Abby's Un-Valentine

  “I’m going to have a cup of tea and unwind a little,” Mom told us. “Can I fix anybody anything?”

  “I was about to bring Ross some apple juice,” I said.

  “No. Thanks. I changed my mind,” Ross sputtered. He began walking toward the door. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Stevenson.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ross,” said Mom with a quizzical look at Anna and me.

  Mom left and Ross said, “Could I use the phone? I have to call my brother to come pick me up.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” I said, and raced out of the room.

  But if I hoped giving Anna and Ross a few more minutes alone would help matters, I was extremely wrong. When I returned with the phone, Anna looked miserable and so did Ross. They were both staring at the floor.

  Ross made his call. As he hung up, he said, “He’ll be here in a minute. He has a job after school delivering flowers for Mom’s shop, and he’s in the neighborhood.”

  I took the phone from Ross and said, “Ross. About what just happened.”

  “Pretty funny,” said Ross. “Ha-ha.” He was being very sarcastic.

  “Ohhh,” said Anna. “Ross, it’s not what you think. It was an accident!”

  “My coat?” said Ross.

  He followed me to the hall closet, reached for his coat, and put it on.

  “Ross, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I think I hear my brother,” he answered.

  He opened the front door and walked out.

  Anna turned to me, and her eyes actually filled with tears. “Thanks for nothing, Abby. I hope someday I can repay you with a plan that is just as stupid!”

  “Hey, you were part of it too. You pretended to be me, don’t forget!”

  Anna said, “What was I supposed to do? You closed the kitchen door and left me standing there with him!”

  “You could have told him then.”

  “I couldn’t! He’d think we did it on purpose and then he’d hate me forever. And he did, and he does!”

  “No, he hates me. I’ll explain it to him and he’ll see that it’s all my fault.” I couldn’t stand the hurt look on my sister’s face. “It’ll be all right, Anna, I promise.”

  “Ha!” Anna shouted. She turned and stormed out of the room. A few minutes later, I heard the door to her room slam and then the violin music start. I didn’t recognize it, but even as a tone-deaf person, I could tell that it was not a soothing tune she was playing.

  I started to go into the kitchen to see if I could talk to Mom about what had happened. Then I thought about how I’d managed to make everyone I knew angry lately, except for maybe Kristy and possibly Jessi, and decided against it. The best way to end this day, I decided, was to keep a low profile.

  As to how I was going to survive the next day, I didn’t even want to think about it.

  * * *

  Friday at last, and the last day of Valentine’s Day madness. The dance, and Valentine’s Day itself, were on Saturday. This would have been a cause for me to rejoice, ordinarily. But not this Friday, not this Valentine’s Day Dance eve.

  The good news was that at breakfast, Anna spoke to me. She said, as I came into the kitchen and she stood up from the table, “I’m going to apologize to Ross today. I think you should too.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll do it first thing.”

  Anna nodded. Mom came into the kitchen. Anna left. I sighed.

  It was going to be a long, long day.

  My locker was flower free when I arrived, but I noticed that more than one locker around me had valentine-type envelopes wedged between the door and the frame or stuck in the locker vent. And I saw one bouquet of flowers resting against another locker nearby. The tombstone effect didn’t bother me so much today. I was feeling a little grave.

  My joke cheered me up. I wasn’t beaten yet, I decided, and went in search of Ross to apologize. As I wandered the halls, I was relieved that no one asked me about the inadvertent twin switch Anna and I had pulled the previous evening. Either Ross hadn’t had time to tell anyone, or he wasn’t going to talk about it. I fervently hoped it was the second choice.

  I found Ross near his homeroom. He turned as I approached him. I smiled, opened my mouth to begin my apology, and … he walked right by me.

  I stood there with my mouth open, feeling foolish. The final bell snapped me out of it, and I went to class. I guess I don’t have to add that Ross ignored me in English. Pointedly.

  I don’t know whether everyone else in the BSC ignored me at lunch, because I didn’t join them at our usual table. I took refuge in the library, where I stared at the same page in my history book for the entire lunch hour.

  I made sure that I was home from a nice, long run in time to catch a ride with Kristy when Charlie took her to the BSC meeting. No way was I going to walk in there alone. I didn’t want Charlie to know what had happened, or that I had not followed his excellent advice and as a result was the local pariah. So I kept quiet. Kristy started to ask me about what happened, but I gestured to her that we’d talk later.

  We were a little early, but everyone else had already assembled.

  “Hi,” said Kristy. She checked her watch, glanced at Claudia’s clock, and raised her eyebrows. For once, she wasn’t going to be able to give the near-tardy members her warning look.

  Everyone sort of mumbled a greeting. I said hello to my feet and sat down quickly in the corner.

  A flurry of phone calls kept us distracted at first, and I was glad for that.

  After Mary Anne had entered the last appointment in the record book and Kristy had called our client back to confirm it, silence fell. Claudia rooted around in a bag of bite-size Snickers, extracted one, and held out the bag. “Candy, anyone?”

  No one wanted any. Silence.

  “It’s been cold,” Jessi said.

  “Yeah,” agreed Mary Anne. “But at least it hasn’t snowed or sleeted anymore.”

  “I just hope it stays that way through the weekend,” Stacey said. “Nice, I mean.”

  “It would be too bad if we had a blizzard or something on Saturday night …” Mary Anne stopped. Her voice trailed off.

  Saturday night was the night of the dance, of course.

  Although I’m the newest member of the BSC, I’ve been around long enough to know that at any other meeting that occurred the night before a dance, the talk would center almost exclusively on the dance: who was wearing what, who was going with whom, what the decorations would be, who the DJ would be, and so on.

  But no one wanted to mention the dance, because who knew what would happen? And that wasn’t fair. Just because I’d declared my life a dance-free zone at the moment didn’t mean that my friends had to follow suit.

  So I took a deep breath and said, “About the dance.”

  I definitely had my audience’s attention.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I snapped at all of you at the last meeting. I’m sorry I implied that you would date anyone just for the sake of going on a date. I’m sorry —”

  “I’m sorry too,” Mary Anne cut in. “I didn’t mean to make you feel as if having a date to the dance was so … earthshakingly important.”

  Stacey nodded. “And it was wrong of me not to listen to you, Abby. You told me you weren’t interested in Ross, but I just ignored it because I wanted you to be at the dance — no matter what you wanted. I should have listened to what you said. You had a right to be angry.”

  “You did, Abby,” Claudia agreed. “I accept your apology and I apologize too.”

  We all fell silent again, but this time, the silence was much more comfortable.

  “Well,” Kristy said at last, in a hearty voice, “I’m glad we can agree that having a boyfriend, or not having one, isn’t worth ruining a friendship over.”

  I grinned. Trust Kristy to sledgehammer a point home.

  Looking around, I realized we were all grinning.

  I held up my hands. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Talk. Who’s wearing w
hat to the dance?”

  Jessi said, “Well, I’m going with some other kids from my grade, and we all want to wear red. I’ve got this red shirt that would look terrific, but maybe it’s a little too, you know, dressy.”

  “I know the shirt you’re talking about,” Claudia said instantly. “It’ll look great with the right accessories.”

  My eyes met Kristy’s. She made a face. I shook my head and leaned back. I was on track with my friends again, and that was a pretty good valentine for me.

  I came home from the BSC meeting feeling better. I actually felt like singing. I warmed up with an off-key medley of Aretha Franklin tunes while I organized dinner.

  Anna set the table in silent mode. I tossed the salad and watched her out of the corner of my eye, singing little bits of “Respect” (one of my favorites). Normally, anything resembling an attempt at a song from my lips makes Anna wince. Sometimes, if I sing loudly and long enough, I can make her beg me to stop.

  Now, I couldn’t even get her to wince. I gave up. I quit singing.

  Anna sighed. Then she said (apparently to the handful of silverware she was holding), “Did you apologize to Ross?”

  “I tried,” I said. “He wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t even give me a chance.”

  Laying each knife, fork, and spoon in its place with care, Anna said, “I tried to talk to him too. He just walked on by. He acted as if I didn’t exist. I thought maybe if you talked to him, since he likes you …”

  “Not anymore he doesn’t.” I didn’t add that this, at least, was a relief. I sensed that levity would not be acceptable.

  “Maybe you didn’t try hard enough,” Anna said.

  “I tried,” I insisted. “Believe me.”

  “He never liked me. Now …” Again Anna let her voice trail off.

  Naturally, Mom noticed the atmosphere of doom and gloom at dinner. After several attempts to carry on a conversation with Anna and me, she said, “Okay, you two, tell me what’s going on.”

  “Ross,” Anna blurted out miserably.

  “That boy I met yesterday afternoon?”

  We both nodded. We hadn’t told Mom the whole story the night before, just that Ross had stopped by and had gotten us mixed up. Since Mom had seen us play the old twin-switch routine on other friends, she hadn’t thought too much of it. And since she had brought work home from her office and spent most of dinner flipping through the pages of a report, she hadn’t noticed that Anna and I were not in our peak conversational form.

  But that was the night before. Tonight, without anything to distract her, how could she not notice?

  “What about Ross?” Mom inquired.

  “He was really upset when he discovered we’d pulled the twin swap on him,” I explained. I paused, took a deep breath, and told Mom the whole story of Ross’s Unrequited Love.

  When I’d finished, Mom said, “Well, that’s quite a story. And quite a problem.”

  “How do we solve it?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know.” Mom shook her head. “You may just have to wait and hope that time will help Ross’s hurt feelings.”

  Anna sighed. “I was thinking of writing him a note, but I don’t think he would read it.”

  “Notes are bad,” I said. “What if your note fell into the wrong hands?”

  I didn’t want what had happened to spread all over SMS.

  Anna didn’t either. She understood what I meant immediately. “You’re right,” she said.

  “Maybe we could convince someone else to talk to Ross,” I said. “He might listen to an apology from us if someone else talked to him first.”

  “Who?” Anna asked. “And what if it made him even more upset that we had told someone else what we did?”

  This was also a problem.

  We cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, and then Anna and I sat back down while Mom made a cup of hot tea. I stared hard at Anna. My twin. Double the trouble, double the fun, my mind sang, skipping in and out of old advertising jingles and clichés. Two for the price of one.

  “That’s it!” I said aloud.

  “What?”

  “Two of us. If we apologize together, maybe Ross will listen. Especially if we talk to him at his house. I mean, he can’t duck into the boys’ bathroom or stalk away down the hall at home, can he?”

  “At his house? Go to his house?” Anna couldn’t believe what I was saying.

  “Yes. And the sooner the better.” I bounced up. “Mom! I have an idea! Can you give us a ride somewhere?”

  By the time we’d organized our expedition to Ross’s, Anna had changed shirts twice. She wore her glasses. I wore my contact lenses.

  When we pulled up in front of the Browns’ house, Mom said, “I’ll wait in the car with my tea. Good luck.” She raised her travel mug in salute, then leaned back as we climbed out of the car and trooped up the walk to Ross’s front door.

  He was definitely surprised to see us. He took a step back and said, “Abby? Anna?”

  When Ross stepped back, Anna started backing up too. But I wouldn’t let her. I put my hand on her arm and propelled her across the doorstep. I figured that once we were inside, he wouldn’t throw us out.

  “What are you doing here?” Ross asked.

  We were inside now. I closed the door. Ross didn’t resist. “We came to talk,” I began. “But I don’t think we should do that standing in the hall.”

  Anna still hadn’t said a word.

  Ross was silent for a moment, then said, “No one’s in the living room. Come on.”

  We stood awkwardly for a moment, Ross glancing from me to Anna and back again. Then he smiled just a little. “Maybe you two should wear name tags, just so I don’t make the same mistake and mix you up again.”

  He sat down. So I did too, on the sofa across from him. I pulled Anna down beside me.

  Then I surprised Anna as well as Ross. “I’ve come to apologize to both of you,” I said.

  Anna finally spoke. “Abby!” she said.

  “This whole mess is my fault,” I continued.

  “Abby,” Anna interrupted, “wait.”

  I held up my hand. “No, listen. Ross, I like you. You’re a great person and I’d be glad to be friends with you, but I don’t want to go to the dance with you.”

  Ross ducked his head a little and his cheeks reddened. “I think I’ve got that figured out by now,” he muttered.

  “But maybe if I’d been a little more emphatic, made less of a joke of your invitation, you might have figured it out sooner,” I said.

  “Maybe I should have been listening,” replied Ross, surprising me. “I guess I just didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was more than willing to let him take some of the responsibility for that part of the mess, since what he had said was true. “Anyway, when I invited you over, it was for two reasons. I wanted to make clear how I felt, once and for all, and I wanted to try to make you see that Anna might be much more the sort of person you’d like than I am.”

  Now Anna ducked her head and blushed. I went on. “I never intended to play a twin-switch trick on you, and Anna certainly never did.” I explained about the contact lens accident and the borrowed shirt. And how, once I realized Ross had made a mistake, I hadn’t jumped in to correct it right away, because Ross was getting along so well with the right twin, even if it was by the wrong name.

  “It was just one of those mistakes that grew bigger and bigger, and it’s all my fault, and it’s killing me that you two are so right for each other and might not ever figure it out because of what I did,” I finished in a rush.

  Silence. Whew. Then I realized that even if it was an awkward silence, it wasn’t without possibilities. Anna was glancing at Ross from under her eyelashes. Ross kept looking up at her and then looking away. Both were seriously blushing.

  “That was you talking, Anna,” Ross said finally (to the rug). “You weren’t pretending to like classical music or flowers to imitate Abby?”

 
“Are you kidding?” I answered. “I like soccer, not string quartets. The only flowers I like are the ones I mow down on a soccer field on the way to the goal. If I —”

  “Abby,” said Anna. “Be quiet.”

  So I was.

  She looked at Ross steadily now. “It was me,” she said. “Not Abby. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you then, when it all happened.”

  “Nah,” said Ross, and he was looking directly at Anna now. “You don’t have to apologize, Anna. It’s okay.”

  “Great!” I jumped to my feet.

  Ross and Anna stood up too. They were still looking at each other. Then Ross said, “So, Anna. You want to go hear the Stoneybrook String Quartet tomorrow afternoon at the community center?”

  Anna’s face was suddenly radiant. “I’d like that,” she said. She added shyly, “Ross.”

  This time, I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut. But inside, I was cheering.

  Ross hadn’t invited Anna to the dance, but somehow, from the look on my sister’s face, I knew that the Stoneybrook String Quartet invitation was at least as good.

  It just might turn out to be a decent Valentine’s Day after all.

  Kristy had had trouble sleeping. When she finally did fall asleep, it was early in the morning, and then she slept hard until the sound of the alarm clock almost blew her out of bed.

  She stumbled around getting dressed and feeling disoriented and blue. She knew why she’d slept badly. Scout was leaving that day, and Kristy was going to miss her. Saying good-bye to Scout also reminded Kristy much too much of saying good-bye to Louie, the old collie who had been Kristy’s best friend. Louie died not long ago, and Kristy still misses him.

  But Scout wasn’t dying, Kristy reminded herself as she went down to breakfast. She was just leaving home to start her new life, the one she was meant for.

  Passing by the hall bathroom, Kristy was stopped by the sounds of a faucet running and water splashing. “Hold still!” she heard Karen command in what, for her, was a whisper.

  Kristy knocked on the bathroom door and heard a thump, thump, thump in reply. Finally, David Michael’s voice said, “Who is it?”