Thwonk

by Joan Bauer

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was Monday morning, 6 A.M. I’d hardly slept. Jonathan was watching me from the top shelf of my bookcase, leaning against my copy of Alice in Wonderland, which seemed bleakly symbolic.

  “Don’t you sleep?” I asked.

  “Not during a Visitation. Get dressed, please. There is much to accomplish.”

  “Don’t you have any idea what’s going to happen?” I wailed.

  Jonathan zoomed off the bookcase and fluttered in my face. “It is too soon to determine the outcome.”

  “I could die from stress!”

  Jonathan gave me a sympathetic pat and pirouetted on my shoulder.

  “Patience, my friend.”

  I got dressed in my ice-green pants and floppy turtleneck that cleverly matched Peter’s eyes, which would come in handy if he were to succumb today. My eyes looked puffy from severe sleep deprivation, my skin was a wan, pasty shade. I pulled on my black boots and tossed out my hair.

  Mom had taught me the importance of an interesting, healthy breakfast. I went downstairs and ate a lemon nonfat yogurt without refined sugar, a happy, red McIntosh apple, and an Eskimo Pie. Jonathan hovered impatiently at the door, tapping his quiver.

  “Shall we?” he asked, and did his through-the-door flitting trick. I tried to beam through the door too.

  “Hey!” I bonged my nose on it, still earthbound.

  Jonathan fluttered back through the door. “I am the cupid,” he directed. “You are the…” He groped here for proper terminology.

  “Art professional,” I whimpered.

  We were off.

  Benjamin Franklin High was awash in Valentine’s Day magic. The King of Hearts Dance Committee had plastered red hearts everywhere; they twinkled from walls and ceilings. I stood by Peter Terris’s locker, my arteries pumped in expectation. I touched it. This, ladies and gentlemen, could be the site where Peter Terris falls madly in love with A. J. McCreary, crashing at her feet in passion for all the world to see. Trish came by and accosted me.

  “You look like cold oatmeal, A.J.”

  “Thank you, Trish.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged.

  She eyed me. “Something’s going on.”

  “This and that.”

  “Start with this, A.J.”

  I smiled wearily.

  “You’re going out with someone.”

  “Noooooo…”

  “You’re planning something.”

  “Ummmmmm…”

  “Tell me!”

  It was killing me not to!

  “Later,” I said gently, and pushed through the crowded hall to Peter Terris, who had just filled the corridor with full-orbed gorgeousness.

  “Hi,” I said, searching his flawless face. He looked at me, half smiled, and walked away. I clutched my heart. Jonathan was zigzagging between comatose students. I motioned him into the bathroom. We went into a stall; I locked the door.

  “I think he needs another arrow, Jonathan.”

  Jonathan sat on the toilet-paper roll and crossed his legs. “That is not the solution yet, my friend. These things take time.”

  I clenched my trembling hands. “Can’t you speed things up? This is massive pressure!”

  There was a knock on the stall door. “A.J.?”

  I looked down to see a pair of familiar scuffed boots. I opened the stall door to Trish Beckman’s psychiatric stare.

  She reached out her hand. “A.J., senior year is a time of conflict. The old gang will soon be gone. No one really knows what college will bring. These are fears that grip us all. If you’re trying to work out your feelings of abandonment by talking to yourself, you know I’m always here to listen.”

  “Thank you, Trish.”

  The fifth-period bell tolled. I ran to Art History class, slid into my desk near O’Keefe, Mr. Zeid’s cactus, and tried to make sense of my crumbling life.

  Mr. Zeid was wrestling with his slide projector from hell, trying to get it to focus and muttering about it being “the wretched refuse of an impoverished educational budget.” He took a sip from his Botticelli coffee mug and told Carl Yolanta to turn out the lights. Carl grinned at me and put his hands together like he was praying.

  I bolted up.

  I’d forgotten about the test!

  Mr. Zeid had warned us about it last week—“all encompassing” was how he’d described it—the educational euphemism for a Real Beast. I hadn’t cracked a book because of Jonathan. My grade average would plummet.

  Mr. Zeid passed out the test to quiet groans and wails. “Part one,” he announced. “In twenty-five words or less, tell me the artist, what you think he was trying to say, and the greatest strength of the painting.”

  He kicked the slide projector from hell and the screen exploded with a Raphael fresco of four cupids circling a nymph, arrows drawn, ready to nail her into oblivion. I knew this one cold. I wrote that sometimes true love needs assistance and that the painting’s strength was in numbers, specifically, the multiple ambushing cupids, providing critical backup in case the lead one missed. I moved to the question sheets and was hurled into space: “What was the precept of art according to Pope Gregory the Great?”

  My mind grew fuzzy. I knew Gregory the Great was sometime after Constantine, which told me very little about this guy’s artistic urges. Being a pope he probably had a hidden motive. Suddenly, I saw the answer from my art history textbook on page 118. I wrote with freedom: “Pope Gregory the Great believed that artistic images are useful for teaching laymen the holy word.”

  Ha!

  I turned to the next question like a lion tamer facing a gerbil. “Rubens’s ‘Head of a Child’ is probably the artist’s: (a) oldest daughter (b) granddaughter (c) niece (d) youngest daughter.” Normally I would have stabbed at something, but once again, the fantastic happened. My mind buzzed with the answer on page 415. I filled in “a” for oldest daughter and laughed.

  “Ms. McCreary.” It was Mr. Zeid. “Let’s keep our chortling to ourselves, hmmmm?”

  Right.

  I sped through the test like it was a giant water-slide, keeping my chortling to myself. I’d never considered myself a candidate for a phenomenal memory, since I tend to blank on basics like where I put my car keys. I must have been studying subliminally all these months, and if I ever figured out how it worked I wasn’t telling anyone.

  I filled in the last box on the last page—“(c) from a tomb in Thebes, around 1400 B.C.”—and sat back in exultation.

  Chortle. Chortle.

  Jonathan fluttered down from somewhere and sat on my desk. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Of course.

  I smiled gratefully.

  “I’ve been watching that Terris fellow,” he said. “It could go either way.”

  My soul sank.

  “His heart is hard,” Jonathan explained. “That is one of the side effects you weren’t interested in learning about yesterday. A hard heart is never promising, because it signals something deep and foreboding at the individual’s root. I would not suggest going farther until we see the effect of—”

  “Please,” I whispered, “go back and do something!”

  Mr. Zeid caught that. “Ms. McCreary, would you care to share your enigmatic thoughts with the entire class?”

  Never bring a cupid to school if you know what’s good for you. I shook my head as Jonathan flitted.

  Mr. Zeid pressed his Doomsday buzzer; the test was over. Glum students passed their papers forward and buried their heads in their hands.

  “I advise against any action right now,” Jonathan announced, and buzzed off.

  Art History had ended. I told Mr. Zeid this was the finest test I’d ever had the privilege of taking. He sat down hard. I joined the teeming mass of Ben Franklin students thundering to sixth-period classes like lemmings bound for the sea. Peter Terris and Julia Hart were walking arm in arm in matching blue sweaters, oblivious to their surroundings. I approached them.


  “Hi, guys,” I chirped. “How are things in the Magic Kingdom?”

  Jonathan zipped on the scene and hovered directly in Peter’s face to observe him. His wings beat quickly. He flew backward a foot, stopped, tilted, and pointed toward the ceiling. He took a small cluster of grapes from his quiver and began eating them. Julia looked at me with total, irritated shock; Peter broke into a wide, friendly grin and started laughing. Jonathan dived straight down and darted in and out between them, his brow furrowed. Peter kept laughing and said did I realize how funny I was? He’d see me around. I watched them leave.

  Jonathan landed on my shoulder. “Still too early to tell,” he said.

  I ducked behind the sainted statue of Benjamin Franklin; angst surged through me. I gripped Ben’s bronze boot. “I’m falling apart!” I wailed.

  Jonathan eyed me somberly. “The human will is not easily broken, my friend. People are not robots.”

  “I don’t want a robot! I want a boyfriend!”

  “Everyone reacts differently to love,” he added. “How Peter Terris reacts, we have no control over. That, my dear, was the piece of information you didn’t care about earlier on!”

  Three lowly freshmen had stopped to watch me shout and gesture to the air. I swung around.

  “Do you mind?” I bellowed. They scattered like squirrels. I brushed off my jacket. Never underestimate the supremacy of senior year.

  “A.J….” It was Trish Beckman, looking Very Worried. She was holding her psychology textbook open to chapter twenty-one—“Word Association.”

  “I’m going to say a word, A.J., and you say the first thing that comes into your mind. There are no wrong answers. Your subconscious will give us important clues so that we can get to the bottom of”—she winced—“your situation.”

  “I can’t cope with this, Trish…”

  “Mother,” she said, her number-two pencil poised.

  “Trish, please…”

  “Mother…,” she insisted.

  “Food,” I said, sighing.

  Trish shivered and wrote that down. “Father,” she said.

  “Cereal.”

  She sucked in a stream of air. I was flunking. “Love,” she tried.

  “Arrow,” I said.

  Trish considered my responses and said that she knew a fine psychiatrist in New Leonard who specialized in adolescent stress. She said she’d walk me to my next class because I shouldn’t be alone. I patted her shoulder and said I’d manage, really, hoisted my book bag, and headed toward Oz. I leaned against the art-room door. It had a poster that read, ART IS THE DOOR WE OPEN TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES. I tried opening the door; it was locked. Figures. Jonathan tapped his arrow on my book bag and hovered in my face.

  “How,” I muttered, “can something so small make me so crazy?”

  “What?” Donny Krumper shrieked, frozen in my path. Donny was the smallest person at Ben Franklin High and took everything seriously.

  “You think small people don’t have feelings?” he bellowed.

  “Donny, I wasn’t talking to you, I was—”

  “Sure!” Donny spat. “Sure! Walk all over small people! We’re cute! We’ll bounce back! You’re going to get yours someday, McCreary!”

  He stormed off, but it was clear I’d already gotten mine. Jonathan placed his arrow in his quiver and zoomed upward like a B-1 bomber.

  I was sitting on the World Peace Bench in the Student Center contemplating the vicissitudes of life. This was not easy because the World Peace Bench was the most uncomfortable bench ever concocted: the back forced you forward, the seat forced you into contortions. It had been given to the school by last year’s graduating class in the hope that everyone who sat on it would think about world peace. I shifted my weight and rubbed my lower back. The only thing I ever thought about when I sat on it was sitting somewhere else.

  It was four o’clock; afternoon shadows crept across the Student Center. Jessica Wong hung a poster about the King of Hearts Dance that was five days away and stood back satisfied. She had a date. I’d never make the dance. I was so lame, I couldn’t even get a guy to fall in love with me with a poisoned arrow. Nina Bloomfeld came by, shaken. She had just seen Eddie Royce, her rotten ex-boyfriend, with another girl. I motioned her to sit down. I patted her hand. I’d been there a hundred times.

  She beat her fist in the air. “He cheated on me! He humiliated me! Who he dates shouldn’t bother me! I should be celebrating that he’s out of my life! Why, A.J., does it have to be so hard?”

  I said I didn’t know, but I knew how much it hurt. I had no idea how love even survived.

  “Does it get better, A.J.? Does time heal?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  Nina nodded, lowered her head, and shuffled off. I leaned forward in despair. My parents were coming home tonight all lovey dovey, probably, from their weekend. They would ask how I was.

  “Just ducky,” I’d say.

  Unloved.

  Massively unappreciated.

  “Hey, A.J.!”

  I looked up.

  “Over here!”

  I looked up at the person who was waving at me with great emotion. I rubbed my eyes as he came closer. It couldn’t be, but it was.

  Peter Terris was running toward me!

  My sinuses clogged with ecstasy. He was wearing sandy pants and a baby-blue sweater and he looked like a recruiting poster for Hunks from Heaven.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, smiling big and wide.

  I shook off the cobwebs of despair. “Not bad…” I was breathing through my mouth.

  He nodded and looked around. “So…” he said, grinning.

  “So…,” I said, waiting.

  “I was just thinking that…” He coughed.

  Yes?

  “Uh, it’s kind of surprising, isn’t it, A.J., that we’ve never gotten…” He stopped here and looked embarrassed.

  I sat ramrod straight. Gotten what? Engaged, married…

  “Gotten together,” Peter said. “You know…”

  I certainly did.

  I crossed my leg nonchalantly and tried not to hyperventilate.

  “Would you like to do that sometime—go out?”

  I felt that answering by leaping into his arms would have been forward, so I said, “Sure,” nice and casual and sat on my hands (they were shaking). I crossed my other leg, which had fallen asleep and now dangled from my thigh like a thick dead weight.

  “Could I have your number?” he asked.

  Could he?

  Peter held out his English Lit textbook and a Bic and said to write it on the inside. I opened the book just as cool as could be. There were lots of phone numbers written there. My mind stopped.

  “Your number,” he said again.

  I wrote 555; the pen went dry. I scratched it up and down to get the blasted ink moving, because Bic pens were never supposed to fail. Even if you forgot to take them out of your jeans and they ruined every last piece of decent clothing you had in the dryer, they went right on writing. Peter looked through his pocket. “I don’t have another one,” he said.

  I tore open my purse, dug through Kleenex, anti-histamine, nose spray, breath mints…no pen.

  Peter looked down and cleared his throat as Julia Hart walked toward us, scowling.

  “Just tell me,” Peter said anxiously. “I’ll remember.”

  “Five five five…,” I began.

  “Yeah…?”

  “Five five five…” I blanked. I couldn’t remember my own phone number! I knew it when I was in kindergarten; they wouldn’t let you go home unless you did. Myra Tanninger couldn’t remember hers and had it pinned to the inside of her coat in complete humiliation. I stood there like a massive stiff as Julia Hart walked faster and faster to claim what was unrightfully hers!

  “Five five five,” said a trusted voice behind me, “four two eight six.” It was Trish Beckman, Best Friend in the Epic Pinch. I turned to her gratefully.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” Peter
said quietly, and walked quickly to Julia’s curvaceous side.

  He steered Julia past Big Ben, down the hall, past Mr. Zeid’s room…

  Trish turned to me, her mouth agape. “He approached you, A.J., in the presence of Death Incarnate!”

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  Her eyes searched my face for uncurbed neurosis. She grabbed my arm. “My mother is waiting for me outside. I’m going to the dentist and will get Novocain and won’t be able to speak, so I’ll say it all now. What is happening?”

  I grinned. “You’re a wonderful friend, Trish.”

  “I want to know everything else!”

  “I’ll call you,” I promised, and tried to look normal. “I’m fine now, Trish. That other stuff was—”

  Her mother was honking the car horn like a hungry seal in the Fire Lane. “You are to call me, A.J., as soon as you hang up with him—the very second, do you understand? Don’t go to the bathroom, don’t stop for reflection, don’t talk to yourself anywhere! It doesn’t matter what time it is!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I drove my Volvo home from school as only a truly desirable person can. I smiled at stranded motorists. I grinned at bad drivers. I drove past Comstock’s Card Castle, past the Valentine cupids on display that had always seemed tired and inane until now.

  I loved Valentine’s Day!

  I pulled into my happy two-car garage on top of which was my merry studio, and danced up the back steps to the kitchen, where Stieglitz, Boy Wonder Dog, greeted me in epic loyalty.

  “Has anyone called, boy?” I danced to the phone and patted it. “Anyone gorgeous and witty and urbane?” Stieglitz had no idea, but took full advantage of my mood; he rolled on his back to have his stomach rubbed. I stroked his long, soft fur. “Wait till you meet him, boy! He is crazy about me!”

  Stieglitz growled, sensing competition. I ran upstairs and pulled out the fabulous red dress I’d bought at retail for last year’s King of Hearts Dance, the one I’d never worn because Robbie Oldsberg had dumped me two days before the dance and gone with Lisa Shooty, breaking my heart into a zillion pieces.

  I put the dress on; the red silk hugged my body in all the right places—even my waist looked small. I pranced before my antique floor-mirror, a person in control of her destiny.