“Come on, Lizzie, let’s go,” she said.
“Girls!” Mrs. Applebaum’s voice was booming, commanding. “I already told you that I want you to stay.”
She certainly had a funny way of showing it. And what if Marcia and Lizzie didn’t want to stay? “Then why are you making fun of us?” Marcia asked, still too angry to be polite.
“Marcia,” Lizzie cautioned.
“Do you think we want to be doing this? And for your information, after my makeovers, every single person looked a thousand times better. And the stories they told Lizzie were extremely interesting, and not one of them was about a privy.”
Agnes Applebaum laughed again. She was less grim-looking when she laughed. “Girls, I apologize. Ever since I broke my hip for the second time last summer and had to come here, I’ve been somewhat—what’s the word? Not cranky, but … Oh, cranky’s probably close enough.”
“Would you rather we didn’t do the interview? And the makeover?” Lizzie asked. “We could talk about other things.”
“The weather!” Mrs. Applebaum sounded even crankier than before. “Let’s talk about the weather! Fascinating subject! The people here never tire of it. Would you say this summer was hotter or cooler than the summer of thirty-three?”
“Hotter,” Marcia said. Two could play at Mrs. Applebaum’s game.
“But you two were in the pool all summer, I suppose.”
“No,” Marcia told her. “I wasn’t in the pool because my ankle was in a cast.” Mrs. Applebaum wasn’t the only one in the world with a broken bone.
“How did you break your ankle?” Mrs. Applebaum asked.
“In seventh grade we have to go to outdoor ed. You know, you go away for a few days with your whole class and stay in a smelly cabin and go on these horrible hikes in the pouring rain? Well, maybe you don’t know, but that’s what they made us do. And this boy, Alex? He pretended to be a rattlesnake. He had brought this real snake rattle with him. And Lizzie and I heard it and started running down the trail—wouldn’t you run if you heard a snake rattle right where you were sitting?—and I tripped on a stupid rock, and fell, and that’s how I broke my ankle.”
“Tell me more about this boy, Alex.”
“He’s just a boy.” Marcia felt herself flushing.
“Just a boy who pretends to be a rattlesnake.”
“It wasn’t like he had to pretend all that hard,” Marcia said.
“She likes him,” Mrs. Applebaum said to Lizzie. “And he likes her. But the course of true love isn’t running smoothly. Am I right?”
Lizzie had the good sense not to say anything. Marcia wasn’t about to say anything, either.
“Let me give you some advice.”
Marcia waited, curious as to what Mrs. Applebaum would say. Maybe she would have some good advice to offer. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t dumb.
“Snakes are for the most part shy and timid creatures. That is the point of the rattle, after all, to scare you away. They want to scare you, because they’re scared of you. Tell me, you, the meek and mild one, is he scared of her?”
Lizzie looked imploringly at Marcia, but Marcia didn’t help her out.
“No,” Lizzie finally said. “I don’t think so.”
“Think again,” said Agnes Applebaum.
Was Alex scared of her? What was there to be scared about? Marcia took a walk the next day, by herself, over toward Alex’s house. She wasn’t walking to his house, she told herself, just in its general direction. She took her sketch pad with her, in case she saw some terrific-looking autumn tree. “See?” she could say to Alex, “I wasn’t thinking about you, I was thinking about art.”
If only the leaves on Marcia’s stupid tree would turn color, fall off, and be ready for raking! Then Alex would come over to rake them, and remember toilet-papering the tree, and fall in love with her all over again. Unless he had never liked her at all and had T.P.ed her tree only to impress his friends. But why T.P. her tree? Did boys T.P. trees of girls they were afraid of?
Halfway to Alex’s house, Marcia saw the perfect tree for sketching. Unlike Marcia’s tree, this one was almost completely bare, its gaunt branches reaching toward the sky like stiff, arthritic fingers. One scarlet leaf—just one—clung to the topmost branch, impossibly bright against the blue Colorado sky. “I am not dead yet,” the leaf was saying.
Marcia sat down on a curb and began drawing.
Five minutes later, Alex Ryan sat down next to her.
Marcia’s breath quickened, but she didn’t stop drawing, or acknowledge his presence in any way. Finally she colored the one flaming leaf. Look at me, notice me, ask me to the dance, the leaf was saying now.
“You are good,” Alex said as she began putting her scattered colored pencils back into the box.
Marcia tried to think of something flirtatious to say in return, but instead she said, “Thanks.” Maybe Alex was frightened by flirtation? But he had never seemed frightened of it before.
“Are you surviving Morrison?” Alex asked.
“Yeah. At first it was—it was like he hated everything I did. Everything we all did. But especially me. But now I think he just expects a lot. Which is sort of good, I guess. I mean, I’m getting better. A lot better. I never used to be able to draw like this.”
“What about Williams? Every time I see you and Lizzie at the nursing home, you’re in with some old lady, yakking away like you’ve known each other forever.”
Marcia hadn’t realized that Alex had been watching her at the nursing home, noticing her interactions with the residents there. The thought was sweet and unsettling.
“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. The old people Lizzie and I have talked to have been pretty nice.” She remembered in the nick of time that boys like to talk about themselves. And she had to make sure to work in some remark about her broken ankle and call Alex a big brute or a hairy beast again. “What about you? Do you mind playing chess with them?”
Alex thought for a moment before he replied. “Not really. It’s not like it’s the worst thing in my life, or anything. Oh, I met the third non-senile guy, the southern dude. He’s definitely on the ball. He even beat me a couple of times, and I’m good.”
“Who taught you to play?” Marcia hoped it was a safe question, though maybe it would be safer to talk about running or football or some manly sport. Not many hairy beasts played chess.
“My dad.”
Marcia had seen Alex’s dad. He was a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, clean-cut man who looked a lot like Alex.
“You look a lot like him,” Marcia said tentatively.
“I do?” Alex sounded less than thrilled by the comparison.
“I mean, you’re both tall, and you have broad shoulders, and look like you’re good in sports.” Marcia opened her eyes extra wide, with the same yearning look she had wasted the other day on Travis Edwards.
“I’m okay at sports, I guess,” Alex muttered.
“I used to be better at sports, before I broke my ankle,” Marcia said. She held her foot out in front of him, hoping that it looked delicate and dainty. Her shoe was a tiny size five. If only she had worn her thin silver ankle bracelet.
Alex looked away. Maybe the thin silver ankle bracelet wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway.
There was an awkward moment of silence, then Alex jumped to his feet. “See you around,” he said.
A sudden cold gust of wind made Marcia shiver. She looked back at the tree she had sketched. The wind had snatched the last bright leaf from its clutching branch. The leaf was gone.
Marcia still hadn’t started drawing any of the people at the nursing home. Find the ugliest person you can and paint his or her inner beauty. The problem was that once you got to know them, none of the people at West Creek Manor looked ugly. The sad-eyed lady looked sad, Mavis Getty was fat, with clown hair, Alberta Estes was a plain old maid, Agnes Applebaum had a half century of frown lines, but none of them was ugly, really. Marcia decided to t
ry drawing all of them.
Next, she and Lizzie were assigned to visit the sad-eyed lady, Mrs. Mabel Thompson.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Lizzie whispered to Marcia. “Tape-record her while she tells us how her son was killed in Vietnam and she still misses him every day?”
“I know,” Marcia said. “It’s like, she needs a whole life makeover.”
They had almost reached Mrs. Thompson’s door. “But everyone is here because they have nobody,” Marcia realized. “It isn’t like anybody here has a terrific life. Let’s just go in there like we did for everybody else.”
Mrs. Thompson was sitting in a chair, a real chair, not a wheelchair, waiting for them.
“Hi, Mrs. Thompson!” Marcia said with forced cheerfulness. “We told you we’d come back to see you, and here we are!”
Mrs. Thompson looked confused. “You told me? You’d come back to see me?” It was obvious that she didn’t remember the previous visit at all.
Marcia let it go. “I’m Marcia Faitak, from West Creek Middle School.”
“I’m Lizzie Archer,” Lizzie managed to say.
“We’re here to interview you for a school project,” Marcia went on, “and …” She didn’t think she could go through with the makeover this time. “And I’d like to draw a picture of you, if you don’t mind.”
“Draw a picture? Of me?” Mrs. Thompson still sounded confused. But then she seemed to understand. “Of course, if you want to.” She pointed to the wall of photographs. “I have some pictures I’d like to show you, too.”
Uh-oh.
“This is my son, Robbie,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Here he is as a baby He was killed in Vietnam. October eighteenth, nineteen sixty-seven. That was the day he died.”
Marcia was afraid Lizzie would start to cry, but Lizzie actually recovered first.
“What was he like as a little boy?” Lizzie asked. “Is it all right if I tape-record this?”
Mrs. Thompson nodded.
“Did he do anything funny? Or naughty? In the picture he looks as if he might have been mischievous.”
Mrs. Thompson settled back into her chair. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but something in her face relaxed. “I’ll say he was mischievous. One Christmas, he must have been four years old, he found all the presents I had wrapped and hidden from him, in that tiny bit of an apartment we had over on Fourth Street, and the next thing I knew, he had opened them all. A week before Christmas! We didn’t have a single present left to give him on Christmas Day.”
Marcia was sketching as quickly as she could, her fingers flying over the page with her pencil.
“What did you do?” Lizzie asked.
“What could I do? I took my last dollar and went to the dime store and bought a pack of crayons, a coloring book, a couple of those tiny toy cars, and a stick of candy or two, and that was what Santa brought him on Christmas morning. And he was as pleased with that cheap stuff as he had been with the fire engine and the Tinkertoy kit. Friendly fire was what killed him, in Vietnam. He was killed by mistake by his own side.”
Lizzie shot an anguished glance at Marcia. “What was he like at school?” She choked out the question.
“Oh, I pitied the poor woman who was Robbie’s kindergarten teacher,” Mrs. Thompson said. “The very first day—the very first day—he ran away at recess, following an ice cream truck he heard going by …”
With Lizzie’s gentle prompting, Mrs. Thompson told them story after story as Marcia worked on her picture: of a pretty old lady with a pale smile hovering about her lips, and sad, sad eyes.
ten
The dance was exactly two weeks away Sarah had stopped asking Marcia whether she should wear her new glitter eye shadow to it. In fact, she had stopped mentioning the dance to Marcia altogether, which was partly a relief and partly a source of further irritation. Did Sarah really think Marcia was so sensitive that she couldn’t bear to hear the word dance spoken in her presence?
Sarah was over at Marcia’s house Friday after school, lying on Marcia’s bed, going through the latest shipment of Jay-Dub samples. Marcia and Gwennie were helping at another Jay-Dub party the next day Marcia didn’t know where. Probably the house of another rich lady with a strange name who would talk the whole time about plastic surgery.
“Marcia,” Sarah finally said, in her most timid voice.
Marcia stiffened. She knew Sarah was working up her nerve to utter the awful word.
“About the …”
“Dance,” Marcia finished for her.
Sarah brightened, as if grateful that Marcia had been the one to say it. “Do you want me to try to do something?”
“Like what? Do you have a magic wand I don’t know about?”
“I could drop a hint to Travis, and then maybe he could drop a hint to Alex, and—”
“No!” Marcia shrieked. “Sarah, don’t you dare! Boys don’t get hints, boys can’t drop hints. The gene for hinting is completely missing from their DNA. Sarah, promise me you won’t. Promise. Promise me now.”
Sarah’s face bore the unmistakable stamp of guilt.
“You didn’t. Oh, Sarah. What did you say to him? You have to tell me.”
“He said, did I want to go with you and Alex, and, well, what could I say? So I said—” Sarah broke off.
“You said what?”
“That Alex hadn’t exactly asked you yet.”
“Great. What did Travis say then?”
“Nothing really. Just …”
“Just what?”
“Just ‘I thought he liked her.’”
It was too much for Marcia. Unable to hold on to the cold comfort of pride any longer, she felt the tears rising up. “I thought he liked me, too,” she whispered.
“Marcia,” Sarah said solemnly, “I have an idea.”
Marcia wasn’t the type to let herself cry. She gave her nose one long hard blow. “If it’s as good as the hinting idea, I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“It’s a great idea. Listen. Did the grapefruit help?”
“The grapefruit? What does grapefruit have to do with anything? I guess it helped.” Actually, Marcia hadn’t thought about her weight for a while. “I’ve lost four pounds now. But I did a lot of walking, too, so I don’t know that it was entirely from eating the grapefruit.”
“Certain foods work in the human body in mysterious ways. Like, grapefruit burns up fat. Am I correct?”
“And your point is?”
“Other foods can work in the body in other mysterious ways. Can work in other people’s bodies in mysterious ways.”
“Such as?”
“Pine nuts.” Sarah beamed.
“Pine nuts?”
“Pine nuts,” Sarah explained, “are an aphrodisiac. You know, they make people fall in love. I read a whole article about them in one of my mother’s magazines.”
“What are pine nuts? Are they like pinecones?”
“No, they’re … Well, I don’t know that they’re nuts, exactly, but they’re sort of like nuts. You can buy them at King Soopers. Did you ever have pasta with pesto sauce? Pesto is made with pine nuts and basil. Basil is an aphrodisiac, too.”
“I still don’t get it,” Marcia said. “I’m supposed to eat pesto, and then Alex will fall in love with me?”
“No. Alex has to eat it. Not pesto, necessarily. But pine nuts. Alex eats the pine nuts, and then he falls in love.”
“With me?”
“I’m not quite sure how it works. I think he falls in love with whoever’s around when he eats them.”
“How many does he have to eat?”
“I don’t think there’s any set amount. The more the better?”
Marcia burst out laughing. “Sarah, you’re crazy!”
Sarah laughed, too. “I’m not saying it’s guaranteed. But it’s worth a try. It’s like, what have we got to lose?”
Marcia knew the sad, true answer to that one. Nothing.
Sarah’s father drove the girls to the high sch
ool football game that night. It was the second home game of the season. Marcia had missed the first one because at the last moment she had seen a pimple coming on her chin and decided that, anyway, she was too fat to go.
Now it felt wonderful to be climbing to the top of the bleachers on a clear, cold night, carrying a heavy blue blanket that exactly matched the color of her eyes, her West Creek High red-and-gold pompons, and a small plastic bag full of pine nuts. Sarah had found them in her kitchen at home; her dad was a gourmet cook with lots of exotic ingredients on hand.
“Did he ask you what you wanted them for?” Marcia asked Sarah as they settled themselves on the highest bleacher to wait for the other eighth graders, including, Marcia hoped, Alex.
“No, I didn’t tell him I was taking them. It would have been, you know, sort of hard to explain? We can buy him a new bag if we use these all up.”
“Sarah?”
“Uh-huh?”
“How exactly are we going to get Alex to eat them?”
“That’s your part,” Sarah said. “My part was getting them to you; your part is getting them to Alex.”
“Getting them into Alex.”
Sarah giggled, but Marcia could tell that Sarah’s attention was elsewhere. She was obviously scanning the crowd of kids trickling into the stadium for any sign of Travis.
Jasmine, Keeley, and Brittany joined them. Not Lizzie. Lizzie had gone to a couple of the games back in seventh grade, but she never went anymore.
“I see him!” Sarah squealed. She waved frantically until Travis noticed her and gave her a huge, happy grin as he headed up the bleachers toward where they were sitting.
Marcia’s heart clenched with jealousy If only Alex would grin that way at her. And come sit beside her with his arm draped casually, protectively, around her shoulders, as Travis was now doing to Sarah. Marcia fingered the bag of pine nuts in her pocket. It was going to be a long, cold, lonely night if Alex didn’t show.
Then she saw him. Alex, Dave, Ethan, and Julius had arrived together. Marcia wasn’t about to wave, but she didn’t need to. The boys started climbing up toward them, Alex mock-wrestling with Dave so that he sent him sprawling onto some old lady’s bony lap.
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