She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)

by Ann Hood

  In fact, I didn’t have any friends now. In the halls at school, some kids were still calling me Ger-trude. I was still stuck having to eat lunch with Jessica. She’d started collecting good-luck charms—a metal four-leaf clover, a gross rabbit’s foot, a penny from the year she was born. Every time she got a new one, she showed it to me and explained why it was good luck.

  “You know,” she told me, “not every rabbit’s foot is good luck. It has to be the left hind foot. And the rabbit has to be caught in a cemetery. During a full moon.”

  She was stroking that creepy thing right near my American chop suey.

  “Some people believe the rabbit has to be shot with a silver bullet. But some people say the foot has to be cut off while the rabbit’s still alive.”

  “Ugh,” I said, pushing my tray away.

  “Do you think that matters?” Jessica asked me, all serious.

  When she got that cheap metal four-leaf clover it was the same thing. “Four-leaf clovers are lucky because they’re so rare,” she told me.

  I looked at hers. The green paint was already chipping off. “I think that only pertains to real four-leaf clovers,” I said.

  “The first leaf is for faith,” Jessica continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. “The second is for hope. The third is for love. And the fourth is for luck.”

  Across the cafeteria the gaggle of Future Cheerleaders broke into loud giggles. I strained my neck to try to see what was so funny.

  “I wish I could find a real one,” Jessica said sadly. “Then I’d have good luck for sure.”

  Kenny Prescott walked past our table and under his breath he said, “Ger-trude,” as if he hadn’t just been my Romeo.

  I put my face in my hands and told myself that I was the only kid in the whole school that was going to see the Beatles. But I didn’t feel any better.

  * * *

  * * *

  Then, just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Dad calls this Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

  I came home from school after another miserable day. At lunch Jessica told me a ladybug had landed on her knee. “That’s supposed to be good luck,” she said, “right?” I actually told her I had forgotten to do something for homework and went to sit with Peter and two other nerdy boys. They were debating if it was possible to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon.

  “I’m telling you, it blocks your saliva glands,” Richard Harriman said through his mouthful of braces.

  “Seriously,” Leo Spitz said, “don’t even try. It can kill you.”

  I chewed my dry hamburger. By the time I made it through the lunch line, they had run out of ketchup.

  That afternoon, I wanted nothing more than to get home and watch TV, even my mother’s boring soap opera Another World.

  Except when I got home, my mother wasn’t there. The house was empty and silent.

  Still, I called out, “Mom?” as if she might pop out of a closet or something.

  In the kitchen, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook was opened to a recipe for Stuffed Pork Chops, and there were four pork chops sitting on butcher’s paper on the counter beside some chopped-up apples.

  Before I could get too worried, the door flew open and our neighbor Mrs. Bellow ran in. Dad said it was appropriate her last name was Bellow because that’s exactly what she did when she talked.

  “Oh, you’re home!” she said in her too-loud voice. “Now don’t panic but your mother was taken away in an ambulance.”

  “What?” I said. Maybe I even bellowed.

  “She’s fine, she’s fine—”

  “People who are fine don’t get taken away in ambulances,” I said.

  “Well, not fine exactly. But nothing serious. She just broke her leg.”

  “What?” I said again, definitely bellowing.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Mrs. Bellow said. “She went outside to get the mail and tripped and fell down the front steps. I called the ambulance and stayed with her until your father showed up at the emergency room. Just a cast for twelve weeks. No swimming or standing or driving.”

  “No driving?”

  “Bones heal!” Mrs. Bellow said.

  I thought about poor Mom in a big cast for the whole hot summer. But I thought about me, too. And the Beatles concert she was supposed to drive me to in just eight short weeks. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Girl

  It is not fun being around someone with a broken leg. First of all, that person—aka Mom—is miserable. Broken legs hurt. A lot. And the cast weighs about a million pounds. Also, it’s impossible to get around. Even small trips, like from the sofa to the kitchen for a glass of water, take so much time and energy that Mom decided it wasn’t worth it. “Let me die of thirst,” she groaned. In other words, I couldn’t be mad at Mom for not being able to drive me to the Beatles concert. But I could be mad at the mail, which is what she was on her way to pick up when she fell. And the front step that had a weird little buckle in it, probably from the winter cold. “Frost heaves,” Dad said, shaking his head and examining what had caused Mom to trip. I could be mad at the universe or whatever was responsible for the bad luck I’d had ever since Mrs. Peabody changed me from Trudy to Gertrude. And I was mad at all those things.

  The next day in school, as I made my sorry way to second period, social studies with Mrs. Peabody, an eighth-grade girl who I knew to be Penelope Mayer came up to me in the hall. She had the longest, straightest, auburnest hair in maybe the entire world and the just right sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks and nose. Why is someone called Penelope and not the cuter nickname Penny considered cool, and another person—me, for example—who is suddenly Gertrude rather than Trudy, a social pariah? I didn’t know the answer. But now that the lovely Penelope was walking by my side, and smiling her smile that was so bright stars practically shone off her teeth, all I could do was accept my own fate and bask in Penelope’s presence.

  “You’re Gertrude Mixer, right?” Penelope said.

  I cringed. “Trudy,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Penelope tossed her hair. Or maybe she just moved her head and the tossing was a kind of by-product of any movement.

  “I heard you’re going to see the Beatles? In Boston?”

  Up close I saw that Penelope’s eyes were as enchanting as the rest of her—a soft brown that brought to mind Hershey’s kisses.

  “Uh,” I said, the way people who are under a spell or hypnotized do. “You smell good,” I blurted, stupidly.

  Penelope smiled. Imagine bright stars. “Patchouli,” she said.

  I nodded, also stupidly.

  She motioned with her chin to the room across from Mrs. Peabody’s. “This is me,” she said. “Spanish.”

  “Adios,” I said, which was one of the very few words I knew in Spanish.

  Penelope laughed. “You’re funny,” she said. “It’s so cool that you’re going to the concert. I am, too. With a boy,” she added. “He’s in high school.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed. High school?

  I watched her disappear, swallowed up in a group of other cool girls. They certainly weren’t in Future Cheerleaders, I thought with great satisfaction. In fact, Penelope was the president of the Poets Club.

  The second bell rang, jolting me out of my Penelope stupor. I scurried to class, but not before I caught Michelle and Kim staring in disbelief at me. They’d seen me with Penelope.

  “She’s going to the Beatles concert, too,” I said as I passed them.

  Take that, I thought, almost happily.

  But of course, I wasn’t going to the concert. Mom had a broken leg and it was going to stay broken until August. All I had were four tickets and a big sign.

  * * *

  * * *

  The last d
ay of school finally arrived. It was such a relief to have the worst school year of my life come to an end. My brief encounter with greatness, also known as Penelope Mayer, was soon forgotten by everyone who’d witnessed it. In no time, I was back to Ger-trude, president of the after-school club with the fewest members. I had tickets to a Beatles concert in my possession, but no one to go with and no way to get there. Summer loomed, as bleak as the rest of the year had been.

  On the Saturday after the last day of school, Dad announced that I had to go to the mall and get Mom all the things on a very long list she’d written on the little pad where she wrote all of her lists. At the top of the paper there was a picture of a melon and the words Honey Do! Nora said that things like that were sexist, that women shouldn’t expect men to do things for them. I guess she was right, but Dad and I like puns, so it didn’t bother me.

  Anyway, Dad would wait in the car while I completed the Honey Do list; he hated the mall, and shopping in general.

  “Dad, I can’t go to the mall alone. That is socially unacceptable,” I explained.

  “Trudy,” Dad said, “we need to help Mom in every way we can.”

  I looked at Mom’s list.

  Women’s housedresses, size medium, various colors and patterns. Not too loud.

  Knitting needles, extra long

  A small but loud bell

  Magazines: Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Gourmet

  “What if someone sees me buying this stuff?” I shrieked. “Knitting needles?”

  “I need them to scratch inside my cast, Trudy,” Mom called from her perch on the sofa.

  “Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “I’m bored, Trudy,” Mom grumbled. “You try sitting for a month.”

  Dad, who had been reading graphs and diagrams, stood.

  “Let’s go so we can get back,” he said, which was typical Dad logic.

  Of course I had to do it. Mom hobbled to the kitchen on her crutches exactly three times a day, muttering and wincing, to make us food. Otherwise, she just sat there with her leg in that enormous cast. Plus, it was impossible to explain to Dad that going to the mall alone—never mind buying knitting needles in the Notions Department at Woolworth’s—was almost as bad as sitting with Jessica in her Girl Scout uniform at lunch.

  “Don’t dillydally in there,” Dad said when he dropped me off at the entrance to the mall.

  As if I wanted to prolong my solitary excursion in the Mrs. Department of Jordan Marsh.

  “That won’t be a problem,” I said.

  * * *

  * * *

  The mall was crowded with kids from all over the state. School was out. It wasn’t warm enough yet to go to the beach. And The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was playing. A perfect Saturday was to walk around the mall, touch everything at Spencer Gifts, pretend to look at books at Waldenbooks but really look at the cute boy who worked there, pretend to look at records but really look at the cute boy who worked at RecordLand, eat cheeseburgers at Newport Creamery, and go to the movies. And that was exactly what the entire population of kids was doing—having a perfect Saturday. With one exception: me.

  I kept my head down and moved through Jordan Marsh fast. First, the housedresses, those ugly loose-fitting cotton dresses that Mom sometimes refers to as muumuus because it sounds exotic, Hawaiian even, while housedresses sounds matronly and the exact opposite of exotic. I yanked four off the rack without really looking at them too closely, and got the heck out of the Mrs. Department as fast as I could. I recognized some girls from school when I zipped past the Junior Department. They were holding teeny bikinis up to their bodies and asking each other for opinions. I kept walking.

  Woolworth’s was practically empty except for some old ladies buying plastic flowers and young mothers with screaming babies buying baby stuff. Of course as soon as I walked in, a parakeet escaped from the Pet Department, because that happened every five minutes at Woolworth’s. The bird dive-bombed the old ladies. Someone screamed. A stock boy rushed past with a butterfly net. Luckily, I saw no one that I knew. I found Notions, chose the longest knitting needles they had, and got out of there. The parakeet was still not caught when I left.

  Waldenbooks would be a lot trickier, since everybody went in there to gaze at the cute guy. He had too-long hair that fell into his eyes and over his collar and he wore a bored expression like he didn’t notice all the girls hovering around him. His name tag said MARC. With a C! This only added to his allure.

  Head down, I slithered into the bookstore. I saw lots of flip-flopped feet with pale pink toenails standing by the paperback best sellers, which were right near the cash register, which was where Marc presided. I headed to Magazines, on the opposite wall. Basically, Mom just wanted women’s magazines, the kind that offered recipes, makeup tips, clothing trends, gardening advice, and articles about how to stay married or overcome horrible luck. She’d made a list, but I just plucked anything that had an actress on the cover and the word recipes in big letters.

  Then I heard the worst thing I could have heard.

  “Gertrude?”

  Slowly, I lifted my head. And looked straight into the soft brown eyes of Penelope.

  “Hi!” she said.

  She had on bell-bottoms and a gauzy flowered shirt and a droopy straw hat. And she was holding a magazine I’d never heard of before. The New Yorker.

  “They run poems every week,” she explained. “And two short stories. And cartoons that I don’t really understand most of the time.”

  I tried to think of something smart to say, but there I was with a bag full of housedresses, two giant knitting needles, and an armful of magazines.

  “Did you hear the Beatles have a new album coming out?” Penelope asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “In August!”

  “Right before the concert!”

  “Right,” I said, and my stomach felt like I’d just swallowed stones.

  “I can’t wait,” Penelope said. “It’s going to be the highlight of the whole summer. Maybe of the whole year.”

  Looking at Penelope, a thought struck me.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to think of the best way to ask what I wanted to ask. “Is that high-school boy . . . um . . . sixteen?”

  She beamed. “He will be. In July,” she said. She lowered her voice. “My parents would kill me if they knew.”

  “So . . . you guys are . . . driving to the concert, I guess.”

  There. I’d said it. Now I just had to get up the courage to ask her if I could get a ride with them.

  “Oh no,” Penelope said, wrinkling her nose. “We’re taking the bus. The Bonanza? From Providence?”

  “The Bonanza,” I said, those stones suddenly gone.

  “One hour!” Penelope said. She lowered her voice. “We did it before, to see the Young Rascals. In April. And we made out the whole way there and back.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Penelope giggled. “It’s so much fun,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said again, not sure if she meant taking the bus or making out. I had never met anyone who had made out with a boy.

  “See you around, Gertrude,” Penelope said, sliding the magazine back on the rack. “I hope!”

  When she walked away, she tinkled. Around her ankles was a delicate silver chain with tiny silver bells.

  Bells!

  The last thing on my list.

  By the time I got back into the car, my father waiting impatiently, I felt like a new person. There was a bus to Boston. And on August 18, I was going to be on it.

  “Finally,” Dad said. He practically had the car in gear before I even closed my door.

  “There was a parakeet loose in Woolworth’s,” I told him.

  His mouth was moving silently, the way it did when he was
thinking his own thoughts.

  I frowned. “Dad,” I said, “a parakeet was flying all around Woolworth’s and some poor stock boy was chasing it with a butterfly net.”

  He grunted. Sort of.

  “Then it landed on a lady’s head and she started to scream and go kind of crazy. Turns out she has an irrational fear of birds.”

  I waited. Nothing.

  “Maybe from that Hitchcock movie?” I tried.

  More nothing.

  “Anyway, they took her away in a straitjacket.”

  “What, Trudy?” Dad said vaguely. “This is not true, is it?”

  I sighed an exasperated sigh.

  “The Beatles have a new album coming out on August eighth,” I said, now that I had a little bit of his attention.

  “They do? We have to be first in line to get it,” he said.

  I could picture it, me and Dad waiting at RecordLand, buying the album, marveling over its cover design, holding our breath until we could get it home and put it on the stereo. We’d sit side by side, listening in bliss. And for maybe forty-five whole minutes, I would have Dad to myself.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Dad was saying. “Get up early. Go to Dunkin’ Donuts. Get to the mall an hour before it opens so we’ll be first in line. Those doors open and we make a beeline for RecordLand so we can see what our Mr. McCartney has done this time.”

  This time it was me who was only half-listening. An idea was taking hold in me. A very good idea. And if I could make it happen, then Dad would surely know that he had the most amazing, wonderful, smartest, fabulous kid ever.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Day Tripper

  One very good thing about having an immobile mother was that I could do practically anything I wanted. I was mostly out of view. Even though all day I was at her beck and call—Trudy, bring some iced tea please! Trudy, change the channel please? Trudy, turn on the fan!—I was pretty much free to roam around the house, as long as I was in earshot. What with broken legs and trips to Japan, everybody seemed to forget about those four Beatles tickets on my parents’ dresser. Everyone except me. One day I slipped them into my hands and hid them in my sock drawer and no one even noticed.