The Yearbook (13 page)

Coming over the hill, Lola saw that Eagle Rock's paved parking lot was gone, as were the familiar streetlights and the battered metal benches with their competing layers of graffiti. Thumbtack pulled onto a bumpy patch of hard-packed dirt where other kids had left their cars. Lola could make out several picnic tables not far from the fire pit, but beyond it stood the forest wall, heavy pines and bare November elms rising out of a thick undergrowth.

The bonfire was high and bright and threw cinders into the starry sky. Lola heard laughing and the strumming of a ukulele and smelled the sweet scent of pipe smoke she associated with old men on park benches.

Thumbtack and Hershel spread a picnic blanket smack in the middle of the action and unpacked the food: forty-eight chicken legs, four pies, an enormous meatloaf, a basket of buttermilk biscuits, a crock of butter, a bushel basket of apples, and half a dozen thermoses. There were hand-painted teacups and china plates, real silverware and linen napkins and little aluminum cups that popped up like telescopes out of little leather cases.

“Wow. Where'd you get all this food?” Lola marveled.

“Whaddaya mean where'd we get it?” Ruby said. “We cooked it, of course.”

“All this? You made all this?”

“Well, it didn't fall out of the sky, Mike,” Whoopsie said, biting into a chicken leg.

Ruby slapped a big slice of the meatloaf onto a china plate. “I'm almost too worn out to eat it now,” she moaned, shoving a big forkful into her mouth.

“Very impressive,” Lola said. “I would have ordered a pizza.”

“What's that?” Ruby said.

“Ordered pizza.”

“I mean, what's pizza?”

Lola looked at Ruby. “Did you say, ‘What's pizza?'”

“Italian food, isn't it?” Ruby uncovered the mashed potatoes and jammed a big serving spoon into it.

“But everybody knows about pizza. Don't they?”

Ruby turned to the group on the next blanket. “Say, Virgil, what's pizza?”

“I dunno,” Virgil said, and returned to his ham sandwich.

“See?” Ruby said. “This isn't New York. We don't have exotic foods or Italians.”

“That's just one of the many problems with this one-cow, backwater hicktropolis,” Whoopsie said, heaving a handful of acorns into the fire and watching them pop. “Everybody's just the same. We don't have any pizza food, and we all do the same things, on the same schedule, year after year, and . . .”

Whoopsie launched into her familiar sermon on the shortcomings of Ashfield, but Lola heard only the first sentence or two before her mind wandered its well-worn path back to Peter. She had examined every silhouette around the bonfire and found his missing. Maybe he wasn't coming to the picnic at all. The thought alone felt like some terrible piece of bad news. She wanted to ask about him but kept quiet.

On the other side of the fire, a girl began to sing along with the ukulele.

“I'm just wild about Harry, and Harry's wild about me.”

Whoopsie got up and danced a little Charleston next to the picnic blanket and sang along:
“The heavenly blisses, of his kisses, fill me with ecstasy.”

Thumbtack watched her with an adoration that seemed almost religious. Hershel did a few card tricks for Ruby until he decided it was too dark.

Lola turned to Whoopsie. She had to work the conversation around to Peter but didn't want to be too obvious about it.

“I wonder if it'll rain,” Lola said.

Whoopsie stopped dancing and plopped down beside her. “You mean you're wondering if Peter Hemmings is coming? You've been looking for him ever since we sat down.”

It was no use trying to fool Whoopsie when it came to matters of the heart.

“If I know old Edison, he's over on the bluff with that telescope of his.”

“You mean he's here?”

“Why? Wanna go see him?”

“I don't know. I didn't mean—”

“I know whatcha meant, Mike. Take the path over beside that clump of trees. When you come to the second fork, go left. Don't go right or you'll get lost on one of those deer tracks to nowhere. You'll come to the bluff above the swimming hole, and that's where Edison usually sets up. Here, take him some drumsticks. He's gotten too skinny.”

Lola followed the dim path and in a few minutes made out Peter's silhouette on a bare, flat rock that extended over a ravine. He was alone, looking through his telescope. A crescent moon shone, reflecting down into the wavering black water of the swimming hole far below, and the sky was so crowded with stars that it looked to Lola like a science fiction backdrop. What had happened to the stars, she wondered, by the time her generation came along? Why had so many of them burned out? A rabbit skittered across the path at her approach and went crashing into the undergrowth. Peter turned toward the noise.

“Hello,” she said softly, entering his camp. “Whoopsie thought you might be hungry.” She set the bundle on a small folding table Peter had arranged near the telescope.

He thanked her with a pleasant, ordinary smile that surprised her after his strangeness at Hillside, and beckoned her over to his observation post.

“Does astronomy interest you?” he asked.

Was he again the friendly teenager in the man's suit she'd met at the dance? She began to wonder if she'd read too much into the encounter at Hillside. Maybe he'd just been mad at her for standing him up at the fountain. Her problem, she now saw, clear as day, was that she had spent way too much time dissecting every little conversation and event. Maybe he hadn't been avoiding her at all. Maybe he was busy with work, school, his family, who knows what? After all, did the whole world revolve around Lola Lundy? She almost laughed.

Peter lowered the telescope to Lola's eye level. She peered into the lens and the stars rushed in close. The moon was bright in her eye. Peter's nearness made her skin prickle. In the absolute quiet, she could almost hear the magnet inside her, buzzing, pulling her toward him.

“Enjoying good old Ashfield High?” he asked.

“I am,” Lola said, and was surprised that she meant it; she did sort of love Ashfield. She loved a school.

“Making friends, I've noticed.”

“Everybody's been nice. Strangers come up to me in the hall with little welcome presents. Like I'm a celebrity.”

“There's a great deal of extra curiosity about you.”

Lola wasn't sure if she liked that or not. “About me? Why?”

She heard him rummaging in some dry leaves with the toe of his boot.

“There are some pretty wild rumors going around about you.”

Lola continued her exploration of the sky, no longer noticing anything she saw. “Like what?”

“Some of the kids are saying you're from Colorado, and that you lived in a remote mining camp so long you didn't know who the president of the United States was when you got here.”

“They're saying that?”

“Funny, isn't it?”

Lola didn't answer. For all she knew, Eunice had shown her typewritten forgery at school. She better not deny it.

Peter reached out and made an adjustment to the telescope. She felt his arm brush her sleeve like an electric shock.

“I'd like to know more about you,” he said, gently this time. “Real things.”

She looked up at his face in the moonlight. The temptation to confess everything was almost irresistible. The secret, which had always been heavy, now seemed crushing. But she would not tell. No one could, or should, believe such a thing. And to say it out loud was to be a freak again, a notorious freak and outcast. She was done with that forever. “All right,” she said mildly, turning her attention back to the telescope. “What would you like to know?”

The girl's singing voice came faintly across the heavy woods.

“The heavenly blisses

Of his kisses

Fill me with ecstasy.

He's sweet just like chocolate candy

Or like the honey from a bee.”

“I think you can guess.”

His matter-of-fact tone startled her. It suggested he already knew everything. But he couldn't know.

“The vital statistics? Well, I'm five-foot-two and I weigh about a hundred and five pounds, I guess. My birthday's June the sixteenth. That makes me a Gemini, in case you're wondering.”

Peter sighed, the way a teacher might when a student misses an easy question. He moved away from her, paced for a minute, then sat down on a boulder a few yards from where she still stood at the telescope.

“Hair, brown,” Lola continued. “Eyes, blue.”

“Blue-gray,” Peter said. He folded his hands in his lap and looked up at her, as if he were gathering his thoughts. “Lola, do you remember the night of the dance?”

That evening, in fact, was recorded in her brain down to the last gesture. She could replay any scene in high definition, and had, time after time, during her many furtive excursions into the pages of the yearbook. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

“I waited around for you,” he said. “At the fountain, until everybody was gone.”

The moon seemed to grow brighter now, dusting Peter's hair and face in its pale glow. Lola felt drugged by the sight of him; he looked like something out of a myth in that light
. I waited, too
, she wanted to answer.
I waited hours and hours in the cold for you
. But instead she said, “I'm sorry. It got very late and—” She couldn't finish without lying, so she said nothing more.

“You told me you lived on Quarrier Street,” Peter continued. The abrupt change of subject left her a beat behind.

“Yes, I did,” she answered. “I do.”

“I asked around for you on Quarrier Street the day after the dance and nobody knew you.”

“I'd just moved in. That's why.” She'd answered casually, but felt caught off-guard and tried to guess his intention.

“This is a small town,” Peter said. “Everybody knows everything. But nobody knew about you.”

“It was a mix-up,” she said, trying for that same airy tone but not quite hitting it. “Why does it matter?”

“It matters because it bothers me, and it bothers me because I don't understand it.”

Peter's voice was still friendly, but Lola heard a note of tension in it. He got up from the rock. She returned her attention to the telescope but knew he was watching her.

“So you're from New York?”

“That's right.”

“Lola,” he said. “Who's John Hylan?”

“John who?”

“John Francis Hylan.”

“Am I supposed to know?”

“He's the mayor of New York. He's been the mayor of New York for the past six years.”

She looked up from the telescope. An ambush. That's what this was. Peter was conducting one of those debunkings he'd talked about at the dance, and she, Lola Lundy, was its subject. Anger rose from the pit of her stomach.

Peter got up from the rock then and meandered over to the folding table. He unwrapped a chicken leg and took a bite, but he watched her, as if waiting to see how she would respond.

She was hot with shame. He had pretended to be interested in her, to want to “know more” about her, just so he could prove she was a fraud, some silly local girl who'd invented a glamorous biography for herself at a new school. How could she have walked right into it, she, who'd been subjected to that same interview technique dozens of times?

And there he stood, eating a drumstick, self-satisfied, thinking he knew everything about her when he knew nothing at all. She hated him.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You can go tell everybody now what a fake I am. I don't have an aunt in France either, by the way.”

“I figured that,” Peter said.

“Tell anybody you want,” Lola said. “Enjoy yourself. I don't care.” She turned, shaking, and walked off in the direction of the bonfire. Disappointment and rage consumed her as she pushed forward in the dark over the rutted path, snagged by thorns, tripped by roots. The way seemed wrong. She had lost her bearings, and hesitated in a pitch-dark stretch hemmed in by leaning pines. A second path seemed to run off to the right. She took a step toward it, unsure, and in that instant, arms grabbed her from behind and she felt Peter's chest pressing against her back.

She opened her mouth to scream but didn't. For half a minute at least there was only his trembling breath on her neck, and then he began to whisper: “You're making me doubt my sanity,” he said.

“Let go of me. Let go.” For some reason she was whispering, too, when common sense told her she should scream.

“I know this is not the behavior of a gentleman,” he went on, the words pouring from his lips into her ear like something hot and intoxicating. “But I don't sleep anymore. I can't think. There's no logic. Not since the dance. Not since . . .”

She could not understand him now. She had lost the thread, and was afraid. “I lied about myself. I admit it. I grew up right around here, right in this county. I'm not interesting at all. That rumor about Denver, it came from me, too. But you knew that. You've seen the letter, haven't you?”

“Yes. Very imaginative.”

“What do you want from me, then? A public confession?”

“No. Not that.”

She could hardly breathe in his grip. She knew at least half a dozen self-defense moves she normally employed with ample success in situations such as this, yet she was motionless. It was that magnet again, holding her against him. “What, then? What is it you want?”

“My mother always said too much study can cause a person to lose his wits,” Peter whispered. “Now, you tell me, Miss Lundy. Have I lost my wits?”

He released her, then, and waited. She turned and ran for all she was worth, blindly. After a minute she stopped to listen for his footsteps but heard only the whine of wind in the pine boughs. He wasn't following her. She stayed still for a moment and waited for her heart to quit pounding in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make sense of the things Peter had said. His ambush had worked. He had uncovered her little lies about New York, and her half-truth about Quarrier Street, the nonsense about a French aunt and the mining camp. Her admission of guilt should have left him gloating, but it had brought on a frenzy.
You're making me doubt my sanity
, he'd said, as if feeling around the edges of the extraordinary truth.