Chasing Orion (14 page)

“Sidelined?”

“Yeah!” I said this slowly for emphasis. I almost managed to make
yeah
into a two-syllable word. “It’s happened to you in basketball only a few times, and you got so awful, I heard Mom and Dad talking about taking you to a psychologist.”

“They did?”

I nodded solemnly. This was not quite the truth. Mom said this kind of as a joke, but I know she was plenty worried.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

I wanted to say it’s not just about doing whatever you were doing that night — like feeling up Ralph! But I couldn’t, obviously. So I slipped back into the innocent again. Georgie Mason, master of disguises! “How am I supposed to know? I’m a sixth-grader. Just . . . just . . . just don’t get all wrapped up with Dr. Keller and the machine. She doesn’t have anybody.” Then it just slipped out. “Not even God.” I paused. “And that goes for me, too.”

“What are you talking about, Georgie?”

“I mean, Emmett — and don’t tell Mom and Dad this and not Grandma and Grandpa — but I don’t think I believe in God anymore. I mean, how can I believe in God when someone like Phyllis winds up in an iron lung? If there were really a God, I don’t think there would be polio.”

“Or the Black Death?” Emmett said.

“Exactly. Or the A-bomb,” I said.

“It was Truman who dropped the atom bomb,” Emmett said.

“Yeah, but if there were a God, he wouldn’t have let President Truman do it, and he wouldn’t have let those scientist guys invent it.”

“Yeah. Well, this is all very interesting, Georgie, but I don’t see how this exactly relates to me and Phyllis.”

“Just talk to her. I mean, Emmett, you like her, don’t you?”

Emmett turned a little bit away from me and began tucking in his T-shirt. “Oh, yeah. I really like her.” There was a huskiness in his voice.

“What’s that?” I asked, suddenly noticing a pile of wire on his desk. I hadn’t noticed what Emmett had been doing. “The lights that your friend Evelyn brought you.” I felt a twinge of guilt. Evelyn had offered to bring them on the night we went and spied. “I’m wiring them together for your Orion thingamajig.”

“My diorama.”

“Yes. You said you really couldn’t get much further without the lights. I found some more for you, too. I can show you how to do this yourself if you’re interested.”

“Gee, yes, thanks, Emmett.” Now of course I felt a little guilty about sticking it to him the way I just had.

I left his room, and just then the phone rang on the upstairs hallway extension. I picked it up. It was Phyllis.

“Saint Georgie?”

“Uh, speaking.”

She giggled.

“Hey, this is the night of the meteor showers.”

“The Perseids.”

“Yes, that’s it. And guess what?”

“What?”

“The stars are aligned, Georgie.” There was silence. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Astrology? Emmett said astrology was a fake science. “You get my meaning?”

“Not exactly.”

“My parents are out. Only the nurses are here, and Emmett and I could have maybe a . . . should I say . . . real date?”

A date,
I thought,
an honest-to-gosh date!
But it was the Perseids, and Emmett always watched them with me. “Put Emmett on the phone.”

“Just a minute.”

I ran to get Emmett. “She wants to talk to you, Emmett.”

He didn’t even have to ask who.

It was mid-August, and the Perseid meteor showers were in full swing. But tonight I would not be going to watch these starry showers. I was a casualty of my own success. Emmett was seeing her more than ever, and they were now talking on the phone a lot, too. Not as much as Evelyn and I talked, but Emmett rarely talked on the phone. Indeed, it appeared that I had managed to penetrate my brother’s brain with the fact that Phyllis really liked him and that he should stop acting so dense. The long and the short of it was as soon as it got dark, dark enough for the stars to break out and start scrambling around up there, Emmett planned to set off with his telescope. He even said to me very plainly, “You can’t come, Georgie. This is a date!”

It was the first time he had ever referred to visiting Phyllis as a date. So my hypothesis had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. All the date data was in, and where was I? Sidelined. Left out! Call it a corollary. We learned about corollaries in the beginning geometry unit we did the previous year in math. A corollary is a proposition that follows from one already proven: a direct or natural result. That’s me — a walking, talking, living corollary.

To contemplate the universe on a star-pricked August night is a recipe for feeling small, insignificant, and alone. I felt especially alone, not looking at the Perseids with Emmett. But this was the price I had to pay for him having an actual date. A girlfriend!

When Emmett and I watched, we had our routine. We did it the same way every year. We got out the plastic lounge chairs and put our sleeping bags on them. We set up a table in between the chairs. Then we made two big thermoses of lemonade. Under the table we had an ice chest with Popsicles. Only orange and grape flavors. He liked grape. I liked orange. In a picnic basket, we had four packages of Hostess Twinkies, which according to Emmett are “the finest baked goods ever invented.” But then we had our own invention, and this was pure genius. I actually had thought it up, even though Emmett liked to take credit. It was the potato-chip sandwich. Here’s the recipe:

Take two pieces of very fresh Wonder bread. (It can’t be stale or it won’t be squishy enough. It’s very important that it be squishy. We call it the squishiness quotient.)

Slather on mayonnaise — lots and lots.

Arrange a layer of potato chips on top of the bottom piece with the slathered mayonnaise. Slather a second layer of mayonnaise over the chips, then add one more layer of chips on top of this. Then put on the top of the sandwich.

It’s not just scrumptious; it is
crumptious
(another invention of mine — that word). It is the best sandwich in the world. And we usually ate about three or four during a night of meteor showers.

I really did hope he and Phyllis were not eating Twinkies and Popsicles. I wanted things to work out, but there was no banishing the loneliness feeling for me, and I was already beginning to feel spectacularly insignificant when I suddenly was ambushed by the complete injustice of my life. It just seemed all wrong that here I was, the one who had no friends on this side of town. Well, I had one, but she was pretty odd, although I had grown used to Evelyn’s oddness. I wondered what my old friends at my old school would make of Evelyn. And it seemed really unfair that I was the one who had to start at a new school. I was mentally whining to myself. I thought this was all happening just in my head, but somehow my mopiness might have oozed out because after dinner I was very quiet and suddenly Dad said, “What’s bugging you, Georgie?” I immediately started leaking tears.

“Georgie, sweetie, what’s wrong? Is it baton twirling? You don’t have to go to the mother-daughter Hoosier Twirler thing if you don’t want to.” My mom gave my shoulders a squeeze. This of course made me cry harder.

“No, no. Mom and I were discussing that, sweetie.” Dad was now patting my head. “I said just last night, ‘Dottie, let’s ease up on the twirling.’”

“It’s not baton twirling,” I sobbed.

“Well, what is it, honey?”

A tiny bubble of snot dripped from my nose. Things had escalated, or at least the mucus had.

“I have no friends. Emmett’s going out tonight on a date. The night of the Perseids.”

“A date!” both my parents blurted out. You would have thought I had said Emmett was running for president of the United States. Emmett had just come down the stairs with his telescope. “Emmett, a date?” Mom almost squealed. Poor Emmett was turning red. If blushing was fatal, he was about three seconds from death.

“Yes, it’s true!” I said. “And this is the first time ever that I haven’t watched the meteor showers with him.”

“Not when you were a newborn baby,” Emmett said feebly.

“That’s not funny, Emmett.”

“Well, I won’t go. I don’t mind,” he replied.

“What? You’ve got to go!” I wanted to say,
After all the work I’ve done, you better go!

“Well, maybe Georgie could go with you,” Mom suggested. Whenever moms try to be helpful in situations like this, they always sound so unbelievably stupid. Emmett and I both looked at her.

“Noooo!” I said. “What’s that supposed to be, when the little sister tags along? A date with training wheels?”

I could see Mom and Dad trying not to laugh.

“Tell you what, Georgie,” my dad said. “How about I take you out to play miniature golf this evening.”

“But I want to see the meteor showers.”

“We’ll get you back in time.”

“Would you take me to the movies?”

“Well, we already saw what was playing at the drive-in theater.”

“What about the Ritz?”

“No, Georgie, we’ve been through this before. It’s not safe. Besides, I just read in the paper today that the Vogue Theater is closing and the Ritz probably will be, too.”

“I don’t think there’ll be one open in the city by next week,” my mother said.

“But miniature golf, well,” Dad continued, “no problem there. That’s outdoors in the fresh air. Come on, we could have ourselves a nice little game. I bet we could get in a quick nine holes right after supper, and it won’t be getting dark till late. I’ll tell you what: I’ll even take you to the drive-in for ice cream.”

“I am not going to go to a drive-in restaurant with my dad, Dad! Teenagers go to drive-ins with dates and friends. And I have no friends.”

“OK. But how about miniature golf?”

“Maybe,” I said, and walked into the kitchen for a second dessert. Emmett followed me.

“Georgie, I can explain to Phyllis.”

I glared at him. “Emmett Mason, if you back out of this, I’ll kill you.”

I took a piece of paper towel. I had to stop this crying. I had to get back into gear as Saint Georgie or Saint Whatever. “Just forget it, Emmett. I’ll be fine.”

I walked over to a kitchen counter, where the newspaper was, and began turning the pages. Mom was right. The Vogue Theater had closed. Then I went to the front page and looked in the corner at the bottom where they always had a report on the most recent polio cases. There had been four more in one day. That made twenty for this week. They never gave the people’s names, but you kind of wondered who they were. Before polio, I used to only read the crime section of the paper. But now sometimes I read the obituaries. It was strange to look at the obituary page, because it wasn’t just old people’s pictures anymore.

I went back into the living room.

“OK, I’ll go play miniature golf. But can we go to Round the World and NOT Old MacDonald’s Farm?” Old MacDonald’s Farm miniature golf course had a giant chicken that clucked very loudly if you sent the ball through its mouth. If we ran into people we knew there, they always made poultry jokes to Dad. Poultry jokes were not that funny, and I didn’t need them in the mood I was in.

“Why don’t you call one of your old friends, like Susie?” Mom said.

“She lives on Park. It’s the other side of town,” I said, trying to make it sound like Siberia, or rather that we were in Siberia and Susie was actually in the city of Indianapolis.

“Don’t worry. We’ll pick her up. She can spend the night. And if she can’t, come ask one of your other old friends.”

I went and dialed Susie’s number. It rang and rang. No answer. I tried Jody, then Ellen. Nothing. Just as I imagined they were all having a slumber party at, say, Minnie’s house, the phone rang. It was Evelyn. So I invited her to come play miniature golf and spend the night. She could do the miniature golf but couldn’t spend the night.

At Round the World, you could shoot a ball through the sphinx in Egypt or the Eiffel Tower. Evelyn knew more about Egypt than she did about miniature golf, that was for sure. She had no hand-eye coordination, but she was a good sport. And I have to say that she looked even weirder than usual. Evelyn’s clothes were odd, to put it mildly. They often looked too big for her and as if they had been made for someone else. This suspicion was confirmed that night. She was wearing a pair of madras plaid shorts (that was OK, very popular print), but they looked way too big. It turned out that they had once been her mom’s madras skirt, and her mom had cut them up and turned them into shorts. With her mom being a doctor and all, I hoped she was better at cutting and sewing up people than clothes. Her mother, I felt, should give up on fashion and hair and just stick to being a doctor. For it was her mom who was responsible for Evelyn’s disastrous hairstyle.

Evelyn had told me this about the second or third time we got together, when I said that her hair looked a lot shorter. She explained that she cut it every two weeks to get rid of the frizz from the home permanent her mother had given her and botched. Apparently her mom hadn’t left the neutralizer on long enough, so Evelyn’s hair sizzled off her head as if she had stuck her finger into an electrical socket. Again, one would think that a doctor would have known better. After all, it was chemistry and stuff.