The Islanders (19 page)

He could either write down the answers Claire was giving him and keep, maybe even slightly improve his low
C
, or he could ignore her, take the
D
, and be suspended for the homecoming game. He was furious at her. She was putting him in a terrible position. He couldn't keep taking her help and then go on treating her the way he had. It was sick. It was like she was seducing him, only with her . . . her niceness.

Claire. Nice. Right.

“Three is
a
.”

This time Ms. Rafanelli looked up sharply and her focus was narrower. She knew the section of the room where the subtle sound of cheating was coming from. She probably guessed it was him. Could probably tell from the way he just sat there, with his pencil frozen in midair, looking pissed off, that it was him.

Do it or don't do it, he ordered himself.

He would never accept her help again. That was his decision. After this, never again.

He wrote down the answers in quick succession.

4. Hemingway is considered—

Jake felt a sharp fingernail pressing into his back. He controlled his reaction, keeping his eyes down on his paper. Claire drew her fingernail over the flesh of his back, drawing a distinct
4
, followed by the letter
c
. It sent chills through him. He could feel his resolve draining away with each contact.

The next six questions went the same way. He would have an
A
on the quiz. It might be enough to raise him to a solid
C
in the class. He would stay on the team.

The bell rang and he got up, feeling stiff and exhausted, as if he had just gone through some terrible ordeal. He didn't want to look at her, to let her see in his eyes the power her simple touch had over him.

He left quickly and headed directly down the hall toward his next class. But she was at his side.

“Don't bother to say thanks or anything,” Claire said.

“I didn't ask for your help,” Jake muttered without looking at her.

“Yeah, but you'll get a ninety on the test.”

“Ninety?” He stopped and stared. A mistake. He would never be able to stay angry at her when he was looking into her eyes.

She smiled her half smile. “Rafanelli would never buy you getting a perfect score, Jake. I gave you the wrong answer for question five. And I gave myself the wrong answer for question seven. That way it won't look like we cheated.”

He shook his head in frank admiration. “Sometimes you're just scary, Claire.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“What do you want from me?”

She seemed to consider the question for a moment. “I want you to love me, Jake. I want you to forgive me for what happened two years ago.”

Jake met her level, unwavering gaze. Love her? Of course he loved her. The mere touch of her finger on his back had electrified him, setting off reactions he couldn't control, desires he couldn't turn off. If he could only stop loving her, his life might go back to normal. He might not see her face every night in the dark as he lay in bed. The memory of her might not war constantly in his brain with the memory of his brother.

Love me, Jake. Forgive me, Jake.

“One out of two isn't bad,” he said sadly.

MRS. GRAY GAVE THE SHALLOW
pan a shake. “Are you ready, Aisha?”

“Ready.” Aisha had four prechilled bowls of vanilla ice cream waiting in the freezer.

“Okay, bring them out. Kalif, turn off the lights.”

The lights went out. Mrs. Gray poured a long stream of kirschwasser into the pan, then tilted the pan so the bubbling liquid nearly spilled into the fire of the stove. In an instant the pan went up in a brilliant flash, then settled down into gentler blue tongues of flame.

From the table Mr. Gray applauded. Mrs. Gray quickly spooned the cherries jubilee over the ice cream and Aisha just as quickly shuttled the bowls to the table.

“Excellent,” Aisha said enthusiastically, spooning up a bite. “You could open a restaurant and give Zoey's parents some competition.”

Her mother smiled at the compliment. “Thanks, but a
bed-and-breakfast is work enough. I don't know how the Passmores do it, breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. They must live in that restaurant.”

“Zoey says they just about do,” Aisha said.

They were eating in the breakfast room, a part of the house reserved for guests when the tourist season brought people to the bed-and-breakfast. As fall advanced, though, there were fewer guests and the Gray family gradually reclaimed more of the huge building.

“Saw a red phalarope today,” Aisha's father said.

Kalif rolled his eyes. Aisha smiled. Her little brother was at the age where their father just embarrassed him.

“
Phalaropus fulicarius
in Latin,” Mr. Gray said.

“What did it look like?” Aisha asked, mostly out of politeness, but at least partly from real interest.

“Well, it was in its winter plumage, gray and white. Has a call like
Peek! Peek!
”

Kalif looked alarmed, and Aisha smothered a smile. The spectacle of her bookish, conservative father suddenly exploding in loud bird noises, something he did regularly, was so incongruous it was hard not to crack up. He was a librarian at the Weymouth main public library, a place where he fit in perfectly, unlike here in his own house with his younger, more energetic wife and his compulsively athletic son.

Aisha was closest to him in temperament. They were both intellectual, reserved, not very emotional people. And to her own surprise, Aisha actually had started noticing the birds that lived on or passed by the island.

“Coffee, honey?” Mrs. Gray asked her husband.

“Just half a cup.”

“I want some, too,” Aisha said.

Her mother gave her a look. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

“I have a lot of homework to do,” Aisha said.

Her mother brought the coffee to the table and poured for Aisha and her father. “What homework do you have?”

“Calc, biology, French, you name it.”

Kalif cracked his knuckles loudly. “Pressure getting to you? Huh? Huh? Going to crack? Going to lose it?”

“Is all
your
homework done, Kalif?”

“I knew I shouldn't have said anything.”

“I was going to see if you wanted to go out to the mall tomorrow after school,” Mrs. Gray said. “Tomorrow's Wednesday; the homecoming dance is on Saturday.”

Aisha shrugged. “I don't need to go to the mall,” she said nonchalantly.

“Don't you want to get something new to wear? The only things you have for dances are getting a little tight on you.”

“What with you getting fat,” Kalif interjected.

“Don't press the girl if she doesn't want to spend money on a dress,” Mr. Gray said mildly.

“She can't go looking shabby, Alan,” Mrs. Gray said.

“Actually, I don't think I'm going at all,” Aisha said.

“Uh-oh, trouble in the land of lo-o-ove,” Kalif said gleefully.

“You're not going to homecoming?”

Aisha shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It's no big deal.”

“Are you having a problem with Christopher?” her mother inquired, trying her best not to sound like she was prying.

She
was
prying, and Aisha didn't appreciate it. “He's not even in school,” she said evasively. “Homecoming is for students.”

“Yep. Trouble,” Kalif opined. “I'm not surprised. Christopher was always way too cool for you.”

“Kalif, finish going through puberty first, then start worrying about other people's lives,” Aisha said. “Look, I'm just not all that into dances and stuff, anyway. I go to school to learn, right? Isn't that the idea?”

“She has you there, Carol,” Mr. Gray said.

His wife was undeterred. “Yes, you go to learn, but I thought you were going to this dance with Christopher, that's all. I just need to know whether you're going to want a new
dress; that's my only interest in the matter. Kalif, clear the table. It's your turn with dishes.”

“So what'd he do, dump you?” Kalif asked.

“No, not that it's any of your scrotelike business, but I dumped him. Actually.”

“Big mistake. He was way cool.”

“He was a jerk,” Aisha said hotly. “And if I wanted to go to the stupid dance, I could easily find a date. Plenty of guys have asked me out.”

“Yeah, right.
Human
guys?”

“Kalif, that's enough,” Mr. Gray said quietly.

Aisha noticed her mother looking at her with an expression very close to pity.

“It's no big deal,” Aisha practically yelled.

“As long as you're okay,” her mother said in her concerned voice.

“Look. I caught him with some other girl, all right? So he's a toad, all right? So he's out of my life, all right? So forget about him.
I
have.” She took a last sip of her coffee. “Now,
I
have homework to do. You can all sit around and discuss my private life if you want, but I'm busy.”

She turned with perfect control and began walking away. Her mother caught up to her at her bedroom door.

“Mother,” Aisha said patiently. She only called her mother
mother
when she was annoyed. “I don't need a little heart-to-heart talk, okay?”

Her mother held up her hands in a gesture of innocence. “Not me. I was just going to say if he was trying to pressure you into sleeping with him, you did the right thing, dumping him.”

Aisha felt weary. “Of course he was pressuring me. Guys usually do, but I know how you feel about that and I know how I feel about that. It wasn't about sex. It was what I said—I walked in on him and this girl and then he lied to me about seventy-five times in less than five minutes.”

“So you dumped him for being a two-timing liar?”

Aisha sighed. “Yes, Mother.”

Her mother grabbed her and crushed her in a hug. “My girl,” she said proudly. “Teach that boy a lesson.”

“I thought you really liked Christopher.”

“I do. Or I did. But if he's going to lie to you, then bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye,” Aisha repeated.

“There are other boys. Find someone else to go to the dance with.”

“You mean so I can rub Christopher's nose in it.”

“Of course. How do you think your father and I got together the first time? Your father was the guy I went out with just to get back at my old boyfriend.”

“So, you been working on your romance novel lately?” Nina asked. She was lying on her back on the floor of Zoey's room, throwing a troll doll someone had given Zoey up in the air and trying to catch it. Unfortunately, Nina was no athlete and she kept banging the hard plastic doll against the sloped ceiling, making a loud noise and distracting Zoey from her homework.

“No. Not lately,” Zoey muttered. She was sitting at the desk in her dormered window, trying to compose a story for her journalism class. It was supposed to be an account of a speech the president had given on tax reform. It had not been an exciting speech, and every time she tried to read the printed version of it, her mind wandered off. Writing a story about a speech you couldn't force yourself to actually read was a challenge.

Nina threw the troll into the air. It hit the slanted ceiling, took a bad bounce, and landed on Zoey's head.

“Nina!”

“Sorry.”

“I have a stuffed bear you could throw. It's soft.”

“So are you ever going to let me read any of your romance novel?”

Zoey shook her head definitely. “No. First of all, it's not a novel. It's just a first chapter rewritten about twenty times. Second of all, you would laugh.”

“Maybe not.”

Zoey put down her pencil and rubbed her forehead. “I can't even write
this
stupid story. I'm not exactly ready to start writing romance novels.”

Nina sat up. “Maybe it's the subject matter. Maybe you have a good feel for romance and you aren't into politics.”

“I don't know that I'm an expert on romance,” Zoey said dryly. “Now, Claire would be an expert.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a total amateur and I can't ask Claire,” Nina said, her sentence trailing off into a low mutter.

Zoey looked at her. “What are you talking about, Nina?” Nina was seldom so indirect.

Her friend shrugged. “I was just saying I don't know very much about all that stuff. I mean, I've only ever kissed one guy—I mean, voluntarily—and then I practically gacked up a kidney.”

“Oh. Are you worried about going out with Benjamin?”

“Worried? Not worried, really. Quivering in terror, sure. It's just that I'm not very experienced. I'm like a Muslim in a liquor store. I'm like a Republican trying to understand rap lyrics.”

Zoey waited patiently. Nina followed what she called her three-part comic tautology rule—funny examples should come in threes.

“Hang on, I'm thinking,” Nina said, wrinkling her brow. “Okay. I'm like a fashion model in a bookstore. Come on, that one's good.”

“So, you're saying you feel lost, confused, intimidated?”

“Yes, yes, help me, please.” She clasped her hands in supplication.

“What is it you want to know?” Zoey said, feeling a little uncomfortable. After all, Nina was going to be out with her brother.

“All the dating protocol. You know, do you hold hands? If you do hold hands, is it just like shaking-hands style, or interlocked fingers, and what if your hand gets sweaty, and how do you know when to stop?”

“Well, Nina, really it's kind of up to you. I mean, what do you feel comfortable doing?”

“I don't feel
comfortable
doing anything. Not to be gross, but when I like even think about kissing a guy or whatever . . . especially whatever . . . I get these flashes back to my uncle and all. It's not like I'm hallucinating or going schizo; it's just I start thinking about it and it makes me sick.”

“It's not gross, Nina, it's just kind of sad,” Zoey said gently. “I mean, the whole dating thing is weird enough without adding extra levels of weirdness.”

“I thought maybe if I could get used to the idea ahead of
time, I could deal with it when it happens. Like when I have to go to my gynecologist, I spend a week ahead of time going, ‘It's okay, she's a doctor, she's not going to hurt you, she's just a nice old lady with no sense of humor,' and so on. I even write out little scenarios. You know, like I'll write that I'll go in, lose it, and end up running out into the street wearing one of those paper dresses they give you. Then when I'm there, it's just unpleasant, as opposed to terrifying.”

“Well, no one exactly enjoys being in those stirrups,” Zoey admitted. “Believe me, whatever happens between you and Benjamin, it won't be
that
unpleasant.” She shook her head. “I can't believe I'm talking about this.”

“So, show me how to hold hands the right way,” Nina said.

Zoey scooted down to the floor beside Nina, feeling thoroughly foolish. She sat facing the same direction as Nina, side by side. “Okay, say you're at a movie.”

“You're at a movie.”

“Are you going to be making jokes all the way through this?” Zoey asked.

“So, we're at a movie.”

“Put your hand like it's on the armrest.”

“Why?”

“Because if you want him to hold your hand, you don't want to have your hand in your lap, right?” Zoey explained. “I
mean, make it easy for the guy. You want him to have to rummage around in your lap looking for your hand?”

“No, then I would definitely hurl,” Nina said. “We'd be talking supersonic popcorn.” She held her hand up on an imaginary armrest.

Zoey ran her fingers through her hair, fiddled with the neck of her shirt, wiped her hands on her shorts.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm being the guy,” Zoey said. “They usually take a while to get their nerve up.” She let her hand creep along the imaginary armrest, until her elbow was resting and the side of her hand was touching the side of Nina's hand.

“Is that it?” Nina demanded.

“This is just phase one. He wants to see if you'll yank your hand away.”

“Will I?” Nina asked anxiously. “I mean, should I?”

“No, Nina. You keep up the contact. Then, after a while he gets up his nerve to make the big jump.” She slid her hand over Nina's.

“What do I do?”

“I would do this.” Zoey turned her hand palm up and interlaced her fingers with Nina's.

“Okay.”

“That's it.”

“Doesn't seem like much,” Nina said, sounding a little disappointed.

“It will seem like a lot more when it's a guy,” Zoey reassured her.

“Yeah, that's what worries me. But I guess I can handle this. As long as I don't have to kiss or anything.”

“Good, because I'm not about to teach you that,” Zoey said.

“Maybe if it was just a little kiss-on-the-cheek kind of thing. Like a Hollywood air kiss.”