by Kristin Rae
“Ugh, no fair. I was promised cake.” I face forward and flip through my book without focusing on anything.
Curtis slips in just in the nick of time, does his handshake thing with Jesse—who again calls him Red—and sits in front of me. Mr. McCaffey walks in and shuffles some papers on his desk. The bell’s going to ring any second.
I face Jesse and speak low. “Do you think I could catch a ride home again today after school?” Ma’s planning another day of errands, so I’d like to have something lined up just in case. Plus, he’s already seen where I live and he’s still talking to me.
“Can’t.” Jesse opens his notebook and clicks his pen. “Baseball meeting.”
“Oh, that’s fine. I’ll figure something out.”
I thought it would be a simple solution to my car-less plight to go to school every morning with Angela and ride home every afternoon with Jesse. Doesn’t look like that will happen.
“I can tomorrow, though,” he adds.
“I’ll bring you home today.” Curtis turns to me, the tips of his cheeks pink.
Jesse laughs. “What? The meeting involves you too, genius.”
“I can come back. How important could it be? Baseball doesn’t even start for real until, like, January.” He looks at me. “I can take you. No problem.”
“Oh, um—”
“Coach isn’t gonna let you skip, Red,” Jesse says, kicking the leg of Curtis’s chair with a boot. “Not if you’re serious about preseason tournaments.”
“I’m confused,” I say. “Is his name Curtis or Red?”
“He is sitting right here. My name is Curtis. Friends call me Red.”
Jesse looks at me. “You can call him Red too.”
“But where did that come from?” I ask. “He’s almost blond.”
“Still right here,” Red says, shaking his head. “And it’s a story you won’t be hearing until I get to know you better. Like during lunch. Sit with me.”
Jesse grunts.
“Oh,” I begin slowly. “I didn’t realize we had the same lunch period.”
“We do. I saw you yesterday.” He smiles as if this should please me. “I’ll find you.”
I rub at my eyebrows, wishing I’d thought of a way out of this. Nothing makes me itchy more than giving someone the wrong idea. I’m possibly the pickiest girl on the planet. My standards are sky-high. No one I’ve ever met has lived up to them.
I watch Red as he rolls his pen back and forth, and notice the way he sort of hunches to fit in the desk. He’s a big guy, at least six feet tall, and very thick with muscles. Solid. Looks more like a football player than baseball. The desk might possibly break away from under him. You can tell just by looking at him that there’s not an ounce of graceful ability in his body. Which, assuming he weren’t a jock, would knock him out of the running all by itself. I need someone who can dance.
Like I said, my standards are up in the stars.
“Why’s Babe Ruth headed this way?” Tiffany asks at lunch between bites of taco salad.
Here comes Red, as promised.
“Oh, no,” Angela says. “He’s gonna sit over here.”
“What do you mean, oh, no?” Tiffany smooths her bangs so they swoop over her forehead.
He takes the empty seat across from me and next to Tiffany, who straightens and shifts to get closer to him. Angela drops her eyes to her plate, pushing at a tomato wedge with her fork.
“You’re off the hook, Red,” I tell him before he has a chance to say anything. “My mom’s picking me up after school. Thanks for the offer, though.”
“Sure, whatever.” He shrugs and pulls a slice of cold pizza from a camouflage lunch box with a deer-head silhouette on it. “I was gonna tell you I couldn’t anyway. I really need to go to that baseball meeting.” Before taking a bite, he looks to Angela. “Hey, kid.”
Tiffany catches eyes with me. “He was going to take you home? Wait. Baseball meeting? Are y’all ordering this year’s uniforms? Will there be modeling?” She spins her entire body on the little circle seat to face him. “I will make out with you right here if you let me help pick them out.”
Red swallows and wipes at his chin with a napkin, as if he doesn’t even hear her. Then he catches eyes with me, the corner of his mouth hitching up, and he slowly angles toward Tiffany. Closer. Closer. She leans toward him, cheeks pink, but no sign of backing down. He glides one of his giant hands along her jawbone and cups the back of her head, just under the base of her ponytail. A surprisingly graceful move.
I can’t look away. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life.
Angela mutters, “I’ve got some homework to finish.” She grabs her tray of mostly uneaten food and disappears.
Red’s lips are maybe three inches from Tiffany’s. Closer. She’s not even breathing now. Closer. I still can’t look away.
“Tempting,” he says before he pulls back and resumes eating his pizza. “But no.”
“Holy whoa,” I think I hear her say through an exhale. I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved. “Just please go with lighter-color pants. Like gray or white. That’s all I ask. The tighter, the better.”
“So,” I jump in, “why do they call you Red? What’s the big secret?”
“Oh, everybody knows that!” Tiffany has magically recovered. “He got totally trashed one night at a pool party, and—”
Red smacks the table with an open palm and I jump. “Tiffany, Tiffany, Tiffany Barrett. Gossip doesn’t look good on you.”
“But you—”
“Sssshhhh.” He presses a finger to his lips. “It’s not your story to tell. It’s mine. And she’s not ready.”
I clear my throat. “You fell asleep drunk at a party, woke up naked the next day, your butt got burned.” So classy.
“Who told?” His mouth hangs open in surprise before he shoves in another slice of pizza.
I munch on a tortilla chip and tap my temple. “No one had to.”
“Go to homecoming with me,” he blurts out.
“What?” Tiffany and I ask together.
“Not you,” he says to her before looking back at me. “Madison.”
“It’s Maddie.”
“You said your name was Madison.”
“And you said your name was Curtis.”
“Go with me. To the dance.” He sits taller. “I won’t be available long.”
“Who could refuse such an offer?”
“No one?” he says as a question, which gives me hope that I’ve shaken his confidence.
Tiffany’s eyes have been darting back and forth between us like she’s watching a tennis match. She mouths “No one” to me.
“I can.” I break a chip into pieces and crumbs fly all over the table.
“What?” Tiffany is the one to ask. “Why not?” She leans forward as if Red can’t hear and whispers, “Don’t you know who he is?”
I mirror her posture and whisper back, “Hello. It’s my second day here. I don’t know who anyone is.”
“Answer her question.” Red crosses his arms. “Why not?”
I stash the empty plastic baggie from my sandwich in my lunch box, zip it closed, and lock eyes with him. “You don’t even know me, for one. And all I know about you is that you play baseball and you think an awful lot of yourself.” I count off each point on my fingers. “Secondly, you act like you’re going to kiss Tiffany right in front of me, and you turn around and ask me to homecoming. That’s just—there isn’t even a word for it. Third, this is the second day of school. I don’t even know when homecoming is.”
Tiffany pipes up. “It’s in a month. The theme is Sherwood Forest.”
I smile at her but let it dissolve when I look back at Red. “Lastly, you don’t ask a girl to escort you to the first homecoming dance at her new high school, mouth full of cold pizza in the middle of a cafeteria. You go to her house. You bring her flowers. You look her father in the eye when you shake hands with him. You gush about how wonderful she is. Yo
u’re charming.”
Both of them gape at me.
“Good luck finding a guy who does that.” Tiffany stands and picks up her tray.
I close my eyes and release a long breath. There’s the man of my dreams, standing on my porch with a handful of daisies.
The table shifts under me as Red grabs his lunch box. “Sounds like you watch too many movies.”
CHAPTER SIX
It may be true I watch too many movies, but what I said to Red obviously made an impression. By Friday, a cheerleader named Colene is hanging all over him, and the story spreads about how he brought her flowers and introduced himself to her stepdad. And, of course, he asked her to homecoming.
The idea catches on like a virus, and throughout the next two weeks, I keep hearing talk of similar acts of romantic spontaneity. Homecoming dates go like candy. Here are all these girls benefiting from one of my fantasies, and they don’t even know it. Angela gets a volleyball with Homecoming? written on it tossed to her in the hallway between classes. And Tiffany’s asked in person by a guy on the football team, which is a huge deal, apparently—Texans love their football. Even Jesse asks someone—Gabby something. She doesn’t go to our school, but I hear she’s pretty and Latina. So they have that in common.
I don’t fret about getting asked again.
I’m gradually learning the rhythm of my new school, so by the end of the third week, it feels almost normal to be here. It’s Friday night and I finally have plans that don’t involve homework or babysitting Elise, which I’ve done once in a while. After dinner with the parentals, I’m spending the night at Angela’s.
I scarf down my food in hopes of going over early. Dad piles our dirty dishes next to the sink and then opens the fridge, pulling out a cake with chocolate frosting and placing it on the table in front of me.
“Cake! What’s this for?” I ask, rushing to the cabinet for clean plates and forks for the three of us.
Ma rests her head in a hand, elbow on the table. “I felt bad about not getting you one on your first day of school, so today I made it happen.”
“We’re so proud of you for jumping in and making new friends,” Dad says. “I know starting over isn’t easy.”
I focus on cutting three pieces from the cake. “I mean, you already know I’m not totally happy about the whole thing, but you guys didn’t want to move either. It’s one of those things, right? You don’t want to do it, but you have to.” I refrain from listing off the movies that share this common theme. Let them think I reached the conclusion to tough it out with class by myself.
Dad turns toward Ma and they share a look. I like to think of it as the We have such a great kid, why can’t everyone be more like her? look.
“Which is why,” Ma continues, “we know you can handle what we’re about to tell you.”
Panic. I drop my fork. “We’re not moving again.”
The faces of everyone I’ve met the past couple of weeks flash through my mind. Angela, Jesse, Tiffany, Sarah, Brian, Ryan, Red, and even Rica. I can’t do this all over again somewhere else, with new faces. Maybe I didn’t audibly complain enough through this whole process. It’s just that I can’t stand whiners; therefore, I try not to be a whiner.
“No,” Dad says without humor. “I’m sure you’ve noticed how your mom hasn’t been feeling well lately.”
I look to her, my eyebrows tense. “What’s wrong?”
“I went to the doctor earlier this week—”
A thought occurs to me, and I can’t hold it back. “West Nile? Do you have West Nile?” My heart races. “They keep talking about it at school, how people are dying from it, right here in Texas even. From mosquito bites. There’s a senior who’s missed the past week and rumors are flying about either mono or West—”
Dad raises his hand to cut me off. “She’s fine. Nothing’s wrong.”
I relax, sinking into my chair. “Then what?”
Ma takes a deep breath. “I’m having a baby.”
I blink, waiting for one of them to bust out laughing, because it has to be a joke. It has to be.
They stare at me expectantly, bracing themselves for my reaction. It takes a lot of power to keep from blurting all the questions coming to mind. How long have you been keeping this from me? Do you realize how old you are? Who’s the father?
I start counting to three, like Alonzo tries to do in Meet Me in St. Louis when he needs to cool off so he doesn’t raise his voice at his kids. It didn’t exactly work for him, but I can’t give some kind of response until I collect my thoughts. I don’t even make it to three before my eyes well up. I tear away from the table without a word and sprint to my room.
Rider. Does he know?
Locking the door behind me, I grab my cell phone and fling myself onto my bed. I call Rider’s number but it goes straight to voice mail. It’s the weekend. He’ll probably be unreachable by sisterly types until Monday, when he’s sobered up. I text him to call me anyway, just in case.
I spot the overnight bag I packed earlier by the closet and lunge for it, slinging it over my shoulder. I stomp back into the dining area and they’re still at the table, Dad picking at his cake and Ma nearly finished with hers.
They eye me curiously but don’t say anything. They still need my reaction. Well, other than me fleeing the scene.
Too bad I don’t have a good one yet.
“I’m going to Angela’s,” I say, looking between them and turning for the front door.
As I grip the knob, I hear one of their chairs scoot against the tile floor. Shutting my eyes tight and wiping away the single tear that finally decided to fall, I head back to face them one more time. Ma’s standing behind her chair, a hand on Dad’s shoulder.
I can do this. I’m the good kid.
“Congratulations.” I test out a smile but a sob escapes.
I turn to leave again, but at the last second I pivot, snatching the plate with the remainder of the double-layered cake and walking out the front door with it. I sure hope they have milk at Angela’s house.
* * *
I walk the winding driveway to the Moraleses’ house, the sinking sun filtering through the trees overhead like long fingers ready to seize me and carry me up to the sky. I wish they would.
A baby. A sister. Or another brother, ugh. It’s too much to process. It’s like in Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda when their two already huge, widowed families are joined, and the oldest boy just enlisting in the military finds out his new stepmother’s pregnant. He gets blood drawn for the health exam and tells the doctor to take it all. I get it now.
A baby. An infant. A toddler. Child. Adolescent. Adult. They’re going to have to go through every stage all over again. And I’m going to have to help. I’m going to be one of those seventeen-year-old girls who have to watch a baby sister and not get paid for it. If I take her anywhere, people will think she’s mine. That my mother’s just helping me out because I got myself into trouble. Little do they know I don’t even let guys kiss me offstage.
This better not interfere with my life after high school. I’m going places. College, where I’ll study my craft with other kids just as serious about theatre as I am, then on to traveling shows—the dream is at least one traveling Broadway show, but I know how stiff the competition will be. I have to be at my absolute best. The window of opportunity is very small for making it anywhere significant. You can’t be too young and inexperienced, and you can’t be too old, because of the physical demands. The human body has such a short prime of life. And mine’s almost here.
The overnight bag slips off my shoulder to my elbow, but I’m gripping the cake plate with both hands. When I reach the porch, I have to poke at the doorbell with my elbow. The dead bolt unclicks and it’s Tiffany who appears. When Angela said slumber party, I didn’t realize that involved more than me and her. I need a good venting session with carbs, not an actual party. That’s not going to help my mood.
About the only thing that might p
erk me up is the possibility of glimpsing Jesse in whatever he wears to sleep.
Tiffany looks me over. “What happened to you? And what’s with the cake?” She takes it from me when I hold it out to her.
I shake my head as I follow her inside, not yet ready to speak. Cool, pizza-scented air slaps me in the face, prompting my eyes to water all over again. I drop my bag at the bottom of the stairs on the way to the kitchen. Angela’s at the dining table cutting a slice of pizza into smaller bites for Elise to eat with a fork—she doesn’t like to touch her food with her hands.
“Maddie’s here, Maddie’s here!” Elise squeals, hopping out of her seat.
She rushes to me and hugs my legs. My body tenses at her touch for an instant, but I make myself relax. This is Elise. I adore Elise. She won me over the very first night I was here, dragging me all over her room to show me her drawings. She has nothing to do with my parents. It wouldn’t be right to take out my shock on her.
“I made you a picture!” She runs back to where she was sitting and grabs a black sheet of paper with colorful chalk scratches all over it. She points to the boxy figure in the center, then to a smaller one next to it. “That’s you and that’s me. And my balloon.” A bright red ball floats above her chalk head.
The smile I’ve been holding back wins. It’s the balloon I gave her earlier this week. They were passing them out at school to promote some club I don’t remember the name of, and I took one for her. I don’t even know what made me do it. I just thought she’d like it.
I look into Elise’s eyes, so big and green and innocent. They whisper, Wouldn’t you like to have a baby sister like me? Wouldn’t you love her?
And I realize I would love her. Or him. It won’t be the kid’s fault I’ll be seventeen years older, about to really start my own life. Or that by the time the kid’s seventeen, I could have children of my own. Eventually, I’ll get used to the idea. But I don’t have to be happy about it at this moment.
Or talk to my parents for a long time.
Angela puts Elise to bed—Mrs. Morales is at the playhouse, helping with a production, and Mr. Morales is visiting family in Mexico—and then the three of us polish off the rest of the cake. After two thick slices and a tall glass of iced milk, I find myself loosening up and spilling my secret.