A Match Made in High School

by Kristin Walker

  Or did he?

  What if Marcie had told him? No, she wouldn’t have done that. Would she? But, hell, she’d already done way worse. Could she possibly have told him?

  The idea of Johnny Mercer knowing about my feelings for Gabe Webber set my chest on fire. But why? Why did I give a crap what Johnny Mercer thought about me? I had no idea. All I knew was that I felt like if he found out I’d been in love with Gabe Webber, I could never face Johnny again. Ever.

  That made absolutely no sense.

  It had to be PMS.

  CHAPTER 20

  LUCKILY, THE NEXT WEEK WAS A SHORT ONE FOR school, because of Thanksgiving. And I told Mom I had killer cramps, so I didn’t even go on Wednesday. On Thursday, Uncle Tommy and Alan brought Nana down to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. We ate too much, drank too much (well, Dad did anyway), and listened to Dad’s old records on the ancient turntable stereo system he insisted on keeping right in the living room. The house was cozy and smelled of roasted turkey, but the weather called for snow. Dad was stretched out on the couch singing along to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” when Uncle Tommy announced that it was time to head home.

  As he and Alan got their coats and said goodbye to Mom and Dad, Nana pulled me aside into the living room. “I have something for you,” she whispered. She opened her paisley quilted purse and pulled out a small red leather box. She lifted the lid and held it out to me. “I want you to have these.” Inside were a diamond solitaire ring and a gold band with diamonds encircling it. I knew them right away.

  “Nana,” I said, “I can’t take those. They’re your wedding rings.”

  “And you’re my only grandchild.”

  I shook my head. “But they’re yours. You still might want to wear them.”

  “No,” she said. She reached up with her knobby hand to touch my hair. Then my cheek. Then the hollow of her own neck. “I’m not married anymore.”

  “But you and Grandpa didn’t get a divorce.”

  Nana’s eyes moistened and she blinked. “We parted at death.”

  I didn’t get it. I’d always thought that even though Grandpa had died, Nana was still married to him in her heart. They’d been married almost fifty years. I always figured she didn’t wear the rings because of her swollen knuckles. How could she just dismiss all that time together? Had she been unhappy? “Don’t you want them?” I asked.

  Nana swatted at her eyes. “I don’t need these rings to remember your grandfather. He’s with me every day.” She closed her eyes and patted her heart. “Every day.” She opened her eyes again. “To me, these are only tokens. I want you to have them so you’ll think of us.”

  So they had been in love. For fifty years. Half a century. That was a span of time I couldn’t wrap my mind around. “But I don’t need them to remember you, either, Nana,” I said.

  We could hear Uncle Tommy and Alan out in the hallway, ready to leave. Nana pressed the box into my hand. “Take them. They’re yours now.”

  I welled up. I didn’t want to cry, but it felt like Nana was saying goodbye. I closed my hand around the box and gave Nana a soft hug. “Thank you,” I said into her ear. She smelled like roses.

  Just before bed that night, I tucked Nana’s ring box into the back of my bedside-table drawer. I could still smell her perfume on me. I reached under my bed for my journal and wrote by the light of my bedside lamp. When I was done, I slid the journal back under my bed and switched off my lamp. Outside, snow had started to fall from the flannel clouds, so I lay on my bed and watched it in the dark. The downstairs window cast an upward light on the flakes, giving them a slanted beam to dance through. I opened my side-table drawer and took Nana’s ring box back out. Even in the dimness, the diamonds caught a trace of light and sparkled. I lifted the rings out of the box and held them up to the window and the snow. I twirled them at the sky, then slipped them onto the ring finger of my right hand, and fell asleep with my glasses still on.

  Thursday, November 28

  Here’s what I learned about marriage from this week:

  1. You should marry someone who likes the qualities you possess, not someone who thinks those qualities suck.

  2. You should marry someone who lets you be the kind of person you are inside, not someone who forces you to be a person you’re not.

  3. You should feel that same way about the person you marry.

  4. If you find a person who fits 1, 2, and 3, then you’re set for life. But be ready for when they die, because they’re going to take part of you with them.

  5. But they leave part of themselves behind for you, too. Which, I guess, is a good thing.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT SNOWED FOR TWO DAYS. THE WET, STICKY KIND. By Saturday night, everything was coated with a lumpy layer of white frosting. With the holiday weekend, plus the fact that I was pissed off at nearly everyone I knew, I had no plans that night. So I went to bed, listened to “Shelter of Your Arms” about a thousand times on my stereo (since I didn’t have my iPod anymore), and had another good cry about Marcie. Then I wept again about the things Todd had said to me. I couldn’t believe he’d been so mean. Truly mean, though, not just pretend-mean. It wasn’t like him. When I faced this fact, the only conclusion I could come to was that maybe he’d been right.

  Could I possibly be an insensitive snob?

  Okay, maybe I had driven Marcie away because I wouldn’t acknowledge her feelings for Gabe. And maybe I’d never even considered that Gabe simply might not find me attractive. Ever. Those things could be categorized as insensitive.

  And I guess you could say that I was kind of a snob to Amanda. I did treat her like a dumb blonde. A person might say I acted superior around her. Like a snob. An insensitive, judgmental, bitchy snob. That was me. It snuck up and smacked me like a two-by-four to the back of the head, and my tears started up again.

  After I was done crying, I watched the heavy flakes tumble down out of the blackness. It was only about ten o’clock, so I got up and crept down the back stairs to avoid my parents in the living room. I pulled on my coat and my dad’s boots, and slipped out into the backyard.

  The sky was quiet. Just the soft plopping sound of flakes padding the ground or the tree limbs or the roof of the shed. My glasses fogged up instantly, so I took them off. I inhaled the clean, snowy air and let it cool my runny nose and raw eyes. I closed my eyelids and let the flakes gather on my cheeks, slipping off like tears as they melted. I pictured myself sinking into the ground, growing roots like a tree. And reaching branchy arms up to the sky. I thought that if I could just stay there, perfectly still, the transformation would truly happen. I would become a solid, immovable, living part of nature. Not some wavering, loser organism. Part of absolutely nothing at all. I held my breath, and for one moment, I felt it. Then a noise from the shed ripped me back to my sucky reality.

  I fumbled to wipe my glasses and put them back on. My first instinct was to run and get Dad, but then there’d be questions of why my face was so red and swollen as though I’d been crying. Which I had been.

  Besides, as I looked closely at the ground, I saw a set of small footprints almost covered by snow, leading straight to the shed. Next to the footprints was a pink pen with a purple flower on top. I recognized it immediately. I picked it up, strode over to the shed, and threw open the door.

  Samantha Pickler fell off the flowerpot she’d been standing on.

  “Sam!” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to hang this trowel back on the hook,” she said. “I knocked it down.”

  “I mean what are you doing in our shed?”

  “Oh, that.” She hung up the trowel and sat on the flowerpot. “I ran away. But you can’t tell anyone, Fiona. You won’t, right? You’re the only person I can depend on. Hey, my pen.”

  I considered the possibility that one or both of my parents might happen to glance out the window and see me talking to the shed, so I ducked inside and pulled the door shut. Luckily, Sam had a flashlight. I squatted in front of
her. “Why did you run away?”

  Sam sighed and doodled on her pant leg with the pen. Then she threw the pen down at her feet. “They’re getting a divorce,” she said. “Dad’s moving out.”

  “Oh no.” I put my hands on top of hers and squeezed. “Sam, I’m so sorry. But sweetie, how is running away going to help you?”

  “It’s not going to help me,” she said. “It’s going to help them. They don’t want me. They don’t want any kids. If I’m out of the picture, then they won’t fight so much. Then maybe they’ll stay together.”

  “What makes you think they don’t want you?”

  “I’ve heard them fight about me. Mom says raising a kid takes so much energy. And she doesn’t have time for her own dreams, she says. Dad says that having a kid is a commitment. And they have an obligation to me. So the way I see it, all I am to them is an obligation. Who gets in the way. So I left.”

  “Sam, you are not an obligation. Your parents love you.”

  “No, they don’t. Maybe they did when I was a cute baby, but not anymore. They hate me.” Tears trickled down her cheeks. “And besides, I hate them too.”

  I wrapped my arms around Sam and she sobbed.

  “Oh, Sister-witch,” I said. “Please let me take you inside.”

  She shoved me away. “No. And if you try to make me or if you tell anyone I’m here, I’ll just run away somewhere else.”

  She meant it, too. I’d never seen Sam so upset. And I sure didn’t want her to go anywhere else in this snowstorm. So I said, “Okay, okay. I won’t tell or try to make you go anywhere. But you’re going to freeze out here.” I half expected her to pull a blanket out from the duffel bag at her feet, or toss her head in her dramatic way and brace herself boldly for the cold. But she said, “I don’t care.” Dead serious.

  “Then let me go inside and get you a blanket and some soup or something to eat. I pinky-swear I won’t tell.” I held up my right pinky.

  She hooked her pinky into mine with half-effort. “Whatever. But I’m only staying here until the snow lets up a bit. Then I’m leaving.”

  Now, I wasn’t a genius by any stretch, but I knew it was no accident Sam was in my backyard. It wasn’t like she’d just been passing by when the snow got heavy and she ran to our shed for shelter. No, she’d set out to come here. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. But that might not stop her from trying to find somewhere else. I didn’t want to agitate her in any way, so I said okay. I crept out of the shed and snuck back into the house.

  I’d managed to squirrel a little instant soup into a thermos when the phone rang. Mom answered it in the living room. I heard some muffled talking then she yelled my name up the front stairs. “I’m in the kitchen,” I hollered. She hurried in with her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “It’s Victoria Pickler. Samantha’s missing. They’re frantic. You haven’t heard from her, have you?”

  Unfortunately, I was unprepared for this direct assault. I was, by far, an abominable liar when the stakes were high. I froze. My eyes widened. My mouth hung open. I managed to utter, “No,” which was pretty obviously untrue. My mom growled, “Young lady, you tell me what’s going on right now.”

  I caved.

  I whispered, “I need to talk to you,” and she told the Picklers I was in the bathroom and she’d call them right back.

  “Mom, Sam’s in the shed.”

  “What?” She picked up the phone and started dialing. I grabbed it from her.

  “No, don’t. She’s really upset. She said that if I told, she’d run away. She’s serious, Mom.” She hesitated. I said, “Please just let me talk to her.”

  “Fiona, they’ve called the police. I have to tell them she’s here.”

  I knew she was right. But I loved Sam more than pretty much anyone outside of my family. I couldn’t stomach the thought of betraying her. “There’s got to be a way to do this,” I pleaded.

  Mom sighed. “Okay. You take some blankets out and stay with her. Don’t let her leave. I’ll have her parents come over and we’ll take it from there. Just pretend you don’t know anything about us knowing. Maybe Dad can figure something out.” She headed back to the living room, dialing the phone and saying to Dad, “Ethan, we have a problem. . . .”

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but the temperature was dropping. I grabbed the thermos, a package of cookies, and some blankets, and headed out back. Samantha sat shivering on the flowerpot. I folded one blanket for her to sit on and wrapped the other around her shoulders. Then I poured her a lidful of soup and sat on the ground in front of her. She breathed in the steam before taking a sip. “Chicken noodle, yum.”

  I needed to make some innocent conversation to keep her distracted from whatever plan my parents were hatching. “So, is Ginny’s curse working yet?”

  “Oh, we’re friends again,” she tossed off.

  I blinked. “Really? How?”

  “I dunno. She got sick of Olivia Purdy. Said she was always bragging about stuff. So we’re friends again now.”

  “But what about that stuff Ginny said about you?”

  Sam shrugged one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”

  I didn’t get it. Ginny had totally stabbed Sam in the back. And Sam could simply write it off? How was that possible?

  “How can it not matter?” I asked, trying to tone down the sound of my doubt so I didn’t get her riled up.

  Sam looked at me like I was a moron. “Because we’re friends!”

  Because they were friends? It couldn’t be that simple. Could it? I mean, they were only friends because Sam had forgiven Ginny. But Sam had only forgiven Ginny because they were friends. It was like one of those algebra problems where you needed to have A to find B. But to find A, you needed to have B. Those were so tough to figure out.

  But Sam had.

  She knew that if you just used one variable to assign a value to the other variable, then you could figure out both of them. Sam recognized that friendship contained forgiveness, then used forgiveness to resolve the friendship. She seemed to know far more about both those things than I ever had. Until then.

  There was still no sign of anyone outside. I needed to stall for more time. “Whatever happened with that boy?” I asked. “What was his name? L-something?”

  “Logan Clarke,” she said. “We were kind of a couple.”

  “Were?”

  “I broke up with him last week. He kept wanting to copy my homework. I let him at first, but after a while, I realized it was all he really wanted. He was truly tacky.”

  Sure, at eleven, Logan Clarke had been after homework. But give it a few years, and he’d be after something entirely different. I had a sudden feeling that if Logan Clarke had been in that shed, he might have suddenly found a trowel lodged between his ribs. “Well, I’m proud of you for not caving, Sam. Because believe me, you’re better off without a guy like that.”

  “Speaking of. How’s your marriage going?” she asked.

  Sam didn’t seem concerned that I was staying out there with her. Or maybe she’d expected it.

  “Not so hot,” I said. “We had our first fight. A biggie.” Even as I said that, I recognized how absurd it was that with all the fighting Todd and I pretended to do, that the night at the bonfire had been our first real one.

  “Over what?”

  I had no idea why I was about to pour my soul out to a kid in a toolshed. But it was Sam, so I did. “He thinks I’m an insensitive snob. He says I judge everybody.”

  Sam huffed. “He’s wrong. You are, too, sensitive. You always know when I’m sad about something. And everybody judges. They’re a liar if they say they don’t. But not everybody has the guts to say what they think out loud. You do. And you don’t give a hoo-ha about what other people think. That’s what I like about you best.” She rummaged in the cookies and popped one in her mouth.

  “It is? You think that’s a good thing?”

  She held up one finger while she chewed and swallowed. “Sure. You’re a r
eal person, Fiona. You don’t let the fakes and phonies get away with their stuff—so what? If they don’t like it, tough.”

  My legs were going dead from the cold. I shifted to a kneeling position. “Yeah, well, pretty much nobody likes it.”

  She chewed and swallowed another cookie and said, “I like it. And Marcie likes it.”

  “Marcie and I aren’t friends anymore,” I grumbled.

  “What?” she said through a mouthful of half-chewed cookie. “What do you mean?”

  “Remember Gabe? The guy I liked?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s been dating him since the summer.”

  Sam’s eyes bugged. She swallowed her cookie. “She what?”

  “And she totally lied to me about it.”

  “She told you she wasn’t dating him, but she was?”

  “Well, no. She just didn’t tell me about him.”

  Sam twisted her mouth up and cocked her head sideways. “That’s not lying, Fiona.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not. She never said she wasn’t dating him. She just didn’t tell you she was. Because she didn’t want to hurt you, obviously!”

  “If she didn’t want to hurt me, she shouldn’t have gone out with him in the first place!”

  Sam slapped the cookie package. “Fiona, what if this is her one true love? What if she and Gabe were destined to be together? You’d have Marcie throw all that away? You wouldn’t let her be happy like that? What kind of friend does that make you?”

  What could I say to that? She was totally right. She’d nailed the truth. Again. I suddenly got the distinct impression that I was kneeling at the foot of a child Buddha. Some prophet of teenage wisdom who doled out morsels of insight while seated between a potting bench and a bag of old fertilizer.