He came up for air, kissed her neck, and murmured, “Hey, Madison, you sure are sweet.…”
They kissed again, really getting into it. This is it, Mads thought. I’m finally getting some experience—with Sean’s friend Alex! It’s not Sean, but it’s close.
He rubbed her back and started inching his hand toward her chest. Mads heard a sound, a knocking sound. She ignored it, and Alex didn’t seem to hear it either. But then it came again, knuckle on glass, louder this time. Oh no. Someone was knocking on the window. Please don’t let it be Gilbert, Mads prayed.
That prayer, at least, was answered.
“Hey, Alex!” It was Sean. “Open up! Don’t steam up the windows too much!”
Mads and Alex broke apart. Alex rolled down the window. “Hey, man, what are you doing in there?” Sean asked. He was with the blond girl and Barton and Mo. He nodded at Mads. “Hey, kid.”
He noticed her!
“Nothing,” Alex said. “What’s up?”
“Jane wants to leave, and I’m starving,” Sean said.
“They’ve got nothing to eat here but that lame pizza. Let’s go get a burger or something.”
“All right,” Alex said. Sean and the others opened the car doors and started piling in.
Mads couldn’t believe it. “You’re hungry?”
“Yeah. Aren’t you?”
Food was the last thing on her mind. She climbed out of the car to straighten her clothes. Mo jumped into the front seat. There was no room left in the car for her.
“Do you want to come with us?” Alex asked, starting the car.
Mads looked for a spot in the car, but it was full. The only way she’d fit was if she sat on someone’s lap. And no one offered.
“Thanks anyway,” she said.
“Okay. Well, see you around.”
Sean sat in the backseat with his arm draped over Jane’s shoulders. “Hey, kid, see you at my party next Saturday, all right?”
Party? He was inviting her to a party? At his very own house?
“Sure, see you then!” she called.
Alex drove away, music blaring, leaving Mads to go back to the dance alone.
Had Alex just dumped her for a hamburger? She knew boys were always hungry but this was ridiculous.
She thought of the Dating Game and their IHD thesis. What had made them think that boys were more sexcrazed than girls? She couldn’t imagine herself ever turning away from a boy she liked just to get some food. Well, maybe for her dad’s homemade strawberry ice cream…no, not even for that. Anyway, she’d share it with the boy.
Who cared about Alex anyway? Sean himself had invited her, Madison Markowitz, tenth grader, to his party next Saturday night. He actually wanted her to be there! She was making progress! Her plan was working!
She found Gilbert waiting faithfully for her in the auditorium. He was holding two plates, one with a slice of pizza and one with a pile of little salty rolls. He offered her a plate. “Garlic knot?”
17
The Velvet Clown Painting
To: linaonme
From: Your daily horoscope
HERE IS TODAY’S HOROSCOPE: CANCER: You’re feeling brave and bold. You’re capable of anything right now. That’s what everyone is afraid of.
Lina stared at the inkblot test they used on the Dating Game site. What did it look like to her? A pizza crust with teethmarks on it. Was that the answer of a sex-crazed person? It might not seem so at first, but Lina would have to say yes.
At the dance she saw Ramona take a leftover pizza crust off Dan’s plate after he dropped it in the trash. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind—the bitten pizza crust, his teethmarks and the little bits of tomato sauce left on it…Ramona had slipped it into her purse. What could the Dan Shulman Cult possibly do with it? And yet, deep down, she understood why they’d want it. Ugh, she was so pathetic!
She still had the poem she’d written, “Pedantry.” She was working up the courage to deliver it to him. At his house. If, as a bonus, her insatiable curiosity about what the inside of his house looked like was satisfied, well, that was incidental.
It was Saturday, the day after the dance. She sealed the poem in an envelope, got on her bike, and rode toward school. Dan lived a mile or two past the school in an old residential area lined with small bungalows. She’d ridden her bike through there before, just checking things out. She knew Dan’s address by heart—it was printed in the school directory.
She stopped in front of his house, a tiny, one-story, pale green cottage set in a small cluster of trees. She straddled her bike and took it in. A cracked cement walk led to the front door, which was framed by shrubs on both sides. A beat-up old Honda sat in the driveway under a carport awning. There wasn’t a garage.
Lina was suddenly paralyzed with anxiety. What would he do when he saw her? What would she say? Oh my god, what if someone was there with him? One of his friends? Or a girl? Or his mother? Did he live with someone? Why did her brain have to wait until this moment to think of that?
Maybe he wouldn’t be home, and she could just slip the poem under his door or leave it in the mailbox. Part of her desperately wished for him to be out, but a stronger part wanted to see him, to test his reaction to her.
She walked her bike up to the door and leaned it against the black iron rail that marked the four front steps. In her mind she practiced what to say. Hi, Dan, I was just riding my bike around and…Hello, surprised to see me?…Uh, Dan, did you realize you’re the object of a goth-girl cult which at this very moment is probably trying to cast a love spell on you using a discarded pizza crust? Just thought I’d give you a heads-up…Ugh, nothing seemed right!
She took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. She waited and listened. She heard a chair scrape across a floor. Someone was definitely home.
The door opened and there he stood. Dressed for a Saturday in old-man slacks and a button-down thrift-store shirt. He really was committed to his style.
“Lina!” He sounded surprised, and why wouldn’t he be? “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”
“Hi, Dan. Everything’s fine. I—uh—”
“Here, come on in.” He stepped aside and opened the door wider so she could come in. She couldn’t believe she was about to step into his house. She put her foot on the little rag rug in the doorway. Another step and she stood on the wooden floor of the tiny entrance. A kitchen with a breakfast bar was just to the right, and beyond that a small living room/dining room. She couldn’t get much sense of the furniture, other than the velvet paint-by-numbers clown that hung over a rickety red table in the hall.
A pained look—fear, consternation, regret, Lina wasn’t sure—crossed Dan’s face suddenly, as if he’d realized he’d just made a mistake. “So, what brings you here?” he asked again.
“I wanted to give you this.” Lina handed him the envelope, carefully sealed with Dan Shulman written in her best handwriting on the front. He took it and stared at it.
“Oh, okay. Thanks.”
“It’s a poem,” Lina explained. “For Inchworm. I wanted to make sure you had a chance to read it. I don’t trust those school mailboxes, you know, anybody can go through them and read anything you put in there—”
“Yeah, you’re right, no security at that school,” Dan said. “Well, Lina, it sure is nice to see you. I’ll read this right away and let you know what I think when I see you at school on Monday. Okay?”
He seemed in a big hurry to get her out of the house. She peered over his shoulder in search of a sign that someone was there, but she didn’t sense the presence of another person. Dub, she thought, finally realizing what was bothering him. He’s afraid to have a student alone with him in his house! Especially a girl student! Even more especially a girl student be likes, she convinced herself.
“So, again, I promise I’ll read this and I won’t show it to anyone else unless you say it’s okay.” Dan moved his hands toward her shoulders as if he were going to gently move her towar
d the door, then suddenly stopped as if he’d thought better of it. He rubbed his head instead. A bead of sweat had popped up on his hairline.
Lina didn’t want to leave, but she knew she should let him off the hook. “Thank you, Dan.”
“Come see me on Monday,” he said. “And we’ll talk about it.”
“Okay.” She went out and picked up her bike. “Bye.”
“Bye.” He watched her all the way down the walk, watched her get on her bike and waved as she pedaled away. When she glanced back he was gone and the door was closed.
He was nervous, she thought. That could be good or bad or have nothing to do with her. She decided to consider it good. And what would he think after he read her poem? If he wanted her to make the next move, the poem was it.
All right, Dan, she thought. The ball’s in your court now.
18
Sex Tips for Girls
To: linaonme
From: Your daily horoscope
HERE IS TODAY’S HOROSCOPE: CANCER: Today doesn’t look too bad, Cancer, as long as you don’t mind a little pain, and maybe some heartbreak to go along with it.
Hey, look,” Lina called from her desk, where she was sorting the latest Dating Game questionnaires and making matches. “Autumn wants us to match her with somebody!”
“Let’s put her with Gilbert,” Mads said. “He needs someone to take his mind off me.”
“I’m sorry, Mads, but I can’t do that,” Lina said. “It goes against the Matchmarker’s Code. ‘First, do no harm.’”
“That’s impossible,” Mads said. “Harm happens. Risk is built into the whole idea of matchmaking. That’s the fun of it.”
Lina, Holly, and Mads sat in Lina’s big bedroom, with its reading nook and white carpet and windows looking out over the bay. Lina’s room had its own bathroom and even a sliding door that led to a private little patio. Her house was elegant. That’s what Mads thought, anyway. No pesky brothers or sisters. So clean and animal-free. Surrounded by trees on three sides, overlooking the water in the back, it was a sleek modern house made of blond wood and glass, all on one level but much larger than it looked.
“If there’s a Matchmaker’s Code, there ought to be a Blogger’s Code, too,” Holly said. “No spreading lies about your classmates on your blog, Miss Nuclear Autumn. She deserves whatever creep she gets. Try Jake.”
“Come on, just one date with Gilbert ought to cure her,” Mads said.
“Gilbert won’t go out with her, and you know it,” Lina said. “He loves you and only you.”
“Lucky me. Gilbert likes me because he’s the only person in school who has less of a love life than I have.”
“Stop exaggerating, Mads,” Holly said. “You’re too obsessed with this experience thing. What’s the big deal? Some people have fooled around more than other people. So what?”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Mads said. “You’re the Boobmeister. No one ever refuses to go out with you because you’re too young. My self-esteem is taking a beating here. I put myself out there, I try to sex up my image, and I get nothing. Guys would rather have a snack than make out with me. Thank god Sean invited me to his party! If he hadn’t, I might be hurting right now.”
She opened a container of vanilla yogurt and spooned some into her mouth. “I wonder what we’ll talk about at Sean’s party,” she said.
“Oh, it will be deep,” Holly said. “Sean and his friends are probably this close to discovering an alternative energy source.” She paused and added, “I wonder if Rob will ask me to go to the party with him.”
After the dance Friday night they drove to Harvey’s Carry-Out for milkshakes, and then Rob dropped her off at home. They kissed good-night but didn’t fool around or anything. It was late, anyway, but Holly wondered if Jake’s teasing had turned Rob off or freaked him out somehow. Or maybe he was just waiting for a better time to pounce on her.
Holly reached for a Cosmo lying on the floor near Lina’s bed. The cover promised to reveal “How to Drive a Guy Wild.”
“Ooh, I read that,” Mads said when she saw the magazine in Holly’s hand. She plopped onto the bed beside Holly, and Lina sat down, too. “There’s some weird stuff in there. Look at this one—‘Grow your fingernails long and trail them down his back in sexy swirls.’ I don’t know, boys always seem to be too much in a hurry for that kind of thing.”
“Maybe when they’re older they’re not so rushed,” Lina said.
“‘Put chocolate or whipped cream all over your body and let him lick it off,’” Holly read. “That would be pretty messy in a car.”
Mads laughed. “There’s that food thing again. They should recommend putting hamburger patties all over your body and letting them use you as a plate.”
‘“Feet are sexy,’” Lina read. ‘“Lie with your feet near his head and let him lick your toes.’”
“Look at these Kissing Tips,” Mads said. ‘“Run your tongue along his teeth. Try nibbling on his lips to really make him go wild.’”
“Nibble on his lips?” Lina said. “Do you really think that works?”
Mads shrugged. “Who knows?”
“I don’t think I’d want someone nibbling on my lips,” Lina said. “There’s something rabbity about it. But I guess if it was the right guy, I wouldn’t mind.”
She couldn’t keep herself from imagining Dan nibbling on her lips, but the image was too potent for her and she quickly snuffed it out with a piece of chocolate. He must have read her poem by now. What did he think of it? More important, what would he do about it?
“So. About your poem.”
Lina sat in the Inchworm office on the other side of the desk from Dan. He had her poem in front of him. Her sweaty right hand clutched at her sweaty left hand, but they were both so wet they slipped and slid between her fingers like clay.
“It—it’s a good poem,” Dan said. Lina waited for more, but he just stared at the poem and didn’t look up and didn’t say anything. So she said, “Thank you.”
“I’d really love to publish your work in Inchworm,” Dan said. “I’m sure Carrie and Ramona and the other editors would agree.”
Ha, Lina thought.
“But I haven’t shown them this poem, and I’m not going to. I think you understand why. Um, if we published this, it might cause a lot of, um, talk, and um, that’s not really what you want, is it?”
He was as nervous as she was, that was clear. But what did it mean? Lina felt a surge of confidence. She had the power to make him nervous!
But she realized, if she was really being honest with herself, that she hadn’t written the poem with publication in mind. She’d written it for him, and only for him. How extremely wise of him to understand that.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to cause anyone any trouble, if that’s what you mean.”
His face cracked into an uncomfortable grin. “Right. So, I’ll give this back to you, for you to keep.” He handed her the poem. “You’re a good writer, Lina, it’s not that. But, um, I guess, you know, this should probably stay just between us.”
She took the poem back. On the bottom of the page, in his red grading pen, Dan had started to write a note to her. Dear Lina, it said, but then he’d scratched it out.
Dear Lina. Was he just using the conventional letter greeting? Or was she really dear to him?
“So, you keep that, and write more poems!” Dan said. “Only, um, not about me. I mean, you can write about anything you want, freedom of speech and all that, but you, you know, probably shouldn’t use my, um, name.”
So he understood. She knew it was really kind of obvious, the device she’d used, where the first letter of every line spelled out “I love Dan.” But it could be any Dan. Dan Morgenstern, the senior class president. Danny Dortmunder, a nondescript dweeb in her class. Danny DeVito, even, although that was a long shot. But, no. He knew who she meant. Dan Shulman. The one and only true Dan.
“I understand.” She stood up to go.
“Good. G
ood. I’m glad.” He seemed relieved. “Okay. So, everything’s all right then?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, um, we understand each other?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good. All right. See you later, Lina.”
She left, the poem rattling in her trembling hands. Now she understood. Of course. This was dangerous for him. He couldn’t admit his feelings for her openly. He liked her. She was pretty sure he liked her. But he couldn’t come out and say it. So he tiptoed around it. He used euphemisms like “I think you’re a good writer” and “This is just between us.” Just between us, like two lovers with a secret!
So that was the way it would stay, a secret, for as long as she could stand it.
19
What Color Is His Toothbrush?
To: mad4u
From: Your daily horoscope
HERE IS TODAY’s HOROSCOPE: VIRGO: People will find you intoxicating today. Time to sober them up.
Are you sure I don’t look too kooky?” Mads asked as she climbed out of the yellow VW. Saturday night and Sean’s big Victorian house was already hopping, lights blazing, cars lining the street, kids stumbling across the lawn. From the sheer number of kids and the loudness of the music, Mads knew Sean’s parents had to be away for the weekend.
Mads was dressed for the party in red high-heeled pumps, her lowest-riding jeans, and a stretchy red wrap top. Nothing weird about that; Holly was similarly dressed in boots, jeans, and a zip-up sweater. Lina wore a mod orange thrift-store mini dress, which drove her mother crazy. Sylvia didn’t believe in wearing other people’s used clothes.
It wasn’t her clothes Mads was worried about, but her hair. To jazz up her look Mads had tried once more—or rather, let Audrey try—to give her fine hair a little volume. It puffed around her head like a black cloud.
“You look really cute,” Lina said. Mads frowned. Cute was too easy for her. “I mean hot,” Lina said. “You look hot.”
Mads glanced at Holly for confirmation. “Hot,” Holly reiterated. And she did look hot, except for the hair. Holly got her brush out of her purse and tried to mat Mads’ hair down a little.
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