“He’s jealous.” Jared sat on the sheet again. “And I am too.”
“Down, Reggie. Stay.” I went back to the sheet. “He won’t move.” I stretched out next to Jared, my back to Reggie.
He started growling again. I turned around. He hadn’t moved, but he was growling furiously.
Jared giggled. “Romantic music.”
“He sounds like a small locomotive.”
“Well, we’re doing Rule Number Four.”
“What’s that?”
“Having fun.” He kissed my nose. A light kiss.
The pitch of Reggie’s growl deepened.
“Is he still lying there?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.” He kissed me softly on the lips.
I kissed him back. The next kiss was longer. I forgot about Reggie. I forgot about popularity.
By the time we stopped, Reggie was asleep. We must have kissed for more than an hour. We had smiled at each other and laughed, but some of the kisses felt very serious. I had pushed my fingers through his hair. I had even smoothed out his eyebrow.
Jared stopped first. He looked at his watch. “It’s five thirty.” He kissed me again.
“Mom’s home.” I sat up. “I better go.”
He sat up too. “Me too, I guess.”
We kissed. We stood up and kissed. Reggie woke up and started growling again. We folded the sheet, and every time we brought the edges toward each other, we kissed. When we finished, Jared put the sheet away, and I untied Reggie from the tree. He seemed to be all right as long as we weren’t kissing, but I made him heel while we walked out of the park.
“So, what are the Rules?” I asked.
“Well, you know what Four is.”
“I forgot.”
“Okay. Here goes. I told you, Number One is my favorite. It’s take your time.”
“We did that.”
“Two is you have to have a romantic setting. I don’t know if we made it on that.”
“Not everybody gets to have a dog growling in the background.”
We waited for the light on Central Park West.
“True. Three is the kissers should like each other. I ace that one.”
“Me too.”
We crossed the street.
“Number Four I told you—it should be fun and not too scary. Five is you can kiss with your mouth open or shut.”
“That’s not a rule, that’s a choice.”
“Go argue with my brother. Six is—”
“You said there were five Rules.”
He blushed. “I didn’t want to tell you about Six till we were through.”
“What is it?”
“Anybody can stop anytime. No hard feelings. I would have told it to you if anything seemed wrong.”
“You didn’t mention Number Seven either.”
“There isn’t a Seven.”
“Yes, there is. Sit, Reggie.” I kissed Jared, a short one on the lips. “Sixty-sixth Street is a kissing zone.” We were at the corner of Sixty-sixth and Broadway, by the subway entrance where he was going to leave me.
“That’s a good rule. Tell Reggie to stay.”
I did, and we had one more long one. And I smiled all the way home.
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday. Eleven more days.
After school, Ardis came with me to study history at my house. When we got there, Reggie was too busy leaping at me to leap at Ardis. She backed into the kitchen but stood in the doorway, watching us and smiling, which I thought was a good sign.
“It seems like fun,” she said. “I wish . . .”
“If a genie gave you one wish, what would it be?” I asked when Reggie calmed down.
“To live forever, I guess. Maybe not to be scared of animals. I don’t know. Maybe for my mother not to be such a cleanliness freak. What would yours be?”
I paused. “Maybe for people to like me. Let’s work in the kitchen. Maud’s in the bedroom. I have to get my history book.” I left before she could say anything.
When I came back, we started studying. And I found out that one of Suzanne’s rumors was true—Ardis was awful at history.
“How do you remember which civilization came first?”
“I don’t know how. I just do.”
“Great. Big help.”
“Let me think. We need a memory thing. You know, a nemo . . .”
“A mnemonic device?”
“Yeah. Like, listen. Mesopotamian came first. That’s an ‘m.’ Then Babylonian. That’s a ‘b.’ Assyrian, Egyptian . . .”
Ardis wrote down the initials.
“. . . Minoan, Mycenaean, Greek, and Roman. What do we have?”
“M B A E M M G R.” She turned her notebook toward me, and we both stared at it.
“Um,” I said. “Most Baboons Are Eaten by Mad Mongooses—mongeese?—in Green Robes.”
“Everything is about animals with you,” she said, laughing. “How’s Many Babies Are Eaten by Mad Mothers in . . . uh . . . Gray Raincoats?”
“We must be hungry. ‘E’ doesn’t only have to stand for ‘eat.’” I pulled a box of pretzels out of the cabinet over the sink. “Can you think of any more?”
“Give me a minute. . . . Here’s one. My Brother And Every Musical Man Grow Radishes.”
“I like it,” I said.
“It doesn’t have any extra words. I won’t go nuts trying to figure out what ‘in’ and ‘by’ stand for.”
“Okay, so now you just have to remember the sentence.”
“That’s easy. My Brother And Every Musical Man Grow Radishes.”
After that we worked on how long each civilization lasted, and I made her memorize them till she could say them back to me without stopping to think.
Finally she said, “I can’t take any more. I’ll work on it this weekend. What are you wearing to Grad Night?” She riffled through the pages of the history book. “I wish I could wear this.” She pointed at a toga.
“You’d look fabulous. You could wear gold bracelets on your arms above the elbows.” She’d be gorgeous. She was gorgeous in the Claverford uniform. She’d be gorgeous times a million.
“Yeah, and I could wear leather sandals with straps that lace up to my knees.”
We were quiet, picturing it. Then I said, “What’s your dress really like?”
She grinned. “It’s not a toga, but it’s okay. It’s an African print, and it’s two-piece, and the skirt is very short. What’s yours like?”
I loved my dress. It was dark-blue taffeta. Not the dull Claverford navy, but royal and midnight blue mixed together. Across the front was a scattering of pale dots, like stars in the Milky Way.
“I’ll show you.” I went into the bedroom, took the dress out of the closet, and went back to the kitchen . . .
. . . and found Reggie sitting next to Ardis with his head in her lap. She had that look you get on your face when a soap bubble touches your arm and doesn’t burst immediately, or when a butterfly lands on you—something magical and precious has just happened and you don’t want it to end.
Her hand hovered about two inches above his head. She was dying to pet him, but she was still afraid.
“He loves it if you scratch behind his ears,” I said.
And she did it!
“He’s wagging his tail!” she said, smiling delightedly.
“He likes what you’re doing. He likes you.” After graduation, please remember I made this possible.
“I like him. I like you, doggie-Reggie.”
Reggie wagged his tail a few more times, then stood and shook himself.
“I feel abandoned.”
“You shouldn’t. It makes it that much more of an honor when he does come over.”
“I guess.”
“I think he’d like a pretzel.”
“Is it all right? The salt isn’t bad for him?”
“It’s all right.”
She gave him one without flinching, and he trotted off with it. “Is that your dress? What a stu
pendous color. Oh! I almost forgot. Nina and BeeBee are coming to my house before Grad Night to get ready together. Russ, Liam, and Carlos are meeting us there. Jared could too. You want to come? BeeBee is incredible with hair and makeup.”
I nodded. Going to Ardis’s would be a fabulous beginning for the Final Triumph of Wilma the Popular.
Chapter Nineteen
Friday. Ten more days.
Ms. Hannah gave our yearbooks out in homeroom. My prepopularity photo smiled dutifully at me from page sixty-seven. Underneath, it said:
Wilma Sturtz
Science Club
You can count on Wilma.
I wondered what they’d write about me now.
There was a saying under each picture. I hunted for Ardis’s. There. Under “SGO, Debating Club, Russian Club,” her saying was “Sensitive, smart, stunning—spectacular!” And they were right.
Under Nina’s photo, it said, “A thousand points for wit and friendship.” BeeBee’s was “The next Picasso—and she’s nice too!” Jared’s was “Behind those eyebrows, the pen of a writer.” It sounded like he had a ballpoint in his skull instead of brains.
Daphne’s wasn’t any better than mine. Hers was “We expect a lot from Daphne.” Under Suzanne’s it said, “The snoop with the scoop. Beware of libel suits!”
I spent the day autographing yearbooks and having mine autographed. I asked everybody to write why they liked me. I wanted to find out how the spell made me seem to them.
In their books, I tried to write why I liked them. In Ardis’s I wrote, “My favorite because you’re honest and fun and brave!” In Nina’s I wrote, “All that’s behind your bark is a wagging tail and a wet tongue.” To BeeBee—“For putting up with a skating dummy and for not having a fit about Reggie.” To Daphne—“I like all dog lovers, especially the ones with a sense of humor.”
I held Jared’s book for five minutes before I figured out what to say. Finally, I wrote, “I like your Rules, your caricature, the amazing stuff you say—and your eyebrows.”
I had to struggle to think of things to write about everybody else, but I didn’t lie to anyone. In Suzanne’s book I just signed my name.
My book was passed around so much that I didn’t get to look through it till sixth period, when I held it in my lap while Ms. Singer went over math problems. I checked first to see what Jared had written. Under his picture were the words “See back cover.” I turned to the back and found two poems. The first one was:
She asks why I like her.
Might as well ask
Why I breathe.
Maybe tomorrow I won’t
Breathe or like her
Anymore.
Maybe tomorrow the tides
Will stop.
Maybe tomorrow will bring
No more rainbows.
Maybe tomorrow
She will stop
Asking useless questions.
It was signed, “From Jared Fein.” The next one was:
I like you because . . .
We held hands and I liked it
We kissed and I liked it
We even talked and I liked it
I like you because . . .
We held hands and you liked it
We kissed and you liked it
We talked and you liked it
I like you because . . .
You’re kind to dogs
And seals
And me
I like you because . . .
He was the poet! Now that I knew, it made the other poems even better. They were beautiful. I felt like a movie star, having poems like that written to me.
I turned to the front of the book. The pages were so full of writing, you could hardly see the photos. I found Ardis’s picture again. In the margin above her face, she had written, “You goof! I like you because you’re Reggie’s owner! And many, many more reasons. Love, Ardis.”
What reasons? I wished she had told me!
Daphne had scribbled over her photo, so I guess she thought it was bad. She wrote, “Thanks for sticking up for me.”
When I read the other kids’ messages, I was bewildered. What they wrote didn’t make sense. They thought they were writing about me, but they weren’t. A sixth grader wrote inside the front cover, “I like you because you know what I’m really like.” But I hardly knew her! Erica wrote that I never made judgments about her. Which was true, but only because I didn’t know her well enough to make them. I think BeeBee summed up what everybody was saying. She wrote, “I like you because you like me through and through.”
Then I figured it out. I was like a celebrity. People felt about me the way you feel about an actor you love. You see his movies and then you read about him in magazines. You find out he likes the same kind of music as you, or maybe he has a dog. And then you discover that his parents got divorced when he was nine, and yours did too. You start thinking, If he knew me, he’d really like me. Pretty soon you feel he does know you, and if he saw you on the street, he’d recognize you as his soul mate, and you’d fall into each other’s arms.
My celebrity status made them imagine I knew their secret, best selves. But to stay a celebrity, I had to find the old lady. And she wasn’t anywhere.
Saturday. Nine more days.
In the morning, I met Daphne in Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Her sheepdog, Samson, kept trying to herd Reggie while they played.
“It’s easy to have friends if you’re a dog,” I said. “If you don’t bite and you smell right, you’re in.”
“Yeah. Nobody says your ears are pointy so I don’t like you.” Daphne sat on the grass.
I joined her. “Are you studying for finals?”
“Yeah. This is the last daylight I’ll see this weekend.”
“Mom isn’t letting me talk on the phone,” I said. “When it rings, she picks it up and sounds like an answering machine. ‘I’m sorry. Wilma can’t come to the phone right now.’”
“At least your phone rings. I don’t know why you envy dogs. You make friends faster than they do. Everybody’s your friend.”
“Everybody at school.”
“Who else is there?”
Nobody else.
We watched the dogs. Reggie had picked up a stick and was prancing off with it, chased by Samson.
“I’m not just studying,” she added. “I’m also working on my valedictory speech.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’ve been trying to think of a way to say how much I’ve hated Claverford without anybody knowing that’s what I’m saying.”
“Why can’t they know?”
“Because they look at the speech ahead of time.”
“They do? Who?”
“The graduation committee. Ms. Hannah’s on it.”
“Isn’t that unconstitutional?”
“I don’t know, but they do it. So I guess I better say that graduation is a turning point, something about remembering these years for the rest of my life. Junk like that.”
“Hey . . .” I was getting an idea. “Do you give your speech before or after we get our diplomas?”
“Right before. I speak and then we get them.”
“Listen. Could you put something in your speech like . . .” I thought for a few seconds. “Like ‘Although we’re graduating today, we’ll always be Claverfordians.’ Um . . . ‘Body and soul’ maybe. ‘Forever’ maybe.”
“I guess so.” She closed her eyes. “‘Claverford has marked us. We are hers forever.’”
“That’s too . . . poetic. Could you say this exactly: ‘Though we get our diplomas today, we will always be Claverfordians’?”
“It’s important?”
I nodded. Maybe I could fool the spell into thinking I would be at Claverford forever and everybody else would be too.
“‘Though we receive our diplomas today, we will always be Claverfordians.’ Is that it?”
“Perfect.” But would it work?
Chapter Twenty
One
more week.
Nothing much happened during finals week except finals. Occasionally somebody mentioned Grad Night, but then the conversation always went back to tests and flunking tests and parents going crazy.
I studied and worried about the end of the spell and looked forward to Grad Night all at the same time. I could concentrate on math and wonder about the solution to my life—my future after graduation. I sent mental petitions to the old lady. See how hard I’m studying? Don’t I deserve to stay popular?
I was nice to Maud. I went to the store for Mom. See? I do good turns for lots of people. Can’t I keep my wish? Please.
In language arts on Wednesday, I told Jared about meeting at Ardis’s to go to Grad Night.
He said, “Okay, but I don’t like Carlos.”
“Me neither.”
There were no classes on Friday, only a few leftover exams. My last test ended at noon. Afterward, I cleaned out my locker. I imagined leaving Jared’s caricature behind to stun and terrify some new sixth grader, but in the end I took it.
The halls were empty. I walked all over the school. I was probably the only kid in world history who didn’t want to graduate.
Ardis had told us to come to her house at four thirty to get ready. The boys were coming at six, and Ardis’s mother was going to give us dinner before we left at seven.
A pile of shoes sat on newspapers outside the door of Ardis’s apartment. I rang the bell, and Ardis and Nina opened the door while I was untying my sneakers.
“Hi. Come on in,” Ardis said.
“Any dust or grime on your body?” Nina said. “The disinfecting room is to your left.”
It was like being in a department-store showroom. I smelled furniture polish, and everything was so clean, it almost sparkled, the way bathrooms do in TV commercials.
BeeBee was waiting for us in Ardis’s bedroom. Ardis lived in it, I guess, but it was not a kid’s room. She slept in a four-poster bed with a canopy. Her desk and dresser were made of reddish wood with shiny brass handles and tapering legs. On the walls were framed oil paintings of landscapes and ocean scenes.
“Someday I’m going to sleep on a normal bed,” Ardis said, “and have furniture that was built after Mesopotamia.” She giggled. “Whenever that was.”