Among Friends

by Caroline B. Cooney

  I touch the cuff of my wool shirt, and the frayed wrist of the only sweater I have left that fits me. When everybody else was abandoning ship, I was busy growing four inches.

  Seven kings.

  I wish Jennie had asked me to be a king. In those clothes, you would feel like somebody.

  What have I written here?

  Nothing I could ever pass in.

  I’ll have to keep two journals. Like laundering money. Keeping two sets of books. One for Miss MacBeth, one for me.

  Who could have guessed that at the moment The Awesome Threesome ended, there would also be three truly awesome kings on the stage?

  My wrist was lifted to bring in the saxophones, my eyes fixed on the drummers who would join after six bars. But my soul watched my best friends, leaving without a word.

  The hand that held the baton trembled.

  Mary sang the lullaby I worked on all of August. Sad, sad music, because Mary knew her baby was born to die in agony.

  When I composed the lullaby, I was only guessing. Now I’ve tasted it.

  Agony is being alone: agony is the death of a friendship.

  I was actually crying when the lullaby finished. The first violin, a nice boy whose only friendship appears to be with his instrument, touched me with the bow. “Good music,” he said softly. “You aren’t the only one crying.”

  I don’t want some violin player to poke me with his bow! I want Hillary and Emily! I want them to be celebrating with me. Weeping with me. But to the violinist, I said, “Thank you.”

  (I should learn to be silent, like Paul Classified. Then Em and Hill wouldn’t be mad at me.)

  How little I share with Hill and Emily now!

  They don’t know how lyrics come: in the night, with a jolt that wakes me up gasping. I have a booklight with batteries that I pull under the covers with me, and write in the tent of my sheets: my rhyming dictionary on one side and my stage notes on the other. I get cramps in my elbows from leaning so long on them.

  They don’t know how the music comes either: rushing in my skull: fierce, pounding, demanding to be played. How I have to stumble away from other things—class or supper—find the piano and quick, quick, play it out loud, get it out from behind the barrier of my bones, past my fingers and onto the keys. The relief of hearing the chords the way I heard them in my head, and then the frantic effort to write them on staff paper before they’re lost.

  Emily and Hill don’t know about Paul Classified, either.

  A crush on Paul Classified is mandatory for junior girls, but I don’t do the things everyone else does and they would not expect me to have a crush on Paul. But I do, and it’s strong, and it rules more of my life than even music, or my parents. I have written six love songs. I turned one into the shepherds’ ballad for the Christ Child, but it was really for Paul Classified. The other ones are tucked away in my music notebooks. I’ve never used his name, although “Paul” rhymes with a thousand words and dances in my head all the day long.

  (So many secrets. I will not die of disease, but of the weight of my secrets.)

  I conducted the pageant while Emily and Hillary walked away.

  The star in the eastern sky lowered.

  My star isn’t going to come softly.

  My star won’t creep across a quiet sky.

  It’ll come with a crash.

  Truth hits you. Truth isn’t a chorus or a carol. If you ever understand at all, it will be to a drum roll.

  The pageant ended.

  My pageant.

  My drum roll.

  And the audience sighed, all together, as if their lungs were one.

  And they stood up to applaud.

  The stage crew, the light crew, the costume crew, the teacher advisers. The orchestra, Miss Clinton, who taught me how to orchestrate, Mr. Grant, who helped with the lyrics—they gave me a standing ovation.

  Beauty.

  Not a star in the sky nor a babe in the manger. Beauty is applause.

  “Awesome,” whispered someone.

  Awesome: a slang word for anything from a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich to the Grand Canyon.

  But this pageant was mine and it really and truly was awesome.

  Oh, applause, applause! Is it sick, to adore applause so much? To love so dearly being the center of attention?

  It stopped. It rang in my ears, carrying me, but the ringing faded, the applause was over.

  The infant’s hay was stuffed back into the manger. The saxophones went back into their cases. The costumes went into the drama room closets. And quickly, oh so quickly, everybody was gone. Gone to other things: supper, homework, girlfriends, home.

  The auditorium was empty.

  I was alone.

  Applause takes a crowd. And joy—joy takes a friend.

  I want to be Awesome! I want to be the Awesomest of all!

  But I don’t want to be awesome alone.

  I never even knew she was making those costumes.

  She had to go into New York for that material. There’s no fabric shop around here that would carry that stuff.

  Jennie—going into the city without us?

  Jennie—finding those kings, rehearsing that sax trio, without us?

  Jennie—never phoning to say, “Come look at what I’m sewing”?

  Emily and I just abandoned the dress rehearsal. We walked slowly to the parking lot. I’m the one with a car. Emily’s not quite sixteen yet and Jennie’s mother will never let her have a car, because having to drive Jennie places means Mrs. Quint can be in on all Jennie’s action. If Jennie gets a car, Mrs. Quint stays home. I don’t like Mrs. Quint.

  I had never driven off without Jennie before. Abandoned her without a ride. It was unthinkable.

  “Give me a break,” said Emily. “There’s no such thing as Jennie being stranded. Her personality wouldn’t allow it.”

  “The way Paul was looking at her, he won’t allow it either,” I said.

  Every girl in school cherishes a daydream that one day Paul Classified will start dating and it will be with her. All mysteries of Paul will be known to one girl, but she’ll keep those secrets, and become mysterious herself. And that, too—that, too, Jennie would have.

  “She wrote the music and designed those costumes over the summer,” I said finally. “I was in Europe, you were working. That’s why we didn’t know about it.”

  “Hillary. It’s December. She could have tossed it into the conversation sometime in all these weeks.”

  We got into my car and drove away. I didn’t feel like adding up all the weeks we three had been sliding apart.

  “Do you think that Jennie—” I began.

  “Don’t let’s talk about Jennie,” said Emily fiercely. “I feel like her satellite. She isn’t even here and we can’t have a conversation without her.”

  We drove under the Christmas decorations strung across the main streets, past the windows glittering with Christmas gifts, Christmas lights, and Christmas colors. The radio played Christmas carols. “I’m even jealous of Christmas,” cried Emily suddenly. “Jennie gets Christmas. I have to pretend it isn’t here and that I don’t care and I never wanted it anyhow.”

  I never think of Em being Jewish any more than she ever thinks of me being Christian, because it has nothing to do with anything. I stared at her. She burst out, “I want January, when there’s nothing Jewish and nothing Christian and nobody talks about anything except skiing.”

  “Oh, Emily,” I said desperately, “none of that matters.”

  “It matters terribly. I—” She broke off with a queer little gasp, and I thought, this is Jennie again. Every time Jennie is involved, Emily and I get hurt.

  Winter Friday afternoons my mother packs the station wagon and we head for Vermont. The Awesome Threesome always goes to Killington. “Only a few more weeks ’til skiing weather,” I said. “Maybe we should give Jennie another chance. Maybe it’s only this pageant. Maybe we have a bad attitude. Maybe in January …”

  I got o
n the highway, drove two exits and got off. Drove seven miles north into the country, where Lost Pond Lane creeps up the crest of a rocky hillside, and the houses look past immense oaks and thick glossy rhododendrons down into the lost pond where deer and foxes wander over the frozen marsh. Each house is unique—architect designed, featured in important magazines. Important people don’t live there anymore: just rich ones.

  Jennie’s house was first (of course) and we drove past the Quints’ and up two more to Em’s. Emily gathered her junk. Emily is always burdened by objects: her purse is huge and bulging and her book bag, torn at the seams from the weight of her books, overflows. Sometimes she carries a second bag, too. What a contrast to Jennie. Jennie takes a tiny purse that holds precisely one short comb, one teensy make-up kit, a single Kleenex, a single aspirin, one pencil, one pen, and a miniature change holder into which she stuffs lunch money. Jennie knows she can handle any catastrophe that comes up, whereas Emily worries so much she has to carry her whole life-support system with her.

  How come Jennie can’t be ordinary? Sometimes I yearn for Jennie almost passionately—the way we were; the trio of us, silly, giggly, ordinary little girls who—

  But Jennie will never be ordinary again. And no matter how hard Emily and I work, we will never catch up to her.

  “You watch,” said Emily. “Come New Year’s Eve, we’ll have yet another all-girls slumber party and Jennie will go into New York for some fabulous evening with Paul Classified.”

  “A person like that deserves to be shot,” I agreed.

  Emily managed to get out of the car without dropping anything, and none of the seams of the book bag ripped as she staggered in her door. Our idea of success—getting home without collapse.

  The whole pageant had a strange breathless quality to it.

  It was us down in the auditorium trying to control our jealousy.

  I took my eyes off Jennie’s spectacle on stage and closed my ears to Jennie’s music floating through the dark room. I studied Paul Classified’s profile. The semidarkness suited him: it was the real Paul. He’s not good-looking. It’s his mysterious aura that’s so attractive. Like Jennie. Jennie isn’t beautiful; it’s her brilliance and poise that draw admirers to her: people who would perform for her, work for her, literally sing for their suppers if Jennie Quint asked them to do it.

  Paul was watching Jennie.

  It’s not enough Jennie has the whole school at her feet. Now she’s going to have Paul.

  Paul’s worn the same shirt and sweater for days now. I have this overpowering desire to buy him a new shirt. I have even chosen the shirt: chamois cloth, one of those beautiful dark teal shirts we saw in the Ski Shoppe. I keep dreaming of using a tape measure for an excuse to get close to him. He’d probably ask Jennie if I measured right.

  When Jennie returned to the podium she directed the orchestra as if she had held the baton from infancy, the way other babies hold pacifiers.

  If the kings in their velvet were soaked with sweat, I was soaked with jealousy.

  Jennie is really a medium sort of person to look at. Medium tall, medium weight, medium brown hair, medium brown eyes, medium everything! And yet she sparkles, she glows, she isn’t medium at all! She is spectacular! How can that be?

  Our three families moved onto Lost Pond Lane within a few years of each other, and all the photographs of birthdays and excursions in my albums include Jennie and Hill. But you didn’t know, when you were learning to skate backward or reading out loud the first sexy passages you ever came upon in a book—you didn’t know you were going to be ordinary.

  There is nothing ordinary about Jennie. Nothing. Ever.

  And me—I’m like a rug. Wall-to-wall dull, blends in anywhere.

  A lot of things this junior year have hurt me. I thought I would date boys. I even thought I would date Paul Classified. I thought high grades would come more easily to me and I’d have more poise. But none of it has come true for me, and all of it has come true for Jennie.

  Jennie’s music changed. Shepherds lifted their crooks and were progressing toward the stable. Instead of the thin reedy oboe you usually hear for shepherds, Jennie had chosen three saxophones. The music was wild and jazzy. The auditorium pulsed with the rhythm of finding the babe.

  It was so good. And sitting there, being mean to Jennie, I admitted something to myself—I had been hoping her music would be lousy.

  Went shopping at Lord & Taylor’s. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Went to Bloomingdale’s, to four boutiques, to the Ski Shoppe. Nothing.

  Shopping is my favorite activity but I get sick of looking. I like to buy.

  Miss MacBeth had us fill out a questionnaire about our journals.

  Here is the first question:

  In writing your diary, do you write down

  1. intimate thoughts

  2. a chronology of what happened during your day

  3. description of weather and news headlines

  Nobody wanted to fill out the questionnaire.

  Already the diaries are too private to talk about!

  Emily put her hand over her diary to keep it hidden. So now I know she carries it with her. I carry mine, too. You can’t tell if Jennie Quint carries her diary—she has so many notebooks, you know: the musical she’s writing, the play she’s writing. Then—along with everybody else in the class—I glanced at Paul Classified. We all want to know what Paul’s writing down. I’m putting my money on the weather. In my opinion he’s a room-temperature personality.

  She phoned. I couldn’t believe she could talk in such an ordinary voice. Like an ordinary person. She even sounds the way she dresses: classic preppy. I can see the collar of her white oxford shirt peeking up under her lovely sweater, and the single gold chain proclaiming her success.

  Less than a year ago she destroyed my mother just by walking up to the door, as if she’d tossed a grenade through the window, and here she can call up and want to chat as if we were old buddies.

  After a while I hung up the phone. It was in the middle of one of her sentences. I didn’t slam it down, it just sort of fell back out of my fingers.

  Mom knew who it was. She looked at the phone as if expecting her to crawl out of it. Mom never talks about her. Only about Candy.

  As if Candy disappeared by herself.

  Mom stood by the phone, shivering—you would have thought that we were standing outside in the sleet—but she had already cranked the furnace up to seventy—and what happens when the oil bill comes? What then? “But I tucked Candy in,” whispered Mom. “I read Candy bedtime stories. I pushed her on the swing. I baked cookies with her.”

  I tried to comfort Mom, but the thing is, I don’t know how to comfort somebody. All I can do is stand there. I ice up, even with Mom. What are we going to do? Every day there’s less of me, and every day Mom needs more.

  Plus, we’re out of money.

  Mom can’t seem to hang onto a job.

  I got a job after school. The cardboard box factory off Selleck Street needed a second-shift janitor. I actually enjoyed it. Being busy helps. Even emptying garbage and sweeping floors is good—too bad I can’t empty my life so easily.

  Came home at ten p.m. to find Mom hysterical.

  “I told you I was going to work the afternoon shift, Mom, to earn some money.” But she couldn’t remember that we talked about it. She was absolutely insane with fear that I, too, had abandoned her. She waits for me after school. Stands at the door, staring down the road for my car. She expects me about twenty minutes after school’s out, and today it was seven hours later than that.

  It took me two hours to calm her down enough so we could both go to bed. I never did my homework. Had to wing it on both tests the next day.

  I stared at Jennie during the tests. What is it like to have two parents who

  A) think you’re perfect,

  B) are perfect themselves, and

  C) have enough money to maintain all this perfection in style?

  Jennie wrote the
answers to the test questions as if she were writing a letter to her grandmother: her pencil just flowed along, like her brain, never slowing down, never forgetting.

  I’m not as smart as Jennie. (But then, who is?) But it’s not her brains I envy; it’s her family.

  I think of that Yuppie Yard sometimes—Jared and Emily and Hillary and Jennie—with all their wall-to-wall perfection, and I’m jealous. I’m angry at Jennie because her parents love each other, and love her. Jennie flirts with me, and I walk away, because her life is perfect and my life is not.

  I say to Emily, “Okay, Christmas. Spirit of love and all that. Joy. Hope. The whole thing. Got to be nice to Jennie, Star of the East.”

  Emily says, “Luckily I’m Jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas.”

  We laugh insanely.

  I say, “Spirit of Hanukah?”

  Emily says, “Oh, yeah. Okay, let me write down what you said. Spirit of love, joy, and hope.”

  I say, “Why write it down? You afraid you’ll forget the answer when the test comes?”

  Emily says, “Listen. Just being with Jennie is a test these days.”

  And oh, it’s true. We’re talking a girl who no sooner finishes three performances of her own original musical than she gets A plus in all exams and demonstrates an original laser project in physics.

  Emily says, “Stay calm, Hillary, two more days ’til Christmas break.”

  “Let’s call it a Jennie break,” I tell her.

  We laugh: and The Awesome Twosome links arms and walks down the hall.

  Every time a teacher announces that she is truly impressed with me, I lose a friend.

  In physics we had to turn in our projects. I’ve been doing that experiment with the laser, and the teacher had me demonstrate it to the class. And Emily said, “A laser? You can’t be a normal person and look up something boring in a library book? You have to come up with some dynamite experiment involving a laser?”