“Julie—”
“Wow! This is pretty incredible. You go up to somebody you’ve never talked to before, and … what did you say to him? ‘I’ve never talked to you before, but tell me what your initials stand for!’?”
“No, Jul, it wasn’t like that.” Toni laughed, but she felt uncomfortable.
“Well, what was it like?”
Toni wished Julie would move a little, give her some space. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Here it was, the moment to tell how she had met L.R. in the office and how one thing had led to another. Should she start with that first day? Or skip that and go to the phone call? But without Mrs. Evelyn and L.R.’s lost key and their lockers being so close, would the phone call make sense?
“It wasn’t in school that I asked him about his name. Do you remember that I talked to him last summer in the drugstore?”
“Sure, I remember. That was nothing. You wrote me about it. It was, Hi, hello, good-bye. You didn’t ask him about his name.”
“Right. But I’ve gotten to know him pretty well since school started.”
“You’re in a class together,” Julie decided.
“No, not that. Our lockers are near each other. We’ve been talking and … you know. He’s very understanding.”
“For a boy,” Julie said.
“For anyone.”
“More understanding than me?”
“Not fair, Julie. It’s different.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Nothing special. School, our parents—stuff. His mom and dad are divorced. He lives with his father, his sister lives with his mother.” Toni studied Julie’s face. “We went bowling, Julie. That’s when he told me about his name.”
“Bowling? Are you making this up? I mean, this is pretty wild. My shy girlfriend bowling with the cutest boy in school!”
Toni smiled, she couldn’t help it. “He taught me to keep score,” she blurted.
“And what else did he teach you?”
“Julie, don’t take it like that. You have to meet him. He’s much better in person than from afar.”
“I’m delighted to hear it.” She looked at Toni closely. “You’re wearing makeup. When did that start?”
“Only a little eye shadow. Does it look okay?”
“What’s going on, Toni? I couldn’t wait to get back home. That’s all I thought about for months, being in my own house again, being with you, everything the way it was before. And now I’m here and nothing’s the same. My sister’s in San Francisco, my father’s still crapping around somewhere, I’m going to be behind everyone in school, and even you aren’t the same. Even you! You’ve changed, you’re different. Damn it, Toni, you’re just not the same!” Julie’s lips quivered.
What did Julie want her to say? Toni could make a speech, too. So what if I’m not the same? Why should I be? Sure, I’ve changed. I wouldn’t want to be the same person you left behind! That was three months ago, Julie, a long time. Time enough for anyone to change. “Things happened to me, too, Julie.”
“Your father’s heart attack? At least—”
“That, and more than that.” Toni cut Julie off before she could start with the at-least-your-parents-love-each-other stuff.
“You would never have cheated behind my back before,” Julie said.
Toni was stung. “If you mean L.R., Julie, let me tell you that I made friends with him for you.”
“Oh, come on!” Julie pushed her hair off her face. “For me? The way my mother went back and forth across the country for me?”
“I w-was thinking of you,” Toni stammered.
Julie ran her hand over Toni’s head. “Where’s your halo? I don’t see your halo.”
“I always had in mind for you to get together with him. The two of you.”
Julie bent over—was she laughing? was she crying?—and came up with her face scrunched hotly. “Tell the truth. You’re the one who’s always going on about honesty. So be honest, Toni! You just had the hots for him.”
“Jul!”
“What have you two done, Toni? How far have you gone?”
Toni could have saved it at that moment—possibly—if she’d laughed. She didn’t. She got stiff-necked and self-righteous, maybe because she was feeling guilty about L.R. and thinking that Julie was at least half right. “If you’re going to be like that, Jul, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That far, huh?” Julie drawled.
Then Toni lost it entirely. “What kind of stupid remark is that? You’re not in a movie yet, Julie!”
“Oh, don’t be so smart.” Julie slammed her hairbrush down on the dressing table. They were shouting at each other. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you and L.R. are none of my business?”
“That’s right! Thank you for saying it.” Toni couldn’t believe that she and Julie were fighting over a boy. Or were they fighting over something else? More than L.R.?
“So what are you staring at with your mouth open?” Julie said. “Go away. Go home. Go. Go!”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the gym, nibbling on a sandwich, Toni leaned against the door, watching L.R. working out on the mats. When he finished, she thought how much she liked the way he looked, sweating, smiling, catching his breath. He bought a can of juice from the vending machine near the door and they went outside.
It was a warm day and everyone was out. Toni and L.R. sat down on the grass under the flagpole. She was telling him about chorale tryouts when she saw Julie coming down the steps. She was wearing wide pajama pants and a shirt printed with splashy purple flowers, short enough to show a strip of belly and back. Very California.
Toni touched the friendship bracelet she was wearing, identical to one Julie had, a narrow band of green and black plastic strands woven together in a diamond pattern. Here it was Tuesday and they hadn’t made up their fight, hadn’t even tried. She leaned forward, her lips tunneling to form Julie’s name. Julie glanced up, then passed by. The flowers on her shirt seemed to wink coolly at Toni.
“Do you want me to come to the chorale tryouts with you?” L.R. asked. “Sort of be backup for you?”
Julie had stopped to light a cigarette. She said something to Kelly Lutz and Leon Victor, and they all began laughing. Their three heads—Kelly’s purple, Leon’s black, Julie’s honey—shone and bent together in the thin October sunlight.
“Or would my being there make you nervous?” L.R. asked.
“I doubt anything can make me more nervous than I already am,” she said. Was it possible she would be trying out for chorale at last, but without Julie there?
She remembered the summer she and Julie were eight and had done nothing but make friendship bracelets for hours on end. And another summer she had spent trying to teach Julie all the songs she knew. And the grief she had felt just months ago when she knew Julie was going to California.
Julie, Leon, and Kelly were still laughing theatrically, throwing up their arms as if they could hardly contain their merriment. What could Julie, the melancholy Julie, have said to set them all off like that?
Fiddling with the friendship bracelet, Toni had worked it off her wrist. She held it out to L.R.
“What?” he said.
“For you. A present.”
Momentarily he looked doubtful. Boys in their school wore earrings and necklaces, not bracelets. Then he took it, pushed it over his hand. It had been tight on her wrist, it was tighter on his. “I should give you something else,” she said.
L.R. took off the bracelet and put it in his pocket. “I’m happy with this.… Now I have to give you something.”
“No you don’t … what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Some friendly something.” He was looking at her and smiling. She saw herself in his dark glasses.
Toni took down the rake and a shovel and opened the garage door. It was a perfect fall day, cool, the sky blue, unclouded. Across the way, she saw Julie clipping a rosebu
sh. Toni banged down the garage door and Julie glanced up. For a moment they stared at each other. She and Julie were still avoiding each other. They didn’t speak, they didn’t walk to school together, they passed each other in the halls looking the other way. It was too strange.
Toni held up the shovel. “Want to go to a funeral?”
“Who’s dead?” Julie drawled. “Paws?”
You asked for it, Toni told herself, but still, what a mean thing to say! No, no one was dead, but maybe something was—their friendship. In the past Toni had almost always been the one to make up first. Right now, right this moment, if she walked across the lawn and said, “Julie, I’m sorry, it was my fault,” wouldn’t that do it? Wouldn’t it be all over with? “Julie, of course I should have told you about L.R. sooner! And I shouldn’t have gone bowling with him! Of course not!” Toni could imagine the dialogue, but she couldn’t get any feeling into it. She wasn’t sorry about L.R. How could she be! And she had been sincere about wanting him and Julie to like each other. So, no, this time she didn’t feel like being the first to apologize. And no, she didn’t feel like playing good Toni for one more moment.
She went around the side of the house and began raking the leaves and twigs shed by the big willow tree. It was an autumn chore that her father had always done before. She raked the stuff into a pile down at the bottom of the yard, then shoveled dirt over it. When she looked up, she saw Julie coming toward her, hands in the back pockets of her pants. She stopped on the line between the two properties and stood there, watching Toni work. Toni raked ferociously. Julie chewed on a cigarette and stared. It was unnerving.
Toni dumped another shovelful of dirt on the pile of leaves. “What do you want?” she said to Julie. “If you didn’t come to apologize, why don’t you just leave?”
“Apologize?” Julie picked something off her lip. “You’ve got a nerve. Why should I apologize to you? I think it should be the reverse!”
“You know what your trouble is, Julie? You can’t stand that I did something independent, that I made a friend all by myself. It makes you crazy.” She cleaned leaves off the rake. “I’ve changed, Julie, only not the way you accused me of. I’ve matured, I’ve had things happen, things to think about—”
“What does that mean?” Julie interrupted. “You think you’re different because you had to put up with your sister for a week? Or because you walked around the big city for a few days? You think that made you so mature? Oh, wait, wait, I forgot! Getting so friendly with L.R., that must be what matured you.” She dropped the cigarette and walked away.
“Great exit,” Toni called after her.
“Nice night,” Toni’s father said, braking at the corner. He was driving her to the mall, where she was going to do some shopping for her mother. “So how are things with you, Babyface?”
“Fine.”
“You seem very quiet lately.”
She shrugged.
“Is anything the matter? School okay?”
“Fine.”
“What’s doing there?” He pulled into the parking lot.
“Not much.”
“Something must be happening,” he said.
Another shrug. “I tried out for chorale today.”
“I know you got in,” he said. “They want your voice!”
“Maybe.” The results wouldn’t be posted until next week. It had been good having L.R. there. Toni had focused on him when she sang for Mrs. Sokolow, and it had helped control her nervousness.
“What’s with Julie?” her father said. “I haven’t seen her around much. Everything all right with you two?”
“Mmm,” Toni said neutrally.
Her father pushed in the cigarette lighter. “So what am I going to do to cheer you up, tell you a joke?”
Toni shook her head quickly and reached for her purse.
Her father lit up. “I’m down to five a day,” he said, as if he wanted congratulations.
She put her hand on the door handle. “You’re not supposed to smoke at all.”
“Babyface, I’m trying.”
“You could try harder.”
He smiled slightly. “We aren’t all as disciplined as you. Nicotine is a powerful habit, not easy to break.… You want me to stop? You want to see me go cold turkey?”
“It’s up to you.” She opened the door, then sat there, holding the handle. “Don’t call me that,” she said.
“What? Don’t call you what?”
“Babyface. I told you before, Dad. I’m asking you, will you stop calling me that?” Her lungs felt pinched, as if she’d inhaled a poisonous draft of his smoke.
His smile faded. “Fine. That’s the way you want it—sure thing. But let me tell you something, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, Daughter, and that’s no way to go around in the world.”
“I don’t—” she began.
“You’re mad at me, don’t think I don’t know it,” he went on. “I notice you don’t talk to me anymore. I notice you avoid me. I notice these things. I’m not insensitive to them. And don’t think I don’t know what it’s all about, something that happened before you were born.”
“It’s not just that,” she said.
“No? What is it then?” He had never spoken to her like this before, his lips thin with demand, challenging her.
She stared at him, swallowing back a rawness in her throat, and he stared at her, a flat, unfatherly look, as if they were unrelated, just two people who had found themselves unhappily together in this car.
“It’s my whole life,” she said. She thought of him hitting her mother, and, as always, with the thought something inside her slid away, a cold sliding as of ice down a slope. “It’s—everything,” she said, trying to grasp it herself. “It’s all connected, everything I thought about you, everything you said to me, every way you ever acted toward me—” Her voice cracked. “It’s all ruined, horrible now.”
“That’s in your mind,” he said. “What did I ever do that wasn’t out of love? I loved you, I stayed, I took care of you, I did the right thing.” He stared at her intently. “You had the best of me,” he said. “And this is what I get in return?”
She didn’t know the words to tell him how much it hurt that she’d never known who he really was. What had he said? That’s in your mind. Yes. The father she’d adored had been all in her mind, and like one of those balloons on a cardboard base, when a pin had been stuck in it, the air leaked out, and all that was left was a deflated rubber skin. And a bit of cardboard.
“I never lied to you,” he said. “I put the past behind me. But if you can’t see it, if this is the way you want it … Just remember that it’s your choice.”
She hated the way he was speaking in that hard, dismissive voice. And she hated her knowledge. And she hated that her throat was raw with anger and tears. And she hated that such awful things were happening to her with all the people she loved.
“Well,” she said finally, “I better get going.” She got out. The moon was rising over the back of the mall, a red harvest moon. It was beautiful, and she almost turned, almost said, “Dad, look!” But she walked away.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
From her bedroom window Toni saw the lights go on in Julie’s room across the way. Then she saw Julie pass the window, pass out of sight. “Hey, Jul,” she sang out softly, “come on over, come on over.” Julie passed the window again, oblivious. No magic. No ESP. No secret pull of Toni’s voice or spirit. Was the little world of Toni and Julie gone then, completely and forever? For a moment, with such intensity that she almost cried, Toni wanted it, wanted that little world back.
Then she closed the window, pulled down the shade, and went to her desk, unaware of what she was going to do until she took up the scissors.
In front of the mirror she picked up a strand of hair and cut. A dark, floating spiral fell to the floor. She picked up another strand of hair. When she finally put down the scissors, her long hair was gone.
What
was left had sprung into tight curls close to her head, and beneath them was her face, no longer tiny. Her tiny face was gone and in its place was a larger face, these bigger eyes, this somber face. She tried out a smile.
“Toni, hello.”
“Hello.”
“How are you? Are you busy right now?”
“No. Who is this?”
“You don’t know who this is?”
“Oh, sorry, is it—Mrs. Frankowitz?”
“No, this is not Mrs. Frankowitz. Try again.”
“I don’t think this is Mrs. Abish.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Who is this? Heather? It’s not you, is it?”
“Toni, let me put you out of your misery. This is Martine. Your sister. Martine Chessmore. Remember me?”
“Martine! Oh, I’m embarrassed. I didn’t recognize your voice. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Take it easy, don’t be so embarrassed. It’s not such a big deal.”
“You sound different. Why do you sound so different? I always recognize people’s voices.”
“I’ve had laryngitis for three days. This is the first day I can talk above a whisper.”
“Oh. That makes me feel better! Are you laughing at me?”
“Just a little. Anyway, I called to find out what you decided about Christmas.”
“Christmas?”
“Toni, what’s going on here? Christmas. Remember Christmas? Santa Claus. Jolly old St. Nick. Jingle Bells.”
“Martine—”
“Christmas in New York with your sister and Alex. Remember now?”
“Martine, okay, okay, I remember!”
“And don’t tell me you’re embarrassed.”
“I am.”
“Tough. So what’s the scoop? Are you coming?”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“Really? You think it’s great?”
“Sure. We’re going to have fun. Bring your ice skates. We’ll go skating at Rockefeller Center. So, anything else? Or do you want to put Mom on?”
“Mom’s not here. Dad is. You want to talk to him?”
“Uhh … okay. Yeah. That’s a good idea. Let me say hello to Dad.”
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