by JL Bryan
Ashleigh stood and stretched, as if taking a casual break. A couple of geeky sophomore boys at the library’s two computers eyed her as she did this, and Ashleigh smiled at them. You never knew who might be useful. She walked past the two boys, winking at the marginally cuter one, who looked like he might suffer a stroke in response. She stopped at Darcy’s table.
“What’s up, Darcy?” Ashleigh gave her a big smile.
Darcy shook her head and leaned back. “Calculus is killing me. I feel like I’ve been faking it all semester. I know what equations to plug in, but it’s like I don’t really understand what’s going on. Don’t you hate that?”
“Yeah, I’m dying for finals to end,” Ashleigh said. “I need a Christmas break.”
“Me, too!” Darcy gave her a big, stupid smile, as if they were bonding over this rare trait of preferring vacation to school.
“To be honest,” Ashleigh dropped her voice to a low whisper. “I need to talk to you about the Crusaders.”
“Oh!” Darcy laid down her pencil and straightened up in her chair. “What is it?”
“Well…” Ashleigh glanced around with a reluctant expression, then sat in the chair next to Darcy and spoke in an even lower whisper. “Darcy, who is your abstinence buddy?”
Darcy drew in a sharp breath. Ashleigh knew the answer already—Darcy didn’t have one. Like more than a dozen other girls, Darcy had been too shy or unwilling to actually approach a boy to talk about abstinence. She’d skipped the meeting where girls and boys were paired up to discuss their values about sex. Ashleigh had not bothered any of the other girls who didn’t participate, but Darcy didn’t know that.
“I don’t have one,” Darcy confessed in a low, shamed whisper. Her eyes dropped to the open pages of her AP Calculus book. “I’m sorry, Ashleigh. I messed up.”
“Why not?” Ashleigh asked, in her most chipper and innocent voice. “You know, it’s very important to have somebody you can talk with, especially with all the temptation out there. I wish I could be that buddy to everyone all the time, but I just can’t, Darcy.”
“Ashleigh…” Darcy’s lip quivered. “It isn’t a problem for me. Guys don’t try things, so there aren’t temptations.” She took off her glasses and rubbed at her wet eyes. She made herself return Ashleigh’s unwavering smile. “Sorry, Ashleigh. I didn’t mean to be a spaz.”
“Oh, no, you’re not a spaz,” Ashleigh said. She laid a hand on Darcy’s and looked her in the eye. “I think I know just what you need. A date.”
“I don’t know. Maybe after finals—”
“I’d say this is an emergency, Darce. I had no idea about your problems with boys,” Ashleigh lied. “Listen, Darcy. I am a total matchmaker. Any guy in school, I can get him for you. Whoever you’ve fantasized about. Just give me a name. Anybody but Seth, naturally.”
Darcy snickered and blushed at the word “fantasized.”
“Come on,” Ashleigh said. “It’s okay to tell me.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Nothing’s stupid. I can make anything happen.”
“Okay.” Darcy glanced around, as if either the librarian or the sophomore boys would be interested in Darcy’s secret crush. “What about,” and now she leaned to whisper right in Ashleigh’s ear, “Bret Daniels?”
“Really?” Ashleigh considered it. Bret was handsome enough, in that dark hair and brown eyes sort of way, and had that loud animal stupidity some girls took for confidence. He was dull, but not hopelessly stupid. Ashleigh had encouraged him to become treasurer because he needed to pad his college application, and she knew he’d be too indifferent to oppose her on student council. He had also slept with at least fifteen girls Ashleigh could name. Ashleigh would barely need to use her power, just point him in the general direction of Darcy’s underpants.
“Stupid, huh?” Darcy asked.
“No way. That’s easy, he’s a friend of mine. I will definitely set you two up. And I promise to act like it was all my idea. That’s not really lying, because it is kind of my idea, isn’t it?”
“Yeah! Okay, right after finals, this Friday!”
“Sure. But you want to meet him and kind of hang out before the vacation. Trust me, the psychology will be all different if you wait.”
“But I have to get an ‘A’ in Calculus or my whole GPA is wrecked,” Darcy said.
Ashleigh pretended to give this some deep thought. Then she said, “I know! He’s in my history class. I’ll have him come study with me tomorrow night, and you’ll be here. I butter him up and then I bring him over. Library romance, Darcy!”
“I don’t know.” Darcy looked very nervous. “That’s a lot to think about…”
“So don’t think about it, do it! That’s what life is about, Darcy.” Ashleigh rubbed Darcy’s mousy, frizzy hair and cupped Darcy’s face in her hand. “Let me do this for you. Please. All you ever do is work. It’s your senior year. Don’t you want one nice memory?”
“Okay, Ashleigh.” Darcy gave a slackened, dopey smile.
“Good! Perfect! This will be so great, Darcy!” Ashleigh managed to squeal.
The librarian shushed them, then coughed and spurted more Chloraseptic.
The next day, as promised, Ashleigh told Bret Daniels to meet her at the library. He’d had other plans, but Ashleigh was holding both his hands when she asked, and she kissed him on the cheek, and that was that.
She waited outside and approached Bret while he was still in his car, a very old, very avocado-colored GTO. She handed him a cut-glass bottle of some expensive tequila, which she’d swiped from the copious liquor cabinet at Seth’s house.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“Just thanking you for all your help on student council this semester,” Ashleigh said. “I know you didn’t really want to do it.”
“Nah, you made it easy, like you said. Wanna do a shot?” He patted the wool-coated passenger seat of his GTO. “We can go for a ride if you want. I know this place with a nice view of the lake—”
“No, that bottle’s for you, for later. May as well leave it in your car,” Ashleigh said. “Come on, I want to get ready for this test, and I’m already sick of studying.”
Darcy was inside, at the first table, punching rapidly on her big Texas Instruments graphing calculator. As Ashleigh had recommended, she dressed in a tight, low-cut shirt. Darcy had protested she was too fat to wear such things, and Ashleigh had replied that if she showed enough cleavage, Bret wouldn’t look much further.
Ashleigh gave her a friendly wave as she led Bret to the last table, near the back.
Ashleigh and Bret actually did study history for about twenty minutes, to brush over a couple of dates and names Ashleigh was unsure about. For the most part, she absorbed history without any effort, soaking up all there was to know about wars, emperors, dictators, how to conquer and rule. It delighted her to study things like that. After Ashleigh was through studying for history, she made her move.
“See that girl over there?” Ashleigh whispered to Bret. When he turned to look at Darcy, Ashleigh wrapped her hand around his wrist and pumped the Ashleigh-energy, and she imagined stabbing him in the chest with a heart-tipped arrow.
“Darcy Metcalf?” he asked, with a husky note of admiration in his voice.
“Yeah,” Ashleigh whispered. “Want to hook up with her?”
“Oh, yeah. I never saw how hot she was before.” Judging by Bret’s past conquests, this put Darcy below a very low bar.
“That’s right,” Ashleigh whispered. “She fantasizes about you. She told me. You could probably nail her tonight if you feel like it.”
“Yeah,” Bret said. “Good idea.”
“Come on.” Ashleigh took his hand and led him to Darcy’s table. “Hey, Darce, got a sec?”
Darcy looked up with terror on her face, clearly too nervous to speak. Ashleigh put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed her fingers against Darcy’s neck. She poured energy into both Darcy and Bret, letting herself be the connectin
g wire.
“Have you two met?” Ashleigh asked.
“We’ve had classes together.” Darcy smiled up at him. He looked down the front of her shirt. Ashleigh felt the charge sinking in on both sides, the growing mutual attraction between them. She visualized each of them getting struck with a dozen of her imaginary heart-tipped arrows.
“Why don’t you invite him to sit by you?” Ashleigh suggested to Darcy.
“Oh, yeah.” Darcy gave one of her goofy, repellently gummy smiles, reeking of Listerine. She pulled out the chair next to her. “Bret, want to sit with me?”
Bret did, very much.
As they started talking, Ashleigh slipped back to her table. She switched to studying for her AP Biology final, which she really did need to do. When she looked up again, they were talking with their faces close together, their hands on each other’s arms and legs.
The next time Ashleigh looked, they were kissing, Bret’s hand way up inside Darcy’s thigh. The librarian was either too absorbed in Tolstoy to notice, or too apathetic to say anything.
When Ashleigh looked up a third time, they were both gone. She gave a tight, satisfied little smile and went back to studying. Finals began tomorrow. It was no time to goof off.
***
The next day, Darcy didn’t make it to school until two of the three exam periods were over. Her hair stuck up in clumps, she wore yesterday’s dirty clothes, and she reeked of tequila and sweat. At one point she was leaning against her locker, crying hard, knowing her GPA was blown. Darcy was too busy with her meltdown to notice when Ashleigh passed by, so Ashleigh didn’t stop or say anything to her. She snickered at the grass stains on Darcy’s jeans and the little twig snarled in the back of her hair.
Ashleigh aced her own exams, that day and the next.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the days leading up to winter break, Jenny kept the kiln in her back yard smoking. She was pushing to get more pottery out in time for Christmas shoppers. She brought them down to the Five and Dime about two weeks before Christmas. While she was there, she shopped for a gift for her dad. She browsed through the secondhand coats, looking for something she could tailor and embellish with new buttons and bits of fabric. Old Christmas carols played from a cassette, and the whole store smelled like the plate of homemade sugar cookies by the cash register.
Jenny gave Ms. Sutland a Christmas card she’d made from stationary and scraps of lace and ribbon. While Ms. Sutland oohed over it, Jenny noticed a collection of snowglobes now on display on the front shelves, near her flower pots and mixing bowls.
“When did you get these, Ms. Sutland?” Jenny asked.
“Somebody dropped off a whole box,” Ms. Sutland told her. “Just in time for the season, too. Do you like them?”
“Yes.” Jenny shook one that held a little cottage with bright yellow windows. A snowman drove a sleigh in the cottage’s front yard. It was lovely and silly at the same time. Another globe had a big orange Siberian tiger stalking among fir trees hung with wrapped presents. It would be a perfect extra gift for her dad, since it looked like it could be the Clemson tiger.
Jenny brought both the snowglobes to the counter, and then added the natty brown overcoat she’d picked out for her dad.
“That coat’s awful big for you, Jenny,” Ms. Sutland joked.
“It’s for my dad.” She gave the tiger snowglobe a shake. “This one, too. The other snowglobe is for my room.”
“And what about your little boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. We just had one date.”
“That’s a shame.” Ms. Sutland placed the two snowglobes into a paper bag. “It didn’t look like a first date to me. It looked like you two had been together for ages, when you were shopping for Halloween.”
“Well, he went back to his old girlfriend, so…” Jenny shrugged and took out her money.
“And you’re just going to let her do that to you?”
“Let who do what?” Jenny asked.
“The other girl.” Ms. Sutland rang up the sale. “You’re going to lie down and let her take him back?”
“It’s his choice,” Jenny said.
“And it’s your choice what you do about it. If it’s something you want, it’s worth fighting for.”
“What if he doesn’t want me?”
“I saw how he looked at you, Jenny.” Ms. Sutland gave a wry, wrinkled grin. “He wants to be with you, even if he’s too dumb to understand that. Sometimes a man needs a woman to show him the way. Lots of times, to be honest.”
“But she’s too pretty,” Jenny said. “And she’s popular, and—”
“Don’t go doing her work for her, now,” Ms. Sutland scolded Jenny. “You take the fight to her. Maybe she wins, maybe not. But don’t let her beat you in your own head.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, but only to hurry along the conversation, which was growing uncomfortable and embarrassing. She reached for the overcoat, but Mrs. Sutland held onto it. Her green eyes, a little cloudy with age, stared intently into Jenny’s.
“Now you listen to me, Jenny,” she said. “You won’t regret trying, win or lose. But you will regret not trying. Next thing you know, you’ll be a lonely old lady who don’t stop talking about the one that got away. Then no one will want to have tea with you.”
Jenny took all this in, remembering the lonely future she’d imagined for herself on Thanksgiving.
“But what could I do?” Jenny whispered.
“That’s for you to figure out, Jenny. I don’t know what you kids are about these days, with all your funny shoes and hair. All I can say is do it soon, because time moves a lot faster than a youngster like you would believe. Day after tomorrow, you’ll be my age, looking back on your life instead of ahead to it. Trust me on that, Jenny.”
Jenny nodded. “Thank you.”
“Don’t forget to take a cookie.”
Jenny picked out an angel-shaped sugar cookie with gold and red sprinkles. She thanked Ms. Sutland for it, and bit its head off as she walked to the door. It was soft and delicious.
“Merry Christmas, Jenny!” Ms. Sutland called after her. “And tell your daddy I said the same to him.”
“I will, Ms. Sutland. Merry Christmas.” The cluster of bells jangled as Jenny pushed the door open into cool, crisp air outside.
“Jenny!” Ms. Sutland called after her. Jenny turned back to see the elderly woman’s impish grin. “One more thing. Be spectacular. Make the boy see how foolish he was to walk away from you.”
***
Jenny brought two cardboard boxes of decorations down from the attic. She hung a strand of fat colored lights across the front porch and a wreath on the front door. Inside, she set out what they had on tables and countertops—a Rudolph figure with a light-up nose; a Santa Claus in his sleigh with his boots propped up, taking a nap; a little nativity scene Jenny had made many years ago out of popsicle sticks, cotton balls, and pipe cleaners. There were some ornaments, including a big plastic snowflake frame with an old picture of both her parents, but they never put up a Christmas tree because her dad said it was a waste of a living thing. So Jenny hung ornaments on the walls and from the ceiling instead.
She tacked the big plaid stockings to the mantle, one labeled “Jenny” and one labeled “Daddy,” both labels drawn by her with glue and glitter. She decided to make one for Rocky, too.
As she decorated, she turned over in her mind the things Mrs. Sutland had said to her. Jenny couldn’t really believe that the time she and Seth had spent together was really just an act, put on by Seth while he tricked her. On the other hand, she found it even more difficult to believe that Ashleigh, too, had an unusual power, one that made people feel love. It sounded like a lot for just one little town way out in the country.
While Ashleigh did seem to wield some kind of power over Seth, Jenny didn’t see any reason to think it was supernatural. The real explanation was probably a lot more down to earth, and could be found inside Seth’s boxer shorts.
She wouldn’t see him until school started, which was two weeks (an eternity) away. She could call him and invite him over, give him one more chance, but that didn’t seem like the best way. It was the opposite of spectacular.
Ms. Sutland’s advice inspired Jenny’s crazy idea. Each year, the Barretts had a lavish Christmas party, attended by all the big people in town and guests from all over the place. Their house would be open, and Seth would be home, and Jenny would have her chance to be spectacular.
The Mortons weren’t invited, naturally, but Jenny knew the date of the party—this Saturday, a little more than a week before Christmas. She knew that because her dad was at Barrett House right now, helping to install new lighting and make some fixes before the big event. If Mr. Barrett was in from Florida yet, he’d send her dad home with a big bottle of good Scotch.
Jenny went into her dad’s bedroom closet and found her mother’s jewelry box on the back shelf. Jenny hadn’t opened it in years. She blew dust from the hand carved roses on the lid, then gently raised it up.
She saw her mother’s wedding ring, gold-plated with a microscopic diamond. She touched it briefly, felt a rising sense of loss, and quickly turned her attention to the other compartments. She found what she was looking for, the silver necklace with sapphires, and the matching earrings. Jenny lifted these out, admired them for a little while, then carried them into the kitchen. She cleaned them until the silver glowed and the sapphires twinkled like tiny blue stars.
She returned to the closet and took down one of her mother’s two good dresses, the one that wasn’t her wedding gown. This dress was a shade of blue her mother had clearly chosen to match the sapphires. All the blue was aimed at bringing out Miriam’s eyes, the same eyes Jenny had inherited.