The Girl Who Invented Romance (5 page)

Bells rang. Our final announcements come complete with
chords. Mrs. Weston finished her history lecture while the principal cleared his throat and school came to an end.

Our principal reads off a paper his secretary has printed out for him. Unfortunately his voice stops at the end of each line whether the sentence stops there or not. Drives me crazy.

“Drives me crazy,” said Will.

Probably the highest intimacy quotient I’ll have all week, I thought.

“Someday I’m going to put my fist through the sound system,” said Will. But he wasn’t talking to me or really to anybody. He was just thinking out loud. You didn’t get a thirty-three, I thought. You got a zero.

“Put your fist through Dr. Scheider instead,” advised somebody. “He deserves it more.”

“Key Club will meet after school in order to discuss,” said Dr. Scheider. He cleared his throat. An entire school twitched. “The fund-raiser for next year the Ecology Club has a field.”

Pause, filled by Will breaking a pencil in half.

“Trip to the state capitol to meet our. Representative and the cost is twenty-seven dollars. Fifty cents the following students report to guidance office immediately after the final.”

Several people were sticking four fingers at their mouths to indicate that on the gag scale, this was worse than usual. A four-finger gag is pretty serious.

“Bell the school sweatshirts in the new designs are in the school store.”

Everybody shuddered but not even Will breathed a syllable of correction. We were all awaiting Wendy’s broadcast. We are addicted to Wendy’s soap. It usually runs two minutes. This week we were worrying about whether Greg would change his socks and whether Allegra was going to shave the right hemisphere of her skull and put safety pins through her eyebrows and quit school for the British rock star she was seeing. There was also the problem Brandon and Octavia were having. Brandon seemed to be falling in love with Lulu. Would Octavia kill Lulu or Brandon?

Wendy has a very intense voice, as if somebody is holding a gun to her head while she reads.

“Brandon slouches against the tall brick column in the library. His eyes drift past Allegra, for whom he has nothing but scorn, and land longingly on Octavia. No matter how drawn Brandon is to Lulu, Octavia has his heart. But Octavia is being cruel to him. ‘Brandon,’ says Octavia, lips curled, ‘I want a real man with a real name. Dirk, perhaps. Or Lance. Someone on a mission, saving those he loves from certain doom. And you, Brandon, worry only about whether to have a cappuccino or a latte. Do I care about you? Do I care whether you have a Gucci jockstrap? No. Does your body or your mind—’ ”

And Wendy was off the air.

It had happened once before when Brandon and Octavia shacked up together. Dr. Scheider got rather fierce about that. I guess Dr. Scheider did not care to have Wendy mention jockstraps, even designer models, over
the school sound system. Perhaps there were school board members in the building, something that did happen once or twice a year.

Everybody in my history class got a kick out of the silence, waiting to see if Wendy would come back on with a revised underwear statement. But she didn’t. The next announcement was from a guidance counselor about a deadline for applying to something or other. It is a rule of mine never to listen to guidance counselors.

School was over.

Everyone raced out of class but I was fastest. Parker is allowed to drive Mom’s car one day a week and this was the day. Parker tried hard to leave without me so he could be alone with Wendy. I sympathized with them but I’d rather be a pain than take the school bus. My romantic ideals apply more to me than to others.

The crosswalks were jammed with parents in cars coming for their kids. As I stood in the crowd waiting for a chance to rush to the parking lot, Wendy and my brother emerged hand in hand from the office complex, laughing. Whatever objection Dr. Scheider had to that episode, Wendy had won. Parker leaned down a little toward Wendy and she stretched up, and their heads rested against each other.

The person standing next to me sighed. It was Jeep, his eyes fastened on my brother and Wendy. His handsome mouth turned down sadly and his head tilted wearily. He still wanted to supply the shoulder on which Wendy rested.

Wendy never glanced our way. She was completely absorbed
in Parker, and when they kissed, their intimacy quotient was as high as it gets. Jeep sighed again. He didn’t glance my way either. Whatever Wendy had, I did not.

But what did I expect? Me with my intimacy quotient of forty-seven? Me in need of professional help because I couldn’t relate to boys? Did I really think Jeep would spot me and suddenly forget all about Wendy and want only me?

I reached our car just as Park and Wendy did.

Wendy glared at me. Did the little sister have to show up right now? Couldn’t she just drop dead somewhere?

“I could drive,” I offered brightly. “Then you could have the backseat.”

“No,” said Parker firmly. “The backseat is your territory, kid. Always has been, always will be.”

Kid? He was ten months older.

He opened the front door for Wendy. I got in back by myself.

This is my life, I thought. Alone in the backseat. When I sighed heavily, nobody heard. Parker and Wendy were having their pre-driving-out-of-the-parking-lot kiss.

On the great board game of Romance, I was still on square one.

I
nterlocked hearts are hard.

They have dead ends. You can’t get your players from one heart to the next. If you add connector strips, you get this jumble of left and right turns and you can’t tell where to go next, and now they don’t even look like hearts, but really bad interstate systems.

My original attempt of six interlocked hearts turned into gridlock. It was a traffic jam instead of a game.

My second design had six hearts facing in a circle, points to the center, attached by slender ribbons. You swung around each heart and over the ribbon to the next heart. My hearts looked like apples drawn by a kindergartner with visual problems.

My third design was one enormous heart with four
layers. You circled the heart first on the red path, then the rose path, then the pink and finally bridal white. It was fun to color. I divided each path into one-inch squares, which I would label for action or dates or something.

I counted up the squares. Sixty per path for a total of two hundred forty squares. I had to think up two hundred forty romantic events?

Even my mother and father, with all those years of romance behind them, hadn’t managed that. Most of their romance was repeat anyway—the usual flowers, dinner out and Hallmark cards. But that was three. Only two hundred thirty-seven to go.

I did my sketching in the back of my history notebook.

Faith had to watch basketball practice because now that Angie had had lunch with her, she figured she was a member of the team. The coach is pretty loose about kids sitting on the bleachers. You just have to stay quiet. There are usually at least a dozen kids lounging around, half watching and half in a stupor from school.

We sat on the top bleacher so we could rest our backs against the wall. The poor boys, fourteen of them, were being subjected to various forms of torture. Right now they were running like madmen toward the opposite gym wall, hurling themselves feetfirst against it and using the leap to turn around and race back.

It’s one thing to do that in a swimming pool. The water will catch you if you fall. You’re not going to break your neck, twist your ankle or crack your ribs. It was good I had
my Romance game to design. I could stop watching the boys playing suicide with their bones and concentrate on hearts.

Kenny—he of mega-loser fame—is a scorekeeper. He wanders in and out of all athletic activities, on the fringes of these as of everything else, and today after wandering over to the coaches, he wandered up to us. “Hello, Kenny,” said Faith in an unwelcoming voice.

Kenny, who perhaps brushes his teeth on a monthly basis and last replaced his shirt in seventh grade, smiled and said, “Hi, Faith. Hi, Kell. What’s new?”

I detest this question. You immediately start to wonder what
is
new in your life and of course
nothing
is new in your life; it’s the same old routine. Or if there is something new, you don’t want to tell Kenny about it. Why couldn’t he just say “How ya doin’?” like a normal person, so you could say “Fine” and be done with it?

Of course, Faith did have something new and wonderful in her life. Angie. She took a deep happy breath because she was dying to talk all about it. But once her lungs were full, she remembered that nothing had happened yet and something might go wrong and did she really want to boast about it before the event? Then she looked hard at Kenny and realized she had been about to discuss an actual personal emotion with him, so she let the air out of her lungs again and pretended to be excited about the team exercises.

Kenny is used to being left out and he knew he was being left out of whatever Faith had meant to say, so he looked
my way for a response. I was flipping pages in my spiral notebook to hide my heart sketches. Kenny’s hand flew out and slid between the pages to flip back to whatever I’d been hiding.

“Hearts,” said Kenny slowly.

I would have ripped my notebook away but the pages would have been torn.

“Hearts,” he repeated thoughtfully. “You’ve never come to basketball practice, Kelly. Today you come. Today you sit drawing little hearts and trying to hide them. Today you changed seats to be next to Will. Then you and Will talked.” Kenny smiled. “So that’s it, huh? You’re crazy in love with Will, aren’t you?”

“I am not. I am just drawing shapes. I happen to like hearts.”

“ ’Cause you’re in love,” agreed Kenny.

“I am not in love. These hearts have nothing to do with Will. I’m just—I’m—well—playing a game.”

Kenny laughed. “That’s what love is, they say. A game. But more fun with two players. Hey, does Will know?”

“No!” I screamed. “You’re wrong!”

The coach looked up at me and glared.

The entire basketball team looked up at me and glared.

I shrank down into my seat, making little apology faces, and Kenny stood below me laughing. “Guess I’ll tell Will, then.” He bounded down the bleachers, trotted across the gym floor, narrowly missing death by trampling, and sat on
the bench next to the water bottles. Sooner or later, Will would go get a squirt of water.

“I’m going to die,” I informed Faith.

Faith flipped my spiral notebook open herself and frowned at my hearts. “Is Kenny right? Are you in love with Will?”

“No!”

I wonder why we always deny love. I remember in middle school, if you were accused of the crime of loving, you screamed denials constantly and stopped ever even looking at the boy you were accused of liking. The boys could destroy each other by yodeling, “An-drew lo-oves Jen-nie,” and both Andrew and Jennie would flinch and blush.

Love is this great thing that most songs and books and poems and lives are all about. So the minute we actually think there might be love around, we start laughing and pretending and hiding from it.

I was hiding my hearts under the cover of my notebook.

If I really do fall in love one day, I thought, will I hide it? What happens if you hide love so well, the person you love thinks you don’t care? How come you can’t just walk up to somebody and say, You know what? I love you.

Faith said, “Kenny just told Will. Look over there.”

I made the mistake of looking over there. Will had a large bottle of water and had been squirting it into his mouth from a distance. Startled by Kenny’s message, Will squirted without swallowing. Water spewed over his face, ran down onto his chest and spilled on the floor.

Kenny tossed a towel over the spill.

Will, staring at us, wiped his face with his arm.

Actually, he must have been staring at me, but we were too far away to see his eyes and I felt safer thinking it was both of us drawing Will’s attention.

Will waved.

“Wave back,” whispered Faith. “Don’t be such a lump, Kelly. Take action!”

I waved back.

Will jogged onto the court to rejoin the action.

“I have to get out of here,” I said.

“Why? He waved at you!”

“Faith, I don’t even like Will.”

“Then why are you drawing the hearts?”

“Faith!”

“Just testing,” she said, leaning all over me like a cat wanting its chin scratched. “I think waving back is a good sign. There are possibilities here. It would be fun to have me date Angie while you date Will. We’d have two-fifths of the starting basketball team sewn up.”

I moaned and took the late bus home before practice ended. Before I had to think about dealing with Will.