“Nothing,” I answer. “Rooms.”
“Mmm.” Now she strolls into the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator door. I follow her and Drew follows us absently, his nose stuck in one of Dan’s travel books.
“Orange juice. Skim milk.” Starla looks baffled. “Where’s the real drinks?”
“I told you, they don’t have that kind of stuff. But listen, they’ll be home soon, and if you’re still here, that won’t look good for me. You two should take off.” I look to Drew. “Okay?”
He glances up from the book, which he is trying to disappear inside. I know that trick. “Yeah, sure.”
“In a minute.” Starla takes three glasses from the cupboard and fills each with water from the tap. “Water?” She hands a glass to Drew.
He takes the glass and sits at the kitchen table, flipping through the book. Where was the guy from last night, whose hand on my shoulder was so sure? There’s been a downshift in Drew’s personality. I’m impatient that he won’t speak up or make a decision.
I deliberately pour out the water from my glass and balance it in the drying rack. “All I mean is you could get me into real trouble.”
“What’s the harm of visiting?” Starla bumps around the kitchen. She centers a magnet over the school snapshot of Lainie on the fridge, then pockets a penny from the glass change jar on the windowsill. At last she slouches into a kitchen chair, her tanned legs stretching out endlessly from her inch of miniskirt, and she stares at Drew until he stops reading.
“This is a good book,” he says. “I always wanted to see the Galápagos. The finches and Darwin and everything.” He looks over at me, and I am certain I feel a flash of last night in the perk of his interest, in the focus of his eyes right on me. “Have you been anywhere cool?”
“Canada,” I say. That’s my standard lie. I haven’t been anywhere at all, but Canada always seems reasonable.
“He didn’t ask me one question on the whole drive over,” Starla says, dropping her head back to yawn at the ceiling. “I was asking everything about his day, right? He says fine and fine and hardly anything else.”
“We could talk about what you did to my car,” says Drew. “We could talk about how you’ve been some kind of freak to me ever since the end of school.”
“Since we broke up, you mean.”
Drew shrugs. “Okay. Since then.”
“If I’m so psycho, why’d you drive me here the second I asked you?”
“Maybe I’m trying to keep things normal, since I never know what you’re gonna do next.”
“Or you wanted an excuse to come over.”
Drew doesn’t speak for a moment. I realize I’m holding my breath. “So what?” he says. “What do you care why I do what I do?”
Starla’s eyes ping-pong from me to Drew and back to me, trying to figure everything out about us. “I’ve got an idea,” she says, drawing out the words slowly. “Let’s play Truth or Dare.”
“Truth or Dare? But that’s a kid game.” Last time I played Truth or Dare was at Britta’s eleventh birthday party, where my dare—for Ali Magros to wear a pair of her older brother’s briefs over her jeans while singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” on the front porch—was considered the top dare of the night.
“Only if you play it like a kid.” Starla gives me her standard look of bored contempt. “Go, give me a dare. A serious dare.”
Now I’m confused. What does
serious
mean? Do I dare Starla to do something that would put her in danger, like shove a Cheerio all the way up her nose or hold her finger over an open flame? “I dare you to drink a tablespoon of Tabasco.”
“Nerd, get a clue,” Starla dismisses me. Then looks to Drew. “You. Do a dare.”
Drew doesn’t hesitate. “I dare Irene to make out with Tara in the closet for thirty seconds.”
Then they both start laughing, and suddenly Drew and Starla both seem a lot older than me. Outside, I hear Lainie and Evan screeching around the house, playing tag. While half of me is rooted motionless to my chair, the other half wishes more than anything that I could run outside and join in their game.
“Arright. You heard him. Let’s go.” Starla is already out of her seat. She pushes out her lips and makes a kissy sound.
“Are you joking?”
“Of course not. It’s a
dare
. Come on.” She takes my hand and propels me out to the hallway, where she finds the closet, scoots me in with her and shuts the door.
The inside of the closet smells like mothballs and rubber rain boots. I’m just playing along, I figure. Nobody’s forcing me to make out with anybody. Though I can hear my own heartbeat running scared in my ears. Then Starla starts. “Understand one thing, okay? Drew’s not your territory,” she whispers. I can’t see her face, but her words come fast and damp and land like warm dew on my face. “I don’t care if he likes you, and I really don’t care if you’re madly in love with him, since I’m not ready for him to be like that with anyone yet, okay? So on your next turn, you better dare me to make out with him.”
“Next turn?” I hiss. “Forget it. There is no next turn. I quit this game.”
“Fine. After your dare.” The grip of her skinny fingers on my forearms is painful. “Got it?”
“And I’m not madly in—”
“Liar.” And then Starla moves closer, filling the dark space between us, and she kisses me, hard, as she opens the door. Starla’s kiss is nothing like Drew’s kiss. Her mouth is flat and small, and her lips are soft, and she makes an almost joking, smacked-together sound with them, but then there’s a little bit of spit on my lower lip from where her mouth has been, and after she’s done, I’m too surprised to speak.
We come stumbling out of the closet. “We did it,” Starla sings out. She ambles back to the kitchen and slumps back into her chair, swinging her feet up to balance, ankles crossed, on Drew’s lap. I feel woozy. Food Chicken dares seem like a million years ago.
“For real?” Drew looks impressed. It occurs to me that he likes this game. “How was it?”
“Okay,” I say.
“Was it really thirty seconds?”
“It was over thirty seconds,” says Starla, “because she wouldn’t stop.” At this, Drew looks even more impressed, so I don’t speak out in protest. “Now it’s your turn,” Starla commands me. “Go.”
Following her order is the last thing I want to do, but I’m scared. The situation has fallen so far out of my control that I don’t want to make it more complicated. I’ll just do what Starla says, and hope they leave soon. So, in a small bird voice, I say, “I dare you to kiss Drew.”
“Aw, you put her up to that,” Drew accuses Starla. But he doesn’t sound as concerned as he does amused. It’s strange how he keeps shifting shapes before my eyes, one minute the old, boy Drew, the next minute a mysterious guy I feel like I just met.
Starla stands up and walks around the table and stops about a foot in front of Drew. “Everyone says I’m the totally best-looking girl in school,” she says, looking over at me. “What do you think?”
“Yes,” I say. “You are.”
“I could be a model,” she says. “I could be an actress.”
“You’d make a good actress, that’s for sure.” Drew snorts. “Everything’s a drama with you.”
Starla laughs. “Don’t be scared,” she teases. “It’s only a friendship kiss.”
“You’re the one who didn’t want to be friends,” says Drew in a tone so private, I feel like an intruder just by listening. “Jeez, Tara. I tried to be your friend.”
“And now I’m trying to be yours,” Starla answers.
“Then how about let’s call it a good-bye kiss.”
She doesn’t answer him, and I can tell that Drew’s comment was not what Starla was hoping for. And then in that next moment Drew pulls her hand so that Starla drop-slides onto his lap, and her arms fall over his shoulders and her head dips, and he balances his hands lightly on either side of her waist, and right before their mouths meet, I catch Starla’s eye, quick as the dart of a minnow, and I know what she is thinking, that I am the Witness, and what is going on here is not completely about Drew anymore. I watch them kiss, and it’s sort of awful, except that it’s also exciting, seeing an up-close, real-live, long, wet kiss, even if I’m not part of it.
And then from outside there’s all this yelling and it takes me a second to realize that the voice belongs to Evan, and that it’s my name he’s yelling, and that something is wrong.
I Mess Up
WHEN JUDITH ARRIVES at the hospital, she flops into the chair next to mine and puts her hand on top of my hand.
“Breathe easy,” she says. “It’s only a broken arm. You’re white as a sheet, Irene.”
“It was my fault,” I say. “I wasn’t outside, and—”
Judith shakes her head. “Children get into scrapes all the time. They’re built to take these kinds of knocks.”
But I’m sick to the pit of my stomach. Images of the past hour whoosh back and forth in front of my eyes. Lainie on the ground at the base of the elm tree. Poundcake hacking up yellow bile. Evan hollering in my ear, “I told her I’d test it! I told her I’d jump first!” Starla, quiet, blinking at the refrigerator box full of pillows, her lifeguard skills dried up on land. Drew kneeling next to Lainie, asking where it hurts. Finally, the five of us packing into Drew’s car to the hospital.
I’ve called Mom, and Judith has called Dan, who arrives before Lainie is finally presented, wearing an icing-pink arm cast with sling, and chattering happily about how brave the doctor and nurses told her she was.
Drew and Starla stick around for a while, too, until Starla asks Drew to take her home. As they leave the waiting room, she pinches his side. “Come on,
buddy
,” she says. Drew jumps away from the pinch, but otherwise doesn’t act standoffish toward her, and my heart falls as I watch them leave the building and cross the parking lot, Starla bumping her hip against Drew’s in that easy, joking way that can only look graceful if a person is built long and willowy. Maybe that good-bye kiss was even better than it looked—and it looked pretty good.
It’s crushing to think that Starla and Drew might be getting back together again. But how could I have ever competed with Starla? I was an idiot to think so.
Dan drops me off at my house. Mom is sitting in Granny Morse’s chair, flipping magazines and humming along with Roy’s blues CD.
“I just got off the phone with Judith,” Mom says. “She didn’t sound angry with you.” In Mom-speak, this means she is taking her cue from Judith and isn’t mad, either.
“Yeah, it could have been worse.”
I sprawl on the couch, locate my book underneath it and try to read. But the dullness of the evening falls all around me, especially when I contrast it with everything that happened this afternoon. After all that action, I feel ill at ease to be so still.
The deadly quiet must be getting to Mom, too. When Bella calls, Mom flies for her purse and keys. “You don’t mind, do you, honey? The girls are all over at McGillicutty’s.”
I shake my head. “I guess not,” I say reluctantly.
“My cell phone’s on, I won’t be late, and I’ll bring home a turkey burger for you, all right?”
“Okay.”
After she’s gone, I feel an extra surge of restlessness. I pick up the phone to make sure it has a pulse, and I realize that I am hoping to hear from Drew. Fat chance. He and Starla are probably taking some moonlit walk, chuckling together about how a not-even-freshman almost came between their passionate romance, while Starla quotes her own love rhymes. My only consolation is that Drew must realize how bad Starla’s poetry is, right down to the flaws in meter.
I roam around the house until I end up sitting on my bed, staring at my bookshelf, although another long night of reading doesn’t exactly entice me. I close my eyes and imagine all of the characters from my favorite stories springing from their books, rushing from the shelf into my head like guests to a party. It’s something I used to do when I was little, to make myself feel less alone. Then I reach out and touch the spine of my most beautiful book, my
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
, which is inscribed with my name in gold leaf. That was a great day, even when that kid booed since he thought I had cheated. A truly great day cannot be wrecked by one boo.
Tender Is the Night
, which I still haven’t finished, is resting on the couch. I decide I’ll take it down to the basement, where I know I won’t be able to hear the phone, even it does ring, which it won’t.
I scoop up the book, then open the door to the basement and stare down the steps. It’s as dark as a ditch, but the temperature is heavenly, and it reminds me of this story I read about a man who climbs down to the bottom of a well, but then somebody takes away his ladder so that he can’t get back up, and so he sits and contemplates his life and all the choices he made that led him all the way down to this moment, and then finally he decides that being stuck at the bottom of a well is not such a grave fate, after all.
I hold the raw wood railing hard and take it one step at a time.
A few years ago, Mom had tried to turn the basement into a sewing room. She got Bruno, her boyfriend at that time, to haul an armchair down here, along with a floor lamp, a sewing table and a sewing machine that hasn’t been switched on in so long, it probably doesn’t even know what it is anymore. My sleeping bag is here, too. I curl up in the chair and pull the sleeping bag around me and practice my contemplating. Too soon, my contemplations turn to sensations, of Drew’s hand on my chin, of Starla’s breath on my cheek, and then Drew’s kiss, then Starla’s kiss, then Drew’s kiss again, sensations that twist achingly through me, and I wish I had more exciting options in store for tonight than my long, lonely basement exile.
I open my book and take a crack at it, but that doesn’t do the trick, either, because in ten seconds I am back to thinking about Drew again.
He’s not going to call please let him call. Should I be the one to call him?
Tonight I’d trade any Epic for an eventful chapter of my own life. A dark basement can’t offer the same pulse-stopping spark of real-life possibility. I am fidgety and agitated inside myself. I know I’d risk anything—even Drew’s rejection—for just one more exhilarating moment of his presence.