“Hey,” Amandine the lawn guy said in a low voice.
“Hi,” I said uncertainly.
“You look good in that shirt.”
“Thanks,” I said. I smiled, unsure if I wanted to play this game. The gray eyes took in my smile, then narrowed in faint disgust. The black poppy seed! I clamped my mouth shut.
“Uh, so are you busy Thursday?” she asked, smirking. Her smirk reminded me of Dad’s Operator expression. It struck me that she was imitating it.
“Mmm.” I put my hand over my mouth.
“What are you trying to hide? I bet you have a real pretty smile.” She swaggered closer. “Why are you hiding that smile? I’ve been watching you a long time, girl. You’re really mature-looking for your age.” She scooched her face up into mine. Then tried to pry off my hand.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I twisted away, my stomach fluttering. It was hard not to feel that, in a peculiar way, Amandine really was the lawn guy. She was strangely convincing.
“Come on, Delia. It’s Delia, isn’t it?” Amandine the lawn guy persisted. “That’s a really sexy name.”
I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and I started laughing.
“Uh, what’s so funny?” Still being the guy, she rubbed the tip of her nose. “Hey, uh, Delia, I think you’ve got something stuck …” She bared her own teeth and tapped one. “Right between your two front …”
“Stop it! Stop it!” I bent double, hiding my face. My hysterical choking laughter finally made her break character and she started laughing, too. It was so stupid, there was no reason for it, but laughing was like a cold flood, a release, the same as that day in the art room. We laughed and couldn’t stop; we stamped our feet and muffled the sounds of our voices by pushing our faces into the plastic-covered choir robes, although I’d heard you could suffocate yourself doing something like that.
PART TWO
WE STARTED PERFORMING SKITS all the time after that, usually at lunch or spring fitness or after school. It saved our friendship, I guess. Or maybe it was the friendship. The skits were weird, fun weird, and the fun was a private kind of fun. Amandine always set them up—she had a better imagination for them. The rules were that one person would act the part of herself and the other would be the character of someone unpredictable. Then Amandine would create a situation.
At first, I could only play myself. Amandine didn’t seem to mind.
“You be you, and I’ll be moron Mark Ingersell,” she would start. (Mark was in our grade; he was gorgeous and failing all his classes.) “And we’re lab partners, and you try to get me to go out on a date with you.”
“You be you, and I’m Samantha Blitz and you have to ask me for a tampon.”
“You be you, and I’m Mr. Serra and you have to tell me that my fly is undone.”
Amandine was so good; her face could reflect the smallest tic—Samantha’s open-mouthed listening, Mr. Serra’s reflexive habit of clearing his throat, Mark Ingersell’s slight stammer. Eventually, she could make me believe that part of her really was that person, and that’s when she’d throw in the wrench.
“Honey,” she would say, clearing her throat as Mr. Serra, “you can’t go pointing to a principal’s pants like that. Now I know I’m, ahem, a foxy guy. Ahem. So if you promise not to tell your parents, I think we could arrange a little, ahem.” She’d start winking, coughing, leering, but by then I would be unstrung in laughing hysterics.
“There go the giggle girls,” teachers would say as we snickered and whispered down the halls, deep into our skit right up until we had to pull apart at different doors. Sometimes I risked lateness, and Mrs. Gogglio’s wrath, and we sneaked in a music room skit after school. The room was almost always deserted, but I never stopped being scared that we would be discovered. And then one day, we were.
We were doing a skit where I accidentally go into the boys’ room. Amandine was pretending to be a strange, silent kid in our class named Dylan Humes. Amandine had her legs in Dylan’s awkward duck-waddle stance as she stood at the standup organ, which she pretended was the urinal. The wrench Amandine had thrown in was that Dylan liked me watching him. “Come a little closer,” Amandine-Dylan was saying in Dylan’s nasal whine. “Don’t be scared.” I was trying not to laugh, to keep “in character,” when the louvered door burst open.
“What are you girls doing in here?” Brett Lokler and Rudy Patrice stood in the door, smugly confronting us. They were in our grade, but cool enough to have perfected the sneer of upperclassmen, especially when they hung out together.
Shame burned through me. I stood silent, glued in place.
“We’re studying,” said Amandine, turning slowly to face the guys. Her hands moved to her hips. She looked bored and bothered.
“Oh, yeah?” Rudy sneered. “Sounds veddy in-ter-est-ing from outside the door.”
Amandine shrugged. “If trying to memorize Antony and Cleopatra is interesting.”
“If you’re doing work, then where’s your books?”
With showy deliberation, Amandine pulled a piece of paper from her pants’ pocket. “Cheat sheet,” she said. Then in a tired voice, read, “‘Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire, and air; my other elements I give to baser life.’ See? And you better not say anything.”
“You idiot, you could get expelled for a cheat sheet,” said Brett, impressed.
“Gee, tell me something I don’t know.”
Rudy yawned. “Let’s go,” he said to Brett. “I don’t know what’s up with these two freaks. Bye, girls.” He stretched the last word into a chiming song.
They left.
“What twerps.” Amandine exhaled a thin laugh.
“Is that really your cheat sheet?”
“Scrap paper.” Amandine held it out for me to see. All that was on it was her name in doodle script alongside a sketch of a ballet shoe and a few words from a French vocabulary list.
“Then how did you know to say that stuff?” The freshman class truly was studying Antony and Cleopatra, and most kids had hardly read it, let alone learned it by heart.
“If it’s a play or a dance routine, I memorize it,” she told me. “Even if I don’t want to, it’s like I have to. I guess it’s from all the plays I was in.”
I believed her, and was impressed. Amandine had saved us. Her grace under pressure was enviable. But afterward, I wondered whether kids did think that there was something freakish about Amandine and me, and I couldn’t help but keep an ear close to the ground, listening for the stealthy crawl of rumors. I knew that Amandine didn’t feel any of that and I tried to imitate her indifference, but it was hard.
That Friday, I was staying at Amandine’s house. I would be getting into the low red car. I would meet the face that belonged to the snappish voice of Amandine’s father, whom she called Roger or Dad, depending. I would be having dinner at the gated mansion, which I pictured having stone fireplaces and mounted elk heads and a pool table.
After school, we stood by the curb together and passed the time doing skits.
We did a skit where Mark Ingersell asked me to the school dance, and he shows up at my front door wearing a mouth-guard retainer.
We did a skit where I had to accept a ride from our classmate Meggie Riet’s snobby mom, and I have dog mess on my shoe.
“Sweetie,” said Amandine as Mrs. Riet, her hands on a pretend steering wheel as she wrinkled her nose and looked over at me. “Have you been eating prunes? You smell a bit overripe. You know, the best prunes are imported from Persia.”
I was laughing so hard I had to sit down. I could never keep in character. Maybe Amandine did it on purpose. She always seemed to know what to say to crack me up. It was one thing that I tried to hang on to when everything else made me want to forget all about her; that I never laughed so hard as when I was with Amandine.
Eventually, we got tired of skits and collapsed on the sidewalk in a fit of boredom. All the buses had left, and the parking lot was almost empty.
“Should
we call?” I asked finally.
“No point,” she answered.
After almost an hour more of waiting, a car drove up. It was not the low red car, but a regular blue parent-y looking one. A rabbit-faced woman beeped and signaled.
“Where’s Dad?” asked Amandine, opening the front door. I climbed into the back.
“Roger is having trouble keeping on top of his one responsibility as your chauffeur,” the woman answered. “Hi, Delia, nice to meet you. He went over to Amherst to get some antique parts for his installation piece, and now he’s stuck waiting for something, I didn’t really listen. I mean, if you even want to believe him … and of course I was right in the middle of pouring a mold when he called, so …” her voice trailed off into a sigh of irritation. I noticed that her arms were crusted in gray chalk.
“Sculpting mud,” she said when she caught my eye. “I’m Roxanne, by the way. I’m Amandine’s mother.” The light changed to green and she slammed on the gas. We shot through the intersection and careened onto the entrance ramp.
Amandine made a show of putting on her seat belt for safety, and for the rest of the drive we were silent.
Years ago, I was given a Halloween pop-up book. Frightful Fun! promised the title. It had only one page, just open the book and—pop!—an entire house sprang to form instantly, bisected so that you could see inside and examine all of its tricks. Every room had a coffin door or trapdoor or revolving door that revealed its secret vampire, goblin, or ghoul. Amandine’s house reminded me of that book. Its first trick was that it popped up out of nowhere at the end of a country road; a big gray haunted house set on a weeded lot and enclosed by an iron gate. Inside, there was no furniture, or hardly any. An umbrella stand in the entrance hall was filled with rolled-up, unread newspapers still in their blue plastic sleeves, and a cell phone plugged into a battery recharger was propped on the floor.
To the right and left of the large, square hall were a dining room and a living room, both still hung in the flocked wallpaper and massive curtains left over from a different kind of house. There were darker squares in the wallpaper where portraits and mirrors had been removed. Dusty glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
It was strange and exhilarating. When I stepped over a squeaky floorboard, I half-expected to fall through the trapdoor set beneath my feet, a quick dark drop to the goblin down below.
“We keep these rooms empty, for Art,” said Amandine. She made a flying leap, or a “grand jeté,” as she had told me it was called. “That’s all my parents’ work.” Her finger swept back and forth, searchlight-style, indicating.
Now I noticed a couple of large canvases propped against the walls. Hands behind my back, I inspected more closely, as an art patron might. It was abstract art, the kind that made me feel stupid and tricked. In a corner of the dining room, I found something more understandable, a piece of sculpture that looked like a gate. The point-ended slats of the gate had been turned into animal ears, with woodcut animal faces fixed beneath. Deer, maybe. Or foxes, or Siamese cats. It was hard to tell.
“That’s from Dad’s ‘Picket Fence’ series,” said Amandine. “A lot of his sculptures are about the dangers of the suburbs. About deer getting hit by cars and stuff.”
“Jin made nutmeg cookies,” said Amandine’s mom, whom I did not want to call Roxanne. I liked using mister and missus. They were like name shields to keep the adults back in their correct, distant places. “I’ll be down in my studio.”
“Who’s Jim?” I asked.
“Jin, not Jim,” Amandine corrected. She sniffed. “He always burns them. My room’s on the third floor, at the top like yours, only we’ve got a whole other floor in between. Obviously, a really, really rich guy used to live here before us. Let’s go.”
Dust lay heavy as fleece on the edges of the stairs, in the corners of doors and windowsills, but I tried to hold my nose so that I wouldn’t sneeze. It seemed rude, as if a sneeze pointed out how the house was in need of a cleaning. Doors to most rooms were solidly shut, but through one that was slightly ajar, I glanced in on a bedroom partially furnished with a mattress. On the floor beside it was a suitcase, open and scrambled with clothes.
“There’s a back stairs, too, for the servants,” Amandine said as we rounded the second floor. Implying that there were a few lurking around, which I doubted.
Amandine’s attic room was regular, maybe even shabby. A worn quilt covered her bed, and the floor could have used a carpet, but a very nice entertainment system was set up on her bookshelf.
“That’s Jin’s,” she said when I ran my finger admiringly over one of the speakers. “I’m keeping it for him while he lives here.”
“Is Jin the … servant?” I asked.
“Don’t be horrible,” Amandine replied. “Jin is my mom’s boyfriend. I told you about that, about my parents only being together for convenience, on account of me. Jin’s an artist, too,” she continued smoothly. “His studio’s in the carriage house.” She started to laugh. “I’m gonna tell him you thought he was a servant! That’ll make him sooo mad!”
“Oh, no! Please, please don’t tell him that.” I sat on the edge of her bed. I felt a little bit sick. I thought of my own room, my prairie curtains and matching dust ruffle, my books and my cigar box of treasures and my bedside lamp that had three different light settings.
“I might have to go home,” I said.
Amandine frowned. “But you just got here.” She stared at me so intently that for a moment, I thought she was going to cry. Instead, she coaxed. “Come on, Delia. Jin’s nutmeg cookies, the not-burned ones, are really good.”
It depressed me that this was the best she could offer.
Roxanne did not come up for dinner. It was Jin who prepared it and then sat down to eat it with us. A cauldron full of pasta in tomato sauce, garlic bread, and dumplings. Lots of stahch.
Amandine flitted and hopped, filling paper cups with soda water, retrieving napkins, ice, another fork. She chatted with Jin; he told her about his day in the studio, and then Amandine offered up a little bit about what we did at school. Just snips of things about math and how boring science data sheets were, while Jin listened politely.
It was the fact of Jin that was harder to believe.
Roxanne’s boyfriend, Amandine had said. But he was so young. Twenty-three? A little older than college was my guess. He was thin like a kid, and ate in huge mouthfuls like a kid, and wore college-type clothes. The cotton fabric of his T-shirt and baseball hat were whiskered with age and his jeans rode low on his hip with no soft stomach rolled over the top like most dads. He was handsome, too. Polynesian on one side, Russian on the other, he told me. His face was angled and fluted. When he talked, his hands were all over the place, gesturing, making even the smallest story exciting.
He acted the way I’d always pictured Ethan, my perfect pretend big brother. Jin was perfect, except for the fact that he was Amandine’s mother’s boyfriend, which made him weird.
Roger came home toward the end of dinner. A back door slammed and then steps thudded down to the basement—his studio, Amandine told me, was also in the basement, same as her mother’s—and then pounded up again.
“Finally,” said Amandine, rolling her eyes at Jin, who rolled his eyes back. “My dad,” she said to me, as if it needed clarifying.
If I hadn’t known beforehand, I might have guessed Roger was Roxanne’s brother instead of husband, or ex-husband, or whatever he was. Like Roxanne, he was spectacled and pointy and small.
“Hi.” Roger’s face twitched, he looked surprised to see me. I noticed he was wearing a scientist’s lab coat. There were smudges of dried red paint on the elbow, giving him the look of a mad scientist who had just finished up some secret bloody experiment. He picked up a plate and loaded it with pasta.
“I told you Delia was coming,” Amandine reminded.
“Yeah, I know, I know. I just forgot.” Roger ate leaning against the kitchen counter, his legs crossed at the ankle.
&nb
sp; “That you, Rodge?” Amandine’s mom seemed to have flowed in from nowhere to become the center of the room and everyone’s attention. “Finally. I hope you got what you wanted, after interrupting my entire day.” She kissed Amandine on the top of her head, patted Jin on the shoulder, and didn’t seem to notice me at all.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Roger, serving himself an extra helping.
“We have a guest, Roger,” said Jin, inclining his head toward me. “Easy on the food.”
Roger grunted; his head shook off Jin’s remark like an old horse shakes off a fly.
Roxanne poured herself a glass of soda water and plopped into a seat at the table, her chin in her hands. I watched her. Everyone else was watching her.
“I can’t get the color right,” she said to no one, to all of us. “Too much green, too much white. What does April feel like?”
“You,” said Jin.
I don’t know why, but I blushed.
“She’s talking about a painting,” explained Amandine.
“She’s always talking about a painting,” snapped Roger.
“If you want to tell me I’m self-centered, then come out and say it,” said Roxanne in a voice that was too loud for the room. “Be brave, Rodge.”
Roger looked up at the ceiling and yawned.
“Delia, would you like some more pasta?” Jin offered the cauldron. I twirled a few thick ribbons of pasta onto my plate.
“Can we be excused to watch television?” Amandine asked.
I nodded agreement and set down my fork. I was suddenly, horribly, full. Stuffed.
The television was in what Amandine called the solarium, but this was another mostly empty room that was sunk two steps off the living room. A wraparound wall of windows took the place of wallpaper, and the television was propped on one of the deep sills, with pillows and blankets spread out on the floor in front of it. Amandine dropped onto her stomach and groped for the remote control. I dropped next to her. The blankets smelled musty and unclean. I contemplated going upstairs to Amandine’s room to retrieve my sleeping bag, but decided against it. I didn’t really want to wander through this house alone.
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