Authors: Jenny Han
“So?”
“So you have no idea how hard that is.”
“But you’re popular; everyone likes you.”
Elaine shrugs. “It doesn’t mean anything. They could have hated me just as easily. People will love you or hate you for being different, but who’s to say which way it’ll go? You never know. It’s completely arbitrary. And anyway, it’s not like no one’s ever called me names.”
I suck my breath in. “Like what?”
“Like ‘chink.’” She says this word like it is nothing, like it can’t hurt her, but I can see that it does, that it has.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I am sorry too, sorry that my Clementon, the place I call home, could be as mean as people say. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I guess I never dwelled too long on the why, or the how. I never thought how it must be for
Elaine. Here I was thinking she had it so easy.
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t you get it? That’s why me and you are special.”
I don’t get it. “What do you mean?”
Elaine says, “We’re different. You like me for me, and I like you for you. The rest of it’s all a bunch of crap.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
Walking home from the bus stop, I see Mrs. Findley picking up the mail. I feel a funny clutch in my stomach, and I’m hoping she won’t see me so I can go home without speaking to her. I keep my head low, walking fast.
But she does see me. “Annemarie!” she calls. She waves at me.
I look up like, who, me? “Hi, Mrs. Findley!” I call back, but I don’t slow down.
“Come over here a minute!”
I trudge over to their mailbox. It’s a good thing Mark had to stay after school for the Student Council Christmas party today. Otherwise I would have kept right on walking.
Mrs. Findley opens her arms and gives me a hug. She’s wearing her thick lumberman’s kind of coat, red plaid on the inside. She smells like cinnamon and wood chips. “How come I haven’t seen you in so long?” she says.
“Oh, you know. I’ve been busy with school and stuff.”
“Still, I wish I could’ve taken pictures of you and Mark for your first dance. I would have loved to have seen you all dressed up. I know you must have been so lovely,” she says, putting both hands on my cheeks. “Did you have a nice time?”
Looking away, I say, “Mm-hmm, real nice.”
“Honey, is something wrong?” Mrs. Findley’s brow furrows. “Have you and Mark had a falling out?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, you haven’t been by the house in such a long time. And Mark did mention something …” Her voice trails off.
I’m dying to know what he said, but I don’t ask. Instead I say nothing; I just keep my lips clamped shut.
“Well, I know you two will work it out,” Mrs. Findley says at last. “How about you come over for dinner tonight? I’ll make spaghetti. We can bake those Christmas cookies you love, the pecan crescents.”
I smile. “I wish I could, but I have to be at home for dinner tonight.”
She nods. “All right, then. You know you’re always welcome.”
“I know,” I say. Then I walk home.
The next day I’m finally ready to see Mark. The sun’s just beginning to set, and I go out to the front porch and wait. Meeks waits with me. I think he misses Mark.
The sun’s dipping away when Mark comes down my street on his bike. He slows down when he sees me, and then he rides down my driveway. “Sic him,” I whisper to Meeks, who brightens when he sees Mark. Meeks, the lousy traitor, bounds over to Mark and starts licking his knees.
“Hey,” Mark says. He sets his bike down on the ground very carefully, taking an extra long time. He stoops low to pet Meeks and then faces me.
“What do you want?” I look straight ahead, straight past him.
“I came to say sorry,” he says, and his voice cracks. First time I ever heard it crack. I wonder if it’s been cracking all along, and I just never heard it. “I’m sorry for what I said at the dance. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yeah, you did.” I look at him now, right in the eyes.
Mark looks back at me, and his eyes are watery and scared. He is about to cry. “No, really. I didn’t mean it.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
The corners of his lips turn down, and he thinks hard for a moment. That’s what Mark does when he’s thinking hard—he frowns. He stands there, thinking and looking puzzled, with his hands in his pockets. Then he says, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I said it, but I know I’m sorry.”
I actually believe him. He really doesn’t know. He doesn’t know any more than I do. “Sorry isn’t good enough. Sorry doesn’t take away what you said. Sorry doesn’t mean we can be friends again.”
“I know, but …” He trails off. But nothing. He has nothing to say for himself.
“If you came over here thinking we could just go back to being friends the way we used to—”
That’s what I hope he came over for, anyway. To beg that we could be BFF, best friends forever, like before. And I’ll
say no, and Mark’ll keep begging, and then I’ll give in, because that’s what we do.
“No, I know we can’t.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I just came to say I’m sorry.”
“Oh.”
Mark stands there, with the sun setting against his back. Then he pulls his bike up off the ground and starts to ride back down my driveway.
I don’t say good-bye, and neither does he.
All day at school I wondered if Daddy was coming home. That last fight was so bad, I wondered if it was the final straw. I wondered if it meant the
D
word was right around the corner. I didn’t want to ask Mama. But Celia said not to worry; he’d be there. I hope she’s right. She usually is.
As the clock ticks closer to dinnertime, Mama stays in her room. The door is shut. Celia’s door is shut too. I guess it’s up to me to cook supper.
I’m stirring a pot of macaroni when Daddy strides through the back door. “Hey, Shug,” he says, setting his briefcase on the floor. “What’s cookin’?”
He winks at me, and I can’t remember the last time I was this happy to see him. Dropping the wooden spoon on
the counter, I run over to him, my daddy. I breathe in his daddy smell and hug him tight. “Hey, what’s all this for?” he says, smiling and chucking my chin.
“Nothing,” I say, backing away. “Macaroni’s cooking. Mama’s upstairs. So’s Celia.”
Loosening his tie, Daddy says, “Well, I’ll just go get washed up before supper then.” He leaves the kitchen, and as I lean against the counter, my happiness starts to fade away. I wonder what happens next. Did he come home just so he could announce he was leaving for good? Could Mairi’s mother be right? I always thought that I wouldn’t mind if Mama and Daddy got divorced, not truly. I thought, well, maybe it’ll be better that way, maybe some people just aren’t meant to be together. But faced with the possibility, I choose together. I choose us. Even if it is all just pretend.
The four of us sit around the kitchen table, the first time in a long time. For once, there’s no wineglass in Mama’s hand, just iced tea. For once, Celia isn’t rushing off to meet Park, or Margaret, or anybody that isn’t us. For once, Daddy is here.
I keep waiting for Daddy to make his announcement, but it never comes. We eat dinner. There’s not a lot of talk, we just eat.
It’s around 9:30 p.m. when the doorbell rings. Mama
and Daddy are watching TV in the den, Celia’s in her room, and I’m doing my homework at the dining room table. Part of me is still waiting for that announcement.
We all look at one another when we hear the door, like, who the heck could that be? We’re not used to late-night visitors. Neither of them make a move from the couch, and sighing loudly, I get up. As I head for the front door, I see Mama put her head in Daddy’s lap, and I feel more okay than I have in a long time.
I open the door. It’s Jack. He says, “Can you come outside for a minute?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” I grab my puffy jacket from the coat hook and zip into it. Closing the door, I holler, “It’s for me!” Not that anybody cares.
We sit down on the front steps. It’s pitch black outside, and the sky is swimming with stars. It’s nights like these that make you realize you’re sitting on a planet. We’re on a planet, in an ocean of stars. They’re so close you could reach out and grab one, put it in your pocket for later. If I had a fishing net, I’d take them all. I’d line my ceiling with them.
Jack pulls a roll of cherry Life Savers out of his pocket. He takes the one on top, then gives me the next one. If you didn’t know him better, you might think he was being rude, taking the first one and all. But I knew that he took the top piece
because the top piece of a roll of Life Savers is always linty and fuzzy from being in your pocket. The ones in the middle are the good ones. I pop that good middle one in my mouth.
He says, “You mad at me for getting out-of-school suspension?”
Clicking the Life Saver on my teeth, I say, “Well, yeah.”
“You still mad at me for getting into a fight with Mark?”
“Yup.”
“’Cause you like him.”
“No, because it was stupid. Why’d you have to go and get in trouble again?”
“I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “The thing is, I’m gonna have to go and live with my dad for a while. I’m gonna leave after Christmas. My mom’s actually going through with it. She already called him and everything.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“For how long?”
“Don’t know.”
“Oh.” I bite my lip. I don’t know how to say this next part. “Are you scared?”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute. “No. I mean, I still hate him. I still hate what he did to my mom. But, I don’t know … I saw him last month. He actually came to see me.
He seems … better. I don’t know how to explain it.”
I say, “You don’t have to.”
We sit there, not talking, just staring up at the sky. How many times had Mark and I sat together, just like this, on a night just like this one, saying nothing, just sharing the silence? Too many to count. It’s funny, but this night feels different than all those other nights. Like Jack and I aren’t just sharing the silence, but we’re waiting for something.
Jack’s got that look on his face, the look he gets when he’s standing on the pitcher’s mound. That summer we played softball in the park, he was always the pitcher, and he always had the same expression on his face right before he hit you with a real doozy. That’s how he looks right now. Nervous. He looks nervous. Then he says, “I’m sorry about the way things turned out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” A long pause, and then, “Mark can be such a jerk sometimes.”
“Sometimes. He’s not really like that though.” I feel oddly defensive.
He doesn’t look at me. “You still like him, even after …?”
“No …” I don’t look at him either. “But he’s still my friend, even after.”
“Oh.”
I’m nervous, really really nervous. I’ve got the whole rest of my life for kissing. I don’t even want him to kiss me. Maybe I do want him to kiss me, but only a little bit. Not enough to let him.
He leans a bit closer and then turns away. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him. His profile is soft in the dark like this—I want to touch the curve of his cheek, just to see what it feels like. Does it feel like mine? Where did that thought even come from? Certainly not from me. I don’t care what his cheek feels like. Oily, probably.
But it doesn’t look oily. It looks clean.
I rest my left hand on my knee. It just sits there, naked and alone. I wish he’d cover it with his hand. Cover me up. Hold my hand. Do something. He’s such a jerk; he’s just sitting there doing nothing.
I close my eyes and will something to happen. Just to see. Maybe I’ll hate it. But maybe I won’t.
He doesn’t kiss me. Instead he touches the scar on my cheek, just for a second. So quick it almost didn’t happen. But it did happen. His fingers felt light and warm on my face. “I’m sorry about that too,” he says, and his voice sounds strange.
I stop breathing, I think. Then he says, “I’m sorry for, you know, pulling your hair out that one time too. I just
wanted to see what it looked like down.”
That’s when I kiss him. Without thinking, I just lean forward and do it. In that moment all I hear are the crickets and my heartbeat. The kiss lasts about four seconds, maybe five. Not what I thought it’d be like at all. Soft and warm and sort of surprising. He tastes like candy. I’ll remember this taste for the rest of my life. I thought my first kiss would taste like a cherry Popsicle. Cherry Life Savers are okay too. Better, maybe.
I break away, swallow hard, and say, “Something to remember me by.” All I can think is, please don’t make a joke out of this. Don’t make a joke of me.
He doesn’t. He just grins crookedly and says, “How could I forget?” Then he stands up and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Guess I’d better go. See ya, Annemarie.”
“See ya.” He walks down the steps, and I watch his sneakers move along the rocky pavement and away from me.
I wait until he’s at the end of the driveway before I let myself shout, “You better write me! I wanna know that all my hard work wasn’t for nothing!”
He turns around and yells back, “Keep dreaming, Einstein!” But he’s smiling.
I’m smiling too. He’ll write. I know he will.
I feel like a lucky star has lit my way and led me to so many amazing people, people who have been more than kind to me.
First, the Pippin women, Emily van Beek and Holly McGhee, the sexiest, cleverest, fiercest women in the business. Truly, you two are the best agents anyone could hope for. Next, my editor, Emily Thomas, for holding my hand and for being Annemarie’s surrogate mama. You’ve done right by her and by me, Emily. Thank you to Michael Nagin for the sweetest cover ever, and to Dorothy Gribbin, Chava Wolin, and the whole S&S family for getting behind
Shug
. I also thank Sarah Weeks, my friend and mentor—you have been nothing but generous with me, and if it hadn’t been for you, none of this would be possible. And who could forget David Levithan, who has counseled me tirelessly and who also shares my deep and abiding affection for all things Angela Chase and BSC. Also a shout-out to the Writing for Children kids at the New School and especially to my writing
group: Melinda, Emmy, Lisa, and Caroline. Write on, ladies. You are all so very exquisite. Thank you also to the Claires—Holly, John, Foster, and Claire: Thank you for being my home away from home and for allowing me to be a part of your family. You are so dear to me.