by Meg Cabot
I studied my brother’s lean face, with its fuzz of a beginning of a beard. And felt a spurt of irritation with him. “Thanks for the heads-up that he was coming, by the way,” I said. “I mean, you could have called and warned me.”
“So you could have run away to the Hamptons for the weekend?” Douglas grinned. “He asked me not to say anything.”
And, apparently, Rob asking him not to say anything was more important to him than my emotional health.
“You and Rob certainly are chummy these days,” I commented, not without some bitterness.
“He’s a good guy” was all Douglas had to say in reply, before moving away from me to bring my mom a bottle of homemade vinaigrette from the fridge.
“Hi, Jessica,” his girlfriend said, giving me a hug. I liked Tasha, not just because she’d followed my advice, and hadn’t broken Douglas’s heart. Which was a good thing, since I’d promised if she did, I’d break her face.
“How’s New York?” Tasha wanted to know, in the wistful manner of someone who wanted to move to the Big Apple, but didn’t feel like they had the guts.
“There,” I said. I like New York. I really do. But. You know. It’s just a town to me. A bigger town, maybe, than what I’m used to. But still just a town.
“And Juilliard?” Mrs. Abramowitz wanted to know. Mrs. Abramowitz always made a big deal about the fact that I was going to Juilliard…maybe on account of the fact that she’d secretly suspected I’d end up in a women’s state penitentiary, and not one of the country’s leading music colleges. She’d never come right out and said this, but I had my suspicions.
I started to give my standard reply—“It’s fine”—but something stopped me. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just being home.
But suddenly, I knew if I told her school was fine, I’d be lying. School wasn’t fine. New York wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine.
I definitely wasn’t fine.
Only how could I tell her that? How could I tell her that Juilliard wasn’t quite what I’d expected? That whatever free time I had, I had to spend in a practice cubicle, playing my guts out, just to keep up with the rest of the flutists at my level? That I hated it? That I wanted to drop it, but didn’t know what I’d do instead? That New York was great, it was thrilling living in the city that never sleeps, but that I missed the smell of freshly mown grass and the sound of crickets and the gentle weeping of Ruth’s cello coming not from the other room, but from the house next door?
I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her any of that.
“Fine” is what I said instead.
“And Ruth was good when you left her?” Mrs. Abramowitz wanted to know, as she helped herself to another margarita.
“Yes,” I said, wondering how Mrs. Abramowitz would react if I told her of my suspicions…that there was something going on between her daughter and my middle brother.
She’d probably be delighted. Mike, like Skip, is well on his way to becoming a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man, only in computers, not business.
But whatever was going on between Mike and Ruth, it wasn’t anything yet, and might never even come to be. So I didn’t mention it.
“And Skip?” my mom asked in a teasing voice. Because, of course, my mom is head over heels for the original hundred-thousand-dollar man. Or at least the idea of his supporting me on that hundred thousand dollars.
“He snores,” I said, and grabbed a bowl of dip to take outside, where we were eating.
“It’s his sinuses,” I heard Mrs. Abramowitz tell my mom. “And his allergies. I wish he’d remember to take his Claritin—”
“There’s my girl,” my dad said with a big smile as I came outside with the dip. Chigger was suddenly all over me again, but this time it wasn’t to say hello, but because I was holding something that contained food.
“Down,” I said to Chigger, who obediently kept down, but who nevertheless followed me to the table with the assiduousness of a bodyguard.
“That dog,” Dr. Thompkins said with a chuckle.
“That dog,” my dad said, “knows over fifteen commands. Watch this. Chigger. Ball.”
Chigger, instead of running to fetch his ball, as he normally did when he heard the word, stayed where he was, panting in the warm evening air, waiting for someone to spill some dip.
“Well,” my dad said embarrassedly.
“He’d go get it, if there weren’t food around.”
I took a seat on the deck, lightly stroking Chigger’s ears, and listened to my dad chat with his neighbors, looking out across the yard and the treetops beyond. It seemed weird that just that morning, I’d been looking through metal bars at fire escapes and into other people’s apartment windows, and now I was gazing at a scene so pastoral and…well, DIFFERENT. I’m not saying one is better than the other. They’re just…different.
I wondered what Rob and his sister were doing. I wondered what Randy and the girl I’d seen were doing. Well, scratch that. I had a pretty good idea what THEY were doing. I wondered instead what I should do about it. My options were somewhat limited, if Rob didn’t want his sister to have to testify against the jerk.
But what about the dark-haired girl I’d seen? Surely she was underage, as well. If I went over there and happened to let the truth about old Randy having a little something on the side—right upstairs in 2T, as a matter of fact—would she come around?
But why should I? I didn’t know the dark-haired girl. No one had asked me to find her. She wasn’t my responsibility.
Maybe Ruth was right. Maybe Iwould make a rotten superhero. Because I really was incapable of just riding off into the sunset.
Mrs. Thompkins came outside, holding a salad, with Douglas following on her heels like Chigger had followed on mine.
“—should really come along,” Douglas was saying as Tasha trailed after him, holding a platter of corn on the cob. “It’s our community. We’ve got to take it back from the developers and yuppie corporate scum.”
“But I just don’t see the NEED for an elementary school in this neighborhood, Douglas,” Mrs. Thompkins said a little helplessly. “The people who can afford to live here have kids in college, like we do, not kindergarten.”
“That’s why we’re proposing a high school,” Tasha said, her dark eyes alight with excitement. “Not an elementary school.”
My mom had followed them out, holding her prizewinning scalloped potatoes in pot-warmered hands.
“Not this alternative high school thing again,” she said wearily. “Can’t we have one meal where we don’t have to talk about this alternative high school idea of yours, Douglas?”
Which was pretty ironic, considering that just a few years ago, my mom would have given her right arm to have Douglas even SIT with us at the dinner table, rather than hide in his room.
“Fine,” Douglas said, not taking offense. “But there’s a community board meeting at eight. I’m hoping at least some of you can come.”
“No politics at the table,” my dad declared, brandishing a dozen perfectly charbroiled steaks. “Or religion, either. Both topics spoil the appetite.”
Everyone ooohed and ahhhhed at the steaks, the way my dad had intended us to, then dug in. I ate with more gusto than usual, not having had much since my Egg ’n Sausage McMuffin that morning.
Sure enough, no sooner was dinner over than Douglas looked at his watch and announced it was time for the community board meeting, and that anyone who cared an iota for the neighborhood should stroll over to the Pine Heights auditorium with him and Tasha to hear what the board had to say about the future of the school.
None of the adults volunteered. Which was hardly surprising, considering the amount of beef and tequila they’d just consumed.
“Great,” Douglas said sarcastically, when he saw this. “I thought you Woodstock generationers actually cared about the world.”
“Hey,” my mom said in a dangerous voice. “I was way too young for Woodstock.”
“Jess?” Tasha had stood up
to follow my brother out the door. “Want to come?”
I did not. What did I care what happened to my old elementary school?
“Jess doesn’t even live here anymore,” my mom said with a laugh. “She’s a jaded New Yorker now.”
Was that what I was? Was that why everything in my hometown looked so shabby and small to me now? Because I was a jaded New Yorker?
“Come on, Jess,” Douglas said from the doorway. “Every locally owned business in this town is selling out to the chains. Look what happened to the Chocolate Moose.”
“Not every locally owned business is selling out to the chains, Douglas,” my dad pointed out dryly, meaning the restaurants we still owned.
“Do you really want to see the place where you played the mouse inThe Lion and the Mouse in your third grade program turned into condos?” Douglas asked me, ignoring our father.
Well, it wasn’t as if I’d had any better offers. No one else had asked me to do anything with them that evening. And if I stayed home, Mom would just put me on dish patrol.
I was touched Douglas even remembered that I’d played the mouse in my third grade program.
“I’ll go,” I said, and stood up to follow Douglas and his girlfriend.
They spent the three-block walk over to the elementary school filling me in on their proposal to turn Pine Heights into a high school—“An alternative high school,” Douglas said. “Not like Ernie Pyle, which was so big and impersonal. That place…it was like an education factory,” he added with a shudder.
Which was interesting, because I hadn’t seen a whole lot of educating going on there.
“The alternative high school would put an emphasis on kids working at their own pace,” Tasha, who was an education major over at IU, said.
“Yeah,” Douglas said. “And instead of the standardized state curriculum, we’re going to have an emphasis on the arts—music, drawing, sculpture, drama, dance. And no sports.”
“No sports,” Tasha said firmly, and I remembered that her brother had been a football player…and how much attention he’d gotten because of it, whereas she, a shy and studious girl, had been almost the family afterthought.
“Wow,” I said. “Great.”
I meant it, too. I mean, if I had gone to a school like the one they were describing, instead of the one I’d gone to, maybe I wouldn’t have turned out the way I had—broken. I definitely wouldn’t have been struck by lightning. That happened to me walking home from Ernie Pyle High. If I’d have been walking home from Pine Heights, which was so close to my house, I’d have made it home well before the rain started to fall.
It was weird being back inside my elementary school after all these years. Everything looked tiny. I mean, the drinking fountains, which I remembered as being so high off the ground, were practically knee-level.
It still smelled the same, though, of floor wax and that stuff they sprinkle over throw-up.
“Remember that time you banged Tom Boyes’s head into that water fountain, Jess?” Douglas asked cheerfully, as we walked by an otherwise unremarkable drinking fountain. “For calling me—what was it? Oh, yeah. A spastic freak.”
I didn’t remember this. But I can’t say I was surprised to hear it.
Tasha, on the other hand, seemed so.
“Why did he call you that?” she wanted to know. “Just because you were different?”
Different. That was one way to put it. Douglas always HAD been different. If you could call hearing voices inside of your head telling you to do weird stuff, like not eat the spaghetti in the school cafeteria because it was poisoned, different.
“Yeah,” Douglas said. “But it was all right, because I had Jessica to protect me. Even though I was in fifth grade, and she was in first. God, Tom couldn’t hold his head up all year after that. The snot beat out of him by a tiny first grade girl.”
Tasha smiled at me admiringly, but I know there was nothing all that admirable about that situation. My high school counselor and I had worked long and hard to combat my seemingly uncontrollable temper, which was always getting me in hot water. I’d finally succeeded in getting control of it, but only after seeing for myself firsthand what could happen when someone with a bad temper got too much power—such as some of the men I’d helped catch in Afghanistan.
We walked into the school’s combination auditorium, complete with stage, gym (basketball hoops), and cafeteria (long tables that folded up into the walls to get them out of the way during PE or Assembly). The room seemed ridiculously small compared to the way I remembered it. About ten rows of folding chairs had been set up before a long table, on top of which sat a scale model of Pine Heights school, only with the windows and landscaping redone, so it looked more like an upscale condo complex than a school.
Standing behind this model, glad-handing what had to be a bunch of city planners and local politicians, was a pot-bellied businessman in an expensive new suit…which couldn’t have been all that comfortable in the summer heat, considering the school had no air-conditioning.
And standing next to the beer-bellied man was another guy in a suit, although this one was more appropriate for the weather, being silk. Also, the guy in it wore the jacket over a black T-shirt instead of a button-down and tie.
Except for the change of clothes, though, he was still perfectly recognizable as someone I had seen—albeit from a distance—just a few hours before.
Hannah’s boyfriend, the two-timing Randy.
Ten
“Everyone, if you could take your seats, please.”
The city councilperson called everyone who was milling around, greeting one another—including my suddenly civic-minded brother—to order. We took our seats and sat there in the evening heat, some people fanning themselves with handouts Randy’s dad had left on all our seats. The handouts described the complex he wanted to convert Pine Heights school into—a brand-new luxury condo “experience,” with a gym and a coffee shop on the first floor. Apparently, more and more DINKs—double income, no kids—were moving to our town, commuting from it to Indianapolis. Such a condo “experience” would perfectly suit their needs.
People stood up and started talking, but the truth was, I didn’t hear a word they said. I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was staring at Randy Whitehead.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, we live in a pretty small town. If a guy’s dad owns one apartment complex, chances are he’s going to own more than one. I mean, look at my dad. He owned not one, but three of the most popular restaurants in a town barely large enough to support a single McDonald’s.
Still, it was a shock to see Randy, up close and personal. He seemed to be there strictly in a “supportive son” role, not saying much, and handing his dad things when it was Mr. Whitehead’s turn to make his presentation. There was no denying that the guy was hot. Randy, I mean. If you like the hundred-dollar-haircut, loafers-without-socks type. Which I guess, to an inexperienced girl like Hannah, would seem pretty exotic.
To me, though, he looked like he would smell. Not of BO. But of too much cologne. I hate it when guys smell of anything but soap. Randy Whitehead looked as if he were DRIPPING in Calvin Klein For Men.
“The overall cost of each of these units,” Mr. Whitehead was saying, “would be in keeping with the rising cost of real estate in a town that is fast becoming an extremely sought-after bedroom community for upwardly mobile workers in nearby Indianapolis. We’re talking low to mid six figures, depending on the type of amenities buyers choose to incorporate into the overall design plan they select. In no way will the Pine Heights community suffer an influx of undesirably lower-income residents through this conversion.”
Randy, while his father spoke, softly tapped a pencil. He didn’t look like a man wondering where his soul mate had vanished to earlier in the day. He looked like a man who wanted to go home to watch some HBO and have a Heineken or two.
The community listened politely to Mr. Whitehead’s spiel, asking one or two questions pertaini
ng to parking and the school’s baseball field, which was still utilized on a somewhat sporadic basis by families who enjoyed an impromptu game of softball on a summer evening. The baseball field would go, turned into a “lush green park area, open to the public, complete with a duck pond.” This, in turn, led to questions about mosquitoes and West Nile virus.
What, I asked myself, was I still doing here? In Indiana, I mean. I had done what Rob had asked me to do. Why wasn’t I on a plane back to New York by now? That’s where my life was these days. Not here, listening to people freak out about a baseball field.
Of course, back in New York, I never really felt as if I belonged, either. I mean, everyone in New York was so excited about going to Broadway shows and having picnics in Central Park. Everyone but me.
Maybe the problem wasn’t Indiana or New York. Maybe the problem was me. Maybe I wasn’t capable of happiness anymore. Maybe Rob was right, and I was broken. Permanently broken, and would never find happiness again—
My musings on my seemingly permanent state of not caring about anything were interrupted by, of all people, my brother Douglas as he stood up and said, “I’d like to know how far the city council has gotten on its review of our proposal for Pine Heights to be turned into an alternative high school.”
There was considerable murmuring about this. But not because people thought it was so out there or weird, as people have murmured over things my brother’s said in the past. There was a general note of approval in this murmur. Someone at the far side of the gym shouted, “Yeah!” while someone on the other side said, “We don’t want teenagers roaming around loose in our neighborhood.”
“Alternative doesn’t mean unsupervised,” Douglas was quick to point out. “State certification will be required of teachers wishing to apply to work at Pine Heights Alternative High School. And like any school, loitering on school grounds after hours will not be permitted.”
“But kids who go to so-called alternative schools,” a woman I didn’t recognize, but who evidently lived in our neighborhood, stood up to say, “are generally kids who’ve been expelled from mainstream schools. The troublemakers.”