The Girl Who Invented Romance

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “So what’s she like? Can I see the photograph?”

  My mother’s smile was forced. “She’s beautiful. Looks ten years younger than she is. And you can’t see it. Your father has the letter and the photograph with him.”

  “With him? You don’t mean in his wallet?”

  “Maybe not in his wallet, but he didn’t leave it behind.”

  I sat down next to her. For the first time in my life, she leaned on me. “I know how silly this is,” she said. I felt like a woman friend, someone on her side, not her little girl. It felt wonderful, even though she was scaring me. “Ellen is stunning. She always was. And he was so excited to hear from her.”

  “Do you have the letter memorized? Quote it to me. I want to know what we’re up against.”

  “Up against?” said my mother. “Kelly, I’ve felt up against Ellen for a long time. If I gain five pounds, I know Ellen would never lose her figure. If I forget the punch line to a joke, I know Ellen would tell more sophisticated jokes and never forget the ending. If I get lazy for a few weeks, I know Ellen has endless energy and everything she does is brilliant and makes money and headlines.”

  I giggled. “I feel that way about half my class.”

  The doors were flung open. In came Wendy and Parker.

  Mother ceased to be a woman friend and became a mom after school, offering Oreo cookies and ginger ale while the children chattered. Passing out napkins. Listening.

  “So you got suspended for two days,” said Parker to Wendy. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “It is the end. I don’t like to be in trouble. I just like to make a splash.”

  At my expense, I thought. I willed Wendy to look sorry and guilty the way Will had, but she didn’t notice. It was so ordinary for her to use people that she forgot in the space of a few hours she’d ever done it.

  I was still envious of Wendy. I’d always be envious of Wendy. But I no longer wanted to be Wendy.

  Maybe she dates Parker because subconsciously she wants his niceness to rub off on her, I thought. Maybe she’s attracted to the one thing she doesn’t have.

  Wendy split her Oreos, licked the icing off and set the uneaten chocolate halves back on the table. Now, there’s self-control.

  Parker told Mom about the soap opera dialogue and how Dr. Scheider felt that since a possible use for that money was abortion or becoming a single mother, Wendy had to think more clearly about the effect of her soap opera on her innocent listeners, and therefore the best deterrence to future unpleasant dialogue was suspension. I thought dismemberment would be better but I restrained myself from saying so. I would have had to admit that I was the one with the forty-seven intimacy quotient.

  “Well,” said my mother, “the school doesn’t like you to pretend that pregnancy can happen to high school juniors.”

  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, Wi
ll. 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.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Where 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?

  My own thoughts were filled with Will. I had never thought so intensely about a boy at all, never mind a boy I didn’t like. What had he ever done that was appealing or friendly or kind or any of the things he himself had listed under love? At last I admitted the truth. I had a crush on Will.

  Why? I thought despairingly. Why on the boy who calls me up to discuss another girl?

  Angie did not ask Faith out.

  Faith should have known. I think she did know. It was just unbearable to contemplate—being rejected. Both she and Parker were walking wounded. Parker bled internally and never talked, but Faith talked endlessly. I never told her about Will. There was nothing to tell. And yet my emotions were incredibly strong and totally private.

  In sociology, Wendy was her usual bubbly self.

  “How could she go out with Park for three months,” I whispered to Faith, “and it doesn’t show? There’s nothing left of it?”

  “It’s as if they wrote that love in the sand at low tide,” said Faith, “and the waves wiped it away, leaving no record.”

  Wendy continued to write her soap operas. They continued to be funny. Whatever happened to Octavia was not announced over the public-address system. School jokes about possible endings were told for days, however, and Wendy thrived on the attention. She wrote her dialogue exclusively during sociology now, passing the scripts over to Jeep for his approval. Jeep always told her that that day’s soap was the best ever.

  At home, the game of romance now included history.

  “For God’s sake, Violet!” shouted my father one night at dinner. “It’s nothing but a meal. Three hundred people having overcooked roast beef or underdone salmon and telling each other we don’t look any different. That’s all the reunion will be.”

  “I understand, George. I understand perfectly.”

  “Good. Ellen is in the past, that’s all. We’ll have this one dinner the following night with her husband what’s-his-name and that’s it.”

  My mother stared into her water glass and whirled it until the ice cubes tinkled against each other.

  “Ellen was always a very kind and understanding person,” said my father.

  “Oh? Am I going to require extra kindness and understanding?”

  “Violet! Ellen will be an excellent hostess. You’ll love her.”

  “You mean you’ll love her.”

  “I do not love Ellen.”

  “Then why do you keep bringing her up?”

  A week of this and we were all ready to shoot somebody. It was just that nobody could agree who deserved to be shot. Ellen for existing? Mom for overreacting? Dad for losing his temper and stomping off?

  “See what I mean?” Parker said to me. “See how ridiculous this is? Mom is weak. Dad is dumb.”

  “That’s not true,” I sai
d, although it appeared to be.

  “I don’t know what Mom thinks is going to happen,” muttered Park. “Does she think old Ellen is going to snatch Dad away from her? That Ellen will divorce what’s-his-name and Dad will divorce Mom?”

  It terrified me. “I suppose that could happen.” If it did, I would definitely find that counselor. Forget my intimacy quotient. I would never survive my parents’ divorce.

  “It could not happen,” said Parker sharply.

  “You had faith in Wendy and look what happened when the competition showed up.”

  Parker did not argue. He just faded. The lines in his face deepened until he could have been Dad’s age.

  “What did happen, anyway?” I asked. I hated not knowing. Not only did it mean I couldn’t answer when the entire school asked me about Park and Wendy, it meant I couldn’t help Park either.

  My brother’s answer was the last I could ever have expected.

  “I yelled at her for mocking you,” he told me.

  “But—but you were so worried about her when we sat in the kitchen with Mom. You didn’t say one word about her using me.”

  “I didn’t know then. She told me later when we went out. She said she found your quiz in the magazine and saw your score written in the margin and decided to use it.”

  “You defended me?” I said slowly. I thought, His love life ended because he was his usual nice self. And about his dumb little sister who’s always a pain when he has a chance to use the car.

  “She picked a fight. It was like she wanted a fight so she could storm off and go back to Jeep. I felt like we were following one of her scripts. She was laughing at you. She said you were a—” Parker stopped, didn’t say whatever word Wendy had used and went on. “I got furious and yelled at her, which I have never done, and she took out her cell phone and right there in front of me called Jeep to come and rescue her.”

  I could not even picture this. How absolutely horrible for Park. He had sat there in his own car while Wendy changed drivers. Had Jeep demanded to know why Wendy needed rescue? Had Jeep said, What, you’re hurting her? You some monster or something?