Holly in Love (12 page)

Hope said icily, “It happens that the chairperson, vice-chairperson, and two of the five committee heads are female, Mr. Hastings. Perhaps you should say, ‘Okay, women.’”

Mr. Hastings chuckled agreeably. He was the sort of man my mother would loathe, because he could not quite believe women were ever in charge of anything. Why am I remembering my mother’s opinion? I thought suddenly. I’m seventeen. I loathe Mr. Hastings!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” amended Mr. Hastings.

I looked over at Jamie and Elsa. Elsa was not listening and didn’t care. Jamie was looking at Mr. Hastings with a bored, scornful look that put Jamie on my side. I grinned to myself.

“We’ve got to have a large number of inexpensive activities this year,” said Mr. Hastings. “Most of the booths have to be fifty-cent booths. All the kids will want to do several things, but their parents won’t be able to fork out two dollars each time. I figure we need at least ten booths or games.”

Ten! I thought, overwhelmed.

“Is it too late to resign?” muttered Gary.

“Holly Carroll,” said Mr. Hastings, terrifying me. “You did a good job on the Treasure Hunt last year. Want to do it again?”

Oh, that horrible Treasure Hunt!

I’d hidden the clues in snowballs, making up batches of snowballs for days in advance, keeping them outdoors and praying the temperature wouldn’t rise. We’d hidden the snowballs all over the college president’s backyard, among the shrubs and rocks and stone fences, and after each bunch of kids finished up and got their all-day lollipops, I’d have to run around hiding the next bunch. After two days of the festival, I was insane.

What have I been daydreaming about? I reproached myself. I have not given one moment’s thought to what I could do this year instead.

“I’d rather do something else,” I announced. I had to improvise fast. What are my natural talents? I thought desperately. Spanish…nice hair…hot weather…“The college drink booths are pretty adult,” I said. “A lot of cold drinks, plenty of coffee, some beer and some booze, but nothing for kids. I’d like to do a hot drinks booth. Small cups and small portions that cost very little. Hot chocolate. Hot buttered cider. Russian tea. Hot lemonade.”

Ask me anything about hot drinks, I thought. I know ’em all. Actually I rather enjoy hot Dr. Pepper, but it sounded too weird to mention, so I left it off the list.

Everybody thought that was a terrific idea. One of the freshmen thought small snacks would sell well, too. Plastic baggies with one doughnut, or two cookies, or a handful of popcorn.

Lydia agreed to do the Treasure Hunt. I revised my opinion of her yet again. She was certainly willing to work.

Darling gamine Elsa claimed to have an older sister who bred husky dogs. “Valery would give sled rides to little kids,” she said. “Once around the block. They’d love that. We’d probably do real well.”

Last year’s big hit was ice-chasing, where the biggest boys took little kids on their shoulders and raced across the ice. The kids loved the height and the speed. It was a little hard on the shoulders of the skaters, but that’s why they had those broad shoulders, right? Gary Beaulieu and Pete Stein, as our best and broadest skaters, agreed glumly to do that this year.

One of the freshmen had a peculiar idea that everyone laughed at at first but then decided was really pretty good. She wanted to fill waterguns with colored water (and alcohol so it wouldn’t freeze) and have children spray pictures on snow! They’d do a huge mural and each kid could pay a dime for his chance to empty a watergun and paint a blue tree or a red car.

“Take an awful lot of dimes to raise a thousand dollars,” said Lydia.

“What we need,” said Mr. Hastings, “is one really good thing that we can charge more for. One really super idea to swing the whole high school end of the festival around.”

There was dead silence. Nobody had a single idea.

And then Jamie said, “Last year when I was in summer camp—”

“Camp!” moaned one of the senior boys. “Jeez, Winter, aren’t you past that stuff yet? How old
are
you, anyway?”

Jamie’s face tightened a little but he plowed on. I felt my stomach cramp up, worrying for him. Don’t say anything dumb, I prayed.

“The camp owned a hot air balloon. It was beautiful. Bright deep red with two rainbows on it. The town had a Fourth of July carnival, and they used the hot air balloon for fund-raising. The balloon doesn’t actually take off. You keep it moored and release it to the limits of its ropes, probably fifty feet up, but that’s enough for little kids. You can charge at least a dollar for that, because it’s so unusual. You can also have someone there with a color Polaroid camera to take snapshots of each kid as he goes up in the air, and you always sell those to the parents.”

“It’s a nice thought, Jamie,” said Lydia in her cruelest voice, “but we can’t afford the balloon, we can’t afford the fuel, and that also lets out the camera.”

I hated her. I truly hated her. It was a terrible feeling, to have so much loathing for one person coursing through me. I almost hit her. I think the only reason I didn’t was that Kate was sitting between us.

Jamie said, “I know a guy in Laconia who has a hot air balloon. His is emerald green with deep blue zigzags. It’s really pretty in the sky. He—”

“Jamie,” said Lydia, “who cares what color it is?”

Several people informed Lydia that she could shut up.

Jamie took a deep, controlled breath and said, “He’d be happy to do it for us. I asked him last week. He loves his balloon, he’s proud of it, he loves showing it off, and he likes taking kids for rides. All we’d have to do is pay him back the cost of his fuel afterward, and by then we’d have the money in hand to do it. As for the camera, I also talked to the Camera Shoppe in town, and they agreed to let us have the film at cost and furthermore to let us pay for it afterward.”

There was a moment of very impressed silence.

Stein said, “Winter, you’re something.”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “Well, there’s one hitch.”

“I knew it,” said Lydia.

Gary kicked her for me. Lightly, but still, a kick. That Gary had possibilities, too.

“He wants two free ski slope passes for a weekend,” said Jamie. Susan, whose father owns the Snowy Owl ski resort, immediately said, “Oh, no problem! My father always has a few passes on hand for special guests. That’ll be our donation. My father was just complaining last night that I’d probably expect him to kick in something, and now I can tell him precisely what!”

We all laughed.

Suddenly the festival seemed like something we really wanted to do. The thought of that huge, many-stories-high emerald green balloon soaring up in the sky, and the laughing, shrieking children in its basket, made us all cheerful and eager to get to work.

We broke into groups. By the time my committee had gotten its thoughts down on paper, it sounded like a major conglomerate preparing for a takeover. I had had no idea providing hot drinks for anywhere from zero to ten thousand people would be so difficult.

“Isn’t winter cute,” said one of my girls.

How anyone could find winter cute was beyond me. I made a mental note not to assign this girl anything very demanding.

“He seems to like Elsa, doesn’t he?” said another girl.

Wrong winter, I thought. I looked up immediately. Jamie and several boys were trying to decide what field they could use to moor the balloon. Elsa was dancing over to offer a suggestion, like a wood sprite, or a gazelle. Jamie was smiling at her. The sweet, private one-quarter smile we had shared in the cafeteria line.

My chest hurt again. I felt fat and ugly and stupid, the sort of girl who would have to resort to meeting men by computer, or in bars, or be introduced in pity by superior female friends with extra men around. Gloomily I wrapped up my committee meeting. People began rushing off to catch the late bus or call for rides home. Carpools were being worked out and mittens searched for. I shoved my stuff into my backpack (the general enthusiasm for carrying my things had long since worn off) and located my crutches. Hideous, evil instruments of torture. I jabbed them viciously into the floor. Elsa danced in front of me. I would have speared her except that she had done nothing to deserve it. It wasn’t her fault I hadn’t been bright enough to keep Jamie.

The group thinned out. Mr. Hastings called out little cries of good-bye and
au revoir
, and everyone sort of shuddered and wondered what the world was coming to when this was the best the faculty could muster. Jamie was slightly behind me, Elsa slightly ahead. I slowed down. “Hi, Jamie,” I said smiling. My lips trembled. One dumb smile, I thought, it can’t matter that much. Surely in seventeen and a half years I have at least learned to smile.

“Hi, Holl,” said Jamie. He did not slow down. Either he was heading after Elsa, or he was avoiding me.

I said, “Jamie? Want to go to the Pew and have a muffin with me?”

I
F YOU ASK FOR
a hot drink at the Pew, you get it in a thick sand-colored mug, with a handle so thick you can’t use it, and instead you wind your fingers around the mug and heat them off your hot chocolate. Ice water is served in an old mason jar. They’ve done that long before anyone thought that kind of thing was cute. It comes from the Depression, they’ll tell you, when they couldn’t afford glassware.

My jar had a pattern of grapes and leaves and vines running around it. I stroked the bulges of the grape cluster with my thumb and listened to Jamie’s stories.

Sitting there with him I had this strange
complete
feeling. It was like the last piece you put into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, or the final word you write in a twenty-five-page term paper. Seeing it done completes it. Seeing it finished wraps you up, too.

Seeing it right.

Jamie, I thought happily, is right.

We were talking about the ice sculptures. The wooden bases were beginning to go up on the fraternity lawns, and it was always fun to try to guess what on earth they might be. Ice sculptures are made from slush. A four-legged animal, for example, requires a simple saw-horse with a wooden headpiece around which you pour your slush, which you’ve mixed to your secret proportions in your snow and water pails. As you pour on the slush, you shape it with paddles and shovels and knives. After it’s all up and frozen, you carve it with a hatchet and finish it off with a fine water spray that shines like glass when it freezes.

Some of the fraternities and some of the independent efforts (like Lydia’s) were starting to go up, but so far there was just the wood and the beginnings of scaffolding for the really big ice constructions.

“Last year I remember Chi Rho had this huge thing on the lawn that I was convinced was going to be a stegosaurus,” said Jamie.

“Chi Rho!” I said, laughing. “They won last year with that giant fifteen-foot-long bunch of bananas.”

“I know. When it was all done it was a perfect banana bunch, but while it was going up I was positive it was a dinosaur.”

“Doesn’t it make you think of Halloween?”

Jamie looked puzzled.

“The ice sculptures,” I explained. “I mean, the effect of them all is sort of wild and crazy and sometimes attractive, but always so
ridiculous
. It makes you feel surprised at humankind for even
thinking
about it. Like Halloween. Who would believe there’s actually a day set aside each year for people to pretend to be ghosts?”

We talked about the weirdness of other people. It was a topic good for hours. Jamie slid into discussing the solar greenhouse we’d be building over the summer, if we managed to raise all the money we needed during the Ice Sculpture Festival. “Solar greenhouse,” he said scornfully. “I can’t stand it when people say stuff like that. Even the biology teacher says it. I want to execute him. I mean, what other kind of greenhouse could it be? There’s no such thing as a lunar greenhouse.”

I buttered another strawberry muffin and handed it to Jamie. It was a purely selfish act. Any more muffins and butter and they’d have to shovel me out the door.

“Tomatoes in winter,” said Jamie dreamily. “Instead of going to the vending machines for two-week-old chocolate-covered doughnuts or soft, ancient golden apples, we can go to the biology room and buy fresh tomatoes.”

I wouldn’t be there.

I would be a thousand, five thousand miles away.

I stared at Jamie for a moment and rethought my position. I could at least glance through the catalog of the University of New Hampshire. It was silly to write off a perfectly fine school without a thorough investigation. It was possible, I thought, regarding Jamie from a distance of two inches and planning how to reduce that to zero inches, that climate was not everything.

“Your lips are buttery,” observed Jamie.

“I know. We can’t go on meeting like this.”

I thought he would kiss me, and I think he thought so, too, but at the last moment Jamie caught himself and pulled back an inch and instead drew a butter mustache on my upper lip.

We had each paid for a round of hot chocolate and muffins. Jamie said, “You have any more money? Because I am now down to fourteen cents, and we can’t sit here forever not ordering because there’s a line at the door.”

I dug around among the used Kleenex and scribbled memos and dried-out felt pens and discovered enough for two more hot chocolates.

“I’m not sure I can drink any more,” said Jamie. “I’m going to float away.”

“We can order it just to sit here,” I said. “We’ll look busy, at least.”

We sat quietly waiting for the waitress to bring another set of drinks. “About the cafeteria the other day,” I said. My stomach clenched around all the food I’d consumed at the Pew. Jamie looked at me without expression, waiting.

“I—I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I loved it that you were there in line with me, Jamie. It was just—when Lydia—well, those girls started giggling and I felt so—I mean, that teasing about the older woman and the younger man thing really threw me.”

Jamie nodded. “I haven’t enjoyed it either.”

I was astonished. “You got it, too?”

“What do you think all the junior boys were laughing so hard about when I went back to sit with them after Gary took your tray?”