Rhymes with Cupid

by Anna Humphrey

I didn’t disagree.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said instead, giving him a small, tight smile. We were at T-minus twelve days to my driving test. I needed him, and there was no use being mad all the time, even if he was mostly infuriating. “And, thanks for the lesson,” I added, rather generously I thought. “It wasn’t totally horrible.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess. And, hey, next time, if you straighten the wheels, you’ll nail it. Then you’ll be, like, the Baryshnikov of backing in.”

  I turned my back so he wouldn’t see me smiling for real and headed toward my house. “Hey, wait,” he said. I stopped, one foot deep in the snowbank between our driveways. “About this panda party. You going with anyone?”

  It either said something about my total lack of interest in dating, or the fact that my nerves were still a little shot from the rare Japanese shrub incident . . . but I didn’t even understand the question. “Depends if I pass my road test. I’m still betting it’s a fifty-fifty chance I’ll fail—no offense to your teaching skills. I might get my mom to drive me.”

  “No. I mean, going with someone. Like, your boyfriend?”

  I actually laughed. “Uh-uh. I mean. No. I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m not going out with anyone. But I’m sure you can bring someone if you want.” I hesitated, knowing that if he showed up with some other girl it would ruin Dina’s entire Valentine’s Day. “But, then again, Dina will probably need a lot of help setting up and everything. If you didn’t bring a date, then maybe you could help out more.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, no problem. I’m not going out with anyone either. And I’m good at pouring chips into bowls and putting up streamers and stuff.” He leaned down and picked up a mitten full of snow, formed it into a ball, and threw it softly against his grandfather’s garage door. “How come you don’t have a boyfriend?” he asked, reaching down to pick up some more snow. “Is your mom really strict or something?”

  “No.” I wiggled my toes inside my boots to keep them warm. “No, trust me. My mom would love it if I was going out with someone. She thinks I study too much. I don’t date because . . .” I trailed off. I’d known Patrick all of three days. He didn’t need to hear the gory details of the Matt Love heartbreak. “It’s complicated,” I finished. “Or, no. Wait. It’s not complicated at all. Men are pigs.” I realized a second too late that I’d just insulted his entire half of our species. “High school guys, especially. I mean, not all of them. Obviously. But ninety-eight percent.”

  “Is that a scientific fact?” he asked.

  “Pretty much,” I answered.

  “Well, what about the other two percent?”

  “The other two percent are really hard to find.”

  “They do exist though,” he countered.

  “Right,” I said sarcastically, then I stepped out of the snowbank and lifted a branch of the totally smushed, totally not-rare spike-weed with the toe of my boot. “I’ll believe that when I actually meet one.”

  I had Sunday off, so my mom and I spent the day unpacking the last of our boxes. It was nice—if a little weird—to see all of our books lined up on the built-in shelves, our photos on the new mantelpiece. Even though the house was smaller than our last house—with hardwood floors that creaked and groaned, cracking plaster, and old-fashioned windows that let in a draft—it was starting to seem more like home.

  “Look at this,” my mom said, coming down the hallway. She was holding something curled in the palm of her hand. “I found it between the floorboards in the attic while I was putting the boxes away.” I set the towels I’d been folding on the linen closet shelf and went to see. It was a thin, tarnished chain with a tiny pendant on it. “I think it’s an opal,” my mom said, tipping the small, iridescent blue stone in the light. It was shaped like a heart. “Must have belonged to the old owners. But they didn’t leave a forwarding address. It’s yours now if you want it.” She opened my fingers and dropped the necklace into my hand. “There’s some silver polish under the sink.”

  I didn’t usually wear jewelry—especially cheesy heart-shaped stuff—but there was something kind of sweet and simple about the necklace that made me not hate it. I dropped it into my pocket, planning to clean it up later.

  My mom ducked into her bedroom and came out dragging the laundry hamper behind her. “I’m going to put in a load before I start painting the bathroom,” she said. “Do you have anything you want washed?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.” My mom started off down the hallway with the heavy hamper, and that’s when I noticed the dust in her hair from the attic; the tired slump of her shoulders. We’d mostly been in separate rooms so I wasn’t certain, but I couldn’t remember seeing her stop all day to eat anything, or to sit down. And I was positive she hadn’t gotten around to showering yet.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “Why don’t you leave the bathroom? We can live with puke green for one more day.” It was hard to understand why anyone had picked that color for a bathroom in the first place. It made everyone who went in there look like they were just getting over the stomach flu. “We could rent a movie. Something brainless, like a romantic comedy. Make some popcorn. Take a break for tonight.”

  “You want to rent a romantic comedy?” my mom asked, raising her eyebrows doubtfully. I didn’t want to, actually. I hated the whole “boy meets girl, they fall in love but—oh—they can’t possibly be together because of some terrible but really very easy-to-resolve misunderstanding” plots that always ended happily ever after with a passionate kiss and/or a wedding, but I knew they were my mom’s favorites so . . .

  “Yeah. I do,” I said.

  “Hang on.” She was grinning. “I’ll put this laundry in, run a brush through my hair, and grab the car keys. There’s a Video 411 at Carson Square.”

  Big mistake. An hour later, I was in sappy story heartbreak hell. “Oh, I can’t look,” my mom said, covering her eyes. “He’s going to see the other girl from behind, wearing the same sweater, and think it’s his fiancée. And they made such a cute couple, too. Didn’t you think it was romantic when he had the airplane skywrite his marriage proposal?”

  I thought it was kind of show-offy, actually, but my mom was obviously enjoying her movie, and I didn’t want to ruin it. I grabbed a handful of popcorn and shoved it into my mouth.

  “Yeah, romantic,” I said not too convincingly while I continued to chew.

  A buzzing sound came from the basement. “Oh, that’s the wash cycle finishing,” my mom said, hopping up. “Don’t pause it. I’ll be right back.” She came up the basement stairs five minutes later with the first load of clean laundry, which she folded while watching the female lead sob into a cappuccino with her best friend. Then, as soon as she finished that, my mother noticed that the mirror above the mantel was streaky. “I can clean it and watch at the same time,” she said, getting up for the Windex and paper towels. By the time the couple was getting to the bottom of the whole similar-sweaters/mistaken-identity thing via a shouting match in Central Park followed by (surprise) a romantic kiss that cut to (surprise) their wedding day, my mother had moved on to dusting. So much for getting her to take a break. I sighed and picked up a dust rag as the credits rolled. If I couldn’t beat her, my only option was to join her. We cleaned until ten that night and both fell into bed exhausted.

  In a way, it was almost a relief to go back to school the next morning. At least in class I could sit down and have a quiet moment to myself.

  But the quiet didn’t last long. Dina started shrieking the second I saw her in the hallway between math and chemistry. “Look!” she said, pulling a scrap of paper out of her pocket. “I got it. On Saturday. You’re making that cheesecake now. No excuses. And the pinwheel cookies. You can pay me out of your next check for the twenty-five-dollar donation to Panda Rescue, if you want. Or even the one after that. I was so nervous I thought I was going to pass out. I wanted to tell you, but you guys left together for your driving lesson. So I decided to wait unt
il I saw you in person today, but it’s been killing me.” I took the piece of paper she was waving excitedly and examined the phone number written across it in crisp black ink. “I gave him my number, too. He said he’d call me tonight if he didn’t get a chance to see me at the store first.”

  “Really?” I handed back the paper, a strange, heavy feeling filling my chest.

  “Yeah. We’re going to talk more about the party.”

  “Dina, that’s great!” I said, biting my lip. I gave my head a shake. Seriously? What was wrong with me? Like I’d told Patrick, I didn’t date; plus, even though he was a nice guy, Patrick got on my nerves every time he teased me (which was often); plus, I wanted him to like Dina. Everything was going completely according to plan for once. “That’s really, really awesome.”

  It was so awesome, in fact, that I felt awesome about it all day long. I moped my way through chemistry and barely picked at my Caesar salad at lunch while Dina and her friends Carly and Cara planned decorations and came up with cheesy panda-themed party games. (Panda piñatas, pin the tail on the panda, and pass the panda present were just a few of the things I had to look forward to on Valentine’s Day.)

  And I felt about ten times more awesome when, halfway through our shift at the store, Dina’s pocket started buzzing and, for once, it turned out not to be Damien. “Patrick!” Dina said, her eyes going wide—a huge smile breaking across her face. “How are you? Are you calling from the Keyhole?” She listened for a few seconds. “Oh no! Oooooh. Poor you,” she cooed into the phone. “What’s wrong? Un-huh.” She twirled a lock of hair around one finger. “Oh my God. Un-huh.” She switched the phone from one ear to the other. “Okay, I’ll tell her. Feel better. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Bye.” She flipped her cell shut.

  “That was Patrick,” she said, like it wasn’t blindingly obvious that I’d been hanging on every word of her end of the conversation. “Your driving lesson’s canceled tonight. He’s sick.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yay! No driving! Or, I mean, oh no. That sucks that he’s sick. What’s wrong?”

  “He caught Lyme disease.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, that’s what he said. It sounds really serious. Elyse, I’m worried about him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, me too.” Except that I was actually more confused than worried. I’d never heard of anyone in Middleford getting Lyme disease before, and I’d definitely, definitely never heard of anyone getting it in February. Wasn’t it spread by deer ticks? There weren’t any deer in town, and even if there were, wouldn’t their ticks be busy nesting, watching deer tick TV, playing miniature games of deer tick poker, or doing whatever deer ticks did to pass the time until summer?

  “If I pick out a card for him,” Dina said, “and maybe some balloons, would you mind bringing them over to his house for me? I’d owe you big.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “You know I’m always happy to help you flirt.”

  I couldn’t get over it. Dina had now let an entire two days pass without texting Damien back. It was a new record, and despite my weird reaction to the news that she and Patrick had exchanged numbers, I wasn’t about to discourage her.

  In retrospect, the only thing I wished is that I’d encouraged her to go with a nice “get well” decorative mug, or maybe a personalized smiley face key chain to cheer him up. Anything but the huge bunch of green helium balloons she put together, which I spent the next half hour trying not to bonk strangers on the head with as I rode the bus home. In fact, by the time I got to our street, I couldn’t wait to get rid of the stupid things. I was planning to go straight over to Patrick’s place to give them to him and to find out how he’d mysteriously contracted Lyme disease in February, but my mom was just pulling into the driveway. She got out of the car and started waving her arms frantically.

  “Elyse!” she called. “Come into the house. Bring your balloons. We have to celebrate. You won’t believe what happened to me at work today.”

  Chapter 7

  My mom made me take off my coat and come into the kitchen before she’d tell me anything.

  “You should sit,” she said, pulling out a chair. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what could have happened at work to make her so excited. Did she get a massive raise? Did spa management already order her the new, ergonomically correct chair she’d asked for? Did Meg Ryan walk in off the street and give my mom her autograph before making a bikini wax appointment?

  “No, no wait. You should stand up,” my mom said. “No. Wait. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just tell you.” She practically squealed. “We’re going to Mexico!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Cancun, Mexico.” She pulled a brochure out of her purse and slapped it down on the table. I immediately recognized the bikini-clad couple on the front, sipping their neon-pink drinks. They were the same ones who’d taunted me while I shivered in the bus shelter outside the mall. “The resort is called Hotel Del Mar. It’s a five-star facility. Ten days, nine nights, all expenses paid. They call it the ‘Sweetheart Retreat,’ but you don’t need to be a couple to go. Sun, sand, and surf. We leave the day after tomorrow.”

  “What?” I said again. The news she was trying to tell me didn’t make sense in so many ways. Mexico? The day after tomorrow? Five star? Us? As in me and my mother, whose last vacation—I don’t know how many years ago—had included driving three hours down the highway to this dodgy-looking theme park called StoryBookLand, and staying at a motel that reeked of cigarettes and had no air-conditioning?

  “I won the grand prize trip!” she exclaimed. “In the staff appreciation day raffle!”

  “What?” I repeated. It was as if all other words had left me.

  “I know!” she said. “I never win anything.” Neither of us did. It was like a family curse. Half the time when I was a kid I didn’t even get the prize the cereal box promised.

  “I didn’t even buy a ticket, and I still won.”

  “What?” I said, then caught myself, adding, “I mean, how is that possible?”

  “It was Valter.”

  “Valter? Valter Big-ass-kiss?” I asked. My mother shot me a disapproving look, but then gave in and smiled. I mean, she’d just won a ten-day trip to Mexico. Who wouldn’t be in a better-than-usual mood?

  “He was in line behind me at the coat check, and he asked if I’d bought my raffle tickets yet. I told him I didn’t think I’d bother. But he said everyone deserved a chance at the grand prize, so he bought a ticket and put my name on it. Can you believe it? People spent hundreds of dollars in tickets, and I just had the one. I told Valter he must be a lucky charm.”

  Well, at least he had that much going for him. You’d need all the luck you could get in life with a name like that. I knew enough not to say any of that out loud, though.

  “Mom, that’s incredible,” I said instead.

  “I know,” my mom went on. “Valter’s just the nicest man. I tried to get him to take the vacation, since he’d paid for the ticket, but he flat-out refused. He said I should take my beautiful daughter.”

  “You have a beautiful daughter?” I said, looking over my shoulder, as if she might be standing behind me.

  My mom didn’t laugh. Self-deprecating humor was on her list of stuff she didn’t find funny, right after making fun of people’s names, apparently. “I have the most beautiful daughter,” she answered seriously, then went straight back into her flustered mode. “The most beautiful daughter who needs a new bathing suit. And do your sandals from last summer still fit? Oh my God, we’ll have to make sure your passport is up-to-date, too. You’ll have to call Mr. Goodman and ask for the time off. And I’ll let your school know. We’ll have to reschedule your driving test, too, I suppose. I hope Patrick won’t mind if you take a break from lessons for a while.” She handed me the cordless phone along with the envelope my last paycheck had come in. She pointed to the store number. “Why don’t you start with Mr. Goodman?”

  An
d that was when our luck—or mine, at least—took a turn for the worse. Honestly, I should have been expecting it all along. Ten-day trips to Mexico didn’t just fall from the sky into my life. “Elyse, you know I’d love to give you the time off,” Mr. Goodman said after I’d explained the situation, “but with Valentine’s Day coming up, I can’t be training new staff right now. As it is, I barely have enough people to cover the shifts.” At the same time, my mother walked back into the kitchen examining my passport—a devastated look on her face. Even from across the room, I could tell from a glimpse at the photo that I was about five years old in it, which meant it was way, way expired. I wasn’t sure how long it took to apply for a new one, but I had a feeling it was more than a day.

  “That’s okay, Mr. Goodman,” I said. “I completely understand.” Sure, my heart was sinking a little—but just a little. I liked beaches and sun as much as anyone, and it would be great to get away—especially if it meant avoiding the whole Valentine’s Day thing at home—but maybe it was for the best. I always got sunburns. I had a chemistry test on Friday that I’d already started studying for, and a social studies project due the following Tuesday. And, even though I was dreading it, it was better to get my driving test out of the way than to spend more time obsessing over it. Plus, Dina might never forgive me if she didn’t get her cheesecake. . . .

  “Maybe they’ll make an exception about your passport at customs,” my mom tried, “if we explain that I won the trip on short notice? And you could always quit at Goodman’s and find a new job when we get back.”

  I sat down across from her. “Mom,” I said reasonably. “I don’t think so. If I quit Goodman’s, it could take ages for me to find something else. Nobody at the mall is hiring right now. And isn’t customs usually pretty strict about things like passports?”

  “Well, then.” She took a deep breath and reached for the phone. “I’ll call Valter and tell him that’s that. We can’t go. He’ll have to take the tickets instead.”