* * *
On Friday, I found someone else to offend.
Dear Diary,
The thing I hate most about Pamela (the book and the character) is that she’s so helpless. It’s all, “Oh no, I can’t climb over that stack of bricks,” and, “Woe is me, there’s a cow in that field!” If she really wanted to escape Mr. B, she would have done something about it instead of wringing her hands for five hundred pages—and then marrying him!
M.P.M.
Chapter 29
When I walked through the door of my house at the end of that long, miserable week, my body sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut. For two whole days I could hide from the world. The muscles of my face might finally relax, now that I would no longer be forced to pretend I wasn’t aching on the inside. And if any of my family members asked why I looked so dismal, I had only to blame it on a book—something French. Or Russian. Or German. There were plenty of depressing literary options.
“Hey, Mary,” said Bo’s voice, startling me from this pleasant daydream.
“Oh. Hi.” Pasting on what I hoped was a reasonably normal expression, I started to move toward the stairs.
“Homework?” he asked, arresting my progress.
When I mumbled an affirmative, he nodded as though he’d expected as much. “Must be a busy time. Jasper said you’ve been coming straight back from school every day.”
My hand flattened across my belly; it felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.
“Do you want a snack?” Bo asked, misreading the gesture.
“No thanks.” Our substitute teacher had shown a movie during American history, under cover of which I’d eaten most of my lunch. I tipped my head in the direction of the stairs. “I just need to—”
“How was the dance?”
At first, I thought he was grasping at conversational straws. Then I noted the tension in his posture and wondered if he hadn’t been working his way around to this subject all along.
“Did you have a good time?” he added, when I failed to respond.
I looked at the floor. “No.”
“Good. I mean, not good, but you know. Because I would hate to see you get caught up in all that superficial high-school business. Like dating, or boyfriends. Committing yourself too young. Before you explore all your options.”
I sniffed despondently. “No danger of that.”
Bo nodded several times. I thought maybe that was the end of it when he suddenly said, “Because I like you the way you are.”
“Oh. Thanks.” That makes one of you. Still, I was grateful for the positive feedback, even if my fan club consisted of a lone thirteen-year-old.
“You’re very nice,” he continued.
“I’m not, actually.”
“Yes, you are! And smart. And really pretty.”
A warning light flashed in the recesses of my brain, but I was too preoccupied to pay close attention. “That’s very generous of you to say.” Too generous, in fact. “Did someone put you up to this?”
“Up to what?”
“Trying to make me feel better.” I watched his face for signs of guilt. “Because of what happened at the dance. With Alex.”
He gulped audibly. “Alex?”
“Alex Ritter, the one who—” I broke off, shaking my head. “It’s complicated.”
Bo’s shoulders slumped. “Complicated is bad.”
Softened by this unexpected display of sympathy, I crossed the room to join him on the couch. “I just never thought he would be interested in me, you know? I assumed he was playing around because he’s so far out of my league.” For the hundredth time, my memory replayed certain moments of my acquaintance with Alex. Sitting on the bench in the backyard. Trivia Night. Dancing . . . I shut down that memory before it could go any further.
Bo cleared his throat. “When you say he was playing, does that mean the two of you were, ah, what you might call together?”
“No! Well, not exactly. At least, I don’t think so.” I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. “I would have known. Presumably.” I glanced at Bo to see if he had any insight on the matter.
“Presumably,” he agreed, not meeting my eyes.
“It’s not like he asked me to the dance,” I reasoned. “Though he did ask me to dance while at the dance. But that’s not really the same thing.”
“I would have asked you way ahead of time. And taken you out to dinner and gotten you a corsage. Orchids.” He touched his wrist, indicating the imaginary flowers. “Did Alex wear a tux?”
“No.”
“I would have worn a tux.”
I didn’t point out that he would have been the only one in formalwear. The fervency of his words suggested the tuxedo mattered a lot to his overall vision. Which was remarkably vivid.
“This Alex character.” Bo’s nose wrinkled. “He’s older?”
“A senior.”
“Damn it!” His fists clenched. Slowly he eased back, expression lightening. “Like you and me.” Bo waved a hand between us. “You’ll be a senior when I’m a sophomore.”
“I suppose that is . . . technically correct.”
“It’s not impossible then.” There was a stubborn edge to his voice, as though we’d had this argument before. “We could go to the dance together.”
From the whirring blender of my brain, I seized the first semicoherent thought. “I didn’t go to the dance with Alex.”
“You would have.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, then closed it again. An aching throb had started in my skull. “The thing is, Bo—”
“I know. That’s a long way off. A lot can happen in two years. Don’t you think?”
He had backed me into a rhetorical corner. “In theory,” I allowed.
The front door flew open. Jasper stomped inside, kicking snow off his shoes. “There you are,” he said to Bo. My brother fell silent when he spotted me.
“Mary and I were just discussing the future,” Bo explained. Jasper raised his eyebrows. Bo stretched his arm along the back of the sofa, not quite reaching my shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re doing two Decembers from now, but I’ve got my date for Winter Formal locked down.”
I whipped around. “What?”
“You didn’t say you wouldn’t go with me,” Bo pointed out.
“I thought we had tabled the issue.”
“Potato, potah-to.”
Jasper caught my eye. When he was sure he had my attention, he mimed yanking something. I frowned to show I didn’t understand. He cut his eyes at the floor lamp—or more specifically, the cord attached to the outlet.
Pull the plug. How was I supposed to do that? Hopping to my feet, I moved to the doorway. “Listen, Bo,” I began.
He stuck fingers in both ears. “Can’t hear you.”
“I’m just trying to say that while I obviously esteem you greatly”—at this Bo flinched, before remembering he wasn’t supposed to be listening—“it’s in a purely platonic way. You’re like a brother to me.” I pointed to Jasper, as though the concept required illustration.
Bo started to hum loudly.
I had the queasy feeling I’d gone back in time to the night of the dance and was once again faced with the impossible task of telling people I cared about something they didn’t want to hear. It was so much more pleasant to have a clean, simple answer. No, I didn’t want to kiss Alex Ritter! Yes, I might suddenly develop romantic feelings for a boy who’s like a sibling to me!
Jasper sketched a circle in the air with his index finger, signaling me to get on with it.
“The thing is, I could maybe go with you—” I broke off when Jasper sighed loudly, shaking his head. Bo had stopped humming, though his fingers were still in his ears. “But I’m never going to another dance. Ever. That sort of thing is . . . not for me. I plan to concentrate on schoolwork. My studies. And so on.”
I gave a decisive bob of the chin. And then I ran away—but not before seeing the hurt in Bo’s eyes.
&nbs
p; * * *
Late Sunday afternoon I was creeping up the stairs with a mug of tea and a handful of cashews when Addie came running down from the attic with a sheaf of acid-green paper in one hand. The twins had been ghostly figures of late, their existence hinted at by midnight creaking from the attic and the random movement of objects from place to place.
She held out the stack of pages for my inspection.
I glanced at the Othello poster, forcing a smile. “Cool.”
“It is,” Addie agreed.
I looked at her more closely. She seemed . . . excited. Not withdrawn and brooding, the way she’d been the last few months. “The play’s going well?”
“I think so. It’s maybe not for me to say, but it feels like it.”
“That’s good.” I tried to make my voice hearty and bright, the way it would have sounded a week ago, but I was having trouble summoning that version of me.
“Yeah.” She smiled like her old self, which was to say with the unshadowed brightness of a summer afternoon. “I can’t wait for you to see it.”
It warmed me, both the smile and the fact that she wanted me to be there. For a shining instant, I wasn’t persona non grata. Even Yarb had given me a wide berth, with a cat’s instinctive distaste for neediness.
“Here.” She handed me a few flyers. “You can give these to your friends.”
And just like that, my spirits plummeted back to earth. “I don’t need that many.” One would be plenty.
But Addie was already halfway down the stairs, singing under her breath. At least one of us was happy.
* * *
That night, I was staring at the cracks in my bedroom ceiling when someone scratched at my door. “Yes?”
“I can hear you moaning from across the hall,” Jasper informed me, shutting the door behind him.
I rubbed the end of my nose. “I must be coming down with something.”
“Sure you are.” Crossing to my desk, he availed himself of the room’s only chair, turning it to face me.
“How’s Bo?” I asked, guessing at the purpose behind this unexpected visit.
“Since your very special get-me-to-a-nunnery speech?” He shrugged. “He’ll survive. But I didn’t come here to talk about Bo.”
“Is there something bothering you?” I asked hopefully.
Jasper ignored my diversionary tactic. “Listen, Mary. You’re my sister.” I nodded; thus far we were on the same page. “I can’t watch you drowning and not throw you a rope.” He fixed me with a serious look. “What I’m about to say stays between the two of us. No ratting me out to Mom and Dad.”
“As long as it’s not dangerous. To people or property.” Many years’ experience had taught me to lay out the fine print before agreeing to one of Jasper’s propositions.
He straightened his shoulders, exhaling in a determined way. “Okay, here it is. W-W-J-A-D.”
I waited for illumination to strike, to no avail. “Huh?”
“What. Would. Jane. Austen. Do.” He sketched a question mark in the air.
I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “Jane Austen Jane Austen? The Jane Austen?”
“Yes.” He waved at me to lower my voice. “Obviously.”
“How is it obvious?” For years he’d been flaunting his lack of literacy, particularly where the classics were concerned. And it didn’t get much more classic than Austen.
“Because maybe I’ve read one or two of her books.”
I continued to regard him skeptically.
“Fine. I’ve read all of them.” He picked at a loose thread on his pajama bottoms. “Including Sanditon.”
“Sanditon? Seriously?” Even mega fans often eschewed the partial manuscript Austen had left unfinished at her death. It was the equivalent of reading Brontë juvenilia.
“What I read is my business. Let’s not get distracted from the main issue.”
“If.”
“Huh?”
“If you read. Because according to the line you’ve been feeding Mom, you’d rather poke yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.”
“Low expectations can be a blessing. But that’s not the point. The important thing—”
“Besides you being a closet Janeite?”
“Whatever, Emma.”
“I’m not an Emma!”
“Really, back-seat driver?” He looked me up and down. “No puppet-master tendencies? Trying to run other people’s lives?”
I flinched; if it wasn’t a direct hit, he was at least prodding the vicinity of a sore spot. Because of course my epic screwup was even more embarrassing given the way I’d handed down judgment on everyone else, with nary a thought for complicating factors such as the animal instinct to keep doing something that feels really good. Like being in close proximity to Alex Ritter, as often as possible.
But did that make me an Emma Woodhouse, blithely dispensing advice while ignoring the truth of what was going on all around her, and in her own heart? Surely I wasn’t that blind.
“So you’re saying Alex was my Mr. Knightley?” That would be a far more comfortable interpretation. And Alex was an older man, though our age difference was about a tenth that between Emma and her neighbor/love interest.
Jasper shook his head. “I’m not talking about Lover Boy. Though it does sound like you’ve basically been going around telling everyone how mean he was to poor, misunderstood Wickham.”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. “Does that mean Alex is my Darcy? Because that would make me—” I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. Who didn’t secretly dream of being compared to Elizabeth Bennet, the witty and vivacious heroine of Pride and Prejudice? As for Mr. Darcy . . . I shivered pleasantly.
“Simmer down there,” Jasper tutted. “I wouldn’t go that far. A wee bit fixed in your opinions, though? Quick to rush to judgment?” He tapped his chin, pretending to consider.
The sad part was, I couldn’t even argue. I felt his words seeping through the cracks in my memory, altering my vision of the past. Had I been hasty? Unfair? Certainly to Alex.
“Then again,” he went on, “you might be more of an Anne Elliot, trying so hard to be a good girl you end up sad and alone. Or one of the Dashwood sisters, caught up in your own drama. Perhaps a Catherine Morland, whose mind is warped by reading too much?”
I cast him a baleful look. “Now you’re showing off.”
“That’s what you think. I’m just getting warmed up—”
“If you compare me to Fanny Price I will scream.” Of all Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park is the only one in which it’s hard not to root for the villain over the milquetoast heroine. Fanny would never have passionately embraced Alex Ritter in the school hallway. She didn’t have the backbone for it. And despite everything that had followed, that was one part of the evening I couldn’t bring myself to regret.
“Your words, not mine. But since we’re on the subject, I’ve always thought Fanny missed out when she sent Henry Crawford packing. He was way more interesting than Edmund.”
Rakishly interesting. A would-be seducer who ends up falling for the target of his attentions, only to be cruelly rejected when she chooses the stick-in-the-mud instead. Except Alex wasn’t actually much of a scoundrel, as it turned out, despite my preconceived ideas about him. I shook my head. Stupid Fanny. Stupid me.
“Let’s say I believe you,” I began. “For the sake of argument. All it tells me is what I’ve already done wrong, which I sort of already knew.” Jasper gave me a skeptical look, but I hurried on. “What I need help with is figuring out what to do now.”
“I don’t know. Go tour his palatial country estate with our least embarrassing relatives?”
“Forget Mr. Darcy. What about my friends?”
My brother frowned. “I thought you were pining for a dude.”
“That’s not pertinent,” I said, dodging the question. “He won’t—it was never going to happen anyway.”
“Huh.”
To my extreme frustration, I couldn’t te
ll whether he was agreeing with me or not. “I guess I could do a reread of the major Austen novels, take some notes . . . ” My voice trailed off as Jasper gave me a thumbs down.
“No way. It’s time to act.”
“Act?” I pictured a darkened stage with a pool of light in the middle, and me giving a dramatic monologue.
“Shake things up, instead of sitting back and waiting for someone else to call the shots. I bet you’d still be following Anjuli around if she hadn’t kicked you to the curb.”
I flinched but couldn’t deny it.
“And now you’re just letting your friends go without a fight.” He shook his head, as if my lack of nerve was a grave personal disappointment. “When’s the last time you took a risk? I’m talking IRL, not in your reading material.”
At first, I couldn’t summon an example. Then I remembered that day at Toil & Trouble. I’d put myself forward to warn them about Alex Ritter—and reaped the rewards of that impulsive decision, far beyond anything I could have imagined.
Until it all fell apart.
“I don’t know, Jasper. It’s like you’re asking me to stick my hand back in the fire.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m asking you to get close enough to roast a freaking marshmallow.” Standing, he scratched his belly. “What about that?” He pointed at the Baardvaark flyer on my desk.
“What about it?”
“Ask your friends,” he said through an open-mouthed yawn.
“Just walk up and invite them to the play?”
He shrugged. “Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. But you know what I hate?”
I shook my head.
“The part in books where supposedly smart characters screw up their lives because it’s just too hard”—he made a crybaby face, fists twisting in front of his eyes—“to tell someone the truth.”
“The truth,” I repeated.
“I love you, I miss you, I can’t live without you.” Jasper yawned again. “Whatevs.”
“You’re right.” My cheeks puffed as I blew out a heavy breath.
“Try not to sound so excited.”
“It’s a little demoralizing,” I admitted.
By the Book Page 24