Dinah Forever

by Claudia Mills

  “No,” Dinah said. And this time they weren’t going to, either.

  * * *

  As Dinah knocked on Suzanne’s door, she heard Suzanne playing one of the songs from Carousel on the piano.

  After all, Dinah had ended up getting a small part in the play, the part of Enoch Snow’s obnoxious daughter. It was actually a pretty good part, for a role that had only two lines total.

  “Do you know your lines yet?” Dinah asked Suzanne as the girls settled down to share a bag of M&Ms in the kitchen.

  “Most of them. I think. Or a lot of them.” Suzanne twisted the end of one of her long blond braids, the way she sometimes did when she wasn’t sure of something.

  “Do you want me to practice with you?” Dinah felt saintly unselfishness radiating out from her like a halo.

  Suzanne’s face brightened. “Sure! If you wouldn’t mind. I have my script right here.”

  Then Suzanne hesitated. “Did you—have you talked to Nick since the election?”

  “No,” Dinah said shortly. “Why?”

  “No reason. Just—Greg is coming over to watch videos tonight, and I thought you and Nick might like to come, too, if—”

  “Forget it,” Dinah said, her halo of saintliness fading. Suzanne and Greg had always had a nice, easy, uncomplicated relationship. Unlike Dinah and Nick, who now had no relationship at all. “Let’s just read lines, okay?”

  “Okay,” Suzanne said, her eyes troubled.

  Dinah started reading at the top of Act One, trying her best to keep her voice from trembling.

  * * *

  When Dinah rang Mrs. Briscoe’s bell later that afternoon, her daughter, Ruth, answered the door. Dinah swallowed back her disappointment. She had met Ruth Briscoe a few times and didn’t like her very much. Ruth Briscoe always gave the impression that she was in a big hurry to do something much more important than interact with her mother, or with her mother’s twelve-year-old friend.

  “Oh, it’s you, Dinah,” Ruth Briscoe said. She didn’t ask Dinah to come in.

  “Is your mother at home?” Dinah asked stiffly.

  “She’s here, but we’re visiting right now, and after I leave she’s going to need to rest. Her heart’s been bothering her this week. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” Dinah said. But she didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Briscoe tomorrow. She wanted to talk to her now, this very minute.

  Ruth Briscoe shut the door. And for the first time since the debate loss, the breakup with Nick, and Nick’s election, Dinah found herself wiping away tears.

  Ten

  Friday morning after homeroom, Dinah hurried outside to board the bus for the Air and Space Museum. It was a gray, gloomy morning, with a raw edge to the wind. Dinah scuffled through a drift of fallen leaves blown across the sidewalk in front of JFK Middle School. Even if you had no boyfriend, and the boy who wasn’t your boyfriend was class president, there was nothing more satisfying than walking ankle-deep in dry, crackling leaves on your way to a bus bound for a full day’s class trip.

  Dinah and Suzanne sat together, toward the front of the bus, and Nick and Artie sat together, toward the back. Dinah and Nick hadn’t spoken to each other all week. They should have been working together as hard as they could in preparation for the next practice debate, but Dinah cared more about not speaking to an enemy than she did about not losing a debate. Apparently, Nick felt the same way. And if they did speak to each other, what would they say? Would they just sit side by side at a table in the library, politely chatting about immigration policy, as if they hadn’t kissed each other so many times that Dinah had finally lost count?

  The bus ride into Washington took over an hour. By the time the great white dome of the Capitol came into view, Suzanne knew every last one of Julie’s lines from Carousel, and the pound-size bag of M&M’s Dinah had brought for the trip was empty. Once everyone was off the bus, Mr. Mubashir lined the students up two by two to enter the museum. Somehow it turned out that Nick and Artie were directly behind Dinah and Suzanne.

  Still holding her crumpled M&M bag, Dinah looked around for a trash can. Suddenly a gust of wind blew the wrapper from her hand and sent it sailing across the street.

  “Dinah littered!” Artie called out, loudly enough that everyone in front of them in line turned around to stare. “Oh, Mr. Environmental President, sir, I just saw Dinah litter!”

  Annoyed, Dinah darted out of line to catch the wrapper. Nick beat her to it. Dinah didn’t say anything as Nick dropped the wrapper in a trash can. He hadn’t done it for her; the environmental president couldn’t very well watch a piece of litter waft by without doing something.

  “I wouldn’t do the jitterbug, With a lousy litterbug,” Artie sang, still at full volume. “Too bad Ms. Dunne’s not here. This is the best poem I’ve written since school started. Let’s see. Here’s some more. It’s really a disaster, When someone drops a wrapper. I’m glad it’s not my job, To clean up after slobs.”

  “I didn’t drop it,” Dinah snapped. “It just blew. Besides, disaster doesn’t rhyme with wrapper. And job doesn’t rhyme with slobs.”

  “Close enough,” Artie said.

  As the JFK group filed into the museum, Artie kept on chanting lines about litterbugs and jitterbugs. It was beginning to get on Dinah’s nerves. At least when the sun burned itself out there wouldn’t be any more Arties.

  The special exhibit on astronomy turned out to be fascinating. One case held some fragments of moon rocks—actual rocks brought back by astronauts over twenty-five years before from the surface of the moon. Dinah wished the case were open so she could touch one with her bare hand. A short film on comets played on a small built-in TV.

  Then, on a table in the second room of the exhibit, Dinah saw a stack of fliers. She glanced at the top one: “Have a star named after you!” The flier went on to say that if you sent in a check for twenty-five dollars you could have a star named after you, a real star that no one had ever named before.

  Dinah felt a powerful yearning: her very own star! She could put in a request for a super-young star, a baby star just one or two billion years old. That way, even after their sun burned out, she could sort of keep on going.

  “Suzanne!” Dinah called. She handed Suzanne a flier. “We can have stars named after us. We could get two right next to each other: a Dinah Seabrooke star and a Suzanne Kelly star.”

  Suzanne shook her head. “Twenty-five dollars is a lot of money. And it’s not as if they can stick a label on the star. They’ll just write it down in some book somewhere that no one will even read.”

  “Still,” Dinah said. “They’d be stars that nobody in the world ever named before, and they’d be named after us.”

  Suzanne looked doubtful.

  “Twinkle, twinkle, Dinah Seabrooke,” Dinah recited dreamily, tucking the flier in the pocket of her backpack. “I’m going to do it. I’ll ask my parents if I can earn some extra money baby-sitting for Benjamin. It’s worth it.”

  “I’ll just look at your star,” Suzanne said. “I don’t think both of us need stars.”

  The next room contained a series of scales you could stand on to see what you would weigh on different planets, and on the moon. The larger the planet, the greater its gravitational force, and the more your weight. Dinah, who weighed a hundred and three pounds on earth, would weigh only seventeen pounds on the moon, but she would weigh three hundred pounds on Jupiter.

  She tried to hop off each scale quickly, so no one else would see what she weighed. A person’s weight was her own private business. But naturally, Artie and Nick were right behind her as she stepped off the Jupiter scale.

  “Dinah weighs three hundred pounds!” Artie shouted. “I just thought of another poem. This must be my poetic day. Here it goes: Dinah weighs three hundred pounds. She can’t get any fatter. If she was playing Santa Claus, We wouldn’t have to pad her.”

  Dinah felt her cheeks flame. Usually she didn’t mind teasing. She even liked it. But lately n
othing in her life was the way it usually was. She was conscious of the slight bulge in her stomach where her share of the pound bag of M&M’s had settled. If she had it to do over again, she wouldn’t have eaten quite so many. Even the thought of her very own star wasn’t as cheering as it had been ten minutes ago. Dinah’s star might burn on after the sun burned out, but there would be nobody to know it was Dinah’s star burning. There would be no one to see it twinkle or to make a wish upon it.

  “I thought of a better one,” Nick said. “Dinah weighs three hundred pounds. She can’t get any fatter. The earth is round instead of flat. But where she stands, it’s flatter.”

  The traitor! To think she had once let him think he was her boyfriend! If she hadn’t hated Nick before, she hated him now.

  Dinah knew she should snap back with a funny poem of her own. But Dinah wasn’t good at writing funny poems these days. She hated herself for the sudden, self-pitying tears that stung her eyes.

  Nick looked over at her curiously as he stepped on the Jupiter scale. Dinah didn’t wait to snicker at what he weighed. She turned around and walked away, back through the first room of the solar system exhibit and out into the museum’s gigantic exhibit hall. She wished she could climb into the rocket ship on display and blast into outer space, never to return.

  “Dinah!”

  She heard Nick calling her. Quickly Dinah slipped over to the line of people waiting to climb up into the rocket ship. She hid herself behind a tall, broad-shouldered tourist. Peeking out from behind the man’s large tote bag, Dinah saw Nick hurrying in the other direction looking for her. Let him look! It was one thing for him to have teased her in the days when he still liked her. It was another thing for him to tease her now, with Artie.

  Dinah’s turn to enter the rocket ship came just as Nick retraced his steps past the exhibit. She slipped inside before he could see her. By the time she emerged from the space capsule, he was gone.

  Now what? Dinah knew she should quietly go back to the solar system exhibit and rejoin her class, pretending she had never left. But she couldn’t bear it. She wouldn’t be able to pretend she had never left, anyway; obviously, Nick had noticed that she was gone. So there would be a new round of supposedly humorous poems from Nick and Artie about how she had run away, how she couldn’t take a joke.

  Dinah decided to wait for a while in the museum cafeteria, until she felt ready to go back. Just as she was entering the cafeteria, she saw Nick coming out.

  For a fleeting moment their eyes met.

  Dinah ran.

  Nick pounded after her, through the cafeteria and then out again.

  “No running in the museum!” a uniformed guard called. Dinah didn’t listen.

  Nick was a faster runner than Dinah, but Dinah had enough of a head start to leap onto the up escalator well ahead of Nick, so that by the time he stepped on, there were a dozen people crowded between them. She was halfway across the long second-floor hall before he could reach the top. Then, as he was closing in on her, Dinah tore past her rocket ship again and hurled herself into a waiting elevator just before its doors drew together. Downstairs again, Dinah pelted past the old-time airplanes.

  “No running in the museum!” a second guard called to her. Dinah streaked by. Across the lobby she sprinted, sensing Nick behind her. She’d head outside and run all the way to the top of the Washington Monument.

  “No running in the museum!” The third guard caught Dinah by the arm, caught her and held her fast. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “This is a museum, not an indoor track. Where are your parents?”

  Struggling to catch her breath, Dinah scowled across the lobby. Nick saw her and slowed to a walk.

  “Your parents,” the guard repeated. “Where are they?”

  “I’m not here with my parents,” Dinah said coldly. “I’m here with my school.”

  “Which school?” With his free hand, the guard fumbled for his pocket notepad, as if to write her a ticket for running in the museum.

  Dinah didn’t answer. Then, over the museum’s booming PA system, she heard, “Dinah Seabrooke. Nicholas Tribble. Please rejoin your school group at the Jefferson Drive entrance to the museum.”

  “That you?” the guard asked.

  Dinah nodded wearily. But she felt a small stirring of satisfaction. She had known something exciting would happen on the class trip; she hadn’t known that her name would be broadcast throughout the whole vast museum.

  Sternly the guard led Dinah to the other entrance to the museum; Nick trailed behind. Mr. Mubashir came striding across the lobby to meet them, relief flashing in his dark eyes.

  “Dinah! Nick!” The guard let go of Dinah’s arm. “We must all stay together. This museum is a very large place. From now on, you two will be my partners.”

  Mr. Mubashir put one hand on Nick’s shoulder and one on Dinah’s, as if they were preschoolers with their name tags pinned to the backs of their T-shirts.

  “We are going outside for lunch now,” he said. Flanked by Dinah and Nick, he led the group out the museum doors, down the steps, and across the street to the well-trampled lawn stretching before them. “We will have ourselves a nice picnic.”

  “Dinah ran away!” It was Artie again, behind her in line, taunting her. “It’s too bad you weigh three hundred pounds. I guess all that weight slowed you down a bit, huh, Dinah?”

  “Oh, shut up, Adams,” Nick said. Artie shut up.

  Nick leaned forward across Mr. Mubashir and gave Dinah a tentative smile. In that instant, Dinah forgave him for teasing her. She forgave him for his remarks to her after the debate. She even forgave him for winning the election. Nick’s telling Artie to shut up was like Lancelot’s defeating a hostile knight in a jousting tournament to defend Guinevere’s honor. Not that the story of Lancelot and Guinevere had a particularly happy ending. Still, it was undeniably one of the great love stories of all time.

  Dinah beamed a smile back at Nick, a smile shining as brightly as the Dinah Seabrooke star.

  Eleven

  “How was the trip to the museum?” Dinah’s mother asked her when she got home that night, after having dinner at Suzanne’s house. Benjamin was in bed, and both of her parents were sitting at the kitchen table, eating bowls of strawberry ice cream.

  “Fine,” Dinah said. The full story was too complicated to share.

  “Fine?” her father asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Fine,” Dinah repeated. Well, maybe she could tell them a bit more. “Nick and I made up. And I kind of got separated from my class for a while, and so did Nick, and they broadcast both of our names over the PA system for the whole entire museum to hear. And I need to earn twenty-five dollars so that I can have a star named after me. And Artie Adams threw up on the bus ride home. How was your biology exam?”

  “Separated?” Dinah’s mother asked, before her father could answer. “How did you get separated from your class?”

  “It just sort of happened. Well, actually—you really want to hear the whole thing?”

  “Please,” Dinah’s father said.

  Dinah fixed herself a bowl of ice cream and settled down at the kitchen table. Then she launched into the full story. “So can I baby-sit for Benjamin sometime? To earn the money for my star?” she asked when she was done.

  “Oh, Dinah,” her mother said. Dinah always tried to make her stories as funny as possible, but her mother tended to sigh afterward, as if Dinah’s stories were excruciatingly sad.

  “I think we might have said yes before we heard this particular story,” her father said. “But now I think—well, we’re still not ready to try this again.”

  “Suzanne baby-sits all the time. So does Blaine.”

  “Did Suzanne and Blaine get separated from their class today?” her father asked.

  “No, but—”

  “All right, then,” he said, as if he had proved his point.

  “Then how am I going to earn twenty-five dollars?” Sometimes Dinah’s parents mad
e her so angry that it was all she could do not to hurl herself shrieking on the floor, like Benjamin.

  “Well,” Dinah’s mother said. “Guess who called today?”

  Dinah tried to remember if she was in trouble with any of her other teachers.

  “Ruth Briscoe. She noticed the newspaper piles, too, when she was visiting her mother the other day, and she asked if I’d spend a few hours over there, helping her get reorganized—sort of a booster session. Do you want to be my assistant?”

  “Yes!” Dinah said. Sometimes she loved her parents so much she had to hug them.

  Then she remembered her first question again. “How was your exam?”

  Her father grinned. “Our prof had the answers posted by the door when we left. I’m not sure what her curve will be like, but it looks like the worst I can get is a B.”

  Dinah gave her father a second hug. “I bet you got an A. If I were the teacher, I’d give you an A plus.”

  “It sure feels like an A plus to me,” her father said.

  Dinah sat back down at the table and scooped up her last melting spoonful of strawberry ice cream. Her father deserved an A plus. Dinah had never seen anyone work as hard as he had, even when he had been so discouraged after that first disappointing exam. It had been a long time since Dinah had seen him without his biology textbook. Even now it sat in front of him on the kitchen table, next to his empty ice-cream bowl. Once again Dinah marveled: How could someone who had only one life to live, in a solar system that was fast burning out, spend it studying biology? But her father certainly looked happy tonight as he picked up his empty ice-cream bowl and carried it to the sink.

  * * *

  Nick came over to Dinah’s house on Saturday evening, with Suzanne and Greg, and the four of them lay on the floor in the family room, eating microwave popcorn and watching ancient episodes of a funny 1960s spy show that Nick had taped at home from late-night TV.

  The shows were extremely silly, but Dinah found herself laughing anyway, leaning up against the family room’s overstuffed couch, with Nick’s arm around her. With his free hand, Nick fed Dinah buttery popcorn from his bowl, kernel by kernel. Nothing in Dinah’s entire life had ever tasted so good. She held each kernel in her mouth as long as she could, until it finally dissolved into nothingness. Then she opened her mouth for another one.