The Girl Who Invented Romance (9 page)

Wendy and Parker and I were for once united. “Pretend?” we said.

Mother shuddered. “I prefer to believe that.”

“You’re wrong. You’re an ostrich with your head in the sand,” Parker said.

“I like having my head in the sand. I don’t want details. Always avoid details,” she instructed us. She ate an Oreo cookie to distract herself.

“A good parent,” said Parker, “is supposed to be on the watch for clues that her children—”

“Hush. Now, Wendy. You call your mother so she won’t think you’re running away from this.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Parker. “You’re the one running away, Mom.”

She ignored him and dialed Wendy’s home number for her, handing over the phone. There is one thing Mom can’t run away from, I thought. And that is Dad’s reunion and Ellen being there.

It seemed that Wendy’s mother had already heard from Dr. Scheider. He was probably regretting his call. Mrs. Newcombe had given him a sharp lecture on civil liberties, freedom of speech, the use of school air time and the pregnancy rate at Cummington High.

Dr. Scheider decided he had been hasty giving a suspension to Wendy and of course he no longer meant it and yes Wendy could go on the air again tomorrow. Although he did insist that Octavia’s pregnancy had to end.

Parker had suggestions for how Wendy could end Octavia’s pregnancy. Mother made him stop. Wendy said, “You know, not to be rude, Mrs. Williams, but you are kind of an ostrich with your head in the sand.”

“Go eat Oreos,” said my mother, and Parker and Wendy left the kitchen.

I waited to see if Mom would bring up Ellen again, but she got out a cake mix and the bowls and beaters. I love cake mixes. No effort and a minute later you have a bowl to lick. You could buy the cake at the grocery store bakery with even less effort, but you wouldn’t have the bowl to lick. I think it’s too bad you have to bake the cake. I like to have batter raw. Once I had a whole cup of batter.

But Mom put everything back in the cupboards without making anything. “No more desserts,” she mumbled. “I have to lose ten pounds.”

“Why?”

“I have to look good at his reunion.”

I would have laughed except she was serious.

“You should have seen how your father held that photograph,” she said, leaning on the counter, as if the shelf where the mixer sat were too high to reach ever again. “He handled it like gold. Like precious—” She broke off.

Our conversation did not continue. Mom fled to her room, which I do constantly but had never seen her do.

I went on up to my room too, and opened my romance game board. I wanted to be on the Start Heart with Will. I wanted Mom and Dad to be at Happily Ever After where they belonged. I wanted—

“Kelly! Telephone!” shouted Parker. He was irked. I understood. All phone calls should always be for you. No fair running to get the phone and it’s for somebody else. Since Park and I each have our own phone, it’s unusual for us to get calls on the family line. It would not be Faith, which was okay with me, because I wasn’t sure how much of the day’s dialogue I wanted to discuss even with her.

“Hello?” I said.

“Kelly?”

It was Will. I recognized his voice instantly, just from the two syllables of my name. Will calling me up! I had to lie down. “Hi, Will. How are you?”

“Did you know my voice or do you have caller ID?”

“I knew your voice. You and I chatter so much, remember, disrupting every class.”

Will laughed. He knew we’d had about two exchanges during our entire lifetimes. “Well, I guess Wendy rescued you,” he said. “She didn’t mean to, but everybody’s already forgotten your romance quiz and they’re talking exclusively about Octavia being pregnant and Wendy getting suspended.”

“You make Octavia sound real.”

“She is real. We know more about what Octavia’s doing than our own families. I was wondering if you’re going to kill Wendy or not.”

“I considered it. But Parker wouldn’t like it.”

“Why does he go out with her anyway?” said Will distastefully.

I was so struck by that. Everybody else wondered why Wendy went out with Parker. Only Will wondered why Parker went out with Wendy.

“I thought I’d tell you my intimacy quotient,” said Will.

“I’ve been worried,” I admitted. “Did you do better than me? Are you capable of tons of intimacy or do you need counseling?”

“I got ninety-three. My social life is what everybody else aspires to.”

“Maybe
you
should go out with Wendy,” I said. “You could stack your conceit next to hers any day.”

Will laughed. “Actually I made that score up. The quiz
was so dumb I didn’t bother to answer the questions. How can you stand stuff like that? It doesn’t have anything to do with real-life romance.”

But I don’t have any real-life romance, I thought. I have to make do with whatever the magazines offer.

I turned the phone over in my hand. It was so much larger than my cell phone, as if it were full of possible conversations, like my heart. Ask me out, Will. Give me real-life romance so that I don’t have to renew my magazine subscriptions.

“Actually,” said Will, very casually, “I have to go to this dinner-dance, because I’m an All-State player and I have to be at this honor dinner.”

A few weeks before, I had disliked Will.

Now I stared down at my board game, still open. My handsome boys, all nines and tens on a scale of attractiveness. There was Will, covering up Oriental Avenue. In real life, I thought, there would be sixes and threes and zeroes as well. There would be stars and losers, people hard to notice and people barely there. But who wants real life? In the game of romance, don’t you always want the stars?

I jerked my mind off the game. I was out of the game league. I was listening to the start of the real thing. My first date with anybody at all on earth would be an important dinner-dance with Will. I clung to the phone.

“And what I want to ask is,” said Will, taking an exceptionally deep breath, “since you’re such a close friend of
Megan, and I don’t know if she’s still going out with Jimmy or not, can you tell me what her situation is right now before I call her?”

I truly felt as if the ceiling had lowered. It was pressing me down onto my bed, laughing at me, squashing my hopes, my pride and my body. Life was indeed a game, and such fun, too.

“They’ve split for good,” I said.

“Oh,” said Will, pleased. “Thanks, Kelly.”

So what about the pixie smile? I thought. Is Megan’s smile pixier? Or is
pixie
an insult, and not a compliment? “Why did you bring up the romance quiz, Will? You want my opinion on what’s romantic for your honor dinner with Megan?” And then I didn’t give him time to answer, but started sniping at him, the kind of conversation Honey always has—half nasty. I hated myself. I wanted to say sweet things, good things. But Will wanted to say those things to Megan.

At last we managed to say good-bye.

To keep from crying, which I told myself the situation did not deserve, I sketched board game cartoons. I had Jimmy walking the squares with Megan. Jimmy gaining a bowling partner. Jimmy tossing Megan to the sidelines. Will rolling a double and heading for Megan. Faith rushing headlong around the curves. Parker and Wendy three squares away from Happily Ever After. Jeep losing a turn.

Suppose you were dealt a hand. Suppose you had a deck
of fifty-two guys. Suppose some were great and some got mixed reviews and some made you throw up.

Okay. You dealt out these cards. Then what? Trade them with other players? Run into roadblocks where you had to surrender one and gain another? Have a card of your own where you had to impress the boy cards so they’d stay?

How awful. How much like life.

I wanted the romance game to be fun and I wanted you always to win. Why play a game if you’re going to lose? Especially if it’s the game of romance?

I stared at my game half the evening because it was better than weeping over Will. Actually I would not have wept over Will, because I still didn’t really like him. I would have wept over me, because nobody loved me.

Around midnight, Parker came home.

Since we had school the next day, he was in trouble. Dad was waiting up for him. I braced for shouting, but there wasn’t any. Quiet talking at the foot of the stairs and then Dad’s voice, soft as a pat. “Try to get some sleep. It’ll be better in the morning.”

Better in the morning? A car accident, maybe?

“Oh, right,” said Parker sarcastically. He came heavily up the stairs. I pretended to be getting a glass of water so I could bump into him in the hall. “Wow, Park. Where were you and Wendy, midnight on a school night?”

My brother stopped in the narrow hall. His ski jacket rubbed against the wallpaper with a slick whispery sound. The night-light near our knees threw shadows over his features. His eyes were pools of dark and his hair seemed longer, his shoulders wider. When he spoke, his voice was like lead.

“We broke up. Wendy went back to Jeep.”

W
here is the fun in a game that leaves one of the players devastated?

Wendy, presumably, was off having a wonderful time with Jeep. And Jeep, who had wanted her back so much, was undoubtedly having a wonderful time with Wendy.

But Parker could not eat, would not speak, did not concentrate and stayed off the phone.

Mom made Park his favorite meals. Dad volunteered to take Park to an ice hockey game at the Coliseum. Parker ignored them or glanced briefly in their direction as if they were crazy. Perhaps they were.

Whatever Parker had felt for Wendy, it was too deep to be assuaged by a pair of tickets to a hockey game. I could
actually see my brother ache. Seventeen, and his joints were stiff and he moved slowly and unwillingly. When any of our phones rang, but especially his own, he’d stiffen and look at the phone as if it were the enemy, but with the potential of being his closest friend. His Wendy.

But Wendy never called.

Did she ever love him? I wondered. What is love, anyhow?

How can Parker have had so much of it and now it’s simply gone? Is love an electric current? Throw a switch and it flows elsewhere? While the other love vanishes like a burned-out bulb?