Just Friends (23 page)

Jena looks like she’s stepped out of a dream. She’s all dressed up: new dress, new shoes and her good coat. The dream she’s stepped out of is not his, of course. Without even looking he can see Copeland’s car at the kerb. Jena’s going to the dance.

Josh hides the rose behind his back and steps forward, blocking her view into the house.

“You didn’t have to dress up for me,” Josh jokes. He hopes she doesn’t realize he’s wearing his best shirt, the one he only wears for gigs, and his lucky red suspenders that belonged to his dad.

“Oh, Josh…” Jena makes a sad, apologetic face. “I’m really sorry. I tried to call you but it went straight to voicemail.”

He turned off his phone so he wouldn’t forget to turn it off; he didn’t want them to be disturbed.

“I’m guessing you and Simon made up.” If he holds the doorframe any more tightly he’ll break it.

“Yeah. You know…” Her shrug is helpless. As if it’s something that happened to her, like getting a cold. “I just can’t seem to stay mad at him for long.”

“Fool for love,” says Josh, trying to remember where he heard that.

Jena laughs. “I guess that’s me. But there are worse things, right?”

There definitely are worse things, even if he can’t think of any of them at the moment.

He doesn’t feel angry or particularly surprised. More like he’s been standing in the cold for several hours, waiting for a train that isn’t going to come.
None so blind as those who will not see
, he thinks – but can’t remember where he heard that either.

“Well, have a great time.” Josh nods towards the road. “You better go. You don’t want to keep Simon waiting. Not tonight.”

She’s peering under his arm. “Why is it so dark?” She sniffs. “What’s that smell?”

“Nothing.” Lilac. Lavender. Jasmine. Rose. Sandalwood. “Some candles my mom had.”

“It looks like Christmas or something in there.”

Could be. It definitely seems to be snowing in his heart.

“It’s just some candles my—”

Jena pushes past him and into the hall, her eyes following the shimmering flames, a string of light weaving its way through the room. She turns back to him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” says Josh. “I just wanted it to look Valentiney, that’s all. I thought it would cheer you up.”

But she isn’t listening to Josh. “Who’s that singing? What’s that song?”

“No one.” Thank God she doesn’t know much music that wasn’t made in the last five years. “Just one of my old records.”

Her smile isn’t sure of itself. “You did all this for
me
?”

Who else? The dozen other people he’s expecting?

“Yeah. Like I said, I thought it would cheer you up.”

Outside, Simon leans out the car window and calls, “Hey, Jen! We have to get going!”

For once, Josh wishes she would do what Simon says. Go. Quickly.

“You really should go.” He tries to edge her back to the door. “Simon’s waiting.”

“Josh, I— I’m really sorry. I didn’t think—”

“It’s okay.” If he wasn’t holding the rose behind his back and had two hands free he’d be tempted to just grab hold of her and throw her out of the house. “I figured you’d probably change your mind. I just did the candles in case.”

“I really am sorry. I didn’t know you’d go to all this trouble.”

He doesn’t want her to be sorry; he wants her to leave. “It’s fine. I told you.” He gives her a tug, but she seems to have grown roots.

“You’re such a good friend,” says Jena. “Next to Tilda, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You know that, don’t you?”

Of course he does. He’s always known it; she made it clear that she would never be interested in him as a boyfriend; made it clear they’d always only be friends. But he wouldn’t listen. Not to her, not to himself and not to anyone. That’s the problem with Hope; it blinds you even more than love.

She gestures to the room. “I just feel so bad—”

She’s not the only one.

“It’s okay, Jen. Really.” It is. It has to be. She never meant to hurt him or lead him on. He’s brought this on himself. She always said she was nothing like him; he always knew what kind of boyfriend she wanted, and the boyfriend she wanted was never Josh. Jena doesn’t want to be on the sidelines; she wants to be smack-dab in the middle with Simon Copeland or someone like him. Someone good-looking and popular and envied. Prom queen to his king. At the centre of the high-school universe with Tilda Kopel. And he remembers her once saying,
Sometimes the people you like the best aren’t the ones you’re attracted to
. “I swear.”

“I really am sorry…” She bites her bottom lip.

“For God’s sake, Jena, it’s okay. You have nothing to be sorry for.” Unlike Josh.

Simon calls her name again. “I guess I better go.” She gives him a hug. “Try not to burn the house down. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Josh stands in the doorway, watching her run down the front path and get in the car. He waves as they pull away and even Simon waves back. The rose falls to the floor.

Back inside, he turns off the player and puts out the candles. He doesn’t bother turning on the lights but throws himself on the sofa. Charley Patton jumps up beside him. Josh strokes his head. “Looks like it’s you and me, boy.” Charley nuzzles against him. Your friends are there when you need them most. Even if all they can do is purr. He and Charley sit in the dark, each lost in his own thoughts. Something Ramona said way long ago last year comes back to him:
Tilda Kopel would never allow it
. He paid no attention then, of course, but now he realizes how right Ramona was. Tilda Kopel never would allow it. If Jena had chosen to date Josh she would have lost everything else – Tilda and all her other new friends; feeling like she fit; finally belonging. Somehow, this makes him feel slightly less bad. The sudden ringing of the doorbell makes both him and Charley jump.

For only as long as it takes him to get to the door, Josh thinks it might be Jena. She dropped something. She forgot something. She changed her heart. But even as he puts his hand on the knob he knows it isn’t her. He opens the door.

It’s Ramona. She’s all in black – black coat, black lace skirt, black boots, black hearts hanging from her ears – looming in front of him like the ghost of Valentine’s to come. She doesn’t wait for him to ask her in. She strides past him, stepping on the fallen flower. She has her violin strapped across her back.

“Christ,” she says, “turn on a light before I trip over something.”

He has no choice but to follow her in, kicking the rose into a corner and turning on a light. “What are you doing here?”

At the moment she’s looking around the room. She squinches up her nose. “It smells like a florist. Or one of those New Age shops with all the crystals in the window.”

“So what are you doing here?”

She turns to face him. “I saw Jena leave with Simon.” Even her earrings seem to shrug. “So I figured they made up.”

This is all he needs. A lecture from Ramona. “Look, I know what you’re going to say. You told me so. You—”

“That’s not what I’m going to say. I didn’t come to make you feel worse. I came to get you. You know, for the party.”

“The party?” He needs a party about as much as Charley Patton needs a skateboard. “But I—”

“No buts,” says Ramona. “You’re coming with me.”

“I don’t really feel—”

Ramona doesn’t care. She’s a lot more like her mother than he thought. “You’re not sitting here by yourself in the dark all night. You’re going to come and hang out with the rest of us. We’re all in the same boat, Josh. You, me, Sal, Carver, Murray and Zara. And it’s not the love boat. So you’re going to get your guitar and we’re going to play some cool music and by the end of the night everybody’s going to feel a lot better. You know, ’cause at least we have great songs and friends.”

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Mo—”

“I’m not trying, I’m doing it.” She grabs him by the shoulders. Her eyes are darker than he thought, too. “You listen to me, Joshua Shine. I know you talked to Sal, so I know you know how great he’s feeling. And how great I’m feeling. Really, if you want the truth, we all feel shitty. Maybe not as shitty as you’re feeling right now, but bad enough. So get over yourself.” She looks at the couch. “Back me up here, Charley. Don’t you think I’m right?”

Charley Patton opens his eyes, stares at them both for a second, then closes his eyes again.

“That’s a yes,” says Ramona. “He doesn’t want you hanging around here making him depressed.” As she takes her hands from his shoulders she gives him a shove. “Go get your guitar.”

After
the days of dark and cold, finally Spring has arrived. The sun is shining, the trees are budding, his mother’s hyacinths are blooming and Josh’s world has gone back to how it was before last September. More or less.

The bleak midwinter is a good time to think. Sitting inside with your cat and your records and your guitar, while outside the freezing winds blow and the snow falls and the part of the world that doesn’t depend on electricity lies low. Josh has done a lot of thinking, and a great deal of it has been about Ramona. How she’s always been there for him. How many times they’ve laughed so much over something that he nearly stopped breathing. How she reacted when he asked her if she’d ever been interested in anyone. He got over Jena. He sees her in school and they’re friendly, but he doesn’t hang out with her any more. Doesn’t want to. She called him a couple of times – when Simon was away for the weekend, when Tilda was visiting her aunt – but he said he was busy. He doesn’t miss her. But he’d miss Mo if she suddenly disappeared from his life. He’d miss her a lot. Sometimes you don’t see what’s right in front of you because you’re looking at something else. That’s when he finally started thinking about Ramona not as a sister but as a girl; when he understood the reason why it annoyed him that she was seeing so much of Sal was because he was jealous. Oblivious
and
jealous. What a combination.

Josh woke up on this Sunday morning to sunshine and Ramona on his mind. And here she is, sitting across from him with her after-yoga tea, talking about the play.

“So it was totally awesome. You should have heard the applause.”
Bye Bye Birdie
had its out-of-town preview at the local nursing centre, and was an unqualified success. “Everybody was great, and lots of people commented on the costumes, and Mr Boxhill said he couldn’t’ve done it without Sal, but, of course, Tilda thinks that most of the credit should go to her.” She picks up her cup. “If it goes that well on the night, there’ll be no living with her.”

Josh carefully lifts the bag from his tea. “There’s no living with her now.”

“And can you imagine what she’s going to be like at the cast party?” laughs Ramona. “She’s going to think it’s for her!”

“I forgot about the party,” lies Josh. “So, who are you going with?” Every member of the drama club is allowed one guest. Sal’s invited Carver. Murray’s invited Zara. But Mo has yet to invite him. “Dara?”

She stares at him over her cup. Blankly. “Who?”

“Maybe it’s not Dara. Maybe it’s Darius.” She continues to look like a new sheet of paper. “You know. Your friend with the black hair and the earring.”

“You mean Dillon Sanduski?”

“Is that his name?”

She does the sigh, accompanied by the rolling eyes. “Yes, that’s his name. For God’s sake, Josh, you’ve met him, like, a hundred times.”

“I think it was only ninety-nine.”

She sets her cup very gently in its saucer. “I hadn’t thought about it.” Which is both true and not true. It’s true that it never occurred to her to ask Dillon. But that’s not because she hasn’t thought about the party, it’s because she thought it was obvious she’d go with Josh. She’s noticed a change in him over the last month or so. Now he looks at her as though he really sees her. She was hoping he’d say something first. Give her a sign; make a move. “Maybe I will ask him.” Or grow old waiting.

“Thing is,” says Josh. “I mean, why I asked.” He seems to be studying his spoon for signs of life. “I don’t really think that would be a great idea.”

“You don’t?” She sweeps a few crumbs of sugar to the floor. “Why not?”

“Well…” Maybe he’s thinking of writing a song about the endless fascination of a teaspoon. “I don’t think he’d enjoy a party like that. He’s such an art-school type.”

Maybe she won’t have to grow old waiting. “Do you have someone else in mind? Someone who would enjoy a party like that?”

“Well…”

She leans forward so she’s almost half across the table. “Josh? Do you have someone else in mind?”

He puts down the spoon. “There’s always me.”

“You?” As if he’s the last person she would consider.

“Yeah.” And, with all the courage he never found before, he says, “You know. It could be our first real date.”

“What makes you think I’d want to go out with you?” asks Ramona.

“I don’t.” Josh smiles. “I just hope you will.”

She smiles back.