Dinah Forever

by Claudia Mills

  A year ago, that same announcement had thrown Dinah into a frenzy of campaigning. The most important thing in her life had been her race for sixth-grade class president. She had planned on being the first girl president of her class, and she had promised to start the first schoolwide recycling program, and when she had been done with her glorious term of office, they were going to rename JFK Middle School in her honor.

  Dinah smiled to herself sadly. In the end, Blaine Yarborough had won the election, not Dinah, and Blaine had been the first girl president, and Blaine had launched the recycling program. (Though JFK Middle School still bore its same name.) But Blaine had been a good president, probably far better than Dinah would have been. Blaine was so serious and sensible. Everyone respected Blaine. Someday Blaine would be president of the United States. Dinah had no doubt about it.

  When Mr. Roemer finished talking, Dinah turned around to Blaine. “I want to be the first to sign your petition,” she said.

  Blaine shook her head. “I’m not running.”

  Dinah stared at her. “You’re crazy. You’d win by a landslide.”

  “I don’t think the same people should have offices all the time,” Blaine said. “Especially president. Remember my platform last year? On school spirit? I really think everyone should be involved in running things. There shouldn’t be one little clique that runs the whole school.”

  As usual, it was hard to disagree with Blaine. Blaine’s conclusions always sounded like no more or less than the simple truth.

  “But if one person is best at being president—” Dinah had an alarming thought. “And the recycling program. What if someone wins who doesn’t care about recycling?” Last year, for a while, it had looked as if Jason Winfield would win the election, and Jason had even said out loud that he thought recycling was dumb.

  “The program’s already there,” Blaine said. “It’s a fact now. It can’t vanish.”

  The bell rang. Dinah followed Blaine out to the hallway. “But recycling is just the beginning. There are a million other projects we could start. Like a campaign against using plastic utensils in the cafeteria. Or for planting more trees on the school grounds. Or—how about starting a JFK compost pile for all the food waste from everybody’s cafeteria trays?”

  “Do it,” Blaine said seriously. “You be class president. It’s your turn now. I’ll campaign for you.”

  The idea was electrifying. Dinah felt a thrilling jolt of excitement at the very thought of it. She loved everything about campaigning: posters, buttons, attention-getting displays in the hall. And this year she would win, with Blaine behind her. She felt young again, full of hope again.

  Did she have time to dash to the office to pick up a petition before first-period math? No. But if she hurried, she could do it between math and English.

  For seventh-grade president: Dinah Seabrooke! Her campaign slogan: Save the planet!

  Then Dinah remembered. Save the planet. Right. Save a few trees now so that more trees could burn in the sun’s blazing inferno later.

  * * *

  Dinah didn’t pick up a petition that morning, but she thought about it every time she walked past the main office. Suzanne didn’t pick one up, either, although she had been a popular class secretary in sixth grade and probably could have won reelection.

  “Blaine’s right,” Suzanne said promptly, when Dinah shared Blaine’s news with her on the way to English class. “The same people shouldn’t run everything all the time. But you should run, Dinah. You really should. I bet Nick thinks so, too.”

  Dinah thought about that for a minute. This year, if she ran, she would have Blaine behind her and Nick beside her. The boys wouldn’t tease her as much if she had a boyfriend by her side, helping out in her campaign.

  At lunch, Dinah swallowed her chicken nuggets and french fries. Then she turned to Nick. “Suzanne and Blaine think I should run for class president,” she blurted out. “I don’t think I’m going to, but I was just wondering what you think.”

  Nick grinned. “You’d be great,” he said. “And if you were president, I could be First Gentleman. Waving from Air Force One! Fancy teas with the other First Gentlemen! A designer tux for the Inaugural Ball! Count me in! But—would I have to kiss babies? I’m not so good at kissing babies.”

  “You could practice on Benjamin,” Dinah said, pleased at Nick’s response. “He doesn’t drool anywhere near as much as he used to.”

  Nick made a face. Then, his voice turning serious, he asked, “You don’t want to run?”

  Dinah shook her head slowly. “No. I did last year, but it was different then. This year—it’s like, if I ran, my platform would be environmental issues. You know, ways we could add to the recycling program. But there’s no point to it anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Nick asked. “Of course there’s a point to it. Why wouldn’t there be a point to it?”

  “If the sun’s just going to burn out anyway…”

  “The sun?”

  The bell rang. Nick and Dinah carried their trays to the conveyor belt. “Come on, Dinah,” Nick said. “You can’t let that stuff about the end of the solar system spoil my one and only chance of being First Gentleman.”

  Dinah had to laugh. But of course the real question wasn’t who would be First Gentleman. The real question was who would be seventh-grade class president. Would it be Dinah?

  * * *

  The first Drama Club meeting of the year was held after school on Thursday. Last year both Suzanne and Dinah had had starring roles in the spring one-act play. But the fall play was always a musical, and that meant Dinah wouldn’t get a part, even though she was the best actress in the seventh grade, maybe in the whole school. Dinah couldn’t sing.

  Dinah didn’t want to go to the Thursday meeting, but Suzanne talked her into it.

  “Maybe this time it won’t be a musical,” Suzanne said loyally. Suzanne didn’t need to worry either way. She was musical through and through. Her mother was a church organist and choir director. Suzanne herself was a wonderful pianist. And Suzanne had a clear, sweet soprano that never faltered.

  Sure enough, after calling the meeting to order, Mrs. Bevens, the drama coach, announced that the fall play would be Carousel, a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Dinah hardly listened as Mrs. Bevens told them the story of Carousel. But she had to admit that it was a pretty strange story, because one of the main characters dies partway through the play, yet he’s still in it, watching over his wife and daughter, invisible to them but not to the audience. He can still sing up a storm, even though he’s dead.

  Mrs. Bevens played them some of the songs from Carousel on the tinny old upright piano that stood at the back of the drama room, singing the words in her quavery old-lady’s voice. Dinah slumped down behind her desk. It wasn’t terribly interesting hearing songs that other people would be singing.

  But then Mrs. Bevens began singing a song so beautiful that sudden tears stung Dinah’s eyes as she listened. The song was called “If I Loved You.”

  The idea behind the song was that the person singing it won’t admit that she loves the person she’s singing it to. She keeps talking about what she’d do if she loved him, making it sound as if she doesn’t. But she sings about what she would do so movingly that anyone listening must know that she loves him very much already. The soaring melody matched the words perfectly.

  It was Dinah’s own song, Dinah and Nick’s, because last year it had taken her weeks and weeks of telling everybody how much she hated Nick before she could tell herself that maybe she didn’t hate him quite as much as she had announced to the world.

  Auditions were to be held next week, reading auditions on Monday and singing auditions on Tuesday.

  “Dinah,” Suzanne whispered to her, “you don’t mind if I try out, do you?” It was a delicate point, since only Suzanne could have a major, singing part.

  Dinah shook her head. She felt a strange, hopeful stirring inside her. It was true that she had never been able
to sing before, but she had never had a song like “If I Loved You” to sing. Maybe she had learned how to sing over the summer, without realizing it. If there was a poet inside of everyone, maybe there was also a singer inside of everyone.

  “I might try out, too,” Dinah told Suzanne. Suzanne looked surprised, but she didn’t say anything.

  Dinah tried singing “If I Loved You” to herself in her head. In her head, it sounded just fine.

  * * *

  Over the weekend, Dinah thought more about the election. So far, two kids had entered petitions to run for class president: Jason Winfield and some girl named Eliza Evans. Dinah knew Jason’s views on recycling all too well; she didn’t know anything about Eliza.

  Should she run? Part of her wanted to run, with a dull ache of longing, but another part felt that she couldn’t run, given the impending extinguishment of the solar system, not to mention the impending extinguishment of Dinah herself. The end of the solar system wasn’t the kind of thing you could agonize about one week and then dismiss the next. “Oh, the sun burning out. Yeah, I was kind of worried about that for a couple of days.”

  Nick and Dinah went for a long walk together on Saturday evening, down to the big park by the public library. The days were getting shorter. By seven-thirty the first fireflies were beginning to blink in the falling darkness. Dinah and Nick both caught one and watched them glow inside their cupped hands for a few moments before letting them go. Then they sat on a park bench near the playground. Nick kissed Dinah. Kiss number nine? Or ten? Dinah was losing count. The kiss lasted a long time. That was one good thing about seventh grade. Seventh-grade kisses were longer than sixth-grade ones.

  “So,” Nick said then. “About the election. Do you think you’ll run, or not?”

  “Probably not,” Dinah said. She tried to make her voice sound appropriately somber and gloomy, the voice of one who was renouncing all earthly ambition in the face of the impending cosmic tragedy. “It’s like, what would I put on my posters? I can’t tell people that I’ll keep the sun from burning out. So why vote for me? I wouldn’t even vote for me.”

  “It’s not going to burn out for a long time,” Nick reminded Dinah. “We can’t just give up on everything else and wait for it all to end. I mean, people have always known they were going to die, but they still did great things with their lives.”

  “Yes, but…” Dinah let her sentence trail off. She didn’t see how people could go on living their ordinary, everyday lives when death awaited everyone inescapably at the end.

  “If you…” This time Nick was the one who let his sentence trail off. It was too dark now for Dinah to see the expression on his face. “If you don’t run, I was thinking—I think you should run, but if you don’t—well, I might give it a try.”

  Dinah was caught off guard. She had expected Nick to urge her one more time to put aside her private despair to assume the noble burden of public service. She hadn’t expected Nick to be getting ready to assume that noble burden himself. If she wasn’t president, obviously someone else would be—but Nick? If Nick was president, Dinah would be … First Lady. She didn’t think she could stand it.

  “You’d be great,” Dinah said, forcing enthusiasm into her voice. What else could she do? Unless she could quickly perk up and announce cheerily that she didn’t mind so much about the death of the solar system, after all. But she did mind. When she thought about the death of the sun, and her own death, and Mrs. Briscoe’s, and the death of everyone else in the world, it was shallow to let herself care about anything else.

  “Look,” Nick said. “Petitions aren’t due till Wednesday. I’ll get one tomorrow, but I won’t turn it in until you decide what you’re going to do. Okay?”

  “I’ve already decided,” Dinah said in a flat voice.

  Dinah had wanted to be president; now Nick would be president. Only one person could be president, and this year it would be Nick. If nothing mattered, anyway, as she kept insisting, why should Dinah suddenly feel so jealous of Nick, and when he was being so decent and reasonable, too?

  “You might re-decide,” Nick said. “I won’t turn my petition in until three-eighteen on Wednesday.”

  So Dinah still had time to change her mind.

  Six

  The reading tryouts for Carousel were held after school on Monday. Dinah read for all the major girls’ roles: Julie, Carrie, Nettie, Louise. Suzanne did, too. In Dinah’s opinion, they both read better than any other seventh graders, and even better than any of the eighth graders. And of course the sixth graders had no chance whatsoever.

  Nick didn’t try out—very few boys did—so if Dinah somehow won the part of Julie, the one who sang “If I Loved You,” she wouldn’t get to sing it to Nick, as Billy, Julie’s husband in the play. But in her heart she knew she would be singing it to Nick, whichever other boy actually played the role—even if Nick ended up running for class president in her place.

  “You’ll be Julie,” Dinah told Suzanne on the bus ride home.

  She waited for Suzanne to insist politely, “No, you’ll be Julie.” She and Suzanne had competed before for parts, so Dinah knew the etiquette of each pretending that she thought the other would get the part both wanted.

  Suzanne looked uncomfortable. “You read the best today,” Suzanne said.

  Dinah knew that Suzanne was thinking about the voice auditions tomorrow. Reading was only half the audition this time. But surely sometimes a person who can’t sing suddenly finds her voice. Dinah was positive she had seen a movie like that one time. The heroine can’t carry a tune, then suddenly, at the climactic moment, when all eyes are upon her, she opens her mouth, and a beautiful nightingale’s song pours forth.

  Yet, facing grim reality, Dinah knew that Suzanne might still be the one to play Julie. Somehow the thought didn’t tear her up inside the way the thought of Nick’s being class president did. Maybe it was because she had lost a lead role to Suzanne once before, back in fifth grade, when Suzanne had been chosen over her to play Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Their friendship had survived, though it hadn’t been easy. And now Dinah accepted occasional competition with Suzanne as a fact of life.

  Why couldn’t she be equally accepting of competition with Nick? Of course, she wasn’t really competing with Nick for the office of class president. She had given up competing with anybody for anything. But how could Nick still go on striving, still go on caring about things, when the universe was going to end for him as surely as it was going to end for her? How could he go on when she wasn’t going on? It seemed somehow disloyal for the boy who would have been her First Gentleman to make such a speedy switch to replacing her as president himself.

  * * *

  That night, Dinah’s father wasn’t home for dinner. His biology class met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights, and this was the night of his first exam. So he had planned on grabbing a quick sandwich at the store and staying downtown to study.

  Dinah used the evening to prepare herself for the voice auditions for Carousel, upstairs, alone in her room. She didn’t actually sing “If I Loved You” out loud, because she didn’t want her mother to hear her. But she sang it over and over again in her head, perfecting every nuance of feeling. She always began very quietly, in a cracked whisper. Then her voice built to a soaring crescendo as she finally faced the truth of her love. Finally, she imagined Nick, as Billy, singing the same song to her in reply. It was a very pleasant way to spend an evening.

  Toward nine o’clock she drifted downstairs to find her mother.

  “Daddy should be home soon,” her mother said. “I hope he did well on his exam. I know he was worried about it.”

  Dinah sympathized. She took exams herself all the time, but this was the first exam her father had taken since he had left college twenty years ago.

  “Here he is now,” Dinah’s mother said.

  Dinah’s father walked slowly into the family room. Dinah didn’t have to ask him how the exam had gone; she knew the answ
er from the slump in his shoulders and the discouraged look about his eyes.

  “Those young kids in my class tore out of there after less than an hour. I was writing up until the last possible minute, and I still didn’t finish the darned thing.”

  “Do you think you passed?” Dinah’s mother asked.

  “Passed? As in got a D? Maybe. But I had been hoping for a bit more than that.”

  Dinah felt a lump in her throat. It was hard to imagine her grown-up father caring about something like grades, something that had mattered to Dinah last year, but that seemed unimportant now, in the face of all her new worries. But she loved her father so much that she couldn’t bear to see him disappointed.

  “You’ll learn how to pace yourself better for the next one,” Dinah’s mother said, putting her arm around him.

  Dinah had a sudden helpful thought. “When I take an exam, I go through first and answer all the questions I’m sure I know the answer to. Then I go back over the exam again and work more at the questions I didn’t know the first time around. That way, if I run out of time, at least everything I’ve put down is right.”

  Her father drew her toward him for a kiss. “That is a very sensible plan,” he said.

  “You can be our back-to-school consultant,” Dinah’s mother told her. “You know more than either of us about how to do well on tests.”

  Dinah felt pleased at their praise. A voice audition was like a test. She only hoped she had somehow, miraculously, learned how to do well on that kind of test, too.

  * * *

  The voice auditions were held in the music room after school on Tuesday. Mr. Maurer, the music teacher, sat at the baby grand piano, playing for each student who came forward to sing. Over and over again, Dinah heard “If I Loved You.” Some kids had good voices—loud, clear, and pleasant. Others sang too softly, or off key. But none of them were singing from the depths of their soul. Dinah could tell that the song didn’t belong to any of them as it belonged to her, and to Nick.

  “Dinah Seabrooke,” Mrs. Bevens finally called.