Holly in Love

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Do you remember a few weeks ago when Grey came to pick me up after school in a silver Corvette?”

  Vividly. The silver Corvette had been absolutely beautiful. Just to be mean I wanted to say, no, I can’t remember, how boring. “Yes,” I said. I thought, Come on, Holly, practice lying.

  “It wasn’t Grey’s car, you know. He has a Chevrolet.”

  It was not like Hope to make Grey sound ordinary. Perhaps Hope was breaking up with Grey in order to date the silver Corvette.

  “The guy with the Corvette is a fraternity brother of Grey’s,” said Hope. “A really gorgeous man. His name is Jonathan Byerly.”

  “Oh.” So now Hope had two handsome, rich college men on her string. Really, it was depressing. How come nobody ever wanted old Holly Carroll? I had lots of fine qualities, I was sure of it. Untapped gold mine, that’s me, I told myself, and congratulated myself on finally telling a good lie.

  “Jonathan noticed you at the bus stop,” said Hope, her voice getting timid again. “He thought you had beautiful hair. You were wearing it in one very long French braid that day, down the middle of your back, and Jonathan said it reflected red highlights in the sun. He wondered who you were, and I told him a little bit about you.”

  I thanked God that Hope knew nothing of my dollhouse. I hadn’t worn the single long braid since Christopher said it made me look like Heidi and all I needed were a mountain, some goats, and a cheese.

  “Jonathan,” said Hope, “would like to date you. He wanted to know if I would fix it up.”

  If she had thrown herself down the nonexistent stairs of her ranch house, she couldn’t have surprised me more. I looked at her searchingly. She had a new expression on her face. Not superior but hesitant.

  “Jonathan said you sounded like the first interesting girl he’d heard of in this town,” said Hope.

  I could not imagine what Hope had said to make Jonathan think that. Clearly, Hope could not imagine what she had said either.

  “Jonathan’s on a full scholarship in the premed program,” said Hope. “He hates northern New Hampshire but he has to be here.”

  Jonathan was a brilliant premed student who hated cold climates and drove a silver Corvette? Had I asked only the day before for perfection?

  “I told him I’d fix it up,” said Hope, and then I understood her timidity. She was afraid I’d refuse and then this Jonathan and her Grey would be annoyed with her. Refuse? I thought. Am I crazy?

  I considered Jonathan. “If he’s on scholarship, how come he can afford a Corvette?”

  “He can’t. That’s his aunt’s. His aunt is Dr. Chambliss, you know. In the physics department. The lady who won that prize last year for whatever it was.”

  I remembered. My mother spoke of Dr. Chambliss with awe and respect. Dr. Cham-bliss was the kind of woman my mother would like me to become. It seemed unlikely. “Jonathan wants to date me,” I said. It was so impossible I couldn’t even get excited about it.

  “He does,” said Hope, finding it difficult to believe. “He wants to meet you in the Pewter Pot after school.”

  The Pewter Pot serves fifty kinds of muffins, bagels, and doughnuts with coffee, hot chocolate, or milkshakes. It’s a very crowded, very hot little hole in the wall that is a college tradition. All the alums hang out there when they come for reunions. You don’t go to the Pew without a date, and usually you don’t go there at all unless you’re in college or an alum. The Pew is silently acknowledged to be off limits to high school kids.

  The Pew.

  With Jonathan the brilliant premed student and his silver Corvette.

  But I was grounded. I maintained silence and tried to think of a way around this problem.

  “Jonathan is a super person,” said Hope. “I’m not kidding, Holly. He’s fantastic.”

  Hope had very high standards in men. If she said he was fantastic, he was fantastic.

  “What year is he in school?” I said, stalling. I absolutely hated discussing my father and our family rules with a person like Hope, who seemed to have neither family nor rules.

  “A junior. Like Grey. He’s twenty-one.”

  My father would go up in smoke. His daughter? Dating a twenty-one-year-old college man with a silver Corvette? Even being Dr. Chambliss’s nephew would not make up for being twenty-one.

  And I had to admit that twenty-one sounded pretty old even to me. I didn’t like Grey, cute and suave though he was. Why would I like his pal Jonathan? On the other hand, a man whose heart began to churn at the mere sight of sunlight on my brown braid was not a man to be discarded lightly.

  “Holly,” wailed Hope, “I promised Jonathan I would arrange it.”

  I had always wanted to be in the position of depriving Hope of something she wanted. Now I was there, and it didn’t turn out to be as much fun as I’d anticipated.

  All day long I thought about Jonathan instead of classwork.

  He sounded like an illustration for a magazine article on eligible men. Maybe Hope had made him up and this was an intricate plot to humiliate me.

  For this Jonathan, I actually flunked a Spanish quiz. Me, Holly Carroll, who gets straight 100s in Spanish. The teacher wanted to know if I was ill. She even offered, rather anxiously, to give me a make-up. I just smiled at her weakly and tried to look ill and deserving of a make-up without actually lying about it.

  My week was too full of lies.

  “Okay,” I said to Hope. “I can miss the bus and not be too late. I’ll meet Jonathan on the steps after school. That way he can drive me home and we can talk, and he can see if he wants to approach my father.”

  “Approach your father!” snorted Hope. “You make it sound like Jane Eyre or something. Bringing your father in is crazy. You know he’ll say no, so why even get him involved in this?”

  Every girl except me seemed to be able to run her own life without bothering about parental approval. It really was beginning to get to me. College, I thought grimly. In less than a year I’ll be away at college and I can make my own decisions.

  I wondered what Jonathan would be like. He’d have to like my shining hair an awful lot to face a minister and beg to be allowed to date his daughter. I pictured that.

  A suitor on bended knee. Neat.

  Eight

  JONATHAN.

  Well, there turned out to be only one adjective to apply to Jonathan, and it was not one of Hope’s.

  Yes, he was handsome. Yes, he was definitely driving a silver Corvette. Yes, I knew by the books piled in the backseat that he was a premed student.

  But he was also old.

  He looked as if I could babysit for his children. Maybe he was only twenty-one, but if so, he was a very mature twenty-one. He made me feel like a Brownie Scout with my camp director. I could accept a ride home with the man, but a date! I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  Lord, let me think of the right things to say, I prayed. Let me get out of this without calling him Mr. Byerly.

  “What’s the matter with you?” hissed Hope in my ear. “Holly, he’s a dream to look at.”

  This was true. A full-color poster of Jonathan and his Corvette would be nice to have on my bedroom wall, just to daydream over. But in real life, dark and smooth and fashionable…Jonathan looked like someone my mother would want a poster of.

  “Hello, Holly,” said Jonathan Byerly in a middle-aged voice. “What a pleasure to meet you at last.”

  It was going to be impossible to call him Jonathan. What he was, was Mr. Byerly. “Hi,” I said. I blushed. I had never in my whole life felt so young. I even had ribbons in my hair. I still had braces on my lower jaw where you couldn’t see them, but they marked me “Kid—still getting repairs for adulthood.”

  “We can get acquainted while I drive you home,” said Jonathan. He made getting acquainted sound like an act requiring a cup of tea and a butler. “Hope was telling me about your father. He sounds quite medieval.”

  I could hardly tell Jonathan that I thought he sounded pretty
medieval himself. I smiled in a sickly fashion, and Hope sort of shoveled me into my side of the Corvette and glared at me very quickly when Jonathan was getting in the other side, just so I’d know I’d better shape up, and fast.

  Shape up? I thought hysterically. Into what? An old lady?

  We pulled away from the curb, and I tried to think of one thing to say to a man who seemed the right age to be the principal of the school. Nothing whatsoever came to mind.

  Jonathan gave me a lovely smile—he, too, had worn braces at some time in the distant, foggy past; it was a perfect smile—and launched into a long description of the nasty weather we’d been experiencing…in Spanish.

  Now, after four years and straight A’s, I am pretty fluent. But he sounded so affected. I could not bring myself to respond in Spanish. Lamely, feeling utterly stupid, I said—in English—“Yes, it is pretty cold.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “Thought you were a Spanish wizard,” he said.

  “Oh. Well, I guess I do get good grades. I, ah, I guess I don’t chat much in Spanish, though.”

  We had driven one block, and I felt as if I had been in the front seat of that car forever. My cheeks were burning and my stomach was clenched.

  “Where do you live?” he said.

  I gave him the worst directions imaginable. I said, “Well, you know, off by the church. You know, where, um, the red light is? Except it’s green now. Well, yellow. Turn there. Turn left, I mean. Yes, there, right.”

  Bad enough to be seventeen with this guy. I sounded about three.

  Jonathan cleared his throat. “I hear you’re not much of a sports fan.”

  “No,” I said and scoured my brain for something to add, but since I wasn’t a sports fan I had nothing to say about it.

  Jonathan tried again. “Given much thought to where you’ll go to college next year?”

  “Uh, well, yes, I guess I have. As long as it’s hot, you know. I mean, I don’t care about the college. As long as I’m warm, you know.” I struggled to make myself sound sensible. “I get cold easily,” I said.

  “You’re picking a college based on whether you can get warm there?” said Jonathan.

  It sounded insane, when he summarized it for me. “Well,” I said. I found myself playing with my braid. I haven’t done that since elementary school when I used to suck on the tips.

  By now we were at my house. Jonathan rolled very slowly up to the curb and let the motor idle for a moment, as though he were trying to decide whether he should park or not. Finally he turned the motor off. Don’t let him come in, I thought. Don’t let him talk to my father. I’d rather be struck by lightning.

  Jonathan handed out yet another topic of conversation. I took a deep breath and tried to sound interesting and logical and sounded stupid and empty instead. I prayed to God to let me think of something to say, but evidently He was off feeding the poor.

  “Well,” I said, finally. “Um. Thanks for driving me home.”

  Jonathan was looking at me incredulously, and slowly his expression changed to amusement. I knew exactly what he was laughing at. Himself. For wasting time on some silly little girl just because her hair shone in the sun.

  I will never never never never wear my hair like this again, I thought. “Bye,” I said frantically, and I fled up to the porch. I didn’t even have to fumble for my key because Christopher had gotten home already and was opening the door to see who in the world had driven me home in a silver Corvette. Christopher gaped. “Holly, what—”

  “I never want to talk about it. Ever.”

  I shoved past Christopher, who stood in the doorway staring out at Jonathan as if the man were a zoo exhibit, and Jonathan, shaking his head and smiling to himself, drove slowly away.

  I sagged against the hallway wallpaper and thought about what Jonathan would say to Grey, who would report it to Hope, who would tell the entire word. It was enough to make a girl sick.

  I fixed myself a terrific snack to make myself feel better. I think food is the answer to half the world’s problems. Leftover cheesecake with a scoop of canned cherry pie filling on top and a glass of ginger ale can unclench even the ulcerating stomach.

  I let the first mouthful sit in my mouth and slide slowly down my throat, and I told myself I would live through this; this, too, would pass; eventually the memory of Jonathan would be nothing but a dim blur.

  The phone rang. If it was Kate wanting to know who that was in the silver Corvette, I would just change the subject. I had another bite of cheesecake.

  “Holly,” said Christopher, in a teasing, singsong voice. “It’s your very dear friend Jamie.”

  I swallowed my cheesecake. “What is?”

  “On the telephone,” sang Christopher. He dropped his singsong and began smirking. “Got a crush on you, doesn’t he, Holly? I think I’ll take the bus tomorrow instead of riding with Josh. I got things to say to Jamie Winter.”

  Perhaps I should forget about waiting for college to get away from all this. I should quit school now, take a bus to Miami, and find a bilingual secretarial job.

  I walked silently past my leering brother and took up the phone. “Hello?” I said, trying to keep my voice utterly blank of meaning.

  “Hi, Holly. Jamie. You forget the lie detector test?”

  “The lie detector test,” I repeated.

  “Holly, you’re on the list for testing at four-fifteen, and it’s four-oh-one now. I’m going in in a moment, and I thought I’d call you because there are at least ten people here hoping you’ll be late and they can have your slot for getting the fifty dollars.”

  Some crush, I thought. I glared at my worthless brother. “Thanks,” I said to Jamie. “I’m on my way.”

  I tugged on my coat and scarf, refused to make explanations to Christopher, shoved another bit of cheesecake in my mouth, pulled my cap on and tucked my offensive braid up into the cap, and ate the last bit of cherry pie filling. Then I gulped the last of the ginger ale, wiped my mouth on a napkin, pulled on boots and mittens, flung open the back door, and tore off through the yard. “That’s what I like to see!” yelled Christopher after me. “A girl in the grips of true passionate love. Running all the way to see Jamie!”

  “Christopher!” I screamed back at him. “You shut up!” Our backyard is adjacent to the campus, and the Psych building is only a few blocks west. I lurched and leaped through the treacherous paths students had tramped into the old, crusty snow. I put Jonathan, dates, younger men, older men, and hot weather campuses out of my mind and concentrated on my fibbing skills.

  Nine

  WHEN I GOT THERE, panting and gasping for breath, Jamie had already gone in for testing. I flung myself into a chair and began the winter clothes stripping process. Actually, I don’t wear nearly as many clothes as I’d like, because people tease me if I wear, for example, three scarves. I do wear two pairs of socks, though. Nobody can see those. I just look as if I have fat feet.

  “Holly Carroll?” said the tester in a dry, middle-aged voice.

  For one awful minute I thought it was Jonathan, but it was merely the voice that was cloned. The tester was plain and ordinary. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “This way, please.”

  The lie detector test was fun. After they attached little electrodes to various places on my body, they showed me three small objects: a key, a nickel, and a paper clip. “You’re going to steal one of these,” said the college boy who seemed to be running things. He looked much younger than Jonathan. Perhaps Jonathan had lied about his age and was really thirty-six. Making Jonathan thirty-six made me feel much better. “When we leave you alone in here,” the boy went on, “take one of the objects and put it in your shoe. Place the other two back in the box and close the lid. That way we, your testers, cannot tell which object you stole. Then we’re going to come back to ask a long series of questions. The first set will be things like, What is the capital of the United States? and, Are you eleven feet tall? You’ll lie to some and tell the truth to others, and
we’ll see what your pattern looks like.”

  He showed me a needle gently coasting over some graph paper.

  “Next, we begin the real questioning,” he said. He seemed totally bored. I wondered if I was a boring subject, or if the experiment bored him, or if it was just the proper tone of voice to take when dealing with potential thieves. “We’ll be asking all sorts of questions, in an attempt to discover which of these three objects—the key, the nickel, or the paper clip—you actually stole. Keep in mind the fifty dollars, now, and remember that it is to your advantage to lie successfully, just as if you were a criminal risking prison. Right?”

  “Right,” I said, feeling rather excited.

  When I was alone in the room, I settled on the paper clip to steal. My mother is always accusing me of stealing paper clips from her desk anyhow, so I thought perhaps my subconscious would not regard this as a theft and my heart would be totally relaxed when they asked me about stealing the paper clip.

  Oh, you’re such a crafty little kid, I said to myself. Even if you can’t speak in complete sentences around twenty-one-year-old men in Corvettes.

  “Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester.

  “Yes,” I lied cheerfully, picturing my fifty dollars.

  “Do you have the key in your shoe?” he said.

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  “Sit still,” he said irritably, totally unaffected by my lovely, shiny brown hair. Except for my parents and Jonathan, nobody ever had been impressed by that hair. Perhaps they all had vision problems. I decided not to worry about old Jonathan. As for Hope’s teasing, that would be nothing new. I’d lived with that since the beginning of time. Or at least, it felt like the beginning of time.

  “Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester again.

  “Yes,” I lied again. I decided against buying miniatures. I wanted a new pair of gold earrings. Heart shapes on hoops, like Lydia had.