Coming Apart

  And now, today, Olivia and Jacob were going out on their very first non-dance date. Just the two of them. Their first official date, in the minds of everyone except Olivia, had been the Halloween dance at school ten weeks earlier. As far as Olivia had been concerned, her friend Jacob (who happened to be a boy) had simply invited her to a dance, which had been thrilling because no other girl in the seventh grade had received an actual invitation. But Olivia had not thought of Jacob as her boyfriend, and she hadn’t thought of the dance as a date. Not exactly. The confusing thing was that she had wondered if the dance was a date and if Jacob might be her boyfriend. But she hadn’t been able to tell.

  Ten weeks of wondering had gone by, and now Olivia knew two things for sure: 1. Jacob thought of himself as her boyfriend and 2. Olivia was not ready to be anyone’s girlfriend.

  Then something almost unimaginable had happened. Jacob had phoned one night earlier in the week and had said, “Olivia, would you like to go out on a date?” He had invited her to go to the movies with him on Saturday afternoon.

  (That was not the unimaginable thing.)

  Olivia had relayed the request to her parents, certain their answer would be no. After all, Olivia had skipped a grade and had a late birthday to boot, so she was nearly two years younger than most of the kids in her class.

  “Mom? Dad?” she had said. “Jacob wants to take me to the movies this Saturday. Can I go?”

  Perhaps her mistake was that she hadn’t actually used the word date. In any case, her parents had merely glanced at each other and then her mother had said, “If he’s taking you in the afternoon, then yes, you may go.”

  That was the unimaginable thing.

  Olivia had suddenly found herself in Dateland, preparing for the event on Saturday all by herself. She had told Flora and Nikki that she and Jacob were going to a movie over the weekend, but she hadn’t told them that Jacob had invited her on a date, so there had been no explosion of excitement. In fact, she was pretty sure they had forgotten about the movie. She had seen Flora and Ruby pedaling down Aiken just after lunch, undoubtedly on their way to see Janie. And when Nikki had phoned Olivia the evening before, it was simply to say that she was surprised she’d been given more than four hours of weekend homework, which seemed like a lot for the first week after vacation.

  Olivia leaned on her windowsill and gazed morosely out across her yard. She knew exactly why she hadn’t told Flora and Nikki about the date, and now she felt like a liar for keeping the information to herself. She hadn’t said anything because she wasn’t excited. (Wasn’t excited? That was an understatement.) And she knew that if they could see her extreme lack of excitement, then she would have to explain it to them, and she wasn’t ready to have that conversation. Not yet.

  So Olivia was getting ready for her date/not-a-date by herself. She looked into her wardrobe. She remembered how much thought she had put into the outfit she’d worn to Thanksgiving dinner with her big family. It had taken her days to settle on something. Now she merely glanced at the clothes she was already wearing and decided she needed a clean top. After all, she and Jacob were only going to sit in a darkened theatre. Who would see her? She whisked off her slightly grubby sweatshirt, grabbed the nearest blouse, and slipped it on.

  Fine, she thought. She looked just fine.

  She realized she felt a teensy bit angry.

  It was while she was dragging herself downstairs that she realized what had made her angry. It was the thought of the darkened theatre. The darkened theatre. She knew what went on in the darkness during dates. The knowledge made her nervous, and the nervousness made her crabby.

  “Bye, Mom!” she called as she reached the front door.

  Usually, Olivia’s parents worked at Sincerely Yours together, but on Saturdays they sometimes switched off so that one of them could spend time with Olivia and her brothers.

  “Have fun, sweetie,” her mother replied. “Come home right after the movie.”

  “Okay,” said Olivia, heartily wishing that her parents had forbidden her to go in the first place.

  She began the walk to Main Street. At least Jacob hadn’t offered to pick her up at home and escort her to the theatre. That would have seemed way too datelike. Olivia had ten more minutes to herself before —

  “Olivia! Hi!”

  Olivia jerked her head up as she turned onto Dodds Lane.

  There was Jacob at the corner of Dodds and Main, leaning casually against the wall of Dutch Haus.

  “Hi,” Olivia replied, and suddenly she couldn’t help smiling, because she did like Jacob. He was her good friend who was a boy (which was how all the trouble had started).

  Olivia headed to Jacob and they made their way along Main Street, waving at Min and Gigi in Needle and Thread, at Olivia’s father and Robby Edwards in Sincerely Yours, where Robby worked part-time, and at the Fongs in their studio. They crossed Main Street, turned right, and continued to the theatre.

  Olivia’s spirits had risen somewhat, but now they crashed to the ground with a resounding thump: Standing at the ticket window were Melody and Tanya, and as they turned to enter the theatre they caught sight of Olivia and Jacob, and waved. At Jacob. They waved only at Jacob, as if he were standing on the sidewalk all by himself.

  Jacob waved back but then touched Olivia’s elbow, stepped up to the window, and purchased two tickets. Melody and Tanya, disappointed, trailed into the theatre.

  “I have money,” said Olivia, pulling several bills out of her pocket.

  But Jacob shook his head. “Nope. This is a date and it’s my treat.” He took both tickets from the cashier, held the door open for Olivia, and handed the tickets to the man at the booth.

  “Popcorn?” asked Jacob, and before Olivia could answer, he bought a barrel-size tub of popcorn and a large Coke. He grabbed two straws from the counter and would have taken Olivia by the hand, she thought, except that his were already full.

  Olivia wished that Camden Falls was large enough to have a giant multiplex with ten or twelve theatres into which Melody and Tanya might have disappeared. But no, the theatre was big enough for one movie only. Olivia squinted her eyes in the dim light, hoping to spot the girls immediately so that she and Jacob could sit as far from them as possible.

  There they were. Smack in the middle of the theatre.

  “Let’s sit in the front row!” said Olivia brightly.

  “The front row?! We’ll get carsick if we sit up there,” replied Jacob. “That happened to my cousin once and he barfed in the aisle when —”

  “Okay, okay,” said Olivia. She was whispering, not wanting to attract Melody and Tanya’s attention. “Let’s sit here.”

  “In the back row?” said Jacob in a rather loud voice.

  “Yes! Shh!”

  But Jacob was already leading her to seats that were just two rows ahead of the vultures, who called out, “Hi, Jacob!”

  Jacob and Olivia sat down and wriggled out of their coats, and Jacob placed the Coke in their shared armrest, artfully arranging the straws in the cup.

  Olivia looked down at it and was now faced with another problem: the Spit Factor. She glanced unhappily at the two straws sticking out of the one cup. It was really a shame that she thoroughly understood the physics of straws, because the thought of all the soda that was slurped up as far as someone’s mouth and then fell back into the soda only to be slurped up again later was positively revolting.

  Olivia would have to pretend to drink the soda.

  The popcorn presented a different problem. There was no way Olivia would be able to eat popcorn after Jacob had licked butter and salt from his fingers and then put them slimily back in the bucket. However, it was one thing to pretend to drink Coke; it was another matter to pretend to eat popcorn. She could fake the drinking — thank goodness for her own personal straw. But she didn’t know how many times she could put an empty fist to her mouth and chew away on nonexistent popcorn.

  Olivia was so caught up in these thoughts that she barely
noticed when the lights in the theatre went down. But she certainly noticed when, as soon as the movie started, Jacob’s right hand snaked around the cup of soda and crept into her lap. It found Olivia’s left hand and, before she knew it, their fingers were laced together.

  Olivia wanted desperately to remove her hand from Jacob’s, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Eventually, she slid her eyes to the left and tried to read the expression on Jacob’s face. He was staring straight ahead as if he were … well, as if he were watching a movie. How could he act as if holding Olivia’s hand was usual? Holding Jacob’s hand definitely was not usual for Olivia. It was the opposite of usual. Not only that, it was sweaty.

  Olivia was not paying the least bit of attention to the movie. Instead, she focused on whether she could extract her hand from Jacob’s without 1. hurting his feelings or 2. giving Melody and Tanya further ammunition in their small but cruel war against her. She was positive they were watching her and Jacob more closely than they were watching the movie, and she didn’t want them to think anything was wrong. She certainly didn’t want them to think she was a baby who had never held a boy’s hand, even though that was true.

  So Olivia’s hand remained sweatily locked in Jacob’s until the end of the show. When the lights came on, Jacob sighed, unclasped Olivia’s hand, patted it, squished the now empty Coke cup into the now empty popcorn container (Jacob had consumed everything by himself), and held Olivia’s coat for her while she slipped it on.

  Olivia risked a glance at Melody and Tanya’s seats and saw that they were empty, except for all of their trash. Good. They were already gone.

  “So,” said Jacob a few minutes later as they left the theatre, squinting in the afternoon sunshine, “what did you think?”

  Olivia almost said, “About what?” but caught herself in time. “Oh. It was … it was great. Thank you.”

  “What was your favorite part?”

  What was her favorite part? What kind of question was that?

  She was still groping for an answer when Jacob said, “Mine was the scene in the castle.”

  “Oh. Mine, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t sound very sure.”

  “Well …”

  “And that part was pretty bloody.”

  “Right.”

  “Olivia, is something wrong?”

  “No! What could be wrong?”

  “I don’t know. You just seem kind of distant.”

  Olivia shrugged.

  “Do you want to go to College Pizza?”

  “I can’t. I promised Mom I’d come home right after the movie.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Olivia heard the hurt in his voice, but she didn’t know what to do about it. A block and a half later, as they stood awkwardly in front of Fig Tree, she said, “Thanks, Jacob. I had fun. It was nice of you to treat me.”

  Jacob smiled.

  “See you on Monday,” called Olivia as she turned to cross Main Street.

  “See you.”

  Olivia walked home quickly and went directly to her room, pausing just long enough to say, “Yeah,” when her mother asked if she had had fun. Then she sat at her desk and considered phoning Flora to discuss the horrifying date and all that had gone wrong, but she didn’t know how to explain her feelings. And anyway, she’d been able to tell, just by walking by Flora’s house, that no one was home yet. It had given off an air of emptiness.

  There were a number of rules in the Northrop household, and one of them was that homework was to be done at the kitchen table or at one’s desk. Min was a firm believer that sitting up at a table or desk helped with focus. And posture. Flora, who had almost never broken a rule on purpose, was downstairs dutifully doing her homework at the kitchen table on Wednesday afternoon. Ruby was upstairs working in a reclining position on her bed. She didn’t care. Min wasn’t home to see her. And Ruby didn’t really understand the benefit of sitting at a desk. Her mind could wander just as easily at her desk as it could anywhere else. And her posture was already perfect.

  Ruby patted her stuffed animals and straightened the necktie on Bun, her pink rabbit. She leaned over and felt under the bed to see if the gum she had stuck there was as hard as a rock yet. Not quite. She could still press her fingernail into it. Maybe in another two weeks it would be petrified.

  She resettled herself on the bed, lay against the pillows, and turned the pages in the geology chapter of her fifth-grade science book. She was supposed to be reading about sedimentation and erosion and layers of dirt, but the chapter on mammals was much more interesting, so she studied the photos in it.

  Mammals made her think of animals, and animals made her glance at her dresser, on which sat her collection of china animals. It really was quite a collection, thought Ruby. She let the book slide out of her hands and tried to count the animals from her spot on the bed. She had added to them considerably since she and Flora had moved to Camden Falls. This was mostly because across the street from Needle and Thread was a store called Stuff ’n’ Nonsense, which, although it was owned by an absolutely horrible old woman named Mrs. Grindle, had a very good selection of china animals, and Ruby had spent quite a bit of her allowance money in there. She now had a china ibex and a china camel and a china elephant and a china fox and a china rhino and fifty-six other animals, including her newest purchase, a china polar bear.

  Ruby sighed. Her homework was not going well. She got to her feet, stood in her room for a few moments, and just listened. When she and her sister had first moved to Camden Falls, it had taken Ruby a while to become accustomed to the sounds of the Row Houses. There was steam heat, for one thing, and squirrels running along the roof, and the noises from the houses on either side of theirs. Ruby’s bedroom shared a wall with Olivia’s bedroom next door, and occasionally Ruby could hear voices or laughter or faint music. All very different from the sounds of the house in which she had grown up.

  But at the moment, Ruby didn’t notice these things. She listened instead for sounds from the first floor. She heard nothing. Good. Perfect Flora was undoubtedly still at work in the kitchen, sitting up straight in her chair.

  Ruby tiptoed to her doorway and listened again. She stepped into the hallway and listened. She walked five steps toward the back of the house and listened. When she still heard nothing, she slipped into Min’s bedroom.

  “Drawers,” Ruby said to herself, and nodded.

  There was a total of eight drawers in Min’s room: four in her bureau, three in her desk, and one in her nightstand. Now would be a good time to explore them. Grown-ups’ drawers were usually interesting. Sometimes they were boring, like the top drawer in her father’s bureau, which she had long ago waited patiently to explore and then had found to hold only neatly folded pairs of socks and a rock that Flora had painted when she was three. But mostly they were interesting. She had discovered that in the very back of her mother’s middle desk drawer had been a box containing all of her mom’s old report cards and also a fascinating plastic pin in the shape of a beetle, with black cords for legs and bobbling wire antennae. Ruby had secretly worn the pin at dinner one night, hidden under her sweater, before replacing it in the drawer. And she had read the report cards, lingering over such phrases as “a delight to teach” and “needs to work on class participation — we would like to hear Frannie’s voice!”

  Where were her mother’s report cards now? wondered Ruby. She wanted to read them again, especially since she attended the very same school at which her mother had once been a student. And where was the bug pin?

  Ruby glanced over her shoulder before gently sliding Min’s top bureau drawer open. She gasped.

  Underwear! And not regular old-lady underwear, but rather large old-lady underwear. Well, Min was on the large side. But Ruby hadn’t expected her underpants to be quite so …

  She held up a pair and then slipped both of her legs into one opening. I’ll bet Lacey and I could wear this pair together! th
ought Ruby.

  Ruby replaced the panties and then rummaged carefully through the rest of the drawers in the bureau, but apart from containing a lot of plus-size articles of clothing, the contents weren’t particularly interesting.

  The small drawer in the nightstand revealed only the remote control for the ceiling fan, a bag of almonds, and two bookmarks. But the bottom drawer of the desk was a different story. Behind all the neatly stacked folders labeled NEEDLE AND THREAD (Ruby had a vague idea that they might contain tax returns) was a cardboard shoe box, the lid held in place with a fat rubber band.

  Aha! thought Ruby, and she sat back on her haunches and pulled out the box. She tackled the rubber band gingerly, afraid it might snap apart and hit her in the face. But the band was new and nicely pliant. Ruby set it on the floor and lifted the lid. Inside were a collection of objects that looked familiar — a silver letter opener; a round wooden box with a sheep painted on the top and a penny from 1966 (the year of her mother’s birth) inside; a small crystal owl, its wings extended in flight; a half-empty bottle of perfume; and a perfectly shaped snail shell. But it wasn’t until Ruby saw the plastic bug with the string legs and the wire antennae that she recognized the items as having belonged to her mother. In a flash, she could picture each one in its spot in her old house. The letter opener on her mother’s desk, the perfume bottle on her bureau, the owl next to the perfume …

  Ruby ran her finger over the smooth, cool surface of the owl and then lifted it gently from the box. She held it in her hand and saw tiny rainbows on the surface as she turned it in the light.

  This was my mother’s, thought Ruby, and Min is hiding it in her desk. (Ruby conveniently forgot that her mother was Min’s daughter.) Min has all these keepsakes that were Mom’s and I have … She considered. Well, she actually did have a number of things. Min had made certain that Ruby and Flora had been given several items that had belonged to their parents. Ruby had a photo album that her mother had kept when she was Ruby’s age and a bracelet her mother had loved and worn nearly every day, but she didn’t have anything nearly as spectacular as the crystal owl.