“Look at it this way, Holly,” said Kate. “The movie is inside. It’s going to be hot in there. You can have buttered popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins. Not one single cold-weather worry.”
I thought about having hot buttered popcorn in my left hand and chocolate-covered raisins in my right hand and a large soda propped between my knees. My brother thinks it’s completely revolting to eat those three things at one time, but I think it’s heaven. I’d be willing to watch anything in exchange for buttered popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins. I said, “But I can’t.”
Even Kate was exasperated with me. “Holly, none of us has a date for tonight. And it’s a terrific movie. Everybody says so. The critics even say so. Even Mrs. Audette says so, and she thinks movies are an insult to the book. Come on.”
I gave up trying to think of excuses. Miserably, I said, “My father won’t let me go.”
“Then we’ll go tomorrow when you aren’t busy with your father,” said Lydia.
“She means her father the minister thinks there’s too much sex and violence in the film, and she can’t see that one at all,” said Kate. Kate heaved a sigh. She knows my father almost as well as I do. Maybe better; she still goes to the youth group meetings and I dropped out the day I turned sixteen. I always hated church activities, but my parents said I had to go till I was sixteen, and then I could make up my own mind. They probably figured by the mature age of sixteen I’d love it so much I’d want to run it myself. They were pretty upset when I said, “Well, that’s it for church.” But it was a promise, and they keep their promises, so they let me drop out. Not, I might add, without daily reminders that the church group still existed should I deign to appear.
Lydia said, “How’s he going to know? Just tell your father we’re going to play Monopoly at my house and how’s he going to know we really went to the movies? Come on, Holly, that’s no excuse. You’ll love the flick, I know you will.”
I thought about promises. I had not promised not to see the movie. But then, my father hadn’t thought extracting a promise was necessary. He said not to go, therefore his daughter would not go.
“Don’t be such a sheep, Holly,” said Lydia. “Honestly, in some ways I feel so much older than you. Still scurrying around doing exactly what Mummie and Daddy say. Making eyes at sixteen-year-old boys, for heaven’s sake. Playing with a dollhouse!”
She made me sound about twelve. I winced at the description.
“The movie isn’t bad,” said Kate. “My sister saw it. She said it was really funny and most of the violence was offstage and the sex was kind of sweet and tender. Not raunchy.”
“Just don’t tell your father,” said Lydia. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
Everything hurts my father. Starving children in Africa, imprisoned people in America, young mothers dying of cancer, teenagers on drugs, and other people’s marriages breaking up. My father is bruised and battered by the entire world.
Lydia was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes. She has slightly slanting eyes, as if mixed in with all her French and German and Scottish ancestry is one lone Oriental, and nobody can look more superior and more bored than Lydia. Not even Hope.
Lydia’s writing me off, I thought. All my mother’s predictions are going to come true. If I don’t do this, I will be the one left out. The girl nobody invites to skating parties and never thinks of for gossip on the phone.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at Kate’s around six-thirty.”
“Good,” said Lydia. She patted me. Then I really felt about twelve years old and part of the dollhouse set. Being patted.
All through the school day I stewed over my decision. First I’d feel guilty. Then I’d be mad at all my parents’ archaic, unfair demands. Then I’d think, at least I ought to argue with my father first, tell him what I want, be up front about it instead of lying. Then I’d think, how can I be old enough to graduate from high school if I can’t even choose my own entertainment?
I worried so much I forgot I had a bus to catch after school and by the time I remembered it, the bus was long gone. I was stranded three miles from home, and there were six inches of snow on the ground. Of course the sidewalks—where there were sidewalks—were salted and scraped, so that if I was lucky I’d hit only a few hundred patches of ice on which to slip. I am the sort of girl whose ankles automatically bend at the sight of ice and whose rear end can always find the deepest, wettest slush to fall in. I wondered what the odds were that the car that ran me down would have metal treads in its snow tires.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen to a person in Hawaii, I thought sadly.
And on top of that, I’d left my scarf and mittens in my so-called homeroom.
“Hi, Holly,” said a familiar voice. “Need a ride home?”
“Oh, Jamie! Were lovelier words ever uttered! Yes, I do.” It was on the tip of my tongue to say, I didn’t know you could drive yet, but I stopped myself in time. Fleetingly I thought of Lydia accusing me of making eyes at a sixteen-year-old. Well, Lydia wasn’t here. As she liked to say, what she couldn’t see wouldn’t hurt her.
Jamie even took some of my books. That boy has possibilities, I thought to myself. “Jamie,” I said, “could you possibly wait another moment while I race down to homeroom and get my scarf and mittens?”
“Sure. Where’s your homeroom?”
“Mr. Tartrella. Basement detail.”
“I’ve heard about that place. Never have seen it. Mind if I tag along?”
“Step right up. The chance of your life. See the famous quarantine room for the forgotten fourteen.”
Jamie laughed. We clattered down the stairs together, Jamie wisecracking every step of the way. Mr. Tartrella was still in the room, gathering up his attendance and cafeteria papers. Mr. Tartrella is not known for his speedy achievement levels. He’s in charge of our Educational Technology Department (known in my mother’s day as Filmstrips). “Hello, Mr. Tartrella,” I said.
He looked at me vaguely. After all, when you have all of fourteen kids in your homeroom, and only two of them girls, it isn’t easy to remember their names and faces. “Hunh?” he said nasally.
Jamie looked gravely at Mr. Tartrella, at the gray ceiling with its exposed bulbs, and at the torn leather on the vaulting horses where Stein and White usually perched. “Mr. Tartrella?” he said.
“Hunh?”
“Is this homeroom up to the standards mandated by federal laws?”
I burst out laughing.
Mr. Tartrella said, “Hunh?”
I pulled my mittens on and tossed my scarf around my neck, and Jamie and I left the room. “Does he ever say anything besides hunh?” said Jamie.
I reflected. “Well, he’s been known to say naah and yup,” I told Jamie, “but not often enough to consider them parts of his working vocabulary.”
Jamie’s turn to double over laughing. He spilled my books all over the basement stairs. If I’d dumped the books, I would have been embarrassed and awkward, trying to gather them all up, and struggling to be graceful while doing it, but Jamie barely noticed. Still laughing, he picked up the books almost as if he’d meant to drop them, and we walked up the stairs. “That homeroom,” he said, “is about as attractive as the inside of a cereal box.”
I hadn’t done so much laughing in ages. I’d forgotten how wonderful it feels to have your cheeks bunch up from grinning, and your eyes crinkle with chuckling, and your whole body aching in a funny way with so much laughter.
“Who else is in that homeroom?” he said.
“La crème de la crème,” I told him. “People like Ron White, Ted Zaweicki, Rich Ayers, Hope Martin.”
We both groaned. It was as much fun groaning as laughing. Jamie opened the door of his car for me, and I thought of Christopher rehearsing and blushed. Jamie drove pretty well. I wondered how long he’d had his license. I liked watching his hands on the wheel. He had large hands, much larger than mine. I found myself wanting to hold them, curl h
is fingers around mine.
“What are you doing tonight?” said Jamie.
“Going to a movie with Kate and Lydia.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
I told him. We were almost at my house. “I saw that movie,” he said, sounding surprised. “I thought your father was pretty strict about stuff like that. Didn’t he object to your seeing it? Or doesn’t he know what it’s about?”
I decided not to incriminate myself by answering that one. I said, “What did you like best about the movie, Jamie?”
“Leaving,” he said firmly.
I laughed in spite of myself.
Christopher was sweeping snow off the steps, getting rid of the afternoon’s flurries. He paused midsweep and stared at me getting out of Jamie Winter’s car.
“Bye, Jamie,” I said, slamming the door. “Thanks a lot.”
“It was a pleasure,” he said gravely.
I scurried up the sidewalk, and Christopher leaned on his broom and said, “Jamie Winter? Holly, he’s my age. You’re a senior. And he’s a bore, besides.”
“He is not boring,” I said. “Anyhow, he just gave me a ride home.” I thought of how I had wanted to hold Jamie’s hand, and I flushed.
Nothing slips by Christopher. “What happened to the bus?” he said, eyeing my hot cheeks suspiciously.
“I missed it.”
Christopher looked at me as if any fool knew that missing the bus was a ruse to get a ride home with Jamie. He said, “So old Holly’s falling for Jamie Winter, huh? Can’t you date someone your own age?”
“I’m not dating him!” I yelled. “I’m not even thinking about him! I just took advantage of his car!”
“That’s typical of girls. Girls are selfish, unpleasant, grabbing creeps. All you want is free rides and gasoline. Don’t give a thing in return.”
Snow has its uses. I dropped everything, made the quickest snowball in history, and got my worthless little brother right in the face. What do I mean—little? He’s now six inches taller than I am. I have to throw uphill. I felt that I was defending old Alison’s right to give nothing in return for free rides. Christopher and I had a snowball fight that threatened to be the death of us both, and I stopped only because I had a sudden thought, not related to Christopher or Alison or rides or snow.
Why had Jamie asked me what I was doing Friday night?
Six
I HAD PLENTY OF time to wonder about Jamie.
On Sunday morning, Lydia’s father told my father how nice it was that the girls had all gone to a movie together just like old times. My father said, “I thought they were going to play Monopoly.” Lydia’s father said, “They’re too old for that, Stewart. Where’d you get an idea like that?”
Fortunately my father is nonviolent. All that happened was a sad lecture in how I disappointed his trust, and he grounded me for two weeks. Very grounded. No nothing.
I stared into the attic of my dollhouse and wondered if I should have a maid living up there. Decorate it in gray and white and black, appropriate for a girl in domestic service.
But I couldn’t get interested.
“Kate’s parents,” I told my mother and father at supper, “don’t care what she sees or what she reads. They believe she is sufficiently mature to sift the reasonable and the good from the unreasonable and the bad. They feel—”
“Holly,” said my mother softly and with a lot of hostility, “I don’t care in the slightest what Kate’s parents feel about anything.”
From the look in her eyes it was best to drop the topic and accept being grounded a little more gracefully.
I kept thinking about Jamie Winter.
Very nice person. Very good-looking. Very amusing. Definitely no more fond of frigid weather than I.
But try as I might, I could not manage a single romantic thought toward him. He was just sixteen years old. Christopher’s age, for heaven’s sake. Just some boy who stood around waiting for the same bus.
Perhaps he would be driving every day now, though, if his mother would let him use the car that often. Would I mind if he didn’t stand with me and crack jokes while everybody else sculpted snow people? If he offered to drive me home every day, the way Grey drove Hope, would I accept?
That was a tough question. On climate grounds, definitely I would accept a ride rather than endure the cold. On boyfriend grounds, that meant accepting the teasing and the funny looks from an entire school, and I doubted that Jamie’s jokes, however amusing, were worth that.
I tried to come up with one boy—any boy—in the entire school over whom I could really flip. But everyone I could name had so many drawbacks. Perfection, I thought—is that an unreasonable thing to ask? Should I allow some ice-hockey jock to date me?
I laughed at myself and turned back to the dollhouse. What an ego I had! I could at least wait to be asked before I decided to turn these hordes of men down.
I needed money for Christmas.
What I really craved was an after-school job, but with eleven hundred college men in a small town, most of whom are desperate for extra income, after school jobs are nonexistent.
Which is why I signed up for the psychology department experiment.
The college is always sending sign-up sheets over to the high school science classes. They need volunteers over sixteen for everything under the sun. (Or snow, as the case may be.) They want you to save your urine for six days while you’re following a special diet; they need samples of your blood; they want to scan your brain while you sleep; they expect you to answer one hundred questions dealing with your perceptions of right and wrong.
I did one of their diet things once because the only way they could get anybody to follow it was to pay each volunteer ten dollars. Frankly, when it was over I would rather not have had the ten dollars.
But this was different. The psych department was going to test whether lie detectors really worked, and anybody who beat the lie detector would get fifty dollars! There’s an incentive we can all respond to. Naturally I went right over to sign up. Apparently the chance to win fifty dollars (not to mention the intrigue of being hooked up to a lie detector) was pretty appealing. The sheet had only twenty slots and nineteen of them were taken. I scribbled my name in the last slot, and it was only after I’d signed in that I saw Jamie Winter’s name above mine.
Naturally Hope Martin, who was also willing to lie to get fifty dollars, was standing behind me and noticed. “So that’s why you’re signing up,” she said. “You’d get so much more satisfaction out of dating an older man.”
“I am not dating Jamie Winter,” I said through clenched teeth. “I am not even seeing Jamie Winter.”
“You’re trying hard enough,” said Hope.
“Hope,” I said, deleting all the words my father would not want me to say, “dry up and blow away.”
She laughed. “Holly, for your own good, look at what you’re doing. You don’t want to bother getting out and meeting new people. You’re too lazy to socialize with the rest of us. Therefore, you settle for a kid who poses no difficulties for you, and you—”
It was either walk away or kick her in the shins, and because I did not wish to be grounded any longer than necessary I chose walking away. I will not lose my temper, I told myself. I don’t care about Hope Martin’s opinions. I signed up to try for fifty dollars for Christmas money. I am not trying to get to know Jamie Winter better. Nor am I a lazy clod who won’t socialize with acceptable people and settles for kids!
I stomped home, crushing Hope with every crackle of ice.
“You?” said Christopher, laughing heartily. “Beat a lie detector?”
“I might.”
“Not a chance. You’re like Abraham Lincoln. You’d walk five miles to return the odd penny.”
“I told Dad I was going to play Monopoly when I was really going to a movie.”
“That’s true,” said Christopher, “but it was a fluke. You were riddled with guilt doing that. Mom and Dad would have seen it if they hadn?
??t been watching the news when you told them about the Monopoly game. Look at the way you enjoy being grounded.”
Enjoy being grounded. Showed what he knew.
All week I thought about the best way to tell lies. I didn’t know how a lie detector worked, so it was hard to come up with a plan to beat it. Instead, I planned the spending of the fifty dollars.
Of course, on Sunday my father’s sermon was about Christmas giving. We were collecting for migrant workers in the Southwest. “Sometimes,” said my father in a slow, sad voice, “these families live in windowless shacks for weeks at a time.” He surveyed an unwilling congregation until they all began to fidget. “What would it be like to have no windows? No electrical appliances?” People began reading the backs of their service leaflets, to get away from the sermon. He was going to ask for money again, and nobody wanted to hear about it. “If all of us gave a dollar for every window, bed, clean sheet, and new toy in our houses, how we could help the poor!” said my father.
Two hundred people shifted guiltily in their pews.
I thought of the oriental rug I’d been yearning to put in my dollhouse parlor, and I thought of skinny children hanging in the doorways of their shacks and how my fifty dollars could put sturdy shoes on their cold little feet. The trouble is, I thought, I’m so shallow and worthless that I would rather have the oriental rug.
Maybe it would be best not to win the fifty dollars. Then I wouldn’t have all these wrenching financial decisions to make.
Seven
IN HOMEROOM, WHEN I had finally peeled off all the layers required to protect my fragile flesh from a temperature hovering at ten degrees and a wind that howled through every scrap of fabric, Hope said timidly, “Holly?”