It was a little worse than that — the aged yellow paper was crumbling to pieces, and pages 11b to 15c were stuck together with a gross brown substance — but I was determined to figure the thing out.
“Are those dress patterns that the storekeeper threw in any good?”
“Maybe,” I hedged. The truth was, they could be the best patterns on the planet and I wouldn’t know it. To me, they were a mystifying collection of shapes cut from what looked like baking parchment, printed with baffling dots, dashes, arrows, numbers and a bunch of other enigmatic symbols. It was like trying to decode hieroglyphics. “But they’re a little old fashioned. I think I’ll start with something newer, something of my own, even.”
From the book bag on my lap, I hauled out a sketchbook which I’d discovered in an overflowing stationery drawer at home, and showed Chloe my first attempts at fashion design.
“Those don’t look half bad. You might have some skills at this,” she said, then peered into the almost empty bag of candies. “Last one — sure you don’t want it?”
“Really, no.”
“Ah, a caramel crème. Your loss.”
My eyes fell on the indigo square of foil and the silver-striped cellophane Chloe had unwrapped from the last candy.
“But can I have the wrappers?”
“You want my candy wrappers?” Her tone was disbelieving, her eyebrows arched.
“Yep.”
I took the foil and cellophane squares from her hand, smoothed them out carefully and, as the bus lurched to a stop outside Longford High, tucked them into the back of my sketchbook for safekeeping.
A sharp pain in my left ankle made me gasp. I’d forgotten how quickly I needed to move my legs out of the aisle once the bus stopped.
“Excuse me,” Brooke, the girl who’d kicked my ankle, said. “Could you get your feet out of my way, if it’s not too much trouble. They’re completely blocking the aisle.”
“Yeah, how’re we supposed to exit with Bigfoot blocking the way?” her friend added.
I pulled my legs out of the way, banging a knee on the seat in front of me in my rush.
“Thank you so much,” Brooke said in a falsely sweet voice.
“Hey, we should call Monster Hunters,” her friend said loudly as they walked down the aisle, “and tell them we’ve found Sasquatch.”
“Yeah, you call them, Brooke, so I can tell them how I found a two-legged talking cow!” Chloe yelled after them. Then she sighed at me. “You need to stand up to them, Peyton. Just ignoring it doesn’t help.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
It wasn’t the first, or even the fifty-first, time that Chloe had urged me to give as good as I got, but I always thought of the perfect putdown only after the offender had moved off and my blushes had faded.
I followed Chloe off the bus and ran beside her through the pelting rain toward the staired entrance of the school, wishing my fleece jacket had a hood.
As we reached the bottom stair, I glimpsed a figure in a black leather jacket disappearing through the glass doors at the top. For a moment, it looked like … But no, it couldn’t be.
Inside, we pushed through the throng of students, sidestepping lost-looking newbies and greeting classmates we hadn’t seen in months, until we reached the senior lockers at the end of the main hallway. Chloe and I began transferring the contents of our bags into the lockers. For once, I’d been assigned a top locker and didn’t have to crouch down on my haunches to reach it.
“Here.” Chloe handed me a fistful of candy wrappers scraped from the bowels of her bag. “Now you can start a collection.”
“You’re so tall, you really ought to play basketball,” someone said from the other side of my open locker door.
I recognized the voice. It was Greg Baker, nagging me about trying out for the girls’ team again. Why did everyone think that height was coded on the same genes as hand-eye coordination?
I shouldered my locker door shut, trying to work up the nerve to tell Greg, What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?
But Greg wasn’t looking at me. He was talking to the figure in the black jacket. The tall figure. The familiar, very tall figure with the green eyes and smiley eye crinkles. The one I’d had to lift my face up to when we’d kissed.
I stood gaping, wet hair hanging in rat-tails, brightly colored foil and cellophane squares clutched in my hands.
Jay must have felt my stare, because he sent a quick look in my direction, then did a double-take, dropping puzzled eyes to the candy wrappers, before meeting my gaze. I could tell that, despite my drowned appearance and the look of idiocy which must be on my face, he recognized me. My face and neck grew so hot, I figured steam must be rising off the top of my head. I probably resembled Chloe’s favorite red china teapot.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s you — Tiger Eyes.”
“Huh?” I said, brushing a soggy lock of hair out of my face with my forearm.
“We met in the diner that night when —”
“I remember.” More blushing.
“Me, too.” He grinned.
Oh, my… I wanted to just stand and stare at the beauty of that grin, but I forced myself to speak. “So, you’re at Longford High now?”
“Yeah, I transferred. I’m officially the new kid.”
“I’m trying to get him to try out for the basketball team. That height shouldn’t go to waste,” said Greg. “Tryouts are on Friday. Will you come?”
“Sorry, man, I have an ankle injury,” Jay said.
Greg groaned in disappointment and then pinned me with a pleading look. “Peyton? It’s your final year, your last chance.”
“Er, no, sorry.” At his hangdog expression, I added, “Really, Greg, you don’t want me. I couldn’t catch a ball if it was handed to me in slow motion. Honest.”
“Okay, okay.” He sighed and gave my long legs a regretful look, then asked his cousin, “Got what you need?”
Jay nodded. He was still looking at me.
I met his gaze, but couldn’t think of anything to say other than, You’ve got freckles! I managed to restrain myself from actually saying the words, and settled for silently admiring the sprinkle across his nose and cheeks.
Someone jostled me, and I glanced down to see Chloe standing at my side.
“Introduce me maybe?”
“Oh, right. This is Jay Young. He’s from DC.”
I admired Jay Young and his freckles for a little while longer, though I could feel Chloe looking up at me expectantly. What did she want?
Someone pushed in between Jay and Greg and gave an annoyed cough. My eyes slid down sideways and took in a pair of big blue eyes. No, not big, googly. It was her, the girl in the blue dress from the diner. Today, she was wearing a pink shirt dress which fit her perfectly.
“Hi,” I said, with zero enthusiasm.
“Sure,” she said.
She looked me up one side and down the other, from the tip of my dripping head to the bottom of my toes in their unflattering men’s sneakers, lingering a moment to frown at my handful of candy wrappers.
“Seems I’ll have to introduce myself,” Chloe said. “Hi Jay, I’m Chloe DiCaprio — no relation to Leonardo — and I’m Peyton’s friend.”
Googly Eyes slipped her arm through the crook of Jay’s elbow, even though it was a good ten inches higher than her own and she looked absurd doing it, and said, “I’m Faye Fenton. And I’m Jay’s girlfriend.”
~ 7 ~
At four-thirty that afternoon, my phone buzzed an alert from Chloe. She was outside my house, below my bedroom window, waiting to be let in so we could have our usual first-day-of-school dissection ritual — herb tea with a spicy side of hot gossip.
I set aside the fabric I’d been attempting to sew on the old Singer, walked over to my sash window, pushed it all the way open, lifted the heavy roll of rope ladder — which was Chloe’s and my preferred way of accessing my second-story bedroom — and tossed it out of the window, yelling, “Beware below!”
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br /> “Hey,” said Chloe as she climbed over the window sill.
“Hi. What’ll it be? Tea or chocolate milk?”
“Tea. I’ve brought ‘Orange Orgasm’ today. And” — she rummaged in her small backpack and brought out two packages — “Berger cookies!”
Good. Buttery shortbread topped with chocolate fudge would help sweeten my mood. I was still bummed out that although there was a hot new guy at the school — one big and tall enough to make even me feel dainty, and one who was an amazing kisser, too — he had already been snapped up. This rare and precious tall boy was close enough to touch, but still out of my reach. Figured.
In one corner of my bedroom — on top of a mini fridge stocked with essentials in the way of food and drinks — was a tray with an electric kettle, cups, tea, coffee, sugar, teaspoons, and even a red china teapot and strainer for when we made Chloe’s exotic loose-leaf varieties.
While she boiled the kettle and made the tea, we gossiped about the day — who’d obviously spent their vacation in sunnier spots than Maryland (“Did you see Brooke? She’s the exact orange of a kumquat,”); which teachers we’d been assigned for our classes (“I’ve still got Dumas for French, so that’s good. But Watkins for Calculus? Kill me now.”), and who’d hooked up with whom over the summer (“Neither of us, friend. Another summer has passed, and we remain single.”)
Which brought my thoughts around to where they’d been tethered all day.
“And I would never have figured Gabe and Liu for a couple,” said Chloe, blowing on her tea. “They don’t seem to fit together, you know?”
“Yeah. Just like Jay and Faye. Jay and Faye? It even sounds ridiculous. Faye — what kind of name is that anyway? I’ll tell you what sort of girls are called Faye — felons, that’s who,” I grumbled.
“Uh, felons?” Chloe took a sip of her tea and nodded at the amber liquid approvingly. “This is pretty good. I mean, not orgasmic-good, but nice. Kinda perfumy on top, with earthy ginger notes below.”
“Yeah, felons,” I said darkly. “People who break the law.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Are we talking about the law of tall girls? Again?”
“She is in flagrant violation of it, Chloe. Jay and Faye — they look as dumb as they sound.”
“They do look hilarious together — I’ll give you that. She’ll have to stand on a stool when they kiss. Or he’ll have to lift her up.”
The image of that pinched at me. Some girls had a list of qualities they wanted in a guy: good looks, intelligence, sense of humor, a cool car. (I’d just bet Faye ranked the cool car on her priority list.) But my boy bucket list included a very different set of attributes. I wanted a guy to have bigger feet than me. Bigger hands. A guy who could scoop me up without having a hernia. Who had to bend his head — or lift me up — to kiss me. Freaking Faye probably got these things all the time.
“It’s just such a waste,” I moaned, downing my non-orgasmic tea as if it was a shot of bourbon handed to me by a sympathetic barman. “He’s tall and he’s gorgeous — well, you saw him.”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t ping ‘sizzling’ on my hot-o-meter.”
I shook my head like a spaniel with water in its ears. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I thought I just heard you say Jay Young is not hot.”
“No, I mean I can see that he’s good-looking, he’s just not my kind of hot.”
“But how can that even be?”
“Beauty — beholder?” said Chloe, flipping first one hand and then the other in the air. “He’s too big, too tall.”
“There’s no such thing!”
“He’s just too … much. Anyway, a guy that size? He’s probably a jock. And you know how much I love them. Not. Or maybe he’s a cowboy — did you see his bowlegs?”
I hadn’t. But the idea of Jay in a Stetson and chaps, calling me ma’am or purrty, brought a dreamy smile to my lips.
“There was a flyer on the main notice board from the drama club, did you see it?” Chloe asked, pouring herself another cup of tea. “They’re doing something called Romero and Juliet.”
“Romero? Not Romeo?”
“Maybe it was a typo. Auditions are on September twenty-second. Going to try out?”
“Maybe.” Probably. I enjoyed the experience of disappearing into someone else’s skin for a while, and an extracurricular activity would look good on a college application. “Even though they’ll probably make me play the butler again, or the narrator.”
My height limited my role options. More often than not, I was given male roles.
“They’re doing two performances in December, right at the end of the semester. And senior prom has been scheduled for the end of April.”
“That gives me loads of time to find tall guys and date them,” I said, relieved.
“Have you begun making a list of potential candidates yet?”
“Nope. I was waiting for you to come and help me.”
“Peyton, I can’t tell at a glance who’s over — How tall does he have to be again?”
“Six-three, minimum.”
“Well, I can’t calculate heights at a glance. That’s your spidey-sense.”
I grabbed a legal pad, wrote The Tall Boys List at the top, and underlined it twice. I doubted I would need such a big piece of paper. I figured there would be only a handful of qualifying candidates.
“Right, number one, Jay Young.” I wrote his name down.
“He’s taken,” Chloe pointed out. Unnecessarily.
Sad, but true. I drew a line through his name.
“Tim Anderson,” I said, adding his name. “He must be six-six or -seven.” Tiny Tim was the tallest boy in the school. “How come he gets called Tiny Tim and I get called Big P?”
“It’s a mystery of the universe.” Chloe collected our dirty cups, carefully wiped crumbs into the trash can, and headed into the bathroom that led directly off my room to wash the cups in the basin. She knew how much I hated a mess.
“How about Dylan Jones?” I chewed the end of my pen, considering. “He might just scrape in. If he stands straight.”
Like me, Dylan was a sloucher. I wrote his name down, grabbed a dishcloth and followed Chloe.
“What I need,” I said, drying a cup, “is a rack to stretch boys, like those ones they had in medieval times.”
“I think that was more for torture than posture.”
“Either way, they’d be elongated.”
When we’d put away the dishes and were back on my bed, I asked, “Can you think of anyone else?”
“This is boring,” Chloe complained.
“Yeah, I know. But it must be done, friend. I’ve got to win that bet. I need the money.”
I did. But I was also more than a little enchanted by the idea of dating a tall guy, of dancing with someone so tall that my head would rest on his chest or shoulder, rather than having his face mashed up against my chest.
In the Venn diagram of dating, the intersection of what boys find attractive in a girl, and what I find attractive in a boy, is tiny, so my dating experience has been majorly limited. I’d only ever been out with four boys, and not a single sorry one of them was as tall as me.
I had my first kiss when I was a sophomore. The top of Carlos’s head reached about to my collarbone — so we had to sit down in order to kiss comfortably. And even then, I had to hunch over. Slow-dancing with him was excruciating, and when he nestled his face between my boobs and began motorboating noisily, any attraction I might have imagined I felt for him died instantly.
My longest-lasting and most recent relationship — if it could even be called that — was with Wayne, who was almost tall enough to look me directly in the eye. We lasted a total of five dates, three of which were spent playing World of Warcraft in his basement. The other two were at house parties, where he spent most of the night dancing with other (shorter) girls.
I haven’t dated anyone since, and I’ve never dated anyone taller than myself. So if I could get over my insecuriti
es, this bet might just be fun.
A knock at the door jarred me out of my fantasies.
“Hi, girls,” my mother said from the other side of the door. “Is that you, Chloe?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane,” Chloe called back.
There was another, softer knock. “May I come in?”
I sighed and walked over to unlock the door. My mother came in, clutching a turquoise plush toy to her chest.
Seeing her there in my room, I felt the usual spasm of annoyance. Her hair, self-cut and already graying at the temples, needed a wash. And her lipstick, probably hastily applied in honor of Chloe’s presence, was already bleeding into the lines around her mouth. My mother was only in her early forties — a good decade younger than Chloe’s mom — but she looked much older.
“Yes?” I asked. “What do you want?”
Chloe gave me a look that clearly said she thought I was being rude.
“I wanted to say hi to Chloe, Peyton. Is that allowed?”
“How are you, Mrs. Lane?”
“Very well. Very, very well, thank you for asking. Look what I found today.” She waved the stuffed toy at me. “Remember this? It was that sweet monster who didn’t like scaring kids, from that movie. What was his name again?”
“It’s Sully, from Monster’s Inc.,” Chloe said. “I loved that movie.”
“That’s right!” my mother said happily, perching the toy on top of a chest of drawers. “Peyton used to call him Solly-monster. He used to be hers before —”
“I don’t want it,” I said quickly.
“You don’t want it?” my mother said, like I’d just turned down the first prize in the state lottery. “Why not?”
“Mom, just look at it.” The monster had only one eye, its blue fur was faded and mangy-looking, and one of its arms hung limply, empty of stuffing. “Besides, I’m seventeen, not a baby.”
I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but my words were enough to make her press her lips together and tear up. Enough to make me feel guilty and say, in a gentler tone, “But thanks for thinking of me.”
The Law of Tall Girls Page 4