Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

  “Plum.” Mom sighed. “Well, I guess it’s well deserved.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’ve never gotten in trouble before.”

  “No,” Mom said. “I meant what you said to Charlotte.”

  “Oh.” I paused to suppress a smile so the school secretary would not think I was making light of my infraction. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll come get you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Everyone stared as I left, and I did not even remember to shrink.

  It was even better when I told the story a second time. Almost-Doctor Andrews, who was home at midday in the way that only part-time academics seem to be able to, made me a cup of Earl Grey and listened with no small amount of interest from a kitchen stool.

  “My goodness,” he said, when I had finished. “Could you go back in time to my junior high years? Because I knew a few people at the Topeka School for the Performing Arts who could use a dressing-down.”

  I blushed into my tea. “I didn’t know you were from Topeka,” I said politely. “What made you come here?”

  “School.” Almost-Doctor Andrews stirred his mug. “Twenty-two years down, two to go. Ish.”

  “Twenty-two years?” I said. “But you’d have to have been playing since you were . . . six?” I guessed.

  He held up four fingers, half grimacing.

  “Wow,” I said. “Like in Amadeus.”

  Almost-Doctor Andrews laughed. “Oh God, no. My teacher had a saying: prodigies aren’t born; they’re built. Not that I was a prodigy, or anything. I’d rather die than rewatch my audition tapes.”

  “But you still started young,” I said.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s really the only way to do it right, isn’t it?”

  A few moments of silence passed.

  “So what does Ginny think?”

  I lifted my head. “About what?”

  “Your suspension.”

  “Oh, she . . .” I glanced at the back stairs. “I think she’s asleep.”

  “I see,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said. “Well. You might want to tell her. At some point.”

  I wanted to ask him what he thought I should say, how he would propose I broach this topic with my sister who had almost died for reasons that were squarely my fault. But he was too tactful to press, and I was too humiliated with myself to pursue the topic, and we each made our polite excuses and retreated in opposite directions.

  That evening I made scrambled eggs, half for Mom to take up on a tray and half for me to not eat much of. I slept with Gizmo and Doug on either side of me and Mozart’s Lacrimosa playing softly.

  The next day was Ginny’s birthday. March 2, as it falls every year, and I didn’t even realize it until 10:00 a.m.—long after Mom had left for campus, a full hour after Gizmo and Doug’s first real walk of the day, several minutes after remembering the chickens needed to be fed.

  It is the sort of thing one could have forgiven me for forgetting, except at that point I was not willing to be forgiven for anything. Ordinarily birthdays were a production—cakes (box mix or supermarket with the super-sugary roses), candles in creative formations, whatever streamers and balloons we could scrape out of the junk drawer. As of that day, which was gray but mild, Ginny and I had not spoken in over a week.

  I remembered, nevertheless, when I returned to the house, dusting chicken feed from my hands, and spied a small package on the back porch, which I realized was from Almost-Doctor Andrews and which contained, despite its plain white exterior, a birthday present for my sister.

  Inside, Kit hissed as I crossed the threshold. I scowled at him, and he, chastened, padded off at a clip. I set down the package, then picked it up, and then I followed Kit, all the way to Ginny’s room. The door was closed, and Kit sat, his cat’s bulk spreading out fuzzily in front of the door, and mewled.

  I knocked only very lightly.

  “Whoizzit?”

  “Kit Marlowe,” I said, for some reason.

  A muffled sound, like pillows and blankets.

  “Does Kit Marlowe have a dead mouse for me?”

  I looked down at his little marble-eyes.

  “No,” I said. “Just a present.”

  “All right,” came her voice. “C’min.”

  I pushed open the door.

  “Plummy?” Ginny, hair spread on her pillows, frowned at me from bed. “What are you doing home?”

  “Happy birthday,” I said. “I’m suspended.” The words blurted out before I could stop them, and then, I burst into sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  Ginny coughed. “What for?”

  “I just . . .” I was hysterical. My breath was jerking up my throat. “Everything. Everything. Ginny, I’m sorry.”

  “Wait. Wait.” Ginny blinked from her mass of pillows, pushing aside the Five Little Field Mice book she’d evidently been reading. “You’re what?”

  “Suspended,” I said, drawing a shaky breath. “I . . . I told Charlotte Forsythe she was a bitch in front of the entire math building lounge area.”

  “You what?” Ginny sat up in bed. “You didn’t.”

  I looked at my sock-covered feet. “I did.”

  Ginny cackled. “Oh my God.” She fell back onto her pillows and scissored her legs under the sheets. “Oh my God. Yes! Ahahaha.”

  I didn’t know at all what to make of this reaction. “You’re not mad?”

  Ginny flopped her head to one side. “Cripes, Plum. She did have it coming. I just never thought it’d be you to say it.”

  “Desperate times.” I looked back up. “I mean . . . you’re welcome. I think.”

  “Mm.” Ginny stilled. She narrowed her eyes at the package in my hands. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s from Almost-Doctor Andrews.” I handed it over. Ginny surveyed, pulled off the red string tying it shut, and uncovered a very fine, very fancy bar of chocolate.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh. That was kind of him.”

  She turned it over a few times.

  “Want some?”

  I shook my head.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Breathing air,” Ginny said. “Can’t complain.”

  The one time she was actually sick, and she understated it entirely. I found myself almost wishing she would be hysterical, rail against her condition, cry out in frustration, anything.

  The edge of the Five Little Field Mice book peeked from under her comforter.

  “I see you’re doing your usual reading,” I said, untucking it.

  “Ha. Yes. It has changed very little these past thousand readings,” Ginny said. I leaned against the end of her mattress, paging.

  “‘Five little field mice lived in a hole, warm and dry. Today, it was somebody’s birthday,’” I read softly.

  “More like, today someone relinquishes her youth,” Ginny said. “Eighteen is too old, Plum. I should go burn my toys on the altar of Artemis.”

  I put down the book. “What do you mean, too old? You can’t even legally drink.”

  “Too old to do anything,” Ginny said. “An eleven-year-old aces the SATs? Fantastic. An eighteen-year-old? So what. Eighteen is the age of unremarkability.”

  “Well, not all of us were child geniuses, okay?”

  Ginny shrank back into her pillows.

  “You know what, Plum?” she said in a small voice. “Every English teacher I’ve ever had has brought that essay up to me. They even teach it in the creative nonfiction seminar for seniors. Everyone knows what they think I am, and I don’t know how not to disappoint them. It’s like . . . I just keep working and working and working and eventually I want someone to say, Okay, Ginny, you know what? That’s enough. You get a break.”

  I had never thought of that.

  “Do you know what I wrote my college essay about?” she went on.

  “I have no idea,” I said flatly. “Marie Curie.”

  “No,” she said. “You.” />
  “What?”

  “Yes,” Ginny said. “Well, I mean, you, and a lot of other things. Amadeus, the Brontës, the nature of youthful genius, blah blah blah. I came to some kind of conclusion. You know how it is. It’s hard to say in any other words except the ones I said it in. I borrowed some lines from Rainer Maria Rilke—”

  “Who?”

  “The German poet?” Ginny said. “I thought you studied him sophomore year. Have you even been reading those books?”

  I folded my arms. “It’s a little bit hard,” I retorted, “given that they’re buried in your stupid notes.”

  Ginny looked wounded. “Well, I’m sorry. I only put them there for you.”

  “For your information,” I said, “I can make my own notes.”

  Ginny shook her head. “No, no, no. I mean I put them there to say hi. I thought it’d be fun, if you got my books later. To send you a message from the past. I knew you’d obviously know everything about the language.” She threw her hands in the air. “See, that’s what I’m saying! I mean, look, college essays are supposed to be a place to brag, right? But it was devilishly hard to write about how supposedly brilliant I am when Dad already exhausted that topic for me. And I was thinking like . . . well, I was thinking that you never got someone to write about how brilliant you are. And that I wasn’t even the best person to write about you, that it should’ve been Dad, but I was the only one left, so . . . so I wrote it. So there.”

  I was silent a long moment.

  “You didn’t have to,” I said.

  “Plum.” She fixed me with a stare. “I did, too. For one thing, you’re hilarious.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes!” Ginny rolled her eyes, like I was being intentionally obtuse. “First of all, you’re so funny that half the time I think your jokes are from somewhere else because they’re so good. And you have that way of just . . . not saying anything for the longest time and then swooping in to say one devastatingly clever thing. You have to be smart to do that. You have to notice stuff. And you’re responsible, you keep everything organized in your head, and you’re patient, just like your name implies.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Yeah.”

  Ginny looked like she might start crying but didn’t let it faze her. “And I know I’m exhausting and dramatic and waste just . . . oodles of my limited human energy on things like being convinced I’m dying and crying and pacing up and down the stairs. You have the good sense not to do that, on top of everything else you already do.”

  She flung her arms around my neck. I let her hug me, and then, when she wouldn’t let go, I tried to hit her with the Five Little Field Mice, but she shrieked and rolled away.

  “No!” She pressed a hand to her temple. “Killed by the thing I loved the most! How dreadfully poetic!”

  “The thing you love the most is Five Little Field Mice?” I regarded the book in my hand. Ginny nodded heartily.

  “After Mom, the dogs, the house, and to a certain extent Kit Marlowe, absolutely,” she said. “Well, and you, of course. You will always be the thing I love the most.” She paused a beat. “So please don’t kill me.”

  And for the first time in perhaps my entire life, I will tell you truly, I did not want to.

  “Fine,” I said, and sat on the edge of the mattress. Ginny moved over, giving me space.

  “Read to me?”

  “Sure.”

  I went back to the books. There were her underlined passages, of course, but frustratingly—well, no, really, obviously—those were the passages I would’ve underlined anyway. In the back matter, the part I’d admittedly never read, I found them:

  HELLO PLUMMY it’s me! Do you like Jane Eyre so far?

  Plum is it just me or is Helen, like, kind of annoying?

  Sooooo sleepy can class be over?

  Sorry but literally WHO WOULD BE FOOLED BY MR. ROCHESTER’S FORTUNE-TELLER DISGUISE!!!!! Am I wrong????

  omg Charlotte keeps pronouncing it “Saint John” and I’m dying inside

  themes: self-sufficiency, religion??, feminism, don’t put your wife in the attic

  Did you see that the Brontës wrote weird fan fiction when they were kids? CELEBRITIES THEY’RE JUST LIKE US. I mean they are literally like us, Plum, except you’re basically Charlotte and Emily combined and I’m Anne with a touch of Branwell.

  I don’t understand the religious parts at all, but by the time you read this book I will be almost in college or dropped out of school or dead or something, so here’s hoping I made it, okay?

  You, of course, will be fine fine fine.

  But even then, I was not done reading unexpected messages.

  That afternoon was dozy and pleasant in the way that only a weekday with no school can be. Ginny slept, and I spent an hour or two reading Rilke, who was, in fact, next on the syllabus, and which Ginny had underlined scrupulously, along with many smiley faces and random phrases in French.

  “Plum?” Almost-Doctor Andrews called up the back stairs.

  Our mail had been delivered to him, again. There was little hope of this ever changing, no matter how many times we assured the mail carrier that Gizmo and Doug were incurably friendly, especially if you gave them a biscuit.

  I took the stack of envelopes with a thank-you. Junk. Junk. A white-enveloped reminder to purchase tickets to the TGS graduation luncheon—quaint. Something about health insurance, for Mom. A letter to me.

  I never got mail. I ripped it open.

  Dear Plum,

  I realize I never actually call you by your real name and maybe thats rude of me. Do you ever go by Patience? You probably have a lot of it to tutor me. Ha ha ha

  Anyway I just wanted to say that I hope your doing okay because I heard some stuff was going on with your sister. I thought about texting you but that seemed weird and you seem like the kind of person who would appreciate a letter. Even if its in terrible handwriting.

  Also if there was anything I did to you then I’m sorry. I hope we talk again soon

  sincerely

  Tate

  PS. Sorry this is so badly written. Its not my tutors fault

  I read it seven times in a row. Then I picked up my phone before I lost my nerve.

  Thank you for your letter. Everything is okay.

  I put it down, upside down, as if I were unconcerned with receiving a response. It hummed on the counter ten seconds later.

  no problem

  i heard you got suspended???

  Yes, I wrote back. If you can believe it.

  whoa

  damn peach

  watch out

  A pause, for the dots. This time I didn’t put my phone down.

  so your just home now

  Yes

  can i come over?

  I thought about it. I really did. But something about being not only the kind of girl who would kiss Tate Kurokawa, but also the kind of girl who would call Charlotte Forsythe a bitch in a crowded math building lounge area, and the kind of girl who might actually be, in some way, in some people’s eyes, a little brilliant, made me inclined to say yes.

  Sure

  Ten minutes later, just as I was hastily finishing rebraiding my hair, there was a knock at the door. Not the door we actually go in and out of, which is the kitchen door, but the front door. I sprinted from the kitchen to the front hallway and yanked it open.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Tate said. I had forgotten just how good it was to see him up close.

  “Thanks for the letter,” I said, before I forgot to be polite. “Do you want to come in?”

  Tate stepped inside.

  “So this is your house,” Tate said.

  “Yes,” I said, a bit defensively. “It’s not in the best shape, I’ll admit. But it is us.”

  “I like it,” he said. “Is the polar bear real?”

  I stared at him. “What do you think?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his chin. “I guess they’re usually bigger than that.”

&
nbsp; “Do you want to sit down?” I asked, before remembering we didn’t have couches. “We can go to the kitchen.”

  “Okay.”

  I led the way, through the dark of the dining room and out into the chaos that was our kitchen.

  “Whoa,” Tate said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s us.”

  He sat on Gizmo’s couch, where Gizmo already was, and gave his ears a scratch. Tate had the uncanny ability to look at ease no matter his surroundings. It was infuriating, but also, I realized something I admired about him. Something that made me like him. One of a few things.

  “So . . . ,” he started. “Were you actually mad at me?”

  “Mad?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because you weren’t talking to me.” He patted Gizmo’s head. “I mean, I guess we haven’t actually talked that much. But I got the sense that you were, like, avoiding me.”

  “Well,” I said. “Things got . . . complicated. Here. And . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I felt. “And I never figured you’d actually care if we didn’t speak.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because . . .” I let out a breath. “You probably don’t even remember.”

  “I can barely remember what I had for lunch,” Tate said. “So yeah, probably.”

  “When we were kids, you, and Stevie, and Tommy . . . that time you took my notebook in fourth grade. You all laughed at me so much. I guess I have a hard time thinking that you’re not just setting me up to make fun of me again. It seems like something you would do.”

  “Oh,” Tate said. He looked at his shoes. Then up again. “It does?”

  “It does. Or it did. I don’t know.” I tucked hair behind my ear.

  “You still think about that, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said tightly. “I do. I don’t suppose you do.”

  “Not really,” Tate said. “I mean, now that you mention it, yeah. But not as much as you did. Do.” He rubbed his forehead. “Look, Peach, we were idiots back then. I mean, the other guys still are. And I probably am, too. But, okay, now that I’m thinking about it, you know what I actually remember thinking back then?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was like, Wow, this girl is smart.”

  “Really?”