“What do you mean—exactly?” said Janie grumpily. “Nobody ever knows anything exactly”
“Okay, start here. Are they getting better about it?”
Everybody said it Nobody called it by any other name because it was too crazy and complicated. Janie said not only it but also them because she did not know what to call her other family. A person with two sets of parents, one of whom had been involved in kidnapping her, had trouble constructing sentences.
Janie could never talk about it When Sarah-Charlotte brought it up over and over again, so bluntly, insisting that the best friend deserved the most gossip, Janie wanted to scream, or else go attend college with Reeve. She couldn’t stand how it never closed up, never went away, but was always in front of her, like fresh tar she’d step in and her life would stick.
Janie felt herself turning into a paper doll again. As a paper doll, she could keep her smile out front and her agony flat and hidden on the back.
This was the sort of thing you did not say to any adult. Adults were quick to leap off their chairs and out of their minds and force you once more to go to counseling.
This is my best friend! she thought. And I feel as if she’s a police officer interrogating me.
Janie had learned, this year, to take questions in her hands and bend them off to the side. “I guess New Jersey doesn’t matter as much as Boston,” she said.
Boston meaning Reeve. Boston meaning boyfriends.
Oh, Reeve! thought Janie. If only you were here! I’m under siege from my own best friend, who won’t give it a rest.
The stab of Reeve gone was like a medieval spear; an iron lance leaving a hole in her life. She didn’t want him crisp and starched in a tuxedo, but soft in cords and his old fleece jacket. The part of his anatomy she wanted most was his shoulder, where she used to tuck herself in, and close her eyes, and let Reeve decide what happened next. Sometimes she wanted to go next door to Reeve’s house, steal his old jacket, and have it to hold.
“He still faxing you every day?” said Sarah-Charlotte.
“It’s slacked off a little. And sometimes it’s telephone or e-mail or a Hallmark card.”
But none of that helped much. Reeve just plain wasn’t here. He lived in a dorm she had never seen, had friends with whom she had never spoken, had a new wardrobe she had never seen him wear.
When Janie and Reeve got together, they didn’t talk about it because it was old stuff for them. Been there, done it, seen it. With Reeve, Janie was no paper doll. Best of all, she was not Jennie Spring, explosive device.
She drew a necklace of hearts around the wedding invitation that said Jane Elizabeth Johnson.
There was nothing she had not shared with Reeve.
Well, within reason. She had not shared with Reeve her hobby of drawing up their wedding invitations. She aimed for the new yacht fantasy and tried to step aboard, tried to stand on the teak deck and hear the wind whipping in the sails.
“Ooooh, here’s a great maid-of-honor gown!” squealed Sarah-Charlotte. “Dark wine-red velvet. Perfect for a winter wedding. Just my color.”
“It’s a beautiful gown,” Janie agreed. Sarah-Charlotte’s white-blond hair would look like its own veil against that deep wine red.
But I have a sister now, thought Janie. A sister with auburn-red hair like mine. Isn’t your sister supposed to be your maid of honor? And Jodie would look better in green. How do I tell Sarah-Charlotte she can’t be my maid of honor? How do I sort out the fathers of the bride?
It’s just as well that Reeve doesn’t know about the wedding, she thought. I’m not quite ready myself.
She ached for Reeve. It was physical, that ache, located inside her arms. She needed to curve around him.
• • •
Think of a topic! Reeve yelled at himself.
His mind was a clear space.
Politics? He didn’t know anything.
The world? Nobody on campus cared.
Music? He couldn’t think of the name of a single band on the face of the earth.
Nature? Women’s rights? Traffic jams?
What do people talk about on the air? thought Reeve.
His mind was as smooth as the polish on a new car. His brain was buffed. The microphone was waiting; Derek was laughing silently and gladly.
Reeve had been a deejay for the first time from three A.M. to four A.M.—an hour when even college kids slept and the number of listeners probably hovered around two. It came easily: no clenching up, no fumbling for words, no mispronunciations. After two weeks at three A.M., Reeve had talked his way into prime time.
Derek’s advice had been against Reeve, and Derek was about to be proved correct.
Reeve had told everybody. Two of his classes were lectures with five hundred strangers. When the prof asked for questions at the end of class, Reeve stood up and announced his broadcast hour. His other two classes had twenty-five kids, and he’d told them, and of course he’d told the guys on his dorm floor and the girls on the floor below—people he had to live with.
Why, oh why, hadn’t he chickened out? Every single person he would ever know at Hills College was going to hear him being a jerk and a loser.
Of course, they might not be listening.
It was just a college station. They were probably listening to real stations.
If I fail, it’s okay, he told himself. Nobody but me cares, and it’s no big deal, and—
If he failed, he would transfer to another college.
It would be fun asking his parents for another ten or twenty thousand dollars in order for their son not to be humiliated on the air.
It’s nothing but a microphone, he said to himself. Say something. Say anything. “Once upon a time,” said Reeve.
Derek Himself stared incredulously. Cal, a deejay, and Vinnie, the station manager, who were the other two guys at the station tonight, looked up from their paperwork. All three began to snicker, and then actually to snort, with laughter, although background noise was forbidden when the mike was on; it would be picked up and broadcast. Once upon a time? A beginning for kindergartners. A beginning for fairy tales and picture books.
Reeve would never live it down. He really would have to transfer.
He pictured Cordell laughing at him. Laughed at by a roommate stupider and smellier than anybody on campus? He imagined the guys in the dorm yelling Loser! Loser! Guys he wanted to be friends with but hadn’t pulled it off yet. Guys who would not be polite about how worthless Reeve was.
“Once upon a time,” he repeated helplessly, stuck in horrible repetition of that stupid phrase.
And then talk arrived, like a tape that had come in the mail. For Reeve Shields really did know a story that began with “Once upon a time.”
“I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy. My girlfriend,” he said softly, into the microphone. Into the world.
“You know the type. Really cute, fabulous red hair, lived next door. Good in school, of course, girls like that always are. Janie had lots of friends and she was crazy about her mom and dad, because that’s the kind of family people like that have.”
Never had Reeve’s voice sounded so rich and appealing.
“Except,” said Reeve, “except one day in the school cafeteria, a perfectly ordinary day, when kids were stealing each other’s desserts and spilling each other’s milk, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton.”
His slow voice seemed to draw a half-pint of milk, with its little black-and-white picture of a missing child. It was almost visible, that little milk carton, that dim and wax-covered photograph.
“And the face on the milk carton,” said Reeve, “was Janie herself.”
Published by Laurel-Leaf
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Caroline B. Cooney
All rights reserved.
Laurel-Leaf and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request.
RL: 5.3
eISBN: 978-0-307-42520-1
October 2008
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Caroline B. Cooney, Whatever Happened to Janie?
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