Not Exactly a Love Story (8 page)

The next day, at the start of fourth-period lunch, I followed Patsy
in, veering around the room before getting in the cafeteria line just behind her. This was not an easy maneuver, I couldn’t look like I was following her.

At fruit salad, somebody she knew stepped into the line.

“Hey, Patsy!”

“Daniel. Hi.”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “I loved your essay on ballet camp.” I knew the type immediately, just hearing his voice. Too thin, mostly nervous, always terribly precise when he’s nervous.

“Thanks.” Said with little enthusiasm as she chose a cottage cheese salad.

“Are you going again this summer?” he asked as the line shifted. He was riveted on her. Plus, he had a galloping case of dermatologist-treated acne, sunburned and peeling.

She said, “I don’t know. I’ve sort of started thinking more seriously. I mean, ballet was never about a career for me.”

“No? No, I—”

“Patsy,” Melanie said, low and urgently, fitting herself into the space between Patsy and myself.

“Move aside, Twinkle-toes,” Brown Bunny said as she horned in on Patsy’s other side. Melanie looked hard at the food choices, and I couldn’t quite read her expression—sad? mad?

Daniel moved up the line to pay for his lunch. Which is to say, he backed off without the obligatory adolescent male’s repartee.

“He asked you for a date?” Brown Bunny asked Patsy.

I guessed “he” was not Daniel.

“Not the way you’d think,” Patsy said, sounding reluctant. “Sunday dinner at his uncle’s house.”

“He didn’t ask anybody out since he moved here, and now he’s wild for you.” Brown Bunny didn’t sound happy about it.

“Please,” Patsy said, as if this was a crazy exaggeration. But she was eating it up. She turned away to pay for her cottage cheese.

“I wonder why he didn’t ask you to go to a movie.”

Melanie said, “This is better, like—” This pause came
with a thoughtful frown. “Like, she’s getting introduced to his family.”

Brown Bunny looked skeptical. “This weekend, meet the uncle, next weekend, plan the wedding? I’m not getting the right vibes here.”

“It’s just a family meal,” Patsy said, very cool. The truth, I think she wasn’t too happy to hear that Brown Bunny wasn’t going to drape a luckiest-girl-in-the-world banner over her shoulder.

“I just wonder who needs the uncle’s permission, you or him.” Brown Bunny had surprisingly good instincts. I liked that.

“You’re making too much of this,” Patsy said as Melanie paid for milk and a sandwich.

“I’ll see you in class later,” Brown Bunny said, which was as close as I’d ever heard her come to sounding like a friend.

I wandered through the maze of tables until Patsy and Melanie sat down. Then I chose a place right behind them. I heard Melanie say, “She’s just mad he didn’t ask her,” and I let my chair scrape across the floor.

I was sharing the table with Daniel, who didn’t even try to sit with them, although he knew Patsy well enough. He laid two textbooks on the table and set his lunch out on top of them like they were a place mat.

I could see he’d resigned himself to a certain position in life. As in, satellite spinning around the popular and beautiful, but never getting swept into the inner circle. I was pretty much a satellite myself. Just not resigned to it.

I had a book report to make up, so I started to reread
The Catcher in the Rye
. We never said a word to each other the whole period.

Mr. B came back to the house for a sandwich at four. Actually, I think he expected a cold dinner to be waiting for him, since this was one of Mom’s at-home days. But she had gone out and hadn’t gotten home yet.

He went right back out to run practice sessions for the powder-puff game. Mom came in about ten minutes later, carrying some Macy’s shopping bags. Mr. B had cleaned up after himself, so she didn’t know she’d missed an important pass.

She and I ate rotisserie chicken and potato salad from the deli. She studied her
Wall Street Journal
. I made notes for my book report. To my mind, Holden Caulfield wanted to get it together, wanted to be heroic in some way, but it was harder than it looked.

I wondered, was he Patsy’s kind of guy?

I saw her going out as I was taking out the garbage. She was dressed in jeans, a fisherman’s sweater, and a peacoat that she hadn’t buttoned up. Maybe she wanted to look rugged, heading for the powder-puff practice session. She was getting into a beat-up Dodge with the Wall.

There you have it, I said to myself. Patsy’s kind of guy.

I didn’t think I would call her again.

Seriously, I didn’t. I like a girl with a sense of humor, and she hadn’t shown me much of that. It looked like I wasn’t her type either.

But I couldn’t help myself. It was the song of the siren.

I dialed.

She picked up, asking, “If you feel so bad, why do you keep calling back?”

Talking to her was like talking to a debate team. I answered, “I don’t regret these calls. I’m sorry about what I said. The first time.”

“Still?”

“Still what?”

“Still sorry? I mean, most people don’t feel sorry for what
they do for too long. They rationalize it, you know? Justify it. So the guilt fades.”

She’d brought up a good point, and truthfully, I’d stopped feeling guilty. Now I wanted to feel, well, like someone who should never have felt guilty at all.

“Who gave you my number, anyway?”

“Someone dropped it,” I said, relieved to have the conversation move in another direction. I fell back on my pillow.

“Come on.”

“Swear. It was on a piece of paper, lying on the ground.”

“Just a phone number?”

“And your name,” I said. “Patsy.”

“What’s
your
name?”

I hesitated, then said, “Do you really think it’s in my best interest to tell you?”

“I have to have something to call you. Besides creep.”

I took a scolding tone. “Patsy, Patsy, Patsy.”

“Got a crush on me? Do you write my name all over your notebook?”

I sat bolt upright in my bed. Her tone had changed, become so condescending.

“Lines and lines of it down the pages?”

Guys don’t do that kind of thing. Okay, I was being teased, but not in a nice way.

“Mr. and Mrs. Patsy—”

My blood beat indignantly in my veins. What could
I say? I didn’t do childish things. I made obscene phone calls.

“So you’re not somebody who wants to date me. That’s not it, right?”

“What would make you more appealing than the average Patsy?”

She made an annoyed sound with her tongue. “There’s no such thing as an average Patsy,” she said.

I grinned. “Sure there is. They have friends named Muffy and they date football players named Biff—”

“Nobody’s named Biff.”

“—and they wear pink with kelly green and they hide their ankles under little socks—”

“Why would they do that?”

“The socks?”

Silence.

“Because they have sturdy ankles that will thicken with middle age. If Biff sees—”

“Is this what you called for? To make fun of me?”

“I think we’ve already agreed on why I call.”

“You’re a pervert.” It had a terrible sound, coming from her. Final.

“I’m sorry I made the crack about the socks.”

“I didn’t know perverts came in kids.”

I laughed. The way I should have when she made that remark about writing her name over and over, like it had nothing to do with me. I felt suddenly that I was getting the hang of this, talking to her, joking with her.

“What’s funny?”

“You make it sound like a size. Kids, medium, and dirty old man.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“Listen, I’m not a pervert.”

“Did you or did you not make an obscene phone call?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Who makes obscene phone calls?” she asked.

“Two kinds of people, apparently.”

“Yeah?”

“Perverts,” I said quietly. “And people who want something they can’t have.”

“And what do you want?”

“Think about it,” I suggested. “And while you do, think about what you want. There are two of us having these lit—”

“You’re obnoxious, you know that?”

“I thought I was neurotic.”

It was only a second before she barked into my ear. “You know what else?”

“What?”

“I’ll bet you’re short!”

Click.

I guess I deserved that.

But as I hung up, I was annoyed with myself for apologizing. Not the first time. Just about the stupid socks. Couldn’t she take a joke?

“Don’t forget, tonight’s the powder-puff game,” Mr. B said to
Mom over breakfast. He had a bowl of instant oatmeal to fortify him for the day.

“I’ll be there,” Mom said cheerfully. This would be the first game she’d attended, largely because it wasn’t a serious game. Actually, the season was over.

We’d missed most of the games through absenteeism, not moving into the house until late in November. Mom had used commuting as her excuse through December, I used makeup homework. I had a feeling we wouldn’t get off so easily next year.

I saw Patsy throughout the day, in the halls on the way to classes and in the cafeteria. My luck that we didn’t have any classes together, probably due to last year’s bad grades.

I saw her come through the auditorium with another girl during study period, putting up posters for the Valentine’s Day dance. I tried not to go around acting like she was invisible to me, but I couldn’t let her catch me staring at her either. Especially now.

I was nearly the last one to get on the bus to go home. All the seats near Patsy were taken, if you counted the seat next to her, where she’d set her books down to save a place for someone.

I took a seat near the back. The Wall got the seat next to Patsy, and I spat mental spitballs at him for the rest of the trip.

Dad called that evening. I really needed his advice, but I wasn’t ready to make a full confession.

While I was ruling out conversational topics, he asked, “How’s your mom doing?” He meant to slip it in casually, just an ordinary family question. If it was so easy, I wished he’d just ask her. “I don’t mean to pry, Vinnie,” he said as the silence drew out. “I just wanted to hear her life is working out the way she wants it to.”

I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see that. “She goes to work. She comes home. She hangs around the house on her days off. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it?”

“Vinnie,” Dad said. I was making him uncomfortable, sounding so bugged. “It’s bad?”

“Mr. B isn’t bad. Mom isn’t bad, either. It’s just not the same as coming home to you.”

“Why haven’t you said something before?”

“I don’t know. It’s just getting to me lately.”

“Why don’t you talk it over with your mom? I’ll take a weekend off—”

“No, no. Easter vacation is only a couple of months away. I’ll come in then to stay the week.”

I didn’t want to say that Mom had some things to sort out with Mr. B. It seemed strange to think of this as a responsibility I had, to hang around the house, but it felt like one. Not only because I had to live with Mr. B, but because Mom had to. I didn’t want to be worried about her when I went off to college. I didn’t want to worry about Mr. B, either.

I didn’t want to say that to Dad. It left us with an odd silence that we didn’t quite know what to do with. But Dad came through. “Hey, I’ll come out tomorrow and we’ll go pick up a tank.”

We’d discovered a neat little aquarium shop at the mall. Forget “little.” This store saw more action than the shoe department at Bloomingdale’s. We had plans to buy a fifty-gallon tank and a setup. We’d had a great fish tank for years, most of my childhood. Up until I dropped a sun-dried sand dollar into the water, thinking it would look nice on the colored gravel.

The sand dollar introduced some kind of bacteria that killed the fish. It also ruined the pumps and filters, and we never could get the tank clean enough to support fish again.
We finally gave up. But after a stroll through that store, I’d gotten all charged up about trying again.