“Finally,” she said, draping the letter over her heart. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Monday dawned crisp and strikingly clear, cold enough to dry up that kind of mid-winter melting mugginess that made you sweat in your rain boots when the TGS radiators came on full blast. If optimism were a morning, it would be this one.
In the Jesus Is the Way parking lot, Ginny immediately bustled off to relay her good news. I walked along with measured step, knowing who else was, if not on campus, fast approaching it in Benji Feingold’s Range Rover. It was a funny thing, having kissed someone; suddenly you felt as though there was this halo around them, this radiance to their presence that wasn’t there before and might never go away. Your senses attuned to the possibility of their arrival; you felt it in your body—not in a visceral, churning way, but in a light shimmer on the surface of your skin. But no sooner did the thought cross my mind than I rebuked myself for my good mood. There was nothing in my life experience to suggest that I would ever get anything more than the things that had already happened. Investing hopes in future good fortune was a waste.
And yet, there, at the lunch break—there he was.
We wouldn’t say hello, I knew that much. We wouldn’t make eye contact, even. Even if Tate wanted to, I wouldn’t. I didn’t want Stevie and Tommy and all the other Loud Sophomore Boys encroaching on this, not even as a joke, not even though they would never in a thousand ages suspect that their friend Tate, their fellow broad-shouldered squash player, would ever have deigned to kiss someone as plain and unassuming as Patience Mortimer Blatchley on the mouth. This was much more than secret fourth-grade poems in a notebook. Very much more.
So at the picnic tables, I kept walking, briskly. Briskly and right into a tree root.
I catapulted forward, the weight of my backpack heaving over my shoulders and pulling me even faster toward the ground. I flung out my hands, and my palms burned as they scraped against the asphalt. From behind me, I heard some oooohs and that’s gotta hurts. I got to my feet, attempting briskness, and shook off my hands.
Stupid, of course, to be distracted by my own limerence. The shimmer had evaporated, replaced by literal pain. I turned the corner as quickly as I could and examined my palms, which upon inspection had been grated raw by the ground. They stung, too.
Fortunately, the school nurse was just inside the next building, across from the lower school science room, at the tail end of the boa constrictor skeleton in its long glass box.
“Oh dear.” The nurse clucked her tongue at my raw hands. “Let me get you some gauze.”
She busied herself in a cabinet. She was wearing a beige ribbed turtleneck, which could only mean that today was the day that the fifth graders were learning about childbirth. When Ginny was eleven, she had come home from school one day wide-eyed, and recounted with horror what they had learned in health class.
“And then after all the birth-canal stuff, she pulled her turtleneck over her head,” Ginny recounted breathlessly, “and pushed it back out and said, ‘There, I was just born.’”
A pause, for dramatic effect.
“Ew,” I said.
“I know,” Ginny said. “And next week they’re going to give us”—she shuddered—“tampons.”
I remembered my chest filling with part relief and part utter panic at knowing exactly what excruciation lay in store, and a wordless wave of gratitude that I had Ginny to tell me these things ahead of time. How people without older sisters survived fifth-grade health class, I did not know.
“I’m so sorry, Patience”—the nurse had never bothered to learn what I was actually called—“I’ll have to go to the supply closet. Two seconds. I know you have to get to class.”
She disappeared down the hall, and I sat on one of the plastic chairs and stared idly around, palms still stinging. The nurse’s office had a private bathroom, which was primarily a place to throw up, and a series of cots hidden away behind a paper curtain. Behind the paper curtain, on the end of one of the cots, a pair of shoes was sticking out. I recognized them; they were my shoes, my purple flats with the rhinestones on the toes that I had not noticed disappear that morning.
“Ginny?”
I pushed back the paper curtain a little. My sister was lying back, her hands folded over her stomach, engulfed in one of mom’s oversize sweatshirts.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Sort of.” Ginny’s voice wavered. She sounded hoarse.
“Are you throwing up?”
“No.”
I stood there. She lay there.
I looked back toward the nurse’s now-empty desk. “Did you see the turtleneck?”
Ginny didn’t cackle. She didn’t even smile. “Oh. Yeah.”
She pursed her lips.
“I just had to lie down,” she went on. “I needed something for my cold.”
I, unlike Ginny, knew the difference between hypochondria and actual illness. This did not look like the former. But Ginny didn’t have a cold, either.
“Are you going to go to class?” I asked.
Ginny put her hands over her face.
“I left my backpack,” she said, from behind her fingers. “Under the stairs.”
“I’ll get it,” I said, because she didn’t even have to ask. When you are a younger sister and your older sister makes a statement like that to you, you know she’s actually asking for a favor. But now I didn’t mind.
The nurse returned and patched me up, and with my taped-over palms I strode across campus in the three remaining minutes of the lunch period.
Under the math building stairs, on the bench of the alcove where Ginny would have ordinarily been sitting with her friends, I saw it, the saggy navy blue with VEB embroidered on it. Ginny’d had the same one since the third grade, but they never really went out of style.
I squeezed behind one of the tables and picked it up without talking to any of the High-Strung Smart Girls, because I never had anything to say to them anyway. But their heads all tilted up, in almost unison, like a flock of sparrows.
“Excuse me,” I said, as if I needed their permission. “I’m just getting Ginny’s bag for her.”
“Hmph.” Charlotte said. She got up from the other table, shouldering her gargantuan tote bag, which swelled out with the corners of various books poking in every direction. “I’m sure you’re very happy for your sister.”
There was nothing happy about her tone, not even a manufactured happiness. I gave her a look that said—well, it did not say enough.
“I’m sure you’re very happy for your best friend,” I replied.
Charlotte did not reply. She brushed past me, one of the corners in her tote bag hitting me square in the shoulder.
When I went back to the nurse’s office, Ginny was pretending to be asleep. I was five minutes late to math.
“Here,” the nurse said. “Let me write you a note.”
“But I’m not sick,” I said. What I meant was: but Ginny’s not sick.
I took the note anyway.
For dinner that night, Mom and I microwaved baked potatoes.
“These look terrible,” Mom said, poking one with a fork.
“The only point of these is to put butter and salt on them,” I said. I felt a deep-seated need to be cheerful, to parcel out the feeling of the other night for as long as I could.
“Yeah,” Mom said.
“So they’re delicious no matter what.”
Yet each of my attempts to force out the cheerfulness made it lose shape. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was not behaving the way a girl who’d had something magical happen.
“They’re just potatoes, Plum. Let’s not lose our heads.”
Gizmo trotted in, a paper towel stuffed into his collar. He plopped his head onto my lap, which was unsavory given that his face was wet and one of the toilet seats somewhere was surely open. I pulled out the paper towel.
DINNER’S READY! xo Mom
A Gizmo-gr
am return to sender. I crumpled it into a ball.
“The school called,” Mom said. “Ginny’s on academic probation.”
“What?” I said.
“Someone accused her of cheating. On the makeup midterm.”
“That’s patently ridiculous.” I put down my fork. “Who told them that?”
“They didn’t say,” Mom said. “Honor system. It’s anonymous.”
The honor system at TGS was as anonymous as its college process was personal and private.
“So it was Charlotte.”
The butter spilled onto Mom’s plate. Neither of us was going to eat our potato, I knew.
“Can’t any of us get a break?” Mom said. “Just one goddamn break.”
She swooped up from the table, taking her wineglass with her and leaving no one but me to clean everything up.
It turned out that the oven had not been the right place to store the party favors.
At first, everything that Saturday was normal, if impossibly busy. 5142 Haven Lane became a hive of activity, singularly focused on preparing every last precious detail of the silent auction. Mom was up at 6:00 a.m. ironing tablecloths. I fed the chickens and fed the dogs and fed Kit Marlowe and even fed the fish, who honestly were the most neglected of the Blatchley menagerie, and then began the hours-long process of printing out tiny cards with aliases on them. Ordinarily, silent auctions used something straightforward, like playing cards, to anonymize the bidders, but Mom in her infinite tendency to overdo things had decided it would be much more on-brand to use the names of famous impressionist artists. This put our printer under considerable strain, and I spent almost two hours gently force-feeding it sheets of perforated place cards in #017 pebble gray.
It was dull work, the kind that made me vaguely wish I had some kind of hand-occupying hobby like knitting or needlework. However, while I was feeding the pebble-gray perforated card sheets into the printer, I got a text message.
you get home okay?
i mean i guess you did haha
i just never asked is all
I wanted to reply, more than anything, more than I wanted to admit. I clenched my hand tightly around my phone, pressing into the gauze over my scrapes, and waited another two perforated sheets’ worth of time.
Yes, I typed back. Thanks for inviting me.
The read-receipt check mark appeared. Then the dots. My chest contracted against my will. Whoever had invented this technology had the rare distinction of creating with it an entirely novel human neurosis. The sadist.
i would have done it sooner if i’d known, came Tate’s answer.
you should watch games more often
Maybe, I responded. I don’t pay that much attention.
you around tonight
?
Was I?
From the floor, Kit Marlowe mewled, his fluffy belly turned up and his tail curling one way and the other.
“You shameless exhibitionist,” I told him. “Since when are you so friendly?”
Kit gave a coy meow. I stuffed another sheet in the printer and went back to my phone.
I wrote back truthfully. I think I have a family thing.
ok, Tate responded.
That was it. That was it until we’d packed up the baskets and shook out the ironed tablecloths and triple-checked the number of tiny candles and lined up the decanters like clear glass soldiers at attention. Then I received one last message.
well let me know
And then we smelled it.
Ginny had sorted about four baskets before she took a break to make toast, and since toast was food, neither Mom nor I nor Almost-Doctor Andrews thought to discourage her, even though it was really outside of Almost-Doctor Andrews’s jurisdiction as a tenant. It wasn’t until Mom returned to the kitchen after wrapping herself in her formal blacks for the silent auction that anyone realized anything was wrong.
“What’s that smell?” Mom put a bell-shaped sleeve over her nose and mouth, coughing. “Plum?”
“Huh?”
I was certainly not wasting time rereading a single text message. I was, in fact, de-perforating the place cards and stacking them in alphabetical order, and had made it as far as Cézanne.
“Oh no,” Mom said. Gizmo and Doug were up, tails wagging, since clearly either Something Was Wrong or There Might Be Food.
“Cézanne is a postimpressionist,” came Ginny’s sharp voice. She had drifted in, wearing another one of Mom’s gigantic Ferrars College sweatshirts, the one with sleeves so long they concealed her hands entirely. “What’s that smell?”
Ginny jogged to the oven and yanked it open. There, in its gaping, metallic maw, lay a mess of melted chocolate, singed ribbon, and cellophane that had gone brown and crispy at the edges. A plume of carcinogenic odor wafted through the room.
“What the hell, Plum?” Ginny yelled. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean, what the hell?” I said.
“You put them there,” Ginny said.
“I was going to take them out,” I said. “I just forgot. Besides, it’s your fault for not looking in the oven before you turned it on.”
“Why would I look?” Ginny said. “We never use it. And why did you even put them there in the first place?”
I looked at Mom, helpless to defend myself, unable to explain. Mom pushed her headband further up her forehead.
“Girls, don’t. Not now.”
“But, Mom,” Ginny said. “Plum ruined—”
“I did not!” I cried. “And I don’t see you helping. You’re just lying around being useless.”
“Girls.” Mom’s voice was steely and tight as piano wire. “I don’t need this right now. I need to get this to the living room, and I need you to be dressed, and I need everything tonight to not be hopelessly fucked-up the way it usually is. So act like adults for once, okay?”
Mom never talked like this.
Ginny wavered. “But—”
“No. You think you’re going to get through college with an attitude like this, Ginny? Because I’ll put up with your bullshit, but only because I’m your mother. You can’t be like this in the real world. Don’t push it.”
“Seriously,” I muttered. “I hope you weren’t like that in your interview.”
Ginny huffed, hard, but her eyes looked weak and watery.
“Oh, so now all of a sudden you care about my future?” She crossed her arms. “Now you want to know how my interview went?”
“I asked!” I yelled. “You think I don’t care? I care a lot about that stupid interview.”
Ginny scoffed. I was actually trembling.
“I’m the whole reason you got that interview, Ginny,” I said. “I talked to Alicia Feingold for you. She owed me a favor, and I told her to talk to you.”
Ginny’s face fell.
“What?” She practically bellowed it.
“Yeah,” I said. “So I do care. You’re welcome.”
“I can’t believe you, Plum,” Ginny yelled. “You didn’t think I could do it on my own? You thought I was that stupid?”
“I did not,” I said. “I can’t believe you would think that.”
“Don’t, Plum,” Mom said. “She’s being hysterical. Don’t engage.”
“But she . . .” Ginny could barely form a sentence. “Plum ruined everything!”
“Ginny, you can either help, or you can leave. I’m not dealing with histrionics right now.” Mom looked at the clock, swore, and grabbed her keys. “I’m going.”
Ginny’s eyes filled with tears.
“Mama,” she said. Her voice sounded stuck in her throat. “Wait.”
“I can’t wait, Ginny,” Mom said. “Now I have to go to the florist’s and get new favors. Just cool it with the hysterics.”
“I’m not hysterical,” Ginny said, even as she was crying harder. She swabbed at her face with the end of a sweatshirt sleeve.
“Uh, actually, you are,” I said. “Get a grip.”
Ginny fixed me wit
h a look, then melted to the floor.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mom said. “Virginia, you are eighteen years old. You can’t fall to pieces like this over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Ginny sobbed. “It’s the f-future. And neither of you t-trust me. It’s my whole future.”
I looked at the mangled mess of plastic. And then I had had enough.
“It is not,” I said. “You just can’t stand for there to be a crisis that doesn’t have you at the center of it.”
If Ginny’s tragic flaw was her reactivity, mine was my own spite. It was just too easy to be mean when you really wanted to be, even to your sister. No—especially to your sister. I could hurt her more than anyone else, more than Mom, more than Charlotte, more than the entire University of Pennsylvania. It was a true and essential ability, and, in that particular moment, I relished it.
“You don’t do anything useful. Ever. All you do is lie around and cry like the crazy person you are.”
Ginny cried harder.
“I’m going,” Mom said. “I’m already late. Ginny, you’re just going to have to deal with this. I don’t know what to tell you anymore.”
She slammed the door, and when she did, Ginny made a strangled noise and pushed herself to standing. She stood very still for a moment, then dashed up the stairs.
“Good riddance!” I yelled after her.
I stood alone in the kitchen a moment, wishing I had somewhere else to go, until I remembered that I did.
Actually, I’m free now if you want
The dots were there barely five seconds.
front row seat. all yours
He was waiting at the back door.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” Tate said.
Immediately I did not know what to do. I’d never allowed my imagination to go this far forward into the future. And even if I had, I would have conjured absolutely nothing. I barely knew how to reciprocate, let alone initiate, anything romantic.
But there was Tate, in his striped rugby shirt, the collar hanging crooked, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and I thought: I know you. Maybe not the way other people know you, maybe not the way you want people to know you, but I know that at least once, maybe even twice, you have seen fit to kiss a girl like me.
Ordinary Girls Page 19