Holly in Love (7 page)

“Well,” I said, finally. “Um. Thanks for driving me home.”

Jonathan was looking at me incredulously, and slowly his expression changed to amusement. I knew exactly what he was laughing at. Himself. For wasting time on some silly little girl just because her hair shone in the sun.

I will never never never never wear my hair like this again, I thought. “Bye,” I said frantically, and I fled up to the porch. I didn’t even have to fumble for my key because Christopher had gotten home already and was opening the door to see who in the world had driven me home in a silver Corvette. Christopher gaped. “Holly, what—”

“I never want to talk about it. Ever.”

I shoved past Christopher, who stood in the doorway staring out at Jonathan as if the man were a zoo exhibit, and Jonathan, shaking his head and smiling to himself, drove slowly away.

I sagged against the hallway wallpaper and thought about what Jonathan would say to Grey, who would report it to Hope, who would tell the entire word. It was enough to make a girl sick.

I fixed myself a terrific snack to make myself feel better. I think food is the answer to half the world’s problems. Leftover cheesecake with a scoop of canned cherry pie filling on top and a glass of ginger ale can unclench even the ulcerating stomach.

I let the first mouthful sit in my mouth and slide slowly down my throat, and I told myself I would live through this; this, too, would pass; eventually the memory of Jonathan would be nothing but a dim blur.

The phone rang. If it was Kate wanting to know who that was in the silver Corvette, I would just change the subject. I had another bite of cheesecake.

“Holly,” said Christopher, in a teasing, singsong voice. “It’s your very dear friend Jamie.”

I swallowed my cheesecake. “What is?”

“On the telephone,” sang Christopher. He dropped his singsong and began smirking. “Got a crush on you, doesn’t he, Holly? I think I’ll take the bus tomorrow instead of riding with Josh. I got things to say to Jamie Winter.”

Perhaps I should forget about waiting for college to get away from all this. I should quit school now, take a bus to Miami, and find a bilingual secretarial job.

I walked silently past my leering brother and took up the phone. “Hello?” I said, trying to keep my voice utterly blank of meaning.

“Hi, Holly. Jamie. You forget the lie detector test?”

“The lie detector test,” I repeated.

“Holly, you’re on the list for testing at four-fifteen, and it’s four-oh-one now. I’m going in in a moment, and I thought I’d call you because there are at least ten people here hoping you’ll be late and they can have your slot for getting the fifty dollars.”

Some crush, I thought. I glared at my worthless brother. “Thanks,” I said to Jamie. “I’m on my way.”

I tugged on my coat and scarf, refused to make explanations to Christopher, shoved another bit of cheesecake in my mouth, pulled my cap on and tucked my offensive braid up into the cap, and ate the last bit of cherry pie filling. Then I gulped the last of the ginger ale, wiped my mouth on a napkin, pulled on boots and mittens, flung open the back door, and tore off through the yard. “That’s what I like to see!” yelled Christopher after me. “A girl in the grips of true passionate love. Running all the way to see Jamie!”

“Christopher!” I screamed back at him. “You shut up!” Our backyard is adjacent to the campus, and the Psych building is only a few blocks west. I lurched and leaped through the treacherous paths students had tramped into the old, crusty snow. I put Jonathan, dates, younger men, older men, and hot weather campuses out of my mind and concentrated on my fibbing skills.

W
HEN I GOT THERE
, panting and gasping for breath, Jamie had already gone in for testing. I flung myself into a chair and began the winter clothes stripping process. Actually, I don’t wear nearly as many clothes as I’d like, because people tease me if I wear, for example, three scarves. I do wear two pairs of socks, though. Nobody can see those. I just look as if I have fat feet.

“Holly Carroll?” said the tester in a dry, middle-aged voice.

For one awful minute I thought it was Jonathan, but it was merely the voice that was cloned. The tester was plain and ordinary. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“This way, please.”

The lie detector test was fun. After they attached little electrodes to various places on my body, they showed me three small objects: a key, a nickel, and a paper clip. “You’re going to steal one of these,” said the college boy who seemed to be running things. He looked much younger than Jonathan. Perhaps Jonathan had lied about his age and was really thirty-six. Making Jonathan thirty-six made me feel much better. “When we leave you alone in here,” the boy went on, “take one of the objects and put it in your shoe. Place the other two back in the box and close the lid. That way we, your testers, cannot tell which object you stole. Then we’re going to come back to ask a long series of questions. The first set will be things like, What is the capital of the United States? and, Are you eleven feet tall? You’ll lie to some and tell the truth to others, and we’ll see what your pattern looks like.”

He showed me a needle gently coasting over some graph paper.

“Next, we begin the real questioning,” he said. He seemed totally bored. I wondered if I was a boring subject, or if the experiment bored him, or if it was just the proper tone of voice to take when dealing with potential thieves. “We’ll be asking all sorts of questions, in an attempt to discover which of these three objects—the key, the nickel, or the paper clip—you actually stole. Keep in mind the fifty dollars, now, and remember that it is to your advantage to lie successfully, just as if you were a criminal risking prison. Right?”

“Right,” I said, feeling rather excited.

When I was alone in the room, I settled on the paper clip to steal. My mother is always accusing me of stealing paper clips from her desk anyhow, so I thought perhaps my subconscious would not regard this as a theft and my heart would be totally relaxed when they asked me about stealing the paper clip.

Oh, you’re such a crafty little kid, I said to myself. Even if you can’t speak in complete sentences around twenty-one-year-old men in Corvettes.

“Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester.

“Yes,” I lied cheerfully, picturing my fifty dollars.

“Do you have the key in your shoe?” he said.

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Sit still,” he said irritably, totally unaffected by my lovely, shiny brown hair. Except for my parents and Jonathan, nobody ever
had
been impressed by that hair. Perhaps they all had vision problems. I decided not to worry about old Jonathan. As for Hope’s teasing, that would be nothing new. I’d lived with that since the beginning of time. Or at least, it
felt
like the beginning of time.

“Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester again.

“Yes,” I lied again. I decided against buying miniatures. I wanted a new pair of gold earrings. Heart shapes on hoops, like Lydia had.

“Okay,” said the tester, “thanks, Miss Carroll. All done.”

“How’d I do?” I said eagerly.

He smiled at me. “Don’t have a criminal career,” he said. “You’re as transparent as glass. May I have the paper clip back for the next volunteer, please?”

I walked slowly out of the test room, seeing myself in a new light. Transparent as glass. How unattractive. Jamie was sitting there, alone in a room. All would-be untested thieves had given up and gone home. “Hi,” I said gloomily.

“How’d you do?” he asked me, which I thought was quite unnecessary. If I’d won the fifty dollars I’d have been doing pirouettes.

“Lost.”

He grinned at me—not a superior grin, but a bubbly, eager grin that made him look like both Kate and Christopher—an unlikely combination if I ever heard of one. I couldn’t help grinning back. “You beat it, didn’t you?” I said.

He beamed at me. “Sure did. I stole the nickel, and they were convinced I took the key.”

“Fantastic! You’re rich! How did you do it? Did you have a technique, or are you a natural born liar?” I said.

“I had a technique. Although I put the nickel in my shoes, I kept saying to myself,
Stealing keys! Disgusting. Low. Immoral. That’s a crime, James Winter, stealing keys, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I convinced my heart, I guess, because the lie detector proclaimed that I actually had stolen the key!”

I shook hands with him. “I’m glad to know somebody devious and mysterious,” I said. “I myself rated transparent as glass.”

We walked out of the Psych building together, laughing and talking. “What are you going to do with the fifty dollars?” I said enviously.

“I really don’t know for sure. Want to break it by having a muffin with me at the Pew?”

“I thought the Pew was college territory,” I said.

Jamie laughed. “The Pew is in the muffin business. They wouldn’t care if vampires sat there as long as they bought muffins. I go to the Pew all the time. Other people like French fries best, or pizza, or ice cream bars, or candy. I like muffins with butter.”

“That’s not a very fitting food for a successful thief,” I said. “Corn muffins are too tame.”

“I usually eat blueberry. Although apple, and cheese, and bran muffins are good, too. As long as I can butter them. I belong to the slathering school of thought,” Jamie explained. “If it comes out of an oven it needs butter.”

“A cholesterol fiend,” I said. “Do you know I’ve been to the Pew only twice in my life, and I’ve lived here all my seventeen years?”

He shook his head in amazement. “That’s why you’re so slim, then,” he said. “You’ve never discovered the joys of butter melting on the Pew muffins.”

Me. Slim. In fact—
so
slim, was what he’d said. I liked it so much I no longer wanted butter on my muffin, so I could
stay
slim.

We walked the long way, so we’d be on cleared sidewalks and not have to churn through the crusty snow and ice. Jamie began telling me some of his thoughts on spending the fifty dollars. His hobby, it turned out, was steam engines. He had small steam engines mounted on boards to run miniature trains and light bulbs and whistles, and right now he had his eye on an antique threshing machine that had a steam engine.

“A threshing machine?” I said, sure I had misunderstood. “A real one? As big as a house?”

“Well, they’re not quite that big, but yes, a real one. The owner doesn’t want it. In fact, he hasn’t wanted it for forty years. For fifty dollars I could get it towed to my backyard and begin a lifetime project of restoring it to its former glory.”

It was difficult to imagine a threshing machine having
any
glory, former or present. Bringing an antique threshing machine home? One presumably covered with rust and filth and having a cracked boiler and missing some parts? “What will your parents say?” I wanted to know. I didn’t know Jamie’s parents at all. They attended church approximately once every two years, and Mr. Winter frowned steadily for the occasion, but whether he frowned at all things or just church, I didn’t know.

“They’d probably like it even less than they did when I got a steam tractor. My tractor’s a little on the decrepit side. Every time I plow the garden, my mother’s terrified the boiler’s going to blow up in my face and leave me blind and scarred for life.” He said this nonchalantly, as if discussing a hangnail. “What will your father say?” I asked.

Jamie looked away from me and his face tightened. “Nothing very nice,” he said after a bit. His sweet, buoyant voice sounded almost dead. I saw Mr. Winter frowning, frowning about everything, never saying anything nice, and I shivered slightly. “What will you do with the threshing machine after you get it? Thresh?” I said lightly. “I mean, you don’t have a farm.”

He paused for another second, and I could almost see him placing his father on a shelf. “I’ll just fix it up. I like steam engines. It’s a nice, simple, sensible form of energy, and it makes such a satisfying rhythmic noise, too.” We discussed collecting. I had a thimble collector in the family (my grandmother) and a Coca-Cola collector living next door, but I had not known there were also old tool, old machine, old farm implement, and even old computer collectors. Jamie himself preferred steam engine collecting. “What’s your hobby?” he said, implying that all interesting people had fascinating hobbies and therefore he knew that I would, too.

We were already in the Pew, seated and ordering, and I had hardly noticed the college boys littering the place. With Jonathan I had been so embarrassed I could hardly move my lips, but with Jamie I was just enjoying myself tremendously. Of course, Jamie wasn’t a date. And he was also just a junior who didn’t matter particularly. That helped.

I had one sick moment when I imagined I saw Jonathan in the back booth of the Pew, but it wasn’t Jonathan, just some middle-aged man with the same color jacket, and I breathed easier. I told Jamie about my dollhouse and the furniture I’d made for it and the almost-finished Christmas tree I was painting and the gazebo I was still sketching out on graph paper.

Jamie quizzed me a bit, to be sure I really did know what a lathe was for and when to use a jigsaw, and his eyes stopped blinking and for a moment he stared at me narrowly, as if rethinking his position on me.

I buttered another blueberry muffin and savored my hot chocolate. I could see how a person could develop an affection for the Pew food.

“Oh, no!” I said. “Oh, Jamie, I’m grounded! For going to see that movie I told you about! I’m not supposed to be here. Dad was so upset with me for betraying his trust, as he put it. I’ve got to fly home.”

Jamie just smiled. “I’ll go home with you and make excuses. Your father and I are old friends. I really don’t think he’d mind that we had a muffin together at the Pew for half an hour.”

“You and Dad are old friends?”

“Sure. He’s good to talk to.”

I stared at Jamie. “About what?”

“Oh, you know. Life. Truth. That kind of thing. How about it? Want me to walk you home?”

It was one thing to meet by coincidence at the Psych building. One thing to celebrate Jamie’s win at the Pew. It was something else again to walk home together as the dusk darkened the streets and the chill went into the bone and you naturally walked closer. Christopher didn’t even like Jamie, for some reason, and would jump to conclusions and be ready and willing to tease us forever. And there was Hope, who would have it in for me already after the Jonathan fiasco and would love to get her teeth into a “Dating a junior, Holly? Really, how immature you are!” scene.