraid of what I’ll say, she thought. What do they know? Words don’t do permanent damage. I should know. If they had any sense they’d be afraid of what I might do. But these two don’t feature sense.
She glued her eyes to Anne’s.
Anne took a step back.
Molly took a step forward.
Anne flinched.
Con wrapped his arm protectively around Anna “Hey,” he said uncertainly.
The purse swung backward.
Molly leaned right into Anne’s face.
Anne stepped back again and the purse swung and Molly caught it, all without looking. She laughed. Her eyes glittered.
Molly said, “Anne, you might like to know that he slept with me, too. Not what I’d call faithful. And how about Jade? He can’t even be bothered to visit Jade on her deathbed. This is a person you want back?”
Chapter 14
“DON’T FREAK OUT,” LEE said quietly.
“Me?” Kip said, not quietly at all. “Freak out? Why Lee! It’s only a formal dance at The Hadley. It’s only eleven p.m. It’s only my three little brothers looking as though they last bathed in 1985. There are only five hundred people staring at them. That’s nothing to freak out about now, is it, Lee?”
“Right,” Lee said. “Let’s all stay calm and—”
“Calm?” Kip shrieked.
Her brothers took refuge behind Lee. Pete finished up the Oreos and began on the apples. The sound of his crunching McIntosh blended in nicely with the snare drums.
“I feel really great,” Lee said, kneeling down to hug them all. “Three human beings knock themselves out to come see me. This is the nicest way to start a New Year I can think of.” Lee took Jamie’s baseball cap off and wore it himself. “I bet you guys are thirsty. Want to have some Coke?”
“They want to be strangled,” Kip said.
“Better stay behind me,” Lee advised Pete and Kevin. “She’s out for blood.”
Lee was so touched.
Nobody had ever missed Lee before.
His parents were glad when Lee left for college, having gone through enough adolescent rebellion to last them a lifetime. Kip hadn’t so much as sent a postcard, and as for Anne, she had come weekends, Lee thought, only so she could tell people she was dating. Across the ballroom, Anne and Con were still dancing.
Nobody was in love with Lee.
But three grubby little boys thought he was worth a trip.
Jamie said, “Oh, food! Is that food? Can I have cookies? Can I have cake? Can I have ice cream?”
He set Jamie down. He handed out plastic goblets of soda to all three, and filled their plates with goodies. There were nutritious things on the pretty tables: celery filled with cream cheese, prosciutto wrapped around cheese. Nobody liked nutrition at a dance. The boys went for the New Year’s cookies with the year in icing, the slices of chocolate log roll, and the glazed doughnut holes.
Jamie ate six doughnut holes and wiped his hands on Lee’s trousers.
“Uh, Jamie,” Lee said.
Jamie smiled up at him. The thick glasses were crooked on his little nose. His bright blue sweatpants billowed out below the enormous cummerbund, and the red-and-black checked hunting jacket was buttoned wrong. “What?” Jamie said.
Lee sighed, and handed him a napkin.
“Thank you,” Jamie said, and passed it on to Kevin, who occasionally used that sort of thing.
Next to him, Kip said, “I—uh—I’ll get a paper towel from the girls’ room and clean off the sugar, Lee. I’m sorry.”
He turned. Whatever anger and embarrassment Kip had felt a few minutes ago had drained off. She was pale and tired. For him it was the ultimate compliment to have this group crash the party: for Kip it was the ultimate embarrassment.
“It’s okay, Kip. I’ll get it later. Listen, I—uh—I kind of lost Anne. So since I’m free, I’ll just drive the boys on home. You want to give me a housekey so we can get in?”
Kip touched the purse hanging by her side. The moment she got the key out, Lee would go. She wanted this awkward minute to last forever instead.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Her little brothers coming all the way to The Hadley just to see Lee. Not—as all the teenagers were speculating—to get Lee and Kip back together. Just because they really missed Lee.
They’re smarter than I am, Kip thought. They know a good man when they see one. She blinked back tears.
“You want the rest of my doughnut hole?” Jamie offered. “I’m full now, Kippie.” He tucked the sticky half-hole in her hand.
Lee handed her a napkin.
Kip ha
d never known how to be subtle. She couldn’t be subtle now. She said, “Lee, I’ve missed you.”
He tried to be casual. “Runs in the family, huh?”
She nodded.
Pete said, “I’ve got my key, Lee, we don’t need Kip’s. Can you stay and play a game with us when we get home? We got two new video games since you were at our house.”
“You did? What are they? Will I be able to beat you?”
“No,” Kevin and Pete chorused. “Because we’re terrific.”
“I’m pretty terrific myself,” Lee said. “I bet once you guys teach me the game we’ll be up all night fighting it out.”
Three little boys did not think there could be a better way to spend New Year’s Eve. They hugged Lee en masse.
“Can I come, too?” Kip said.
“Aw, Kippie,” her brothers said. “You stay here and dance. We wanna see Lee.”
But Lee was looking at Kip. A long look. Where’s Mike? he wondered. He looked around. He said, “Uh—what’s happening?”
Her face muscles jerked the way they had the other time Lee ever saw her cry. “Sort of like Anne. Mike had other things to do.”
“What other things?” Kevin demanded.
“He didn’t tell me,” Kip said.
“Why not? He’s your boyfriend,” Pete said. “How come you’re not in control, Kippie?”
Kip closed her eyes. She had never been less in control.
Lee studied the selection of pastries left on the table after Kevin, Pete, and Jamie had gone through like a hungry hurricane. “You glad about that?” he said softly to Kip.
“Yes.” Her brown hair clouded around her. Taking the plunge, she said, “Are you?”
It was a short answer. Kip and Lee had always managed to be brief. “Yes,” Lee said.
The answer didn’t need to be any longer than that.
Joy came back into Kip’s life.
“What are you talking about?” Jamie demanded.
They didn’t hear him. They didn’t even see him. They inched closer to each other. Jamie was between them and they didn’t notice that either. “Oh, Lee, I’m so sorry, I was such a dumb bunny, I don’t know why I did all that last summer,” Kip said, the words pouring out. “I didn’t mean to, and I really missed you, and it’s New Year’s Eve, and I want a different New Year and—”