A Summer of Kings (2 page)

"It isn't because I haven't wanted to, that's for sure," Pip said.

Auntie Pie honked the horn—the one thing on the car that always worked—and I waved to her. "Just a second," I shouted, noticing that the college girls had left. Then returning to Pip, I said, "You just like saying you're in love with me so you don't have to face rejection from every other girl in the school. You think that as long as you can tell yourself and everybody else that you like me, then you don't have to think of yourself as a pip-squeak loser. You're using me, Pip, and I allow it because I like you, but don't act like it's for real. And don't condemn me because I say I'm in love with someone else. I've moved on and maybe it's time you did, too. It's time you grew up."

As I was speaking, Pip's face got redder and redder, and he blew his cheeks up as if they were full of water. Then he let loose with a big burst of air and said, "You know, it's times like this that I don't even like you, let alone love you. Not even a little bit." He squinted up at me. "When did you get so mean, Esther? When did you get so heartless?" And with those words, he threw the trowel on the ground and marched off down the road past Auntie Pie, who honked at him and shouted, "Hey!"

I stooped down and picked up the trowel and called after him, "I was only telling you the truth for your own good. I didn't say no girl would be interested in you; I said
you
thought no girl would be interested in you. I said
you
thought you were a pip-squeak loser."

Didn't I say that? I wanted to think about this, but Pip was getting away. I shouted, "I wasn't saying
I
thought that. Pip! Jonathan! Come on."

I trotted after him, and Auntie Pie honked at me and yelled out the one window that worked, "Get in the car already; I'm burning up in here," when I passed the car, but I kept on going.

Auntie Pie started the engine and backed the car up and followed me while I followed Pip, who had started to run.

"Have fun with your colored boy," he called back to me. "Have fun with your cold-blooded killer, Esther." He stopped and turned around and walked backward so that with Auntie Pie driving backward and him walking backward, I was the one who looked out of place. I stopped walking and Auntie Pie pulled up beside me.

"Hey, just remember to invite me to your wedding, okay?" Pip said. "Would you do that? Invite me to your wedding? 'Cause that I've got to see." Pip jabbed his index finger in the air for emphasis, and then, jerking his head sideways as if his neck were in sudden spasm, he said, his glance returning to me, "You know, why would anybody be interested in you? Huh? Did you ever think that maybe I pretended to be in love with you because I knew no one else liked
you
?" He stopped walking and brushed at his eyes a second. Then he said, "All the guys make fun of you. You may be cute and all with your big brown eyes and all those freckles and your so-called million-dollar smile your old grandfather's always going on about, but like your parents said, you're not photogenic, and anyway, you're a ... a goofball. Yeah, that's right." Pip nodded to himself and started walking backward again. "You're always saying the wrong thing and knocking into people and making a total fool of yourself, and your hair is always in tangles like you just came out of the jungle or something. The guys make fun of the mass of knots in your hair you think you're hiding with that headband."

I put my hands up to my hair and adjusted my new pink headband. "That's not fair. You know I have trouble keeping the tangles out. It hurts. You know blond heads are more sensitive."

Pip wasn't listening. He said, "Didn't you ever think that maybe
I
was protecting
you
? Huh?" He was still walking backward, and when he said "Huh," he tripped and fell back on his bottom. He popped up again like it didn't happen and said with his voice cracking, "Think about
that,
why don't you. You made me say it. You made me tell the truth. How's it feel? How's it
feel,
Esther?"

Pip turned back around and ran off so fast that he was out of sight before I could even think of a response.

Finally one came to me.

"Oh yeah?" I shouted back.

"Now, what was that all about?" Auntie Pie wanted to know when I climbed back in the car with the box of dead squirrels in my arms.

"Oh nothing," I said, even though my heart was pounding and my stomach was churning. Pip and I almost never fought. We were best friends, really. Pip was the only reason I even survived staying back in the third grade. Everybody else made fun of me and called me lame brain, or moron, but not Pip. The first day of school, he took my hand and we walked together to Mrs. Mahoney's class and Pip walked right up to the teacher and said, "I'm Jonathan Masters. My father is the president of the college, and this is Esther Young, and we want to sit together."

Mrs. Mahoney had smiled at Pip and frowned at me. Then she said, "Yes, I had Esther last year. I hope we're planning on a better performance this year, Miss Young."

"Yes, I hope you are, too," I said in all innocence, thinking she was talking about herself. I realized by the way she had arched her brow, that evil brow, and by the elbow poke Pip had given me that she had meant my performance and not hers, and I corrected myself. "I mean, yes, Mrs. Mahoney, I am."

I hated the third grade—both times. I hated that I wasn't even given a new teacher. Mrs. Mahoney was fat, which wouldn't have mattered if she had kept it to herself, but she liked to threaten to sit on us if we did anything wrong, so it mattered plenty, and it meant I was in constant danger of getting flattened. I think I would have ended up looking a lot like the dead squirrels I had sitting on my lap if it hadn't been for Pip running interference for me all the time. I knew I owed him a lot.

That's what I was thinking, that I owed him a lot, when Auntie Pie said, "It looked to me like the two of you were fighting. Why did he run off like that?"

Auntie Pie had begun backing the car down the road and I was afraid to answer her because I didn't want to break her concentration.

I twisted around in my seat and looked out the back so that I could help navigate and look out for Pip, who most likely took the shortcut through the woods, since I didn't see him anywhere on the road.

"Well?" Auntie Pie said.

"Well, he's mad at me. I think I told him to get lost—kind of."

"Why would you do that?"

Auntie Pie was heading for a telephone pole, so I said, "Pole. Pole. Pole!" She swerved just in time and we were back on the road and she was still waiting for my answer.

"I don't know why I did it." I shrugged. "I guess I just want this summer to be different. I want to be different. This is my first summer in forever that I'm free. No tutors and no homework. If I hang out with Pip all the time—I don't know. That's my old life. He's part of my childhood. I need to move on from that."

"Just like that?" Auntie Pie took her hand from the wheel and snapped her fingers.

"Well..." I shrugged. "Laura and Kathy have cut me off just like that." I snapped my fingers. "Or at least they're trying to. They think I'm too tomboy or something—too immature."

"Everybody matures at their own rate, Esther. Don't be in such a hurry; your time will come." Auntie Pie took a hand off the steering wheel and patted my knee. We rolled back onto the side of the road and headed toward the stone wall that ran the length of our property. I said, "Wall. Wall. Wall!" Auntie Pie jerked the wheel just in time, and we didn't speak again until we were safely home.

At home, Auntie Pie and I carried the box of squirrels into the gatehouse that stands at the entrance to our property just inside an enormous iron gate.

While Auntie Pie prepared the food for the hawks and let her pet skunk, Earl, out of its cage to run around, I cleaned the hawk squirt off the wall and thought about Pip and what he had said about nobody liking me. When I looked up, still deep in thought, I noticed through the side window the local taxi that waits for passengers down at our train station enter through the gate and roll down our driveway.

Auntie Pie saw it, too.

"Is that him?" she asked, peering out the window at the taxi. "Is that the killer? He's early. First he's a day late, now he's two hours early." She scooted the skunk back into its cage, wiped her hands on her dress, and said, "We're all going to be murdered in our sleep."

I said, "But it can't be him; I'm not dressed yet." I looked down at my dirty plaid Bermuda shorts and my green striped shirt. In my fantasy of our first meeting, I had imagined myself in a more exotic-looking affair. I had imagined myself wearing something out of Beatrice Bonham's closet, something with a lot of fluff and frill. I had pictured myself wearing makeup, with curled hair and high heels. I didn't own any makeup or high-heeled shoes, and the most exotic thing I did own was a black turtleneck leotard that zipped up the back, a leftover from Mother's attempt to either turn me into a ballerina or just plain humiliate me by signing me up to take classes in the city with the School of American Ballet. Mother was on the board there, so they had to take me. I lasted six years (six years!) before Mr. Balanchine himself told my mother that it was pointless: I did not have the body of a ballerina; however Stewart and Sophia, my brother and sister, were beautiful dancers, of course.

Auntie Pie heard my comment about not being
dressed and said, "We've got a cold-blooded killer in our midst and you're talking about your clothes?"

"Mother and Dad said he didn't do it," I replied, placing a towel on the side of the hawk cage closest to the wall, trying to finish up so I could get to the window and see for myself what our new guest looked like.

"Mother said he is just a victim of prejudice and circumstance," I added.

I went over to the window, with my heart racing, and watched as a tall black person climbed out of the taxi and looked around.

"There he is," I said. I took a deep breath and let it out, fogging up the window. I had to wipe it down to see him again.

"Uh-huh, that's him," Auntie Pie said.

The murderer, the Negro boy, the boy I told everyone I was going to have a romance with, looked like a full-grown man standing out there in our driveway. He was dressed in tan pants, a white shirt, brown bow tie, and a straw hat. No boy I knew dressed like that.

I saw him gazing up at the house and whistling to himself, and I knew he was surprised by the size of our house.

Normally, seeing someone admiring our house would give me a real thrill, because if you asked me what I was most proud of about myself, it would be that I lived in this wonderful mansion with my famous director father and my beautiful mother and my gifted brother and sister, but right then I was far too nervous to be thrilled.

I glanced at Auntie Pie, then returned to the window. "Well, all right, then," I said. "I guess we ought to go greet him. Nobody else is home except Beatrice, and she's in no shape to see him. She only got home this morning. She'll be sleeping it off till four at least."

Auntie Pie backed away from the window. "You go ahead, and I'll stay behind and keep watch over things," she said, picking up Roily Raccoon, then lifting him to examine his bandaged front paw. Her voice sounded shaky. "Anyway, I have to go move the car before your parents get back and find out I drove it."

I turned around to face my aunt. She's really my great-aunt, and even though she's only in her sixties, she acts much older and wears dresses and clunky shoes that have got room for her bunions, with thick stockings she wears rolled down to her knees that she orders from some old-lady catalog. She looks just like an old granny, except for her face, which doesn't have a wrinkle in it.

I said, "You're scared, Auntie Pie. You're scared of a poor boy down on his luck." I moved over to the door and one of the hawks screamed, which, when it's right in your ear, is bloodcurdling.

I hunched up my shoulders against the noise and opened the door. "He's the grandson of Mother's maid from childhood and the son of Mother's oldest best friend. You've heard her talk of her maid Cassie. This is
her grandson." I knew she knew all this, but sometimes she forgot things, and anyway, I needed to say those things out loud to reassure myself.

Both hawks screamed when I said grandson, and Auntie Pie and I both jumped.

Then she said over the screams, her voice sounding irritated, "I know who he is. And just because he's from a family of good women, it doesn't mean a thing. He can still be a killer—a cold-blooded killer. You of all people ought to know families don't come out just alike."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, not really wanting an answer. I knew all too well that I was the one in our family who didn't come out right.

Auntie Pie ignored my question and said, "Oh all right, I'll go with you to meet this young man. I guess I can't let you go out there by yourself."

We stepped out of the gatehouse together and saw that the taxi had gone and Mr. King-Roy Johnson was nowhere in sight.

"Where did he go?" I asked. I ran toward the house.

"I see his suitcase on the porch," Auntie Pie called after me.

I ran up onto the porch and turned around. I called out, "Mr. Johnson? Mr. King-Roy Johnson. Hello. We're here on the porch."

Auntie Pie took her time climbing the steps of the porch, then said, "Why don't you look inside and I'll keep a watch out here."

I nodded and went inside the house. I stood in the foyer and called out, "King-Roy Johnson? Mr. Johnson, are you here?"

"Yes, ma'am, I'm here."

I heard his voice coming from the direction of the ballroom. I ran through the living room and solarium and saw that the ballroom doors were open. We always kept them closed because it was the coldest room in the winter and the warmest room in the summer. I knew King-Roy Johnson had to be in there. I hesitated a second before entering, thinking I should wait for Auntie Pie, but then I thought that maybe my hesitation was some kind of sign of being prejudiced against murderers or black people, so I went on inside and found Mr. Johnson standing in the middle of the room, staring at all our stained-glass windows.