The Girl Who Invented Romance

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “What time was this?”

  “Maybe five o’clock.”

  “It’s seven now. All Cummington knows I invented a romance game. By nine the entire state will know and by eleven o’clock the national television networks will be preparing a feature.”

  “But if you’re going to market the game nationally, isn’t that what you want?”

  “I want to be in control of my own fate,” I said.

  “Good luck.” Mom turned into a vast parking lot. Cummington has many malls, none of which has enough parking, except this one, which has ten times the parking it needs. There’s always a sea of black pavement waiting to be parked on. But it was the end of January, and pockets of old snow and slick spots of ice reached out to ruin your footing.

  The pharmacy at this mall carries everything from closet dividers to picnic baskets. I went to the candy section. I didn’t really like Faith’s game pieces. The nail polish had not stuck very well to the painted Parcheesi pieces and they looked—well—cheesy. I was going to buy a big bag of those tiny pastel valentine hearts that say LUV ME TRULY and BE MINE and I’d cover them in clear nail polish so they’d last for the evening and remind people not to eat them and they would be perfect game pieces and nobody could mix theirs up with anybody else’s.

  My mother went to look at greeting cards. I could see her way down the aisle, fingering card after card. Was she buying Dad a Valentine’s Day card? An “I’m sorry” card? Should I buy Will a Valentine’s Day card, and if so, should it be mushy or literary or slapstick? Did they have cards that said, “I hope you really do love me, because if you don’t, I’m going to die”?

  I hoped Mom was choosing a card that said, “I love you completely; let’s kiss and make up and have everything the same as before.”

  I bought a very large bag of hearts. Either nobody would come to my party at all now that Mom had said what the game was about, in which case I could console myself for a long time popping candy hearts, or everybody in town would come, in which case I would need this many hearts.

  Mother went to the checkout counter and I followed. “Let me see our card,” I said.

  She showed me willingly. A soft photograph, blurred like watercolor, of two people in a canoe, drifting beneath a weeping willow. It was very romantic. I couldn’t wait to read the verse, but inside, it was blank. “You couldn’t find a verse that fit?” I asked her.

  “I think this time I have to write my own.”

  There were episodes in my life lately that nobody knew about. Mom, Dad, Faith, Megan—they hardly knew a thing about Will. Parker knew a little. What episodes in Mom’s life did I not know about? As she and Dad drew closer and closer to Ellen Day, what was happening between them?

  It was amazing how we could live under the same roof, share the same genes and meals and furnace, eat the same snacks, use the same sinks and glasses and stairs and yet be so separate. Glimpsing each other’s pain or joy, but sideways, catching only shadows and reflections.

  Mom and I returned to the car. Nobody was parked around us. Nobody was parked anywhere. It was a marvel the mall was still in business.

  “Candy hearts?” said my mother. “Oh, perfect. You drive, Kelly. I want to pick out the best hearts to tuck in my card.”

  My real heart soared. We opened the bag carefully, so the hearts wouldn’t spill, and my mother sorted through, eating some, throwing some back and cupping a few in her palm, where I couldn’t read them.

  “Are you choosing I’M YOURS and FOREVER YOURS?” I said.

  She had chosen four of the same slogan, one each in pale pink, pale yellow, pale green and pale blue: I LUV U.

  I thought of all the questions I would like to ask.

  All the answers I would like to have.

  All the interrogating I would like to do.

  All the advice I would like to pass on.

  But instead I turned left toward Fox Meadow, and when I came to a red light and stopped the car, Mom held up the candy bag for me to choose. I chose a heart that said I’M 4 U and I gave it to her and she said, “That goes right in my bloodstream,” and she ate it and we laughed.

  When we got home, my mother said, “Relax, Kell. We had a rough spot, neither of us handled it very well and now we’re past it. Since you’re spending every waking moment working on romance right now, I’ll tell you that romance is something you can see, like a note tucked under your pillow. It’s something you can smell, like a bottle of fragrance or a bouquet of lilacs. It’s something you can wear or taste or show off. But love—it doesn’t package well. You can’t tie it up with ribbons and bows. You couldn’t make a board game of love. Love won’t sit in neat little squares and pause obediently for other people to take a turn.”

  She slid her hearts into her greeting card and slid her card into its envelope, but she didn’t seal it. Her words weren’t written yet and her signature wasn’t there yet.

  “But only love,” she said finally, “is worth playing for. Worth working for. Fighting for. And even yielding for.”

  We went into the house silently. I felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe part of love is silence, I thought.

  But silence made me think of my cell phone, which had not been ringing, and if Mother had really told the entire town, it should have been ringing steadily, so I pulled it out of my purse and looked to see if anybody had called, because sometimes love is a telephone that rings for you.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The first guest drove up while Parker and I were still setting out the games on the floor because we didn’t have four large tables in one room.

  “This is high risk, Kelly,” said my brother. “You’re setting yourself up to be taunted by all these kids. You’re baring too much of your soul.”

  Of course I had not slept all night, thinking the exact same thing, but I bluffed. “Don’t you want me to make a success of this and have it become a nationwide fad and make us zillionaires?”

  “Sure, but I want you to do it anonymously.”

  “I don’t think romance can be an anonymous activity.”

  The doorbell rang. I got uncertainly to my feet and Parker called, “Mom, get the door, will you?” To me, he said, “Kelly, you have a HUG ME heart stuck to your cheek. Is that intentional?”

  I touched my cheek, and the candy fell into my palm. I didn’t know whether it was intentional. There was certainly one person I hoped to hug in the course of the evening.

  “Why, Katy!” cried my mother. “How lovely to see you! Come in!”

  “I adore the color you’re wearing, Mrs. Williams,” said Katy. “Now, where have you been all winter? You haven’t come to a single basketball game. Don’t you have any school spirit this year?”

  My mother chose not to enter a discussion of where she had been and in what spirits. “What a beautiful cake!” she exclaimed.

  “After you told me this would be a romance game, Mrs. Williams, I had to rethink my dessert plan. I’ve been icing this cake all day. I went for hearts and flowers.”

  Parker and I caught up to the action. Katy’s cake was a work of art. It was a glorious sheet cake, with icing an inch thick, ruffled with colors, cornered in hearts, beribboned and clumped with icing roses.

  “Wow,” said Parker reverently, already pushing a finger into the icing for a taste. Katy just grinned.

  “Kevin!” cried my mother, loudly, so that Parker and I would recognize a cue when we heard one and remember that we were hosting this party, and not Mom. “This is going to be such fun!” said Mom. “How are you, Kevin?”

  “Hi, Kevin,” said Parker. “Look what Katy made for our dessert.”

  Kevin was suitably impressed. “It isn’t a white or yellow cake underneath, though, is it?” he said anxiously. “Romance cakes have to be chocolate, don’t they?”

  “Absolutely,” said Katy. “In fact, I think true romance calls for eating dessert prior to eating the meal, so if you’d like to start, Kevin, especially since Parker has alread
y started, that would be very romantic of you.”

  Kevin felt he could handle that degree of romance. He and Katy headed for the kitchen, a cake cutter and plates, although Kevin felt able to handle his cake without a plate or fork or even a napkin. Katy explained that just putting his face down in the cake and snarfing it up was not romantic.

  Megan came racing across the yard and slammed into the house the way she always does, as if she’s some four-wheel-drive vehicle attacking a cliff. Angie came a minute later, Donny, Julie, Faith and Will hot on his heels. Parker and I were so busy saying hi that Mom remained on door duty. “Mario!” she cried. “Honey! I guess everybody wants to be on time for romance.”

  There was an edge of hysteria to our laughter. We were embarrassed. But my mother handled romance with the ease of one who has spent two decades swinging it around.

  Katy and Donny and Kevin began guessing what a romance game involved. Kissing each other? Adding clothing to become brides and grooms? Stripping off clothing to become brides and grooms at some point after the ceremony?

  “I bet we’re going to do an inventory of our hearts,” said Katy.

  I liked that a lot. An inventory of the heart. As if your heart were an attic, cluttered with trivial crushes and affections, but somewhere in there, one large trunk was packed with true love.

  Will was grinning at me. He stood head and shoulders above most of the crowd, although head only above Mario and Angie, and his eyes were fixed on me. The angles and lean lines of his face, like the face of a very young Abraham Lincoln, smoothed away and became infectiously happy. He edged toward me. I edged toward him.

  Although it was midwinter and winter colors are dark, all the girls had chosen to wear pastel. I love it when nobody plans in advance but everybody matches. It’s like cars on the turnpike driving in clumps or everybody naming their babies the same thing. My year it was Jessica and Michael. For my party, group telepathy had put the girls in mint green, pale yellow and dusty pink. The boys, however, wore jeans and heavy sweaters in navy or gray, as if they had known they would need solidarity to play romance with girls.

  When we were ready to sit down at the game—Katy’s cake half eaten and the chips and dips totally ignored—people were nervous.

  “How’s it work?” said Angie. His jaw clicked to the side. Perhaps he was afraid of exposing a vein of ignorance.

  “We divide into three groups of four each,” I said. “Two girls and two boys per game. Nobody sits with a girlfriend or boyfriend because it will inhibit you.”

  They circled the game boards solemnly, counting out, following rules, looking like candidates for an ulcer screening. Honey said, “But there’s nothing on the game board.”

  “It’s upside down. Don’t touch it yet. This is an unveiling and we’re not ready to unveil. First, everybody sit.”

  “Wait!” cried my mother. “Don’t start yet. Here comes another couple.”

  I frowned. Everybody was here. Faith and Parker and I moved toward the front window to see who it could be.

  It was Wendy and Jeep.

  Crashing my party.

  The nerve! To come to the home of the boy she had just thrown over to play out a script of her soap opera. To a party she undoubtedly wanted solely as material for that soap opera.

  Wendy bounced up our sidewalk, flirty and unself-conscious, while Jeep, handsome and perfect and outshining Parker, admired her progress.

  I went to the door to shove them down into the pricker bushes but Parker beat me. “Come on in,” he said cheerfully. “How are you, Jeep? Wendy? You almost missed the start of things.”

  “Give me a break,” said Faith from the game room. “They’re trying to start things.”

  Parker shot Faith a grin as he ushered Wendy and Jeep into our house. The grin caught at me. It was not brotherly. It was a boy exchanging a look with a girl.

  Wendy waltzed into the room where she had no business being and sat on the very sofa where she had passed many an hour with Parker.

  Katy, who has never had any use for Wendy, said, “There is not room for two more players, so you might as well stay on that couch and be silent observers.”

  I decided it was time to be better friends with Katy. She was an ideal person. Baked outstanding cakes, considered chocolate romantic and put Wendy down.

  But Parker said, “Having four people to a board is arbitrary and we don’t know yet how many can easily play the game at one time, so we can probably work Wendy and Jeep in.”

  Four was not actually arbitrary. The game board had four sides, so it was going to work best with four people. But I let it go.

  “I’ll sit out the first game and go around getting people their drinks,” said Parker. “Wendy, you sit over here by Julie. Jeep, you’re next to Angie. We’ll just have five at your board.”

  “We want to sit together,” said Wendy, lip out in a pout.

  “Against the rules,” called Will. “Boyfriends and girlfriends can’t sit at the same board.”

  Wendy plopped down where Parker had told her to. It was the only really bad position in the room. There was no place to rest her back and no floor pillow because Julie had taken two and didn’t look as if she was giving one up to Wendy, and the boys at that board—Mario and Kevin—were personality-free (Mario) and also not fond of Wendy (Kevin).

  Angie scrunched over to let Jeep sit down, so Faith was now squashed against Angie, which had been her master plan. “Angie,” Faith said flirtatiously, “you can’t sit with a girlfriend.”

  He laughed at the joke. “We’re fine, then, because I’ve never had one. Never plan to. I’m not made for the game of romance.”

  The boys dropped to the floor with thuds that shook the lamps on the end tables. Katy and Julie pretended to be shaken by earthquakes, giving little shivery aftershocks and giggling. Faith, for whom it was an earthquake, had tears in her eyes.

  “Faith,” said Parker, “how about you sit out the game with me, instead of Kelly, and pass out pencils and paper and help me with the drinks. Please?”

  “Pencils?” said Donny, worriedly. “Is this an exam? Do we get graded on how romantic we are? I’m leaving. I’d rather have my teeth drilled.”

  It was good cover for Faith’s exit to the kitchen and a tissue.

  “No,” said Parker, surpassing any expectation I might ever have had of brotherly love, “this is a great game. You’re going to have fun. Trust me.”

  When Faith came back, he gave her a hug. In a lifetime of living near each other in Fox Meadow, Park had given Faith many a thump, a scolding and a shove. But this was a hug.

  What if a romance flowered during a romance game? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Wouldn’t it be the seal of perfection on my game? There might even be two romances, because Katy and Kevin were looking at each other the same way that Faith and Parker were. Breathless and eager and hopeful.

  I wanted to stand there and watch things unfold, but people were waiting. Expecting fun. My stomach clenched.

  “Okay,” I said. “Everybody get a pencil and everybody get a scorecard. You have six name slots on your scorecard. You have to make up names to fill in. Every girl fills in six boy names and every boy fills in six girl names. These are your potential dates. You cannot choose the name of anybody in this room. I’m going to make up different name-choosing rules for each set of players. Board One players may use any name. So a girl might choose Mitch, Jonathan, Jason, Dave, Lance and Rob, while a guy might choose Michelle, Jessica, Kathleen, Andrea, Molly and Ethel.”

  “I don’t want a romance with a girl named Ethel,” said Will.

  “Who do you want a romance with?” said Wendy. “Somebody named Michelle or Jessica?”

  Our school is packed with girls named Michelle or Jessica.

  “No,” said Will. “Somebody named Kelly.”

  For an instant nobody reacted.

  Then it hit. Katy gurgled with laughter, Parker raised his eyebrows, Angie snorted, Donny looked delighted (but then, Donn
y always looks delighted), and Kevin said, “Sweet.”

  I focused on my list of instructions and tried to breathe.

  “This romance game works fast, Kelly,” said Wendy. “You have drugs in the soda maybe? Hypnotic suggestion in the pencils?”

  “Only you have to resort to that kind of thing,” said Katy. “The rest of us use personality and character.”

  Everybody howled. But Wendy’s self-image is so great that she could laugh it off. Jeep didn’t defend her, perhaps because he agreed or perhaps because he thought it was funny.

  But Faith said, “There’s a rule. Anybody who digs a knife into anybody during a romance game will never ever get to Happily Ever After.”

  “Oh, no!” said Katy. “I withdraw my knife.”

  “Happily Ever After,” said Will. “I might have guessed that’s where we’re going.” He was grinning at me and I thought, Who needs a game? I just want to think of Will and be with Will and plan for Will and dream of Will and then actually really truly have Will.

  Instead I moved to the next set of players. “You guys will choose the names for the person on your left. So Julie chooses for Kevin, and so forth.”

  “Okay, Kevin,” said Julie instantly. “I’m giving you two sexy names—Jody and Laurie. Two basic names—Catherine and Lee. And two loser names—Olga and Hortense.”

  Kevin said, “Then I’m giving you Percival and Dudley.”

  “You don’t get to choose for me,” said Julie. “The person on your left is Wendy.”

  “Oh,” said Kevin happily. “Wendy, you get Percival and Dudley.”

  “Okay,” said Wendy, surprising me by jotting down Percival and Dudley. “Those are my two loser names. What are my two sexy names?”

  This group was obviously going to do fine. I moved on to game three. “You guys have to choose names alphabetically, so you might choose Anne, Bonnie, Claire, Deborah, Emma and Francine. Or Aaron, Burt, Chad and so forth.”

  “Can I start my alphabet where the last person left off?” asked Honey. “So I start with G?”