Amandine (11 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yeah?” Thunderstorm blue. I hunched under his gaze. “That’s n-not what I’ve been hearing.” He paused, his face reflecting something between puzzlement and scorn, then turned and strolled back to his easel.

I looked over at Miss Rose, our art teacher who was stooped in a corner of the room, sorting acrylic from oil paint tubes. She had no idea. I blinked down at my coffee cans. All the kids knew the story, I realized. All of them, every single one. The entire class had fallen into a hush when Mark approached me. Now, as I stared at my paper, I could sense their nudges and whispers.

After a few torturing minutes, I excused myself from art and spent the rest of class time hiding in the bathroom, tearing a piece of paper towel into a thousand little scraps and dropping each scrap one by one into the toilet.

The worst thing about school, any school, is there is no right place to go when everything goes wrong.

Spring fitness was my next class. I kept a careful distance while we hit tennis balls against the gym wall and I caught up with Amandine afterward, while she was changing in the sports locker room.

“Why are you telling everybody this lie?” I asked her. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You’re not supposed to talk to me, remember, Delia?” Her voice projected loud, all the way to the back row of the theater, if we had been in one.

“This isn’t a skit,” I said. I held my arms crossed at my waist, my elbows squeezing hard against the sides of my body. “This is real life.”

“True,” she agreed. “This is real life. And if you keep on talking to me, my parents will get the real police involved.”

A few girls standing near us had gone utterly silent.

I backed off, terrified. Amandine arched a pewter-penciled eyebrow and tugged off her gym shorts. Standing in her underpants, her exposed legs looked uncooked and undernourished.

She loved it. The audience was transfixed. We were all watching her.

Only late at night, wide-awake in the darkness, did I allow myself to think about this.

They are in the car and the music is on. Throughout the entire trip into town, they have been play-acting. His silly accents and her quick retorts make a happy banter between them. The sun glints behind her, standing her hair into a blond halo, and she is focused and sure in his spotlight. She is sophisticated and clever and pretending to be old for her age. She is nothing like me.

And that’s why he kisses her. It seizes him in a fit, like in those old movies, when a kiss was something you had to have against all better judgment.

I sat up in bed, dry-eyed. “You liar. You lie about everything. Every single thing!” My anger was lonely, though. It whispered through my room with no place to go, but I couldn’t get rid of it.

Amandine’s teeth once had reminded me of a kitten’s, but I had chosen the teeth of the wrong animal. Because Amandine, the real Amandine, was slippery as an eel, and she attacked with an eel’s unexpected, vicious bite.

It was done and there was no undoing it. The image of Amandine and my father might have been torn straight from her Ugliest Things notebook, was now pressed permanently into the pages of my mind.

Mr. Serra’s office was clean and worn, like Mr. Serra himself. He sat tucked upright behind his desk. A fountain pen was balanced horizontally through his three middle fingers; he tipped it back and forth like a seesaw. He was a small, combed man like Batman’s Robin. A sidekick waiting for the real hero to arrive.

But there was no Batman. Just me and my mother.

After we had taken our seats in the two chairs facing him, Mr. Serra stood up and closed his office door.

His window showed off a boring view of the parking lot. I looked out anyway.

It was on my insistence the night before that my mother had called Mr. Serra. Outrage had made me brave. I would expose Amandine, I decided. I would plead my case and explain who she really was, and maybe everyone would understand that none of this was my fault, and maybe they’d even realize that it was I who had suffered most.

In the fresh glare of morning light, with my mother coiled like a spring in the chair beside me, my nerve faltered. I squinted into the sun. If I stared long enough, perhaps I would go blind. At least it would create a new crisis to stamp out the old one.

“Delia,” said Mr. Serra. I turned. He looked as if he would rather be anywhere than behind his square steel desk. “This is a delicate predicament. The school is reluctant to take action, officially, as there has not been a formal complaint filed, and as whatever did or did not happen, did or did not happen outside the school’s jurisdiction. But. In light of your current … dilemma, in that somehow this … story … has become … known, I am ready to hear what you feel you need to say. So, yes.” He smoothed a hand over the back of his head, spent from his excessive speechmaking. Then he picked up a piece of paper and set it down without looking at it. “You think, it is your opinion, that Amandine Elroy-Bell is a … threat … to the … student body?”

“I know she’s lying,” I said with what I hoped was an expression of the whole truth under oath. “She’s lied before.”

“Well, Delia, there are two sides to every story. Another version would suggest that maybe it is you who hasn’t been playing as straight a hand as you might have.” Mr. Serra put down his pen and laced his fingers together over his chest. “According to her mother, Amandine says you took things from her.”

“That
I know is nonsense.” My mother raised a hand to stop Mr. Serra from more talk. “After we spoke on the phone last night, I checked my daughter’s room. There’s no box of pins and pens and whatever else. There’s nothing.” Now the flat of her hand cut straight across the air. “Nothing. And you have to admit, it was such a
detailed
fib. In fact, it’s what convinced me that our meeting today might be a good idea. I’m beginning to think that the girl, Amandine, is quite evidently disturbed.”

I had dropped Amandine’s dragonfly pin into her book bag just yesterday. I just knew she would try to use my cigar box against me. Now I had nothing to hide. I sat straighter in my chair.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” I said stoutly to Mr. Serra. “Amandine’s the liar. She drew these gross pictures and she made up stories all the time. The fact is, she’s delusional.” I had picked out the word last night, as I lay sleepless in my bed.

Mr. Serra coughed. “Yes, well. Hmm. You see, Delia, we have an information problem now. Because according to what Amandine told her mother, and according to what her mother told me, you … also … like to make up stories.”

That surprised me. “No,” I insisted.
“She
made up stories. She was always making up—”

“And that you lived, a little bit, in your own world. That you liked to play make-believe games about students and,
ahem,
teachers …” Mr. Serra coughed again. Remembering Amandine’s brutal imitation of him, I could feel unwanted laughter bubble up in my throat. Mr. Serra frowned at my smile. “Little games of an unpleasant nature.”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t, that was
her.”

“Also, that you insisted you had …” Now he stared at a piece of paper in front of him. A paper filled with conversation scraps, I realized. A funnel of lies straight from Amandine to her mother to Mr. Serra. “That you had an older brother. She said you talked about him all the time, as if he were real. She said that you once became very agitated when she questioned this brother’s identity.”

I went cold. A sweat broke out on my upper lip. My one stupid lonely lie. Amandine had thought she would catch me with the cigar box but instead she caught me—by accident—with Ethan.

Carefully, I looked at my mother, who stared straight ahead, although every thin bone in her neck became visible. She leaned toward Mr. Serra, and then sat back again with a sigh. When she spoke next, her voice was level as if she were talking to a client.

“I’m hopeful that my husband and I can resolve this terrible misunderstanding, Mr. Serra. My feeling is that the best we can do is to maintain a noble silence until this all quiets down. The nature of the friendship between the two girls seems beside the point. We’ve probably taken up too much of your time already.”

“No, no! The friendship is the whole point. It is! Amandine played much worse games!” I was frantic, as the yoke of blame slipped back over my head. It was so unfair, all of it. “You can ask our other friend, our friend, Mary … I already talked to her. She said she’d tell …”

“Reverend Whitecomb called me to ask specifically, on behalf of his daughter, that she not get involved in this … situation,” said Mr. Serra.

My mouth gaped open.

“Of course, I understand,” said my mother. “It’s an unpleasant business.”

“Mom,” I begged, “the older brother thing was just—”

“How could you do this to Dad and me?” Mom broke in, turning on me. “What is wrong with you, Delia?”

“It was one dumb story,” I pleaded. I was close to tears. “What I made up and what Amandine did are two totally different things. And her thing is way, way worse.”

My mother looked weary, but she didn’t want to say anything more in front of Mr. Serra. “I think we’re finished here.”

Mr. Serra nodded almost imperceptibly, then stood and opened his office door.

As we left, I saw him press a card into my mother’s hand. “She’s a very good doctor, specializes in adolescents, if you ever need to talk … about …”

My mother took the card and tucked it into her purse with a nod. I knew she was too embarrassed to speak another word.

“I’m sorry.” Mary’s voice was soft and floaty as a cobweb. I could hardly catch hold of it. In the background, I heard Jasper bouncing a basketball on the Whitecombs’ kitchen floor. I pressed the phone closer to my ear.

“I don’t need sorry,” I told her. “I need help. If you could come with me to Mr. Serra’s office and explain about that picture, for one, it would really mean a lot to me.”

“I tore up that picture,” she said.

“Or how Amandine made up all those skits and then got us to do them with her.”

“Delia, I never did those stupid skits. Not really. Listen, Amandine’s just a person who’s lost hold of herself. Or maybe all those skit people
are
the real Amandine. In the end, it probably doesn’t make a difference. All I know is she’s messed up, and I don’t want anything to do with her. Besides, how I can really help with whatever happened between, you know, between her and your dad …”

“Nothing
happened. That’s the point. It’s a lie, the way she always—”

“Delia, my dad and Mr. Serra both decided we should let it all blow over, and that I should keep my distance in the meantime. You can understand that, right?”

“Right.” I slammed down the phone. I wondered what more there was to lose.

My parents were in the den, talking intently. I stood in the doorway. I had interrupted too early. They looked up from where they were sitting, side by side on the love seat. Their hands were around their tea mugs and their shoes were kicked off. They did not appear to be in any mood for good-night hugs, not that I was much in the mood to give them.

“Once, Mrs. Gogglio made me tea,” I said. I looked around. The only other place to sit in the room was a high-backed armchair, and Mom’s briefcase was opened on top of it.

“That’s nice,” said my father.

“It was good. Irish breakfast. She had this funny Popeye teapot she found in—”

“Delia, Mom and I are talking. Go ahead and watch television in the living room, if you want. Come visit us a little later.”

“There’s nothing on television,” I said. I began to back toward the door anyway.

“Read, then, your mother and I have things to say.”

“Can I listen? It’s not like I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

My father made a gesture of impatience. I pushed ahead anyhow.

“I know I failed, I know that, okay? But are you going to hold it against me for the rest of my stupid life?”

My mother laughed, a sad sound. “It wasn’t Dad’s and my intention to give you a stupid life. Just as it wouldn’t be our intention for you to use things that are private and personal to this family in order to play strange little games with your friends.”

“I didn’t mean anything by—”

“A miscarriage is common enough, Delia, especially during a first pregnancy. But it’s private, it’s personal to a family. That is, it was, until you decide to … to hurt us with it. Then it becomes … something else.”

“I wish I’d been a boy,” I burst out. My voice was too shrill. “I wish I had been anyone, instead of me.”

“Now you’re just talking a lot of crazy talk,” said Dad. “Go to bed, Delia, all right? It’s been a long day.” He himself, I noticed, looked flat-out exhausted.

“Come give me a good-night hug.” Mom reached out. I went to her. “Oh, Delia,” she said softly, her mouth at my ear as she pulled me close. “What are you missing? What do you ever need?”

“Nothing, I guess,” I answered, straightening out of her hug. “I guess I’ve got everything, don’t I?”

There was nothing they could say that would make us feel better.

I left, closing the door behind me.

It was a long time ago; I must have been in fifth grade, that evening when my mother told me the story of me. We were living in Connecticut at the time, and Lexi Neumann’s mother had just given birth to twins, but one of them was sick.

“Remember the Neumanns in your prayers tonight,” my mother said when she came to tuck me into bed.

“I don’t know why everyone’s so upset,” I’d mentioned. “Whatever happens to the sick one, they still have a whole other brand-new baby.”

My mother had leaned down and cupped my face in her hands. “A mother’s love cannot be measured,” she said. And that’s when she explained how hard it had been to have me. She left out nothing, even telling me about her late miscarriage and the years of hoping that came afterward, and her story ended with the happy day I was born. The happiest day of her life, she said.

It was the miscarriage part, though, that seemed the most romantic and sad to me, the part of the story I locked onto. I asked my mother if she knew whether the baby would have been a boy or girl. A boy, she answered.