The Kissing Diary (10 page)

Immediately after she had committed her crime, Rosie's eyes darted from Mary's bloody nose to Mr. Woo's warm brown disappointed eyes. He said, “Hitting is not tolerated, Rosie. You give me no choice. Please go to the principal's office and tell him what happened. Lauren, take Mary to the nurse's office.”

Lauren glanced at her friend briefly and steered Mary down the hallway as if she were Rosie's grandfather not remembering how to walk.

Rosie felt as though she were starring in her very own prison movie, sentenced to death and dragging herself to the electric chair. Mrs. Collins, the school secretary, instructed Rosie to sit inside the principal's office and wait for his return. Mr. Dosher's desk was full of photographs of his smiling children and his devoted wife. His wife looked slim in her wedding gown, and as the line of pictures progressed, she got fatter and fatter. The children hit the awkward stage, a teenaged girl trying to hide a mouth full of braces, a sullen boy looking as though he didn't want to smile at all. There was even a picture of a grinning dog. When Mr. Dosher walked through the door, he wasn't smiling. Rosie's heart pounded wildly, and she tried focusing her attention on the collie's pink wet tongue instead of the principal's turned-down mouth.

“I'm surprised to see you here, Rosie,” he began.

“Me too,” Rosie answered.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Mr. Dosher adjusted one of the framed pictures as if he suspected someone had moved it. “I just saw Mary in the nurse's office, and she says you gave her a bloody nose for no reason at all!”

“I guess,” said Rosie. Why was her voice so trembly and high?

“You guess?” Mr. Dosher repeated. “You either did or you didn't.”

“It wasn't on purpose,” Rosie tried to explain.

“I see.” Mr. Dosher took his index finger and pushed his glasses up the slope of his nose. Rosie had never noticed how long it was, because she had never talked to him face-to-face. “You mean, you were aiming for another part of her?” he asked.

It felt like a trick question to Rosie. She hesitated, and said, “I didn't aim. I mean, it just happened.”

“Hitting someone doesn't just happen, Rosie. Violence is a deliberate act. There is always that split second when you can say to yourself, Do I really want to do this? Hit this person or steal this piece of candy?”

“I never stole candy,” Rosie squeaked, wondering why she was defending herself against being a thief.

“Hitting, stealing, where does it stop? When your hand is raised, you have an opportunity to make the right or wrong choice. And I expect children in this school to make the right choice. Can you try and explain why the only solution you found to a problem was to hit a student?”

What could she say? That she'd liked Robbie forever and that Mary made her doubt herself time after time? Would it lessen her guilt and lessen her punishment? After some deliberation, Rosie said, “She told me she was sorry I ever existed.”

Mr. Dosher blinked at her. “‘She was sorry you ever existed,'” he repeated. “Haven't you ever heard the words ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones'?”

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? Rosie would have rolled her eyes at Mr. Dosher if she'd had the nerve and wasn't scared to death. But words
did
hurt, she might have explained! Couldn't grownups see that? When her father left them and Rosie heard her mother say, “Please don't break up the family, Bob,” his answer made Rosie burst into tears. “We haven't been a family for a long time, Lucy.” Words don't hurt? What adult made
that
rule up?

“I'm sorry.” It was all that Rosie could say. It didn't take away the hit, or the bloody nose, or the embarrassment she had felt when everyone watched her behave like a lunatic.

Mr. Dosher adjusted his glasses one last time. Rosie thought idly that his eyeglasses were nerdy but contacts wouldn't help him one little bit. “I'm glad you're sorry, Rosie, I really am. I'm sorry, too. But you're suspended. You can pick up your work in the morning and go to the detention room every day for the rest of the week. I want you to write an essay about what you did and why it was wrong. I'll be calling your mother to come and get you now. Is she at home?”

Rosie nodded and blinked back tears, fixating on the photo of the wet collie tongue. Mr. Dosher picked up the telephone, spoke to her mother briefly, and must have instantly ruined Mrs. Goldglitt's lunch. She was most likely eating a tuna fish sandwich, since she'd read that fish improved your memory. By the time Mr. Dosher hung up the phone, her mother was probably sick to her stomach.

Rosie left the office and weaved her way through throngs of whispering students, or was she imagining it? Were they pointing and jeering and gaping at her? Was she suddenly transplanted from a prison movie to a Western epic, where she had been taken captive and made to run the gauntlet, pelted by sticks and stones? Where was Lauren, and what about Summer, who didn't like Mary any better than Rosie did? Would they talk to her, a convicted criminal sentenced to detention? And what about Robbie? Could he bring himself to consort with a criminal?

Rosie jammed her books in her book bag and ran the gauntlet back to the bench outside the office, where sick children sat, waiting to be picked up by their anxious mothers. Rosie felt sick herself when she saw the flash of Mrs. Goldglitt's favorite red jacket appear at the door.

The look of anger on her mother's face was a hundred times more recriminating than Mr. Woo's sad eyes or Mr. Dosher's grim mouth. Stone-cold eyes and lips pursed together into a furious line for Rosie's joyride home.

Rosie's descent from the sky to the ground had been swift and fast, like a meteor's. She had started out Miss Rosie Goldglitt, in an excellent mood, that very morning. She was a crisp green leaf on a nice walk to school. For several hours, Rosie's name had matched her—golden, glittery; yes, life was good, to use Mr. Woo's favorite device, alliteration.

Why hadn't she remembered what Grandma Rebecca had once told her: all that glitters is not gold. Her new life was fool's gold, that's what it was. The Kissing Diary had fast become Rosie's Diary of Doom. She should never have retrieved it from the garbage can.

12

The Goldglitts at the Gynecologist

Mrs. Goldglitt walked swiftly ahead of Rosie and jumped into the car. She waited half a second for her daughter to close the door, and took off as if she had just robbed a bank.

“My seat belt!” cried Rosie before she understood that safety was not what Mrs. Goldglitt had in mind. Out of habit, she switched on the radio, and her mother turned it off. It reminded Rosie of Jimmy, but she didn't dare say so. She was afraid her mother might decide to drive the car into a ravine, if there
were
a ravine in the town.

“Is that all you have to say?” said her mother, which was confusing, to say the least, because Rosie hadn't said much of anything.

“I'm sorry,” said Rosie, although a deep part of her was not, the part that still throbbed from Mary's wishing that she didn't exist.

The air felt oppressive inside the car. Rosie opened a window, wondering if her mother's fury could give off heat.

“What on earth possessed you to hit someone, Rosie?”

She could barely hear her mother. Were her teeth clenched, preventing the words from escaping?

“Wait until I tell Dad.”

Rosie couldn't believe what she was hearing. Her mother had cast her in an old-fashioned movie, except that the “Wait until your father gets home” routine was tired and pointless when your father didn't even live with you.

“She hates me,” said Rosie.

“Who hates you? Dad's wife?”

“Dad's wife?” Rosie shouted. “Mary, that's who. Mary, the one that I hit, the one you told me was evil!”

“I may have said she was evil, but did I tell you to hit her? Did I, Rosie? Why on earth would you do that?”

“Because she hates me, and I hate her because she hates me, that's why!” So much for saying that she was sorry, but Rosie couldn't help herself.

Her mother sighed and turned her head slightly toward her daughter, as if she had switched on the air-conditioning inside her head. “You don't hit people because they hate you,” she said, making an effort to soften her tone. “You ignore them, Rosie.”

“If a baseball landed on your head, could you ignore it? If you stepped on a piece of glass, could you make believe you didn't, Mom?” Why hadn't she ignored Mary Katz? She'd done it for months and months and months. Why couldn't she be like Gandhi and turn the other cheek? She watched her mother drive past their street onto a major thoroughfare. It wouldn't do to complain.

“I can't believe this!” Her mother must have been thinking too hard, and was on the rampage again. “I need this, Rosie? With Grandma gone, and Grandpa sick, I need my own daughter behaving like a juvenile delinquent? Your father will blame it all on me, you know.”

Rosie stayed silent. So
that
was the problem. Her mother was afraid she would be blamed for her downfall. Maybe it
was
her mother's fault that Rosie had screwed up. Maybe it was her father's fault, too, messing up their lives and leaving the family to marry someone else. Maybe Rosie was slugging the whole world, did her mother ever think of that?

“You'll have to come with me to the gynecologist's office,” her mother said.

Rosie sucked in air. Just what she wanted, to be holed up in a room full of pregnant women.

They parked, and Rosie followed her mother into Dr. Shapiro's office, which smelled faintly of baby wipes and antiseptic.

“Sit,” said her mother, tossing aside a copy of
Parents
Magazine that lay on the seat.

Rosie wedged herself between her mother and a woman whose belly was the size of the cage ball they used in gym when it was raining outside. She averted her eyes from the monstrous stomach.

Mrs. Goldglitt leaned across Rosie toward the woman, saying, “I hope you know that your baby could grow up and be suspended from school someday.”

The woman smiled faintly and placed a protective hand on her belly, as if to say, Save us from this silly, raving woman. Rosie huddled in her seat, knowing that her mother was losing it and would embarrass her more before the visit was over. She grabbed a
Highlights for Children
and started leafing through it, hoping to find the tree with the hidden pictures, anything to distract her from her mother's lethal behavior. Rosie hid behind the magazine as if she were wearing blinders. She wouldn't look to the right of her where her mother had become a rattlesnake, nor to the left of her, where an alien was living inside a belly.

Mrs. Goldglitt found another target. Across from them, a mother was unstrapping a baby, cooing at her with such love that it made Rosie feel sad. Could her mother possibly have loved her as much as that? The baby had chubby round cheeks and a pink ribbon tied around a tiny strand of hair, which meant she was definitely a girl even if she looked like a boy.

“Yours, too,” said her mother, startling the woman. “As cute as she is, she could grow up and be suspended from school someday.”

“God willing,” said the woman, unfazed by Mrs. Goldglitt. “Just let her be healthy.” She hoisted the baby up and held her firmly in her lap, lifting her shirt up with the other hand. One, two, three, the baby was under it, latching on to the mother's nipple so quickly that Rosie was totally
mesmergusted
and
fascinpulsed.
She wanted to run out of the office and home to her bedroom, where she could call up Lauren and describe her horrible afternoon and hear her best friend laugh as if she hadn't hit Mary and gotten detention and ruined her life in an instant.

“Can I wait outside in the car?” Rosie hissed at her mother.

“Absolutely not.”

Rosie's punishment continued as the baby sucked noisily. The hidden toys in the
Highlights
tree couldn't distract her. Terrific, thought Rosie, it was time for the other breast.

She made a note to herself never to nurse in public if there was a young girl around. She made a second note not to embarrass her daughter in a public place if she ever got suspended from school.

At last, her mother's name was called. “Just urinate in the cup, Lucy,” the nurse said easily. Oh, joy and rapture, Rosie could sit there and imagine her mother peeing in a cup.

Finally, her mother returned to the waiting room. The nursing mother had gone and two more women in varying stages of pregnancy flanked Rosie, who had started reading
Working Mother
magazine out of sheer desperation. Mrs. Goldglitt paid at the glass window and muttered a thank-you.

“Come,” she told Rosie.

In the car, Mrs. Goldglitt fastened her seat belt. She turned on the radio and let Rosie's music penetrate the air. “Sorry,” was the first word she uttered.

“What?” said Rosie, stunned by the reversal.

“I should have dropped you at home. I don't know why I dragged you to the gynecologist.”

“Do the crime, serve the time,” Rosie answered. She was happy to hear her mother laugh for the first time all day.

Then Mrs. Goldglitt said, “Don't ever disappoint me like this again, Rosie. I don't ever want another phone call from the principal's office telling me that my daughter the hooligan is hitting some child.”

Rosie considered her new nickname,
hooligan,
on the twenty-minute ride home. It was a far cry from hooking up with a boy named Robbie.

In her diary that evening, she gave herself several names. Her first choice, Rosie Gold-hitter, was to the point. Rosie Gold-bitter described her mood. The last one was signed:

Half-regretfully yours,