I was not surprised, when I looked up, to see that it was her. A Harvard student—that was my guess—who’d come in alone every afternoon that week and burrowed into the corner booth, ordering tea and barely looking up from her book. Day after day she wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt, as if that were her uniform. She looked like she’d been raised in a convent, and not just because of her porcelain-pale skin, either. There was also something so innocent about her, so born-yesterday, it made me feel like I shouldn’t look at her too closely. As if she wasn’t fully formed yet, a chick just out of the egg, still damp and wobbly.
Except for ordering the tea, she didn’t speak, which offended me slightly. The Mug was the kind of place where people yakked at you constantly, and even though that got on my nerves, this girl’s I-am-so-smart-I-can’t-be-bothered attitude was annoying me too. Where did she think she was? Au Bon Pain? I picked up my order pad and stalked over to her booth. If I had to put down my coffee, I was going to make it worth my while.
“So,” I said, “you want some T. S. tea, and what else?”
She looked startled, her pale blue eyes open wide. “TST?” she asked. I guess she thought I was offering her drugs.
“Tea. You want tea, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. I guess so.”
“I mean, that’s what you usually order, so I just assumed. How about a piece of pie with that?” I gave her my pushy-waitress smile.
She turned her book facedown on the tabletop with a shaky hand. Grace Paley. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. A book I’d always meant to read.
“Pie?” she whispered.
“Yeah, pie. It’s a round pastry thing with fruit in the middle.” I kept my pencil poised over the pad, waiting to write.
She blushed. “Okay, well, what kind do you have?”
“Today we have apple, blueberry, apple-blueberry, and pecan.”
“I guess I’ll have …” She seemed to be stumped. Obviously she needed that Harvard education badly.
“Or I could have Sophie make you a sandwich. Turkey, tuna, salami, grilled cheese—”
“I don’t think—”
“Or maybe both, huh? Turkey sandwich? Blueberry pie?” I put the pad down on the table. She was going to order something.
“Do I—do I have to order food?” the girl asked. And when I looked at her again, her blue eyes were starting to swim.
God, I was such a bully. “No, you don’t have to. You can just have your tea,” I said, giving up.
She sat up straighter in the booth and managed to look me in the eye. “No, I would actually like a piece of pie. How much is the pecan?”
“It’s a bargain at two fifty. The others are two bucks.”
She thought it over. “Okay, I’ll have a piece of apple pie.”
I winked my smart-ass waitress wink. “Good choice. Everybody loves Sophie Schifferdecker’s apple pie.”
The girl nodded and picked up her book again. Just shy, I decided. Pitifully shy. Amazing she has the nerve to go out and sit in a restaurant by herself. I felt kind of bad about pushing her to order the pie. It occurred to me that she could be on scholarship—even at Harvard, not everybody was rich. I set the pie in front of her and decided not to get mad if she left me a crappy tip.
I sipped my coffee behind the counter and glanced at a copy of the Boston Globe that someone had left in a booth. I kept having the feeling that Pale Girl was looking at me, but I didn’t turn around to check. Then a bunch of customers came in and I forgot about her. Around four thirty I realized she was still there.
“You want anything else?” I said, walking over to her booth. “More tea?”
She blushed. “Oh, no thanks. I guess I should leave.”
I shrugged. “The dinner rush won’t start for another hour—you can hang out, if you want to.”
“Thanks.” She ran her fingers through a headful of messy rusty curls.
“So,” I said, “you a freshman?” Waitresses at the Mug are supposed to be nosy.
“A freshman? You think I’m a freshman?” She looked at me as if I’d slapped her.
“Hey, I’m just guessing. You’re not?”
“No! I’m a senior.”
I would never have thought that. “So, your last year at Harvard, huh?”
She blinked a few times. “I don’t go to Harvard.” “Oh, sorry. It’s just that a lot of the students who come in here do.”
A light went on behind her eyes. “Oh, you thought I was a Harvard freshman! I get it. No, I’m in high school. I go to Cambridge Rindge and Latin.”
“Really?” I sank down in the booth across from her without really realizing it. “We almost never get any high school kids in here. They all hang out in the pit by the T station in nice weather, or at Bertucci’s if they’re hungry.”
She shrugged. “Yeah. I’m new here. I don’t know many kids.”
“You had to change schools your senior year? That’s rough. Did your parents move here for jobs or something?”
She smiled but didn’t say anything for a minute. Obviously I was prying, which I normally don’t do, but there was something kind of interesting about this girl, and I felt like I’d almost figured out the puzzle.
“My parents are still back in Indiana, where I grew up. I’m living with my older sister now. She went to Harvard, but she graduated last year. She works for an architect.”
Pale Girl picked up her teacup and pretended to sip from it, though I knew the contents had disappeared a long time ago. What was she not saying? I looked at her clipped, unvarnished fingernails, the bashful smile that vanished as quickly as it appeared, her uniform of invisibility—were these clues?
And then I knew. Of course. That’s why she’d been studying me all week. Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Was my gaydar on the fritz?
“Did your parents make you move out?” I asked.
She blushed again, knowing I’d figured it out. “Not exactly, but they were pretty upset about the whole thing, so my sister suggested I come out here and stay with her. It seemed like a good idea.”
I nodded, hoping to keep her talking.
“I like it here pretty much—I mean the kids aren’t mean to me or anything. I just don’t know anybody very well. And Lindsay, my sister, doesn’t get home from work until after six o’clock, and I hate sitting around her apartment by myself, you know? I mean, it’s small, and it just doesn’t feel like it belongs to me yet.”
“So you decided to hang out here in the afternoon.”
“I came in on Monday, and I saw you, and it seemed like … well, you know, I thought maybe—”
“That I was a lesbian too,” I said.
She nodded.
“Well, I don’t hide it. My name is Marisol,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Marisol Guzman.”
“Lee O’Brien,” she said, hesitantly shaking my hand with only slightly more gusto than Damon the gorilla had a few hours before. We’d have to work on that.
“Welcome home, Lee O’Brien,” I said.
It had taken me only moments to decide to befriend Lee. Maybe it was some latent social-worker instinct I’d picked up from my mother, I wasn’t sure, but I was practically smacking my lips over the opportunity to help this baby dyke learn how to live in her new world. She needed somebody like me who was older (okay, only by a year), who’d been out longer (going on two), and was pretty much fearless about taking on the world (a trait I’d had forever, thank you very much).
It was only later, after Lee had hung around the Mug (eating a smuggled cheeseburger) until I finished work, and then followed me back to my apartment, where we’d walked in on Birdie and Damon howling over Sex and the City reruns and tossing popcorn kernels to the dog, that I wondered if picking up a stray of my own was such a good idea after all.
About the Author
Ellen Wittlinger is the critically acclaimed author of the teen novels Blind Faith, Heart on My Sleeve, Zigzag, The Long Night of Leo and Bree, Razzle, What’s in a Name, and Har
d Love (an ALA Michael L. Printz Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award winner), and the middle-grade novel Gracie’s Girl. She has a bachelor’s degree from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. A former children’s librarian, she lives with her husband in Haydenville, Massachusetts.
Ellen Wittlinger, Hard Love
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