Amandine (8 page)

Amandine shook her head. “Not anymore.”

I peered into the other homeroom on the way to mine. Mary was sitting alone at her desk. When I hissed her name and waved, she stared and didn’t wave back. As Amandine pushed past me into the room, Mary looked down.

What was done was done.

I tagged Mary down in the hall after first period. Hooked her arm as she brushed by. She veered up like a spooked horse and nearly caused a couple of girls to collide into her from behind.

“Watch it,” one girl snapped.

Which spooked Mary even more. Wheeling away from them, from me, she changed course and fled around the corner. I followed her into the sports locker room, which was empty.

“Go away, Delia,” she called over her shoulder.

“Mary, what is it?”

She had pulled herself up into a huddle on the windowsill. Her overlong arms were wrapped around her knees with her nose buried into the space between. All I saw was hair. I stopped at what seemed to be a polite distance. From far away, the starting second period bell rang. I would have to be late to algebra.

“What?” I stepped from one foot to the other. “What?”

“That picture.” Her voice was muffled.

“Picture?”

“As if you don’t know!”

“Where is it?”

“What do you care?”

“I do. What was the picture of?”

Mary looked up, her face working hard to stay controlled. “You thought I’d throw it away, but I’ve got it. In case I want Mr. Serra to suspend you guys. It’s evidence, you know. Bet you never thought of that.”

“It wasn’t me, Mary. Whatever it was, it wasn’t me.”

“Ha, ha. Funny, funny. You even signed it, in your own handwriting.” She stared at me hard, then leaned back to fish inside her front jeans pocket. The paper she extracted had been folded prettily in an imitation of Mary’s own style. But the paper itself had the same thick creamy weight and texture as a page from Amandine’s Ugliest Things notebook.

I unfolded it.

Amandine had used my rotten eyeballs as starting point. She had encased them in a pair of thick scratched glasses and gone on from there. In her picture, Mary was monstrously tall and hunched and hulking, a nightmare of all the things most awkward about her. Her underbite pushed her chin out like the man in the moon; the knobs of her elbows and knees stuck out from the church choir robe in which Amandine had dressed her. The details were scrupulous; the three-colored friendship bracelet, the scuffed hiking boots that Mary always wore, her carrot-shaped fingers. Amandine had picked up on everything and had translated it into this creature.

Our names were signed at the bottom-Delia Blaine, Amandine Elroy-Bell—under the neat capital letters that read

MARY WHITECOMB:

HE UGLIEST THING AT JAMES DEWOLF HIGH SCHOOL.

What made it bad was that it was so good.

“You’re smiling.” Mary snatched the paper.

“No.”

“It’s not anything to smile about.”

“No, I know.”

“Why did you?”

“I didn’t. I mean, all I did was the eyeballs,” I explained. “That’s why I signed my name. She did all the rest. She made the rest of you out of the eyeballs.” It sounded like a lie. I could hear my breath, shallow as a dog’s. Why couldn’t I ever say the right thing?

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I promise, I really didn’t have anything to do with this picture of you, Mary.”

“That picture is not me,” said Mary.

“No, of course not, all I meant was … Please, I promise we can clear this up.” My voice whined, begging her. “We’ll go find Amandine. She can’t … she’ll answer for it. She’ll have to. She’ll have to apologize.”

It was lunch or never. I pushed through the rest of my morning’s classes in a fog. It had taken some convincing, but Mary had agreed to meet me in the cafeteria so that we could brave Amandine together.

Fury and fear squeezed into a knot inside me. I just hoped that Amandine would be reasonable. That she would see how her joke had struck too hard. That she would understand how she had not thought all the way through the consequences. When she realized she had hurt both of us, she would back down. She would apologize. Amandine was tricky, sly. But she was no monster.

Spying her across the lunchroom, I relaxed. She was eating alone at our usual table in the back, her musty movie star dress flowing onto the floor under her chair, her back and shoulders ballerina straight. She looked almost pretty, certainly harmless. A water sprite, Mom had called her. Yes, I saw that.

“Hey,” I began, forcing a false brightness into my voice as we approached. “Tell Mary that I didn’t do any of that drawing.”

Amandine looked up, startled, and her face tightened. When she spoke, though, she sounded only puzzled, and not at all defensive.

“Of course you did, Delia. The whole thing was your idea.”

“Come on, Amandine. That’s just a huge lie and you know it.”

Amandine sighed patiently. Her eyes moved from me to Mary and back again. She pushed away her lunch and clasped her hands together to her chest as if in prayer.

“Mary,” she began seriously, “I know it’s not nice for me to repeat what other people say behind your back, but in this case, I have to. When I showed her the note, Delia said, and I quote, ‘That stupid prissy preacher girl only has to take a look in the mirror to find an Ugliest Thing.’ See, and that’s how the whole idea got started. The reason Delia’s mad now is cause I actually showed it to you. The original plan was that we were just going to draw it for ourselves. I stuck it in your locker because she dared me for five dollars, and now I
am
sorry. Especially since Delia decided to
blame
me for the whole thing.” She tipped her head in my direction and gave me a grave, wounded look. “Delia, I think I’ll give you back that five dollars. It just wasn’t worth it.”

Mary backed away, her hands twisting. “I hate you both!” she said. “Both of you! I’d rather be marooned on a desert island than spend another second with either of you!”

Turning her back on us, she fled stumbling from the cafeteria.

I stared at Amandine, too shocked to speak.

She picked up her sandwich and bit into it contemplatively. “Marooned on a desert island,” she repeated, giving each word scoffing emphasis. “If that’s not the absolute lamest, prissiest thing I ever heard.”

My fingertips touched my forehead. My brain felt gummy, slow to make sense of what Amandine had done.

“You,” I began. “You.” It seemed like the right word to start off with. “You are the worst, worst liar.”

“The best liar, you mean. Don’t be jealous. You’re the best thief. How long have you had her bracelet, anyhow?”

“I did not steal Mary’s bracelet.”

“Of course you did.”

“You made that up.” I laughed uneasily. “You never stop making things up, do you?”

“Oh, Delia, you’re such a hypocrite. I could even tell your mother where it is. One phone call to Shelton-McCook—not that I’d ever do that. I don’t care about any of your little stolen things.” Her voice changed, became gentle and entreating. “It’s no good with Mary and us, anyhow. She’s always wrecking skits and being horrible. She’s starting to talk about guys too much. And that
note,
ugh. I’m sick of her. Aren’t you sick of her, Delia?”

My memory circled and returned to the morning that Amandine had stayed over. My bookshelf, my cigar box. She hadn’t taken anything from me. But she knew.

“Sick of her?” I asked vaguely.

“Yeah, don’t you think it’s better, just us?”

“I guess,” I said.

Amandine grinned. “Good. And now that it’s just us, you have to admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That my picture of Mary was pretty funny. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I answered. It was.

Mrs. Gogglio and I did not speak during the ride home, not even when she noticed that I was crying. I’d heard her make a quiet, sympathetic sound, and my whole body clenched against the questions I knew she wanted to ask. When she asked me nothing, I was grateful. She understood I was not able, not ready to talk yet.

“I’m just across the road,” she said as I opened the car door.

I nodded, then ran up the walkway to my house. Free. Neither of my parents would be home for another couple of hours.

Relieved to be alone, I toured slowly through the rooms. First my parents’ downstairs, then my upstairs. Everything was neatly arranged under my mother’s precise hand. Pillows plumped, this month’s magazines in the wooden rack. There was aspirin in the medicine cabinet and there were fresh herbs in the kitchen window. It was nice here. Anybody could come into this house and feel at home, or at least as at home as I felt.

The upstairs was as tidy as the downstairs. Maybe that’s why it didn’t seem as if it belonged to me. I noticed that the wastepaper basket was empty, that my mother finally had thrown out my flowers. She swept through my room every few days or so just to make sure I wasn’t hoarding snacks or storing up a collection of empty glasses and mugs.

But she did not know about my treasures. Neither of my parents did. It would not even have occurred to them to look. Somehow, though, it occurred to Amandine.

I did not hesitate. I took the cigar box from my shelf and headed over to Mrs. Gogglio’s. My mind was empty. When I stepped onto her porch, I heard wind chimes, and my mind filled with their same erratic, tuneless clink.

She opened as I knocked. She must have seen me from across the way.

“Delilah! I’m having tea. Do you want some tea? Do you like cinnamon toast? I was fixing some for myself.”

“All right.”

“You have a seat in the front room there. I’ll be right out.”

I sat. Mrs. Gogglio’s house was nice in a different way from ours. It was soft and faded and filled with things my parents would have rolled their eyes at; dressed-up mice dolls and framed Dolly Dingle pictures and netted lace everywhere—in the curtains, on the pillow fringe and lampshades. When Mrs. Gogglio came back and set down a tray, I saw that the tea set had a Popeye motif. Knock-kneed Olive Oyl danced with Bluto on the kettle. Li’l Swee’Pea beamed woozily from the creamer.

“Cream and sugar?” she asked.

I nodded. My mouth tasted metallic, as if I’d bitten it and drawn blood.

Watching Mrs. Gogglio pour tea was relaxing. She took extra care. Two sugars, cream. Stir, stir. Clink, clink.

My treasure box was opened on the coffee table. We blew on our tea together, sipped, and stared at it. I put down my teacup first. She lingered over hers. I had not bothered to hide the double-coupon book. In its green felt sleeve, it perched on top of Amandine’s dragonfly pin. Other treasures, Mary’s friendship bracelet, a fountain pen that had belonged to a teacher at my old school, lay in a jumble.

“I’m listening,” she said. She placed her winking Popeye cup on his saucer.

“I’ve got these things,” I began slowly. I stirred my fingers over the box, then let them fall on my favorite treasure, a cigarette lighter I’d had for so long that I couldn’t even remember who it had belonged to before me. “And some of them aren’t mine.” I cleared my throat. “What I mean is, they all belong to people I like. People who have a lot—to offer, I guess. And I guess I feel like if I can take a chip off that person, just a tiny little chip, then part of what they have becomes mine. But it doesn’t, really. It’s just some dumb, stolen piece of nothing.” I pushed my hands through my hair. I was raw, my insides turned out.

“And you’re here because you think you’re ready to stop holding on to these things?” she asked. Her voice was soft, her rosy apple face serious, trying to make sense of the information.

“Yes. Well, I’m not sure,” I finished lamely. “It’s something I’ve done for a while now. But it doesn’t help me, or anything. It doesn’t make me feel good.”

Mrs. Gogglio thought on that a moment, then slowly she began to shake her head. “I’d never have missed that silly coupon book, Delilah. It was free in my mailbox, and the sleeve was free at my branch bank. So it’s not for value that you took it. It looks to me that there’s no real money value in any of what’s there in that box.”

“No.”

“Then why did you want to show me this?”

Fear rose in my throat. It was suffocating me. I swallowed and braved it. “Mrs. Gogglio, you tell me these stories about old people, and all the things they do because they aren’t in their right mind. Maybe I’ve got what they’ve got. Maybe I’m not in my right mind. All I want to be is normal, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m crazy.”

I could hear the last words in the silence of the next moment, and it scared me. Was it true? Was I crazy?

I waited. The wind chimes clanked dully in my head. It was hard work to keep my seat, when all I wanted to do was to grab my treasures and run out the door and down the road to nowhere.

It was the nowhere part that held me in place.

“Odie MacKnight is ninety-six years old,” said Mrs. Gogglio after a minute and another slow sip of tea. “His memory is failing him. He thinks he’s back in the Depression. Talks about working as a hired hand. ‘Gotta get to work,’ he says to me every morning. ‘Work or starve.’ Makes me feel sorry for him, on account that he can only recall back to this sad time in his life. After the second war, he’d gone on to be an engineer. Married, bought a house ten miles away from here—his son lives in it now. Odie’s got five children, eleven grandchildren, and a great-grandchild on the way. There’s a lot to be thankful for. A lot of achievement in that life.”

I stared at her uncomprehendingly.

Mrs. Gogglio smiled. “My way of saying it’s a shame the most memorable time in Odie’s history is the most painful. Just as I think it’s a shame that you’ll always have this time in your life to remember. Now I don’t know much about the Depression, but I remember fourteen years old like it was last year. First time I saw you, I thought to myself, Why, now—there’s fourteen! Oh, and it hit me like a train wreck, my memories of it. Good lord, I thought fourteen would never end.”

She bit into her toast. I chewed my lip. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here. Mrs. Gogglio didn’t really understand. I drew a shaky breath.