The Secret Language of Girls (16 page)

Maybe that was why it was such a big surprise when Marylin stopped by Kate’s desk on her way down the aisle and said, “I think it’s sort of cool about you and Andrew.” She had a funny expression on her face. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Kate realized Marylin actually looked jealous, like she wished she had a boyfriend too. Marylin hadn’t been jealous of Kate since fourth grade, when Kate had gotten a skateboard for her birthday. Marylin’s mother was against skateboards for children.

Unfortunately a little envy from Marylin didn’t change the fact that people would start expecting Kate to hold hands with Andrew in public.
Maybe I should tell my mom about Andrew,
she thought. Maybe she’ll say, “You’re much too young to have a boyfriend. Maybe when you’re fourteen.”
I’m sorry,
Kate would
have to tell Andrew.
We can still play basketball, but only as friends.

“He sounds like a nice boy. When do we get to meet him?”

Kate leaned back in her chair and let out a long sigh. This was not going as planned. Instead of giving her a firm lecture about being too young for boys, Kate’s mom was calmly chopping up onions for dinner.

“What boy?” Tracie asked, walking into the kitchen and grabbing some grated cheddar cheese from the bowl by her mother’s elbow. “Don’t tell me Kate has a boyfriend. Who is it?”

“You wouldn’t know him,” Kate said. “His name is Andrew O’Shea. Besides, he’s not really my boyfriend. He’s more like a boy who’s a friend.”

“Is he related to Dave O’Shea?” Tracie asked.

Kate nodded. Dave was one of Andrew’s older brothers.

“Geeksville!” Tracie said, hopping onto the stool next to the counter. “That whole family is from Mars. Dave O’Shea, Brian O’Shea, they’re always winning these science contests, and all the teachers love them.”

“Some people would say that that’s a good thing, Tracie,” Kate’s mom said, reaching for a dish towel.

“They’re really good basketball players,” Kate said, defending Andrew’s brothers.

Tracie laughed. “Who cares? They’re geeks.”

Later that night Kate sat on her bed and doodled in her social studies notebook. She was supposed to be brainstorming a list of the Ten Most Important Natural Resources of the Future, but she couldn’t concentrate. The whole problem with love, Kate decided, was that it was the opposite of basketball. With basketball the object was simple: You put a round ball through a round hoop. You had to overcome some obstacles to score, sure,
but if you practiced hard and played smart, you could win.

With love there was no ball and there was no hoop. And as far as Kate could tell, there was no winning. There was just Andrew O’Shea, a very nice person whose hand she didn’t want to hold because she was afraid everyone would make fun of her. In the old days, when Kate had no interest in romance, she never cared what other people thought. Now, it appeared, love was turning her into a rotten human being.

Andrew was getting a drink at the water fountain outside the cafeteria. There was something about the way his neck showed so that Kate could see the top bump of his spine that made him look innocent to her, like he was a little kid who still believed in Santa Claus.

“Go ahead,” she said, bumping Marcie with her hip. “Go talk to him!”

Kate quickly walked into the cafeteria and sat down with Amber and Timma. A few minutes later Marcie came over to the table.

“He said okay, no problem,” she told Kate, throwing her lunch on the table.

“What happened?” Amber asked.

“Did you break up with Andrew?” Timma asked as she bit into her sandwich.

Kate shrugged. “It wasn’t working out.”

Kate was sure she had made the right decision until social studies, when Andrew read his list of the Top Ten Most Important Natural Resources of the Future. It was a really good list. For the tenth item he had put “Tiger Woods” and everyone had laughed, even Mrs. Watson, who usually didn’t appreciate her students joking around on homework assignments.

Andrew looked straight ahead and didn’t even glance at Kate as he passed her desk on the way back to his seat.

“I heard you dumped Andrew,” Flannery
said from the seat behind Kate on the bus that afternoon.

“Why do you care so much about my life?” Kate asked, not bothering to turn around. “Why is what I do so important to you?”

“I don’t care, actually,” Flannery said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the back of Kate’s seat. “But I don’t not care either. Watching what happens to you is like a scientific experiment.”

“What am I?” Kate asked. “A lab rat?”

“Not exactly,” Flannery said. “But you are interesting. You have a lot more potential than I thought you did. Which is more than I can say for Marylin.”

The two girls were silent for a minute. Then Flannery sat up in her seat. “Anyway, it’s too bad about Andrew. What happened anyway?”

Kate turned around and looked at Flannery. “It’s too hard to explain. I can hardly explain it to myself.”

Flannery nodded. “Love is a lot more complicated than people think.”

Kate sat in the hallway closet and stared at the phone receiver. Then she looked up at the list of phone numbers she’d penciled on the closet wall in very tiny letters so that her mom wouldn’t notice. Marylin’s was on the very top, even though Kate had memorized Marylin’s phone number a hundred million years ago. Under Marylin’s name was a long list of names and numbers from the kids in her fifth-grade class. Kate had copied them from the school directory very carefully on the wall one night when her parents had gone out to dinner. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, although now it struck Kate as sort of dumb. She’d never called half those kids, and anyway she could have just looked them up in the phone book.

Her eyes tripped down to the bottom of the
list, where the sixth-grade names were, and found the number she’d been looking for. Kate smiled as she punched in the buttons.

“I think Andrew’s great!” Paisley exclaimed after Kate had explained the situation to her. “But maybe you’re not ready for love.”

“How can you tell?” Kate wanted to know. “It seems like half the girls I know have boyfriends.”

“But that doesn’t mean they’re ready for love,” Paisley insisted. “Phoebe says that you should always start as friends first, anyway. Which you and Andrew did, but that still doesn’t mean you have to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“But maybe I want to be boyfriend and girlfriend.” Kate sighed. “I wish it could all be private. Why does everybody have to know about everything in my life?”

Paisley laughed. “Why don’t you quit thinking about love and boyfriends and girlfriends?
Why don’t you just think about Andrew O’Shea, the human being?”

Kate stretched her legs so that they were poking out into the hallway and examined her shoes, which had extra-bouncy soles so she could jump extra high. Andrew had a pair just like them. Andrew the human being.

“Maybe I’ll try that,” she told Paisley. “But sometimes it’s hard to think about other people as human beings. Too much stuff gets in the way.”

Then she and Paisley decided to do their homework on the phone together, and Kate actually helped Paisley with a math problem, which made Kate feel like maybe she could be an accelerated child, and they talked about some things they might do that summer, like hang out at a creek that was near Kate’s house and famous for its frogs. For forty-five minutes, until Tracie started yelling at Kate to quit yakking and let someone else
talk on the phone for a change, Kate forgot all about boys and love and caring what other people thought about her. She was too busy thinking about how nice it was to have friends like Paisley.

And, it occurred to her all of a sudden, like Andrew O’Shea.

As soon as she walked into the gym before school the next morning, Kate saw Andrew shooting baskets with a couple of guys from Mr. Tower’s homeroom. She almost turned around, but she stopped herself. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life trying to avoid Andrew O’Shea. She’d hardly ever get a chance to play basketball if she did that.

It’s time to set things straight,
Kate thought. The least she could do was talk to him in person, instead of sending her friends to do her dirty work.

Kate ran across the court from Andrew,
holding up her hands. “I’ve got an open shot!” she called to him. “Throw it here.”

Looking confused, Andrew lobbed the ball at Kate. She grabbed it, then put it into the air. The ball teetered on the rim for a few seconds before falling through the net.

“Two on two!” Tim Lopez, one of the guys from Mr. Tower’s homeroom, called out. “Me and Charlie versus Kate and Andrew. No competition!”

Kate took the ball back to half-court, then passed it off to Andrew, who made an easy layup. For the next five minutes they played like they’d been on the same team all their lives. Finally Tim held up his hands as if he were surrendering.

“I’ve got to go get my books before the bell.”

“Yeah, me too,” Charlie said, scurrying after Tim out of the gym.

“Amateurs,” Kate said to Andrew, throwing him the ball. “Tim should stick to soccer.”

“Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “He’s a lot better with his feet than his hands.”

Kate kicked the floor with the toe of her shoe. “So anyway,” she said, “when are we going to play against your brothers?”

“I thought you didn’t want to do stuff with me anymore,” Andrew said, looking closely at the basketball as though he were inspecting it for very tiny holes.

Kate took the ball from him and put it on top of her head. “It’s not that,” she said, moving her neck and shoulders around to keep the ball balanced. “It’s just that I don’t want to hold hands. I don’t think I’m any good at holding hands.”

“Probably because you’re too busy using them to play defense,” Andrew said, grabbing the ball off Kate’s head and dribbling it toward the hoop. Kate ran after him, putting her hands up to block his shot. But instead of stealing the ball away from Andrew when she had a chance, she grabbed his wrist.

“Maybe I could start with wrists and work my way down to hands,” she told him, suddenly inspired. “Maybe that would be okay.”

Andrew smiled. Then he hooked the ball into the air with his free hand. Kate watched as it curved neatly into the basket, falling through the net without a sound.