Holly in Love

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Okay,” said the tester, “thanks, Miss Carroll. All done.”

  “How’d I do?” I said eagerly.

  He smiled at me. “Don’t have a criminal career,” he said. “You’re as transparent as glass. May I have the paper clip back for the next volunteer, please?”

  I walked slowly out of the test room, seeing myself in a new light. Transparent as glass. How unattractive. Jamie was sitting there, alone in a room. All would-be untested thieves had given up and gone home. “Hi,” I said gloomily.

  “How’d you do?” he asked me, which I thought was quite unnecessary. If I’d won the fifty dollars I’d have been doing pirouettes.

  “Lost.”

  He grinned at me—not a superior grin, but a bubbly, eager grin that made him look like both Kate and Christopher—an unlikely combination if I ever heard of one. I couldn’t help grinning back. “You beat it, didn’t you?” I said.

  He beamed at me. “Sure did. I stole the nickel, and they were convinced I took the key.”

  “Fantastic! You’re rich! How did you do it? Did you have a technique, or are you a natural born liar?” I said.

  “I had a technique. Although I put the nickel in my shoes, I kept saying to myself, Stealing keys! Disgusting. Low. Immoral. That’s a crime, James Winter, stealing keys, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I convinced my heart, I guess, because the lie detector proclaimed that I actually had stolen the key!”

  I shook hands with him. “I’m glad to know somebody devious and mysterious,” I said. “I myself rated transparent as glass.”

  We walked out of the Psych building together, laughing and talking. “What are you going to do with the fifty dollars?” I said enviously.

  “I really don’t know for sure. Want to break it by having a muffin with me at the Pew?”

  “I thought the Pew was college territory,” I said.

  Jamie laughed. “The Pew is in the muffin business. They wouldn’t care if vampires sat there as long as they bought muffins. I go to the Pew all the time. Other people like French fries best, or pizza, or ice cream bars, or candy. I like muffins with butter.”

  “That’s not a very fitting food for a successful thief,” I said. “Corn muffins are too tame.”

  “I usually eat blueberry. Although apple, and cheese, and bran muffins are good, too. As long as I can butter them. I belong to the slathering school of thought,” Jamie explained. “If it comes out of an oven it needs butter.”

  “A cholesterol fiend,” I said. “Do you know I’ve been to the Pew only twice in my life, and I’ve lived here all my seventeen years?”

  He shook his head in amazement. “That’s why you’re so slim, then,” he said. “You’ve never discovered the joys of butter melting on the Pew muffins.”

  Me. Slim. In fact—so slim, was what he’d said. I liked it so much I no longer wanted butter on my muffin, so I could stay slim.

  We walked the long way, so we’d be on cleared sidewalks and not have to churn through the crusty snow and ice. Jamie began telling me some of his thoughts on spending the fifty dollars. His hobby, it turned out, was steam engines. He had small steam engines mounted on boards to run miniature trains and light bulbs and whistles, and right now he had his eye on an antique threshing machine that had a steam engine.

  “A threshing machine?” I said, sure I had misunderstood. “A real one? As big as a house?”

  “Well, they’re not quite that big, but yes, a real one. The owner doesn’t want it. In fact, he hasn’t wanted it for forty years. For fifty dollars I could get it towed to my backyard and begin a lifetime project of restoring it to its former glory.”

  It was difficult to imagine a threshing machine having any glory, former or present. Bringing an antique threshing machine home? One presumably covered with rust and filth and having a cracked boiler and missing some parts? “What will your parents say?” I wanted to know. I didn’t know Jamie’s parents at all. They attended church approximately once every two years, and Mr. Winter frowned steadily for the occasion, but whether he frowned at all things or just church, I didn’t know.

  “They’d probably like it even less than they did when I got a steam tractor. My tractor’s a little on the decrepit side. Every time I plow the garden, my mother’s terrified the boiler’s going to blow up in my face and leave me blind and scarred for life.” He said this nonchalantly, as if discussing a hangnail. “What will your father say?” I asked.

  Jamie looked away from me and his face tightened. “Nothing very nice,” he said after a bit. His sweet, buoyant voice sounded almost dead. I saw Mr. Winter frowning, frowning about everything, never saying anything nice, and I shivered slightly. “What will you do with the threshing machine after you get it? Thresh?” I said lightly. “I mean, you don’t have a farm.”

  He paused for another second, and I could almost see him placing his father on a shelf. “I’ll just fix it up. I like steam engines. It’s a nice, simple, sensible form of energy, and it makes such a satisfying rhythmic noise, too.” We discussed collecting. I had a thimble collector in the family (my grandmother) and a Coca-Cola collector living next door, but I had not known there were also old tool, old machine, old farm implement, and even old computer collectors. Jamie himself preferred steam engine collecting. “What’s your hobby?” he said, implying that all interesting people had fascinating hobbies and therefore he knew that I would, too.

  We were already in the Pew, seated and ordering, and I had hardly noticed the college boys littering the place. With Jonathan I had been so embarrassed I could hardly move my lips, but with Jamie I was just enjoying myself tremendously. Of course, Jamie wasn’t a date. And he was also just a junior who didn’t matter particularly. That helped.

  I had one sick moment when I imagined I saw Jonathan in the back booth of the Pew, but it wasn’t Jonathan, just some middle-aged man with the same color jacket, and I breathed easier. I told Jamie about my dollhouse and the furniture I’d made for it and the almost-finished Christmas tree I was painting and the gazebo I was still sketching out on graph paper.

  Jamie quizzed me a bit, to be sure I really did know what a lathe was for and when to use a jigsaw, and his eyes stopped blinking and for a moment he stared at me narrowly, as if rethinking his position on me.

  I buttered another blueberry muffin and savored my hot chocolate. I could see how a person could develop an affection for the Pew food.

  “Oh, no!” I said. “Oh, Jamie, I’m grounded! For going to see that movie I told you about! I’m not supposed to be here. Dad was so upset with me for betraying his trust, as he put it. I’ve got to fly home.”

  Jamie just smiled. “I’ll go home with you and make excuses. Your father and I are old friends. I really don’t think he’d mind that we had a muffin together at the Pew for half an hour.”

  “You and Dad are old friends?”

  “Sure. He’s good to talk to.”

  I stared at Jamie. “About what?”

  “Oh, you know. Life. Truth. That kind of thing. How about it? Want me to walk you home?”

  It was one thing to meet by coincidence at the Psych building. One thing to celebrate Jamie’s win at the Pew. It was something else again to walk home together as the dusk darkened the streets and the chill went into the bone and you naturally walked closer. Christopher didn’t even like Jamie, for some reason, and would jump to conclusions and be ready and willing to tease us forever. And there was Hope, who would have it in for me already after the Jonathan fiasco and would love to get her teeth into a “Dating a junior, Holly? Really, how immature you are!” scene.

  “That’s okay, Jamie,” I said nervously. “It’s getting late and your house is in the opposite direction. Thanks for the muffins. I had such a nice time. And congratulations on winning! I’m truly impressed.” I kept talking on and on, as if we were parting forever and I had to wrap up the loose ends of my entire life.

  Finally I managed to stop babbling. Jamie was just grinning at me. “You’re w
elcome,” he said. “See you.” He turned and walked off toward his house.

  I felt incredibly lonely, seeing him go. He was broad-shouldered, as big as Stein and Beaulieu and the others on the hockey team. He doesn’t look sixteen, I thought. I took one step after him. “Jamie?” I called.

  He looked back at me, with his same sweet grin. “What?”

  And then I didn’t know why I had called after him. I flushed and stammered a moment. “You aren’t really going to put an antique threshing machine in the backyard, are you?”

  “Probably not. My father’s reached his limit with that hobby. But it’s nice to daydream, don’t you think?”

  I definitely thought. He daydreams, too, I thought. I felt vaguely giddy. We said goodbye again, and more quickly this time, as the sun was gone and the air was turning downright hostile with night cold, and I went home alone.

  Ten

  I LOVE CHRISTMAS.

  The gaudy lights, shaped like enormous bells, that are hung each year from the telephone poles in the village. The streams of jazzed-up carols piped through every store. The window decorations with their pretend snow and their flickering lights. Candles on the table and shiny wrapping paper and curling ribbons and bows.

  I love it all.

  In church we hung beautiful evergreen wreaths around the old copper wall sconces and tied them with fragrant winter apples and tiny, scarlet velvet bows. For me, it was the smell of Christmas: apples and pine.

  My father, who frets over everything, worries each year that someone in the village, or from the college, will be alone Christmas Day, and that sounds so awful to him that he extends invitations to anyone who might possibly require the company of strangers for Christmas dinner. So this year our table seated a few stray foreign students (including a confused Hindu and a fascinated Moslem), a few students too broke to fly home for the holidays, a couple of elderly widows, one man in his fifties whose wife had just left him after thirty years of marriage, and my grandmother.

  It was a wonderful meal, with wonderful conversation, and I noticed that Christopher and I had passed out of our embarrassed stage. For years we blushed when Dad prayed, and ducked our heads when he read from Luke, and tried to leave when he lit the Advent candles. But this year I just loved it. As the strangers at our table added their prayers for peace, I thought of Jamie, and what sort of things he might have talked about with my father, and I saw my own father differently: as the sort of man Jamie would consider a friend.

  Dad was especially happy because the church had given almost half again as much money for the migrants as he’d asked for, and so he felt he really was accomplishing something in this wicked world. My mother made no comments, just smiled. I don’t think she’s one fraction as religious as Dad, but she won’t hurt his feelings or confuse the issue by saying it. I hoped that in a few years my mother and I would discuss things like that. Or even this year. Seventeen was adult.

  I had loads of lovely gifts. Long, dangling gold filigree earrings from my grandmother—the sort you’d wear with a satin gown at the party of the year. Two beautiful sweaters—soft pastel knits with creamy snowflake patterns. New boots—thick, furry, lined boots to keep even my toes warm. Beautiful, tiny velvet draperies for the drawing room of my Victorian mansion. Dad had made me an octagonal Shaker barn to go with the mansion. It was a triumph of woodworking, although not precisely a period match.

  “A whole new world!” I said. “Now I’ll need tiny fences and shrubbery and miniature paving bricks for paths. I can make hay from yellow broom tips.”

  Christopher handed me a package. He’d bought me a flock of miniature china chickens and one gaudy old china rooster looking ready to peck my fingers! “I thought we’d put the dollhouse on a four by eight piece of plywood,” said Dad, “and you can make a yard and have the barn out back and leave a space for that gazebo you’re planning.”

  Even if it came in winter, Christmas was wonderful!

  I went upstairs to put on the new earrings. All my others were costume jewelry—enameled scarlet hearts, miniature crayons, preppy alligators, and that sort of thing. I slid into a wonderful daydream about the sort of dances and dates I’d have in the New Year where my grandmother’s filigree gold earrings would be just right. I could see myself swirling on a dance floor, sparkling like a princess.

  Downstairs I listened to the prayers for peace. Our Indian and Iraqi guests prayed in their own languages, and Mother spoke some old Latin prayers, and one of the students, a French major, prayed in French.

  Christopher had vanished outdoors. I’d gotten him a pair of snowshoes, and he was wild with excitement. My mother worried a little, looking out into lightly falling snow and talking of trackless wilderness in which Christopher could get lost, but actually we could see him just fine tramping across the college campus.

  A white Christmas. Two years (to the grief of the ski industry) since our last white Christmas. I sat indoors and dreamed and thought of peace and love.

  On December twenty-sixth, I called Kate to see what she’d gotten and whether we could get together. She’d gotten the new ski boots she was yearning for and had left very, very early to get a space on the slopes. I called Lydia, but she’d gone with her boyfriend to work on their ice sculpture.

  I called two other girls. They were both out. One was skiing with Kate, and the other had gone to a hill to take her little brother and sister sledding.

  I sat in my bedroom and stared at my doll-house and my lovely sweaters and the soft bubbly feeling of Christmas dwindled away. Christopher was out with his friends. My father was checking on three families he thought might be short of money to order fuel oil, and my mother was correcting term papers. Grandmother was back in Boston.

  It was a long day. Longer than any I could remember.

  I had plenty of projects I could start. Doll-house stuff. A kit from my uncle in Milwaukee for making Ukrainian Easter eggs: the kind with intricate designs on them. Some strange, rough-feeling but beautiful knitting wool from a sheep farm near us.

  But I was not in a crafts mood. I was in a company mood. I wanted to talk to a friend.

  I thought about telephoning Jamie, just to talk.

  Would it be as easy on the telephone as it was in person? Would we start laughing and telling stories right away? Or would he be startled and unable to figure out what I was doing on the line? Would he think I was chasing him? Be horrified and embarrassed?

  I wondered whether his parents had let him tow an antique threshing machine into the yard. What sort of gifts had been given Christmas Day to a boy who was crazy about steam engines?

  For supper, we had leftover ham and warmed-up sweet potatoes. It had such a day-after feeling to it. I couldn’t even finish eating.

  When the telephone rang I knew it was for somebody else. It felt like years since anybody had shown any interest in me, and I dragged myself around the table, clearing it, thinking that the only thing anybody wanted Holly Carroll for was doing the dishes.

  “For you, Holl,” said my brother.

  Jamie? I thought, and the thought surprised me. Why should he call? Why should I even think that he might? “Who is it?” I said.

  “Kate.” Christopher doesn’t care for Kate. She’s going to be eighteen next month and once or twice, when Christopher was ten or eleven, she actually babysat for him. Why, Kate’s almost two years older than Jamie, too, I thought. No wonder she thinks of him as a kid.

  “Hi, Kate. Have a good Christmas?”

  “Super.” She told me every detail, concentrating on how wonderful the skiing had been that day, and how they had oversold tickets, so that there were infuriating lines at the lifts, but still, she had had a ball and everybody had been there, everybody but me. “Hollyberry,” she said, “come skating with us tomorrow? The temperature is going to be up in the high twenties with no wind, and the sun shining so it’ll be really very comfortable. Come on, please?”

  It’s pretty bad when your best friend has to hear a weather
report before she dares invite you anywhere. “I’d love to,” I said, and I made a mental note never to mention weather again. Hope and Christopher were right: I was a bore, the way I kept whining about the frigid air outdoors.

  “Do your old skates fit?” said Kate anxiously. “Mom says you can wear hers.”

  Kate and her mother had talked over how to get me to the skating party. It warmed me right down to my toes, being wanted like that, “Great,” I said. “Mine are a little crunchy around the toes.”

  We giggled. I forgot about Jamie. What I’d needed all day was a friend, and Kate was the best friend I had.

  Eleven

  KATE’S MOTHER’S SKATES WERE just a fraction too big, and even with two pairs of socks and the ankles laced as tight as my fingers could pull, I didn’t have enough ankle support. I hadn’t skated once that year, and I was very rusty.

  I wound slowly around the pond, getting my coordination back, and I was circling for the fourth time when Christopher came gliding toward me at full speed, making faces and yelling, “Is that slow-moving vehicle actually my sister?” I tried to veer away from him, but of course he didn’t really plan to bump me, and he veered in the same direction. We crashed right into each other, and even before I heard my ankle hit the ice I knew the bone was going to break.

  Christopher just bounced a little and was back on his skates in the space of an instant, but I took a terrible spill, turning my ankle under me with a crack that sounded as if the ice was splitting. Half the skaters heard it and turned, cringing, to see who it was.

  It hurt so much I literally could not speak. I could not untwist myself from my fallen position, and the skate kept my ankle in a horrid unnatural curve.

  “Somebody call an ambulance,” said a voice. “She’s really hurt.”

  Christopher hunched down beside me, white and horrified. “Oh, Holly,” he said desperately, “I’m sorry, I was only teasing.”

  I couldn’t even moan. The breath had been knocked so completely out of me it was all I could do to breathe. Tears sprang into my eyes, from cold and pain and shame, and when the ambulance attendants unwrapped my legs and straightened me out, I bit right through my mittens trying to hold back the scream.