Amandine (7 page)

“Don’t be horrible. Just because she goes to church doesn’t mean she’s a priss. In fact, she was my computer lab partner last year, when we both were at James DeWolf Middle. She’s
so
not prissy.”

“Delia, you’ve been on that phone for over an hour,” Dad said, startling me as he came out to the kitchen from the study. He was carrying his and Mom’s empty tea tray, and I realized I’d forgotten to give them their nightly kiss. “Time’s running …
out.”
He said the last word like an umpire as he set down the tray and reached for the phone.

“Is that your dad?” Amandine squealed. “Tell him hi! Tell him I say, what’s going on, old man!”

“It’s Amandine,” I said. “She says hi.”

Dad misunderstood. He took the phone from my hand. “Hello, ballerina! When are you coming to fix our floors?”

There was a pause. Then Dad laughed.

“Oh, really?” he asked. And then, “What sort of tools and equipment might you need?”

A longer pause. Dad laughed again. “Of course, you’d be paid a working wage!”

Then Amandine said something else, and Dad’s face lost its grin. “All right, miss. I’m saying good night from all the Blaines,” he said. “Good night! Good night!”

He hung up the phone, his expression carrying faint amazement. “Miss Amandine,” he said. “She’s a real piece of work.”

“Why, what’d she say?” I asked. “What’d that mean, about fixing our floors?”

“It was a joke she made up on the way to the hardware store, about turning the house into a dance studio, that morning I drove her home …” Dad looked troubled for a moment, as if he might tell me something more. But then he just said, “Okay, Honeydew, I’m turning in and so are you.” His voice was loud, the way it had been on the phone. “Good night! Good night!”

The next day, Amandine asked Mary Whitecomb to sit with us at lunch. She brought extra food, I noticed—a half dozen of Jin’s nutmeg cookies and a vending machine bag of Gummy Worms. She made a show of splitting everything into three equal parts. She was wearing a collared shirt, and her hair was rolled elaborately into two sausage curls pinned on either side of her face.

“It’s my Joan Crawford from
Mildred Pierce
look,” she told us. “A classic.”

“It’s nice,” said Mary doubtfully.

“It’s to make you think she’s trustworthy,” I said with a small laugh. Amandine didn’t like that one. She glared, then sucked in her cheeks and looked past me, heavy-lidded.

“Oh, would you just get a load of Jolynn, sitting with all those guys. What a slut,” she said with a sniff. I craned my neck. In fact, Jolynn was sitting in a mixed group of girls and guys.

Mary looked, too. “Actually, that’s the debate team,” she admitted. “They’re competing against South Kenworthy High this afternoon. They’re probably practicing.”

Amandine arched her thickly penciled eyebrows and straightened her back. Her mouth downturned slightly, in an imitation of somebody I could not quite place. “You know what? You have a very pretty face,” she said to Mary. “Contact lenses could change the whole essence of you.”

Mary blushed. “Really, do you think?”

“Absolutely, dear.” The imitation was of my mother. The same politeness, sincere and detached.

“Jolynn tried to set me up with Robby Verdone last year,” Mary confessed. “He’s a junior, he just got his license and a Vespa scooter. But it didn’t work out. He’s way too old for me. We went to the movies and I couldn’t think of a thing to say all night.”

“Robby Ver-
done.”
Amandine wrinkled her nose. She would have said it about anyone, though. Amandine was not interested in the guys here, except to pluck as characters for our skits. In real life, they hardly seemed to exist for her. Not that I minded. Even gorgeous Mark Ingersell looked better from a distance. Up close, he made me feel sweaty and wrong.

“I’m taller than Robby, anyway.” Mary frowned. “I’m taller than everyone. You guys know Jasper, my brother, he’s on the varsity basketball team and I can hardly run three steps without tripping. Every time he sees me, Coach Frost probably thinks, there goes DeWolf’s most humongous waste of arms and legs. ’Cause I mean, what’s the point of being so tall if I can’t even play basketball?” She was speaking fast, angrily, as if she had given the subject a lot of thought but had reached no peace with it.

“Delia’s big brother, Ethan, plays running back on the football team at Washington State, and she can’t do any sports, either,” said Amandine. “And she’s not even that much of a brain. She’s just regular.”

I’m in advanced math and English, I thought, but there seemed no point in mentioning it.

Mary looked at me with wistful empathy. “Isn’t it awful? When the brother gets it all? My parents always compare me and Jasper.” She looked so defeated that I was quick to say the thing I knew she needed to hear most.

“Mine, too.”

In the back of my mind, I knew that our three-way friendship wouldn’t last, but our brief togetherness was a welcome break. Amandine could be intense, yet Mary seemed able to stand in Amandine’s heat without feeling the burn. And now I was allowed to sit in the shadow, to observe quietly. Which was fine by me.

Mary shared her lunch with us every day. She often brought us homemade foods, brownies or cupcakes, treats far better than anything Amandine or I could offer. Sometimes she joined in the skits, but our skits didn’t amuse Mary the way they got to me. Too often, usually right at the point when Amandine had thrown in her wrench and revealed that her character was a pervert, freak, or snob, Mary would break out of character and shake her head disapprovingly.

“You
guys,”
she would say. Or, worse: “I don’t know how you talked me into these … story-plays. It’s the stupidest kid stuff. I mean, we’re
freshmen”

She probably had a point, though I wished she wouldn’t keep making it. When I peered down the halls or across at the other tables and desks, I didn’t see other kids doing skits. I didn’t see Samantha Blitz and her crowd living in a world of imagination and improvisation and make-believe. Everyone else was interested in beer and concerts and staying out and hooking up. Then I felt ashamed of myself, and I wondered what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t be normal, and what Amandine had spied in my character that made her know that.

But Mary was normal enough. Mary was sweet, too. One morning, she arrived at school with a handful of woven friendship bracelets that she had made over that weekend. Mine was purple and white. Amandine’s was pink and white. Mary’s was pink and purple and white.

“I should wear the three-colored one,” Amandine suggested. She did not explain why. Simply held out the flat of her hand.

“No way.” Mary grinned. “It takes double time when you braid in the extra color. I’ll keep mine, thank you.”

I could tell that Amandine didn’t appreciate that. If it were up to me, I probably would have handed over the nicer bracelet, just as I usually let Amandine have her choice of skits or the last word. This was a difference between Mary and me.

“Come on,” said Amandine. “You can make yourself another one.”

“Nope.”

“How about I borrow it for the week and give it back?” Amandine persisted.

“How about no way, forever?”

“You can wear mine today,” I appeased, taking off my bracelet and offering it up. “Then you have all the colors.”

“All right.” So Amandine wore two bracelets, and I wore none, and although Mary was irked by my solution, I’d solved the spat temporarily. It was part of my role, as a member of the group, and I wasn’t bad at figuring out the thing to say or do to keep the peace. But I was not always there to tamp out the fires.

Since Amandine and Mary were both in the same homeroom and as neither of them was in the honors track, they shared a majority of classes. That meant lots happened in their day that I didn’t witness. So if Mary did or said something that Amandine chafed against, I had to hear her complaints after school while we waited for our rides. It was always something—that Mary hadn’t let Amandine cheat off her paper during a pop quiz, or that Mary forgot to save Amandine a seat in lab or study session.

One afternoon, Amandine walked up to my locker looking furious. Her face, usually so flat and still, was plummy with rage.

“You might be right that Mary’s a stupid bitch,” she said, whisking past me without stopping.

Quickly, I collected my books, slammed my locker shut, and followed Amandine out the doors. “I never said that.”

“Did so.”

“I said
priss.”
My face was hot. “And I never said stupid, and whatever I did say, I said it a long time ago.” I dropped my bag and crossed my hands over my chest, trying to get her to look at me.

“Fine, whatever.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Really, tell me.”

Amandine pressed a hand over her eyes. I knew she was nowhere near a state of crying, but I suspected she was trying to force it. When she lifted her hand, her eyes looked shiny, and I felt almost as bad for her as if the tears had been real. Tears are powerful, even phony ones. “The thing is,” she began in a tremulous voice, “in art, I passed her a note asking her to draw a picture of her Ugliest Thing, and listen to what came back. You won’t believe it.”

She pulled an origami-style folded sheet of paper from the zip pocket of her book bag and then, in a voice that was too squeaky-mean, but otherwise not a bad imitation of Mary’s, read, “‘Why would I want to draw an ugly thing? There are so many beautiful things in the world! Believe me, it’s not good for the soul to celebrate ugliness! P.S. Did you take my bracelet? I put it in my desk before math and now it’s gone. P.P.S. I promise I won’t be mad. P.P.P.S. Here’s a picture of you.’”

“That doesn’t seem so awful,” I said. “Can I see?”

“What, you think I’d make it up?” She flipped it to me. The picture of Amandine was just a stick figure in a tutu and ballet slippers.

I passed it back. “It’s a little prissy,” I admitted. “Like, using the word
soul
especially.”

“Prissy? It’s worse than a sermon! She probably copied it off her preacher dad!”

“Maybe she couldn’t think up a good Ugliest Thing.”

Amandine seemed to consider this. “No,” she said finally. “She saw it as a way to slam me. Oh, and I like that extra touch, accusing me of stealing.” She looked at me and stuck out her tongue. “Which we both know is
so
not true. Right?”

“Right,” I answered.

“Are you with me for my joke, to get her back?”

“What kind of a joke?”

“Leave that up to me, how about.”

I said nothing.

“Are you with me?”

“I guess.”

“It’ll be funny. I promise.”

In my opinion, the worst thing about what Amandine did to Mary next was that she waited a day. To me, that seemed more awful than the “joke.” The next morning, as I held my breath through classes, then through lunch, art, and fifty excruciating minutes of freeze tag at spring fitness—the only class I shared with both of them—Amandine acted as though she weren’t angry at all. She chatted, shared lunch, passed around her box of lemon throat drops, even braided Mary’s hair while they sat on the exercise mats once both of them had been tagged out.

She’d forgotten. I tried to convince myself.

“You look tired, Delilah,” Mrs. Gogglio informed me on the ride home that afternoon. “What kind of day did you have that put such a sag in you?”

“Just a regular one, I guess.”

“Munchkins?”

“Sure.”

“I had my coupon book around somewhere. Do you see it? It’s got a green felt billfold sleeve.”

My heart was beating so loud I was sure she could hear it. At that moment, all I wanted was to get out of the car and be alone, far away from school and Mrs. Gogglio.

“No.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t much off anyhow. Fifty cents, if that.”

We pulled through the Dunkin’ Donuts and split a baker’s dozen along with large hot chocolates. I closed my eyes and let the taste absorb me. Powdered, cinnamon, chocolate. Sweetly filling. It made me sleepy.

“Mrs. Roe, she forgot her own daughter’s name today,” Mrs. Gogglio began comfortably as she sipped her hot chocolate. “It wasn’t unusual, but this time her daughter was there to see. ‘Julie,’ I said to her later, ‘what’s in a name? Your mama knows who you are without her needing to sticker a word onto your face.’ But Julie was upset. We were school friends, Julie Roe and I. Her mother used to dress up as a witch every year when she passed out candy on Halloween. Full of life and fun, Mrs. Roe was.”

I listened, tried to loosen myself into Mrs. Gogglio’s stories.

“You could talk to me, if you ever wanted,” she said when she stopped the car at my driveway. “I’m just across the road here. I’m a pretty good talker, but I’m a five-star listener.”

I nodded mutely and looked down at the front of my shirt. Powdered sugar had scattered all down the front. When I wiped at it, the powder turned streaky, making the mess worse.

The next morning, I almost stayed home from school rather than face another day of waiting and watching.

“You don’t look sick to me.” Mom’s forehead rippled perplexedly. She checked her watch, smoothed her cuff over it, and tapped her low-heeled, business-casual foot.

“Maybe I will be.”

“Up, up, up.”

She flipped back the covers and left my room. I noticed that the flowers bought in honor of Amandine’s visit had turned brittle and brown in their vase.

At school, Amandine met me at my locker. She was in a slinky dress too light for the weather. With a silky scarf and open-toed shoes and an anklet. She twirled.

“I’m Barbara Stanwyck today,” she said. “From
Double Indemnity.
With my dragonfly pin, it would have been perfect.”

“If you say so.” I glanced her over. She looked ridiculous. Her dress smelled mildewed and her red lipstick was dry on her mouth. But her smile was smug, satisfied, and I knew that whatever she had done, was done. My stomach rolled.

“Is Mary here?” I asked.

“What do you need to tell her that you can’t tell me?”

“You’re not still mad at her about that note, are you?”