He didn’t have one anymore.
“Quel temps fait-il aujourd’hui?” Madame Cowper was asking somebody
Marcia knew that meant: What is the weather today? She gazed outside the classroom window. It was sunny, as it was almost every day in Colorado.
“Il fait beau,” the kid replied. It is beautiful.
It was beautiful. The tree outside the classroom window was starting to turn from green to gold. The lawn underneath was littered with the first fallen leaves, stray patches of pure yellow. Marcia felt like drawing them in her sketchbook. But she didn’t have her colored pencils with her.
The leaves on the ground made her think of the tree outside her window at home. Its leaves were starting to turn, too. And her father had made a deal with Alex last spring that this fall he would come over to rake them, to make up for breaking a branch while he was toilet-papering it. Marcia remembered how happy she had been the next morning, to step outside and see the tree festooned with miles of toilet paper. She had known right away that it was Alex. She and Gwennie had had so much fun pulling the paper down and letting the long streamers trail behind them, like wisps of lace on a bridal veil.
Marcia glanced at Alex now, conveniently sitting right next to her. Did he remember his promise? Was he looking forward to having an excuse to come over to her house? Or was he dreading it? If a boy liked a girl enough to T.P. her tree, shouldn’t he also like her enough to invite her to the eighth-grade dance? That seemed only logical. But sometimes Marcia thought that the male brain was totally devoid of logic.
“Mademoiselle Faitak.” Madame Cowper spoke her name. “Quel temps fait-il à New Delhi en Inde?”
Marcia had to think for a minute. What is the weather in New Delhi, India? How would she know? For all she knew, or cared, India could be in the middle of a mon-soon. “Il fait chaud?” she ventured. It is hot?
“Très bien.” Very good.
Alex hadn’t been called on yet. Marcia expected him to give some funny wrong answer to his weather question—that it was snowing in the Sahara Desert or boiling hot on the summit of Mount Everest.
But the world’s weather wasn’t enough to distract Marcia from all her bleak thoughts. She didn’t have the nerve to pull out her sketchbook, so she turned to a blank page in her French notebook. Ignoring the pale-blue, college-ruled lines, she started to draw Madame Cowper standing by the chalkboard. Madame Cowper was wearing one of her usual too-tight polyester pantsuits. She looked much better in the flowing caftans she wore on special occasions, and a caftan would have been easier to draw. But Marcia concentrated on drawing what was in front of her eyes, as Mr. Morrison had told her to. A real apple, not a red tennis ball; a real person, not a Barbie doll.
Marcia drew carefully: the teacher’s enormous legs, poured into the two bulging tubes of her pants; the teacher’s buttoned jacket, with the buttonholes gaping and straining across her ample stomach; the way Madame Cowper’s folds of chin hung down over her collar.
She could feel Alex’s eyes on her, looking at the drawing in the notebook. Too late, she covered it with her forearm. Alex had already burst out laughing.
“Monsieur Ryan,” Madame Cowper said. “Pourquoi ris-tu? Why are you laughing?”
Alex didn’t answer; his shoulders were shaking from suppressed guffaws.
“Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose d’amusant? Is there something amusing?”
“No,” Alex managed to say.
“En français, s’il te plaît. In French, please.”
“Non.”
Madame Cowper was approaching down the aisle. The desks were positioned closely enough together that her thighs brushed against them as she walked.
“Mademoiselle Faitak?” Madame Cowper’s eyes fell on Marcia’s notebook, still shielded by her arm. The teacher held out her hand. “Donne-le moi. Give it to me.”
Marcia felt sick. But she was too paralyzed with horror to refuse. She handed Madame Cowper her notebook.
Madame Cowper stared down at Marcia’s drawing. A dull red flush spread over the teacher’s face and neck.
“I’m sorry,” Marcia whispered. “I didn’t mean …”
“You draw very well,” Madame Cowper said quietly. For the first time since school had begun, she spoke entirely in English. “This is an accurate likeness. I do not think, however, that there is much kindness in it.”
She handed the notebook back to Marcia and returned to the front of the room.
She called on Alex as if nothing had happened. “Monsieur Ryan, quel temps fait-il en été?” What is the weather in summer?
“Il fait chaud,” Alex said. It is hot. It might have been the only time Marcia had ever heard Alex give an answer to a teacher’s question without a wisecrack in it.
seven
Marcia waited until after school to tell Sarah about the conversation with Travis. She felt bad waiting, but there were too many other girls around at lunch, and Marcia couldn’t face speculation from Jasmine, Keeley, Brianna, and Brittany on why Alex hadn’t asked her yet. Plus, the memory of Madame Cowper’s face when she saw the drawing still burned in Marcia’s chest as if she had swallowed a live coal.
“Guess why I was late to math?” she quizzed Sarah as they headed outside for the 2,317-step walk home. “I’ll give you a clue: somebody stopped me in the hall to ask me an important question.”
“Alex!” Sarah squealed. “You’re going to the dance with Alex! Why didn’t you tell everybody at lunch?”
“No, it wasn’t Alex.” Marcia tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “It was—Travis!”
Marcia hadn’t realized Sarah wouldn’t understand. Of course, when Travis had made his first awkward mention of the dance that morning, Marcia hadn’t understood, either. Sarah’s face fell, and she turned away, clearly to hide her disappointment and wounded pride.
“To ask me if I thought you would go to the dance with him!” Marcia finished triumphantly, unable to let Sarah suffer a second longer.
Sarah whirled around, her face ablaze with happiness now. “For real? You’re not making this up? What did you say?”
“I said I thought you might consider it, if he asked you the right way. I’m supposed to kind of test the waters, find out what you would say iƒ he asked you.”
Sarah flung herself into Marcia’s arms. “You’re the best friend in the whole wide world! I ‘might consider it.’ How do you think of stuff like that to say, right on the spot?”
Marcia soaked up Sarah’s praise. It was good to know she hadn’t entirely lost her touch. “Practice.”
“Okay,” Sarah said importantly. “Tell him … What should I have you tell him?”
“I’ll come up with something,” Marcia said. “He needs to know you like him, that you like him a lot, but you’re not desperate about it, and you’ll go to the dance with him if he asks you, but he needs to ask you soon, or you’ll go with someone else.” All the same things someone needed to tell Alex about Marcia. “I can handle it.”
Marcia suddenly remembered one dumb part from the Shakespeare play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which they had read in English last year. There were these two lovers who lived on opposite sides of this wall, and one actor in the play was the Wall. That was his whole part, to make a little hole with his fingers so that the lovers could use him to talk back and forth to each other. Right now Marcia felt like the Wall.
“But what about you?” Sarah asked then, as the girls started walking again.
Marcia almost wished Sarah hadn’t remembered. She had planned to nurse her hurt feelings in silence a little bit longer. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ll just stay home the night of the dance and do my nails.”
“Marcia! We have to make Alex ask you!”
“Maybe I should get somebody else to ask me.”
“Like?”
“Julius?”
Sarah looked thoughtful. Then she shook her head. “I’ve seen him with some girl who doesn’t go to West Creek.”
&
nbsp; “Maybe it was his sister.”
“This girl was not his sister. Julius doesn’t have a sister, does he?”
“What about Dave?”
Sarah didn’t make a face, but she didn’t look thrilled with the suggestion, either. “I guess that would count as sending a message to Alex. But it’s risky. If you really like Alex. You know how boys are. Once you hurt their pride.”
“What about me? I have some pride, too.”
“What is it with Alex? Why isn’t he asking you?”
Marcia blinked back tears, glad they were walking fast enough that Sarah couldn’t see her face. “I don’t know.”
Why wasn’t Alex asking her? Of course, the dance was still a little over four weeks away; as of this morning, Travis hadn’t asked Sarah yet, either. Marcia knew Alex liked her, or he wouldn’t hang around her as much as he did, and he wouldn’t have toilet-papered her tree last spring, though that was a long time ago now. Marcia hadn’t told anyone, not even Gwennie, that she had saved a piece of toilet paper from the tree and had hidden it in the carved wooden box where she kept special things.
Sarah was right. If Marcia really liked Alex, she shouldn’t flirt with his best friend.
And she really did like Alex.
If he didn’t ask her to the dance, maybe she would stay home and do her nails. She looked down at them now. The Purple Pizzazz had been replaced with Wild Strawberry, which had been replaced with Electric Blue. Electric Blue, Marcia decided as she inspected her hand, was a truly hideous color for nail polish. On the night of the dance, if she wasn’t going with Alex, she’d do her nails with Ashes of Roses and burn her cherished scrap of toilet paper, all alone up in her room.
If she wasn’t going with Alex.
After school on Monday, as Marcia’s mother drove them to their first official afternoon of service at West Creek Manor, Marcia and Lizzie didn’t talk much in the car. Lizzie had a tape recorder and a camera, as well as her usual floral-covered notebook. Marcia had a tote bag full of Jay-Dub samples.
“When I thought up this oral history project,” Lizzie finally said, “I forgot how bad I am at anything to do with machines. I know I’ll press the wrong button at some point and wind up erasing the whole thing. And every time I try to take a picture of anybody, I cut off the top half of the person’s head, or the whole picture is this huge blurry pink thing that turns out to be my thumb.”
Marcia laughed. Lizzie wasn’t exaggerating her mechanical ineptitude. In sixth grade Lizzie had been the only kid who couldn’t light a bunsen burner; in seventh, she had caught her hair in a sewing machine in their family-living class.
The girls fell silent again. Marcia almost said, “Well, when I dreamed up this makeover project, I didn’t know I’d have to be putting lipstick and eye shadow on people who are a hundred years old.” The thought of touching someone that old gave her the creeps.
“Maybe we should play chess with them,” Marcia suggested as her mother pulled into the long drive leading to the manor. “Like Alex is doing.” She had heard him tell Ms. Williams that he was going to take his chessboard with him on his first visit to the nursing home, and Ms. Williams had said that was a great idea.
“I don’t know how to play chess,” Lizzie said.
“Neither do I.”
Both girls laughed.
“Now, don’t be nervous,” Marcia’s mother said. “I’m sure whatever you do will be greatly appreciated.”
“Do you think that whatever Alex does will be greatly appreciated?” Marcia whispered to Lizzie. It was hard to imagine cutup Alex solemnly playing interminable games of chess with a bunch of doddering old people.
Both girls laughed again. Marcia felt a surge of friendship for Lizzie. Whenever you laughed together with someone, it made you feel a lot closer afterward. Maybe she should try to laugh with Alex—at something other than her sketch of Madame Cowper.
Once inside the nursing home, the girls stopped at the reception desk to sign in and get their volunteer badges.
“I have the list of residents for everyone to visit today,” the receptionist told them. This was not the beehive lady, but she, too, could have used a makeover. Her dyed jet-black hair contrasted harshly with her tired, pale face, and Marcia could see a full inch of gray roots extending on either side of her part. If only Marcia could grab a black Magic Marker for a quick touch-up!
The lady squinted down at the list. “They’ve put you two together. I believe they’re putting everybody in teams.”
Marcia felt weak with relief. Lizzie looked relieved, too. Marcia wondered if she’d ever be paired with Alex, but right now she was glad to be partners with Lizzie. Being partners with Alex would have added a stress of its own, and Makeovers by Marcia was stressful enough already.
“Mrs. Mavis Getty,” the lady told them. “Room one twenty-four.”
The door to the room was open. The TV was on. A woman sat in a wheelchair, facing away from them.
“Mrs. Getty?” Marcia called from the doorway The volume on the TV was so loud the woman couldn’t hear.
“Just barge right in, girls!” one of the male aides said as he came up to them with an armful of clean linens. “She won’t bite!”
The man strode past them into Mrs. Getty’s room. “Mavis! There’s two girlies here to see you.” He turned the wheelchair around and clicked off the TV “Now, isn’t that nice? Not one visitor today, but two!”
Mrs. Getty smiled at them uncertainly. She was a large woman, almost as heavy as Madame Cowper, with bright red hair and crooked orange lipstick. “Which one of you is Diana?” she asked.
“I’m Lizzie,” Lizzie said softly, “and this is Marcia.”
“You’ll have to speak up,” Mrs. Getty said. “Who did you say you were?”
“Lizzie.” Lizzie spoke loudly and clearly this time.
“Marcia.” Marcia did the same.
“Where’s Diana?” Mrs. Getty asked. “Isn’t she here? Diana? My great-granddaughter? Jerry’s girl?”
“I don’t think so,” Marcia said. “Does she go to West Creek Middle School?”
“She lives in California somewhere.”
“I don’t think she’s here,” Marcia said. “But we’re here, Lizzie and me, and …” And what? And we think people with red hair shouldn’t wear orange lipstick? And that particular shade of red hair is most often seen on circus clowns?
Lizzie took over. “I’m doing a school project where I interview people. About their childhoods, where they grew up, where they went to school, and what the world was like back then. Would you mind if I interviewed you?”
Mrs. Getty beamed. “Not at all! Sit right down, both of you. Over there, on my bed. Shove the newspapers out of the way. Your friend, the pretty one, is she going to interview me, too?”
Marcia knew she must be “the pretty one.” If only Alex thought so, and not just Mrs. Getty. And if only her project weren’t so hard to explain. “My mother works for a beauty product company, and I have some samples—of lipstick? And nail polish? And I thought it might be fun if—”
“A makeover!” Mrs. Getty chortled with glee. “For eighty-four years I’ve read those magazines every month, watching other gals getting makeovers and wondering when it would be my turn. And it’s today?”
Marcia nodded, glad that Mrs. Getty looked so pleased.
“But now—you won’t do anything to my hair, will you? You’re not going to hack it all off, are you? Those magazine makeover folks, seems the first thing they always do is chop off somebody’s hair. A woman’s hair is her glory, that’s what I’ve always believed. And natural red hair is the most glorious of all.”
Natural red hair?
Mrs. Getty laughed. “Well, it was natural once. And that’s all that counts, right, girls?” She winked at Lizzie, who had red hair, too.
Marcia found herself liking Mrs. Getty. She was certainly more fun to be with than the sad-eyed woman they had met last time.
“All right, Diana,” Mrs.
Getty said to Marcia. “You don’t mind if I call you Diana, do you? What part of me are you going to make over first?”
“Maybe … Well, why don’t you take off the lipstick you have on.” Marcia handed her a box of tissues. “And we’ll try a different shade, one that complements your hair. And then we can do your nails in a matching shade. All our Jay-Dub lipsticks have nail polish to match.”
“And you, Diana number two,” Mrs. Getty said to Lizzie. “I can talk while she does her fixing and fussing. I talked through the Great Depression. I talked through a world war. About the only thing I ever shut up for was Elvis Presley. When he came on The Ed Sullivan Show, I didn’t scream and carry on like those other gals, oh, no. I watched him, and I fell in love. Now, my husband, Frank, he couldn’t sing a note, not one single solitary note, but he had Elvis Presley’s eyes. I might’ve preferred Elvis Presley’s hips, but I was lucky to get his eyes. It was a good marriage, all in all. I’ve been awful lonely since Frank passed away three years ago this October.”
Marcia saw Lizzie scribbling away in her notebook, as fast as she could write. Mrs. Getty hadn’t given her time to turn on the tape recorder. Marcia held up a dark red lipstick—Autumn Flame. It was several shades darker than Mrs. Getty’s hair, but hair like hers needed toning down, not bringing out. She’d try some green eye shadow, too, a hint of it, to draw attention to Mrs. Getty’s best feature, her wide green eyes.
“‘Love me tender,’” Mrs. Getty started to sing, crooning into an imaginary microphone.
“Wait.” Lizzie pressed a button on the tape recorder.
Marcia checked; it was the right one.
Mrs. Getty started the song again as Marcia began rubbing Jay-Dub moisturizing cream into her cuticles. It didn’t feel any stranger to be manicuring Mrs. Getty’s nails than it did to do the nails of the ladies at Muffin’s party. Her skin felt surprisingly soft and warm, not creepy at all.
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