Ordinary Girls
Page 23
My sister and I are happy, for the most part, and alive, and we miss our father terribly. That is what I wanted to say, I suppose. That is all I have ever wanted you to know.
Epilogue
“Summer is coming, summer is coming
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again.”
Yes, my wild little Poet. . . .
Summer is coming, is coming, my dear
And all of the winters are hidden.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Reader, she graduated.
There was a resolutely festival air to the Gregory School graduation, as is traditional. Tasteful nosegays (white) for the girls; small boutonnieres (also white) for the boys; an anodyne valediction from some democratically elected representative of the senior class who also happened to have lobbied her peers for the four weeks leading to the ceremony; a reception of chicken-salad sandwiches and something sure to be gluten-free.
Two by two they came down the center aisle of the Gregory School’s Ecumenical Chapel and Meditation Space, white dresses and suits. And when it came her turn, Ginny marched straight ahead, eyes trained on the giant frosted window above the altar that had long ago replaced the cross, almost outpacing poor, diminutive Nick Cartwright at her alphabetically ordered side.
Her hair was wound into one of my finest braids, a thick four-stranded plait over one shoulder and a tinier one arcing above her brow like a coronet. Small white blossoms wove through her hair, peeking out like little stars. The dress, it must be noted, was new—a graduation gift from Almost-Doctor Andrews.
He sat on my left, Mom on my right, clutching my hand. If anyone wondered what Iris Mortimer-Blatchley was doing with a much younger man who was certainly not her husband, they were polite enough to wait until out of earshot to remark on it.
“Look at her go,” Mom whispered.
When they gave out diplomas, we cheered at Ginny’s name, even though the printed program requested we kindly wait for the end of the distribution.
And then the mad crush of everyone’s parents looking for their child while the children were all looking for their friends and the teachers were just trying to get out of the way and on to the lawn, where the tent of refreshments was waiting.
Ginny, trapped behind a wall of slow-moving grandparents, bugged her eyes at me.
“I’ll wait,” I called over her. She made a face, then hitched up her skirt and climbed over the first two pews.
“Ginny!”
“What are they going to do, expel me?” She rolled her eyes and tugged at my hand. “Come on!”
We threaded our way to a side door and burst out, where the brick-walled buildings and the freshly replanted impatiens looked as Ginny let go of my hand and, with a whoop, threw her nosegay into the air. It landed with a splat on the bricks of the school commons, splattering petals everywhere.
“Ginny!” Mom was calling from just outside the chapel. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Ginny called back. “It just seemed like the thing to do. The girl who catches it will be the next to get in early admission.”
“You could have saved it,” I said.
“And do what? Hang it upside down and dry it?” Ginny said. “Put it in my hope chest?” She shook her head. “No. I don’t care. I don’t want it.”
She did, however, go back to scrape it off the bricks.
“What a lovely braid.” A gray-haired woman in a dress printed with tulips in almost radioactive shades of pink and green caught Ginny’s elbow.
“Thank you,” Ginny said. “My sister did it.”
The woman smiled, revealing the smallest smudge of lipstick on her teeth. “Well. Aren’t you lucky.”
Ginny tossed her hair. “Oh, supremely. There is no friend like a sister, ah . . . something something something.”
“Where are you off to for college, dear?”
“Nowhere,” Ginny said. “For the time being. I will be taking a year off.”
“Oh,” the woman said, politely. “Traveling?”
“Working,” Ginny said. “In a furniture shop. I’m going to learn to make tables.”
“Ah,” said the woman. “I . . . excuse me.”
Ginny crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue at the woman’s retreating back, then threaded her arm through mine.
“That poem isn’t really about sisters, you know,” I said. “It’s about lesbians. Or at least I think it is.” We’d done Christina Rossetti at the end of our poetry unit, the last enjoyable thing to read before the unit on rhetoric and argumentation that presaged many drafts of college essays to come.
But there was no reason to think about that yet.
“Well, whatever.” Ginny waved her hand in the air. We were making our way toward the tent with the sandwiches. “You know, I think I’m the first person to graduate from the Gregory School bound for a career of manual labor.”
“This century, at least,” I said. “Does that disqualify you from the Women’s Alumni Association?”
“I should be so lucky.” Ginny put a hand to her brow, scanning the lawn. A few yards away, the High-Strung Smart Girls were holding phones aloft, posing and reposing to get all five of them into a single frame.
“Do you want to—?”
“No,” Ginny said abruptly. She turned on her heel. “Sandwich?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I think,” Ginny said, “you should get one from over there.”
She indicated a table at the edge of the tent, where Tate Kurokawa, in a blue button-down was standing, alone, and staring right at us. At me.
He waved.
“Gin!” Mom flapped a hand from the edge of the tent, where Almost-Doctor Andrews was waiting with his fancy camera. “Pictures!”
“Coming!”
Ginny flew off, and I circled around table by table to find Tate.
“Hey, Peach.”
“Hey yourself.”
He grinned. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
It had not been a while. It had been approximately sixteen hours.
“Having some sandwiches?”
We both looked at his plate, which was heavy-laden.
“Obviously.” He was wearing boat shoes with no socks, I noticed.
“That was a joke.”
“Obviously.” He chewed on his lower lip, an action I found attractive to the point of downright manipulative. But I, Plum Blatchley, was not about to grab Tate Kurokawa and make out with him right next to the cut-up fruit and cheese platters.
“Congratulations,” I said. “To Benji.”
Tate looked over his shoulder, where Benji was roughhousing with some other Sporty Senior Boys, ostensibly to take a picture.
“It’s a miracle he graduated,” Tate said. “Honestly.”
“When was the last time someone didn’t graduate from TGS?”
“Good point.” Tate stuffed a sandwich in his mouth. “So do you guys go away or anything?”
“What?”
“For the summer.”
“Well, Ginny’s working,” I said. “And I’m working. And my mother won a fellowship for an artist’s retreat in Maine. Do you go away?”
“To see my dad. But that’s just for a few weeks, or whatever. Just to get some sailing in.” He picked at a second sandwich. “But you’ll be here?”
“I will.”
“So I’ll see you around?”
“Yes,” I said. “You will.”
“Plum!!!” Ginny cried. She and Mom were waiting by the chapel entrance, holding their arms out to put me in place for a photo. I left Tate, for the time being, and went to be with them.
For once, I was not waiting for the future. For once, I was there on the green lawn in the breeze, seeing my laughing mother and my unruly sister, both happy and alive, and I knew I could not take either for granted, and that one day I would be old—if I was lucky, I would be old—and I could think back on this one
day in June, this one day when there was light and leaf and light and love and we were together and all that glory was so ordinary we didn’t think to be grateful for it.
Cripes. I’m no better at knowing how to end than to begin. I will go on and on until I run out of words or run out of brain. Such is my gift—to be insufferably long-winded.
But, yes, the occasion was drawing to a close. And we counted down, smiling, together, and the camera flashed.
One is never grateful for the glory of ordinary things. And yet—I was.
Acknowledgments
Thank you first to Alyssa Miele, whose editorial insight and delightful revision letters guided this project from “draft completed in a frenzied state of anxiety” to “actual novel.” Thank you too to Alexandra Cooper, a stellar editor and all-around publishing superwoman. To Uwe Stender, my agent-cum-Rilke-consultant, Frau Dornenberg says danke schön. Emily Rader, thank you for many exact and expert edits. Molly Fehr and Julie McLaughlin, thank you for a stunner of a cover—lucky, lucky me to see this beauty on the front of my book. Thank you to Kristen Eberhard, Janet Rosenberg, Meghan Pettit, and Allison Brown for all your hard work keeping every detail of this book on track.
To the gracious receivers of panicked chats/messages/texts, the metaphorical holders of hands, the truest of the true and the smartest of the bunch: Kate Brauning, Whitney Gardner, Katherine Locke, Aimee Lucido, Eric Smith, and Alex Yuschik, thank you for being there and being brilliant.
Josh, thank you for reminding me to make my writing unpredictable. I love you.
Mom and Dad, thank you for absolutely everything in my whole life. Rory and Zero—alias Doug and Gizmo—good boys! Sit. Stay.
Finally, thank you to Alice Thornburgh, the Plum to my Ginny—you are a wonder of a sister. This book is for you.
About the Author
Photo by Chris Urie
BLAIR THORNBURGH is the author of several books for kids and teens. Her first novel, Who’s That Girl, was named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. A graduate of the University of Chicago and of Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for children and young adults, she lives outside of Philadelphia (in real life) and at www.blairthornburgh.com (online).
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Books by Blair Thornburgh
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Ordinary Girls
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
ORDINARY GIRLS. Copyright © 2019 by Blair Thornburgh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2019 by Julie McLaughlin
Cover design by Molly Fehr
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932653
Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-244787-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-244781-4
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1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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