Bittersweet Dreams (14 page)

This whole experience had me confused, not just about him but also about myself. I hated anyone causing me to be unsure about myself. It rarely happened at school, but I wasn't leaving his room because I was dying to get to the library. As hard as it was for me to admit it, I was leaving his room because I was a little frightened of my own reactions.

I was acting and thinking like one of those girls in my class whom I ridiculed.

I hurried out and didn't look back, but just like before, I instinctively knew that he was standing in his doorway watching me walk away.

And he wasn't interested in my good posture, either. I had first thought that this skirt Julie had chosen was too snug and too short, but it was the way many of the other girls were dressing. Give the devil her due. Julie knew fashion, knew how to be attractive. She had captured my father's interest and his heart, hadn't she? What good did it do me to deny it?

I did almost nothing in the library. I couldn't get the conversation I had with Mr. Taylor out of my mind, nor could I stop thinking about the way he looked at me. When the bell rang and I left to go to my next class, I anticipated him being in his doorway waiting for me to walk by again. At first, he wasn't there, and I felt a combination of relief and a little disappointment, but before I'd passed his room completely, he appeared.

“How'd your research go?” he called out to me.

“Fine,” I said, only glancing back at him.

“Best posture in the school,” he called after me, and laughed. I kept walking, walking faster but smiling to myself.

I was thinking so hard about him that I completely forgot about the incident in the cafeteria with Carlton James. It wasn't until I went to PE class that the consequences of that disappointing conversation were brought home to me. I was just getting my uniform on when Joyce Brooker stepped up behind me.

“We heard you blew off Carlton today,” she said.

I turned and looked at her. I couldn't remember the last time she had spoken to me or I to her. She was probably the prettiest of the girls with whom she hung, or I should say clung. They always looked more like a clump of girls clinging to one another than a group of close friends.

Joyce had almost doll-like facial features, stunning green eyes, and thick amber hair. She had the best figure, too, but she behaved just like someone who knew all this would behave. Talk about a walk, I thought, recalling Mr. Taylor's comment about me. Joyce didn't walk; she moved as if she were on a fashion model's runway. If any of them would go on to become Miss California, it would be Joyce. I could just see her answering the final question.

“If you could have one wish, what would it be?”

“A better cell phone.” Or maybe she'd realize she had to at least look serious and mature and say, “I would want to see an end to poverty.” Even though she didn't know a single poor person.

Sometimes I felt a little envious of her, but I smothered that feeling as quickly as it showed its face.

“He never got on,” I told her.

“Huh?”

The other girls joined her. They were like pigeons waiting for me to cast some peanuts.

“I couldn't have blown him
off
. He never got
on
.”

She laughed and looked at the others. “Well, he tried, didn't he?”

“If so, it was a pathetic attempt,” I said.

“Pathetic? Carlton James? I think it might be you who's pathetic for rejecting him. Unless, of course, you're seeing someone outside the school. Someone older, maybe? Someone in college? Figures that someone with your brains would probably be dating a college boy, maybe even a graduate student.”

“Are you?” Cora Addison quickly followed. I always thought she had a face like a fox's, because it was so narrow, and her nose was so pointed and long.

I gave them all a big smile. “I never realized my comings and goings were of so much interest to all of you. I guess I should be flattered. You're interested in someone other than yourselves. I didn't think that was possible.”

“Curiosity, not interest,” Denise Hartman corrected. “We can't help wondering if being so intelligent means you have no love life. Men don't like brainy girls.”

“There's no basis in fact for that sort of conclusion, Denise. The least intelligent organisms conjugate.”

“What?”

“I'm surprised you're not familiar with that, being closer to an amoeba than a primate.”

“Excuse me,” she said, with her right hand on her hip. “Can you talk English?”

“Is that what you speak? It's difficult to tell.”

“Very funny.”

“You didn't answer the question,” Joyce said.

“Was there a question? I'm still not finished translating.”

“Ha-ha,” Cora said. “Forget her.”

“No,” Joyce said, not giving ground. “The question was, are you seeing someone on the outside, and is that someone older, maybe much older?”

I half wondered if someone had reported my private conversation with Mr. Taylor or had overheard him talking to me in the hallway. Was that what she was fishing to find out?

“That's two questions,” I said.

“Well, give us two answers.”

“Do you write the social column here?”

“Sort of. So?”

I slipped on my sneakers and looked at the three of them. “I still don't understand why this is so important to all of you. Don't you have any lives of your own? Do you have to use other people's lives for your kicks and highs? Live vicariously?”

“Forget the big words. You don't have anyone, do you?” Cora said with a wry smile. “That's why you're not answering us. You've probably never had anyone.”

“Any boy, at least,” Denise said.

The two others brightened.

“Yes, that's it, isn't it? You're gay. That explains why you rejected Carlton and why no one has ever seen you with a boy anywhere.”

“Believe what you want,” I said. “Unlike you, I couldn't be less interested in what you think or do or what anyone in this school thinks or does, for that matter.”

“Carlton's the best-looking boy in school. He could have any girl he wanted,” Cora said, mostly to the other two. They nodded. “Why would she reject him if she wasn't gay?”

“Come to think of it, now that you've brought it up, Cora, I've seen the way she looks at us, especially in here when we're undressing,” Joyce said.

“Oh, really? How do I look at you?”

“Like a boy looks at us.”

I smiled. “You have misjudged me, girls. I am studying you, but I'm in the middle of doing a research paper on lower forms of life, and your resemblances to single-cell organisms are too remarkable to ignore. Carlton James might be the subject of every adolescent girl's wet dream to you, but he doesn't fit my criteria. I require more than a handsome face. I have to be with someone who can do more than talk about bubble-gum cards.”

“Wet dream?” Denise said.

“Look it up,” I said, and walked out to the gym.

The only reason I continued to take PE was my belief that it was important to get some physical exercise every day. I enjoyed the warm-up Miss Hirsch put us through, all the exercises, but only halfheartedly participated in the games, especially basketball. Whatever team I was on, the members hardly passed the ball to me. I didn't care. I was more interested in running up and down the court. Sometimes I didn't even notice who had the ball.

The three bitches from
Macbeth
ignored me for the remainder of the period and afterward in the locker room. What Joyce had been asking about my seeing someone older did make me a little more self-conscious, and I deliberately avoided walking near Mr. Taylor's classroom. I hurried out of the building at the end of the day. Allison was already waiting for her mother to take us home.

“You probably got a lot of compliments today, huh?” she asked me.

“I didn't notice,” I told her.

“Yes, you did.” She stared at me and almost reluctantly added, “You look very pretty now, Mayfair. Even some of my friends said some things about you, some nice things.”

Why take it out on her?
I thought. “Thank you, Allison. And yes, I did receive compliments.”

“I knew you would. My mother will be very happy about it.”

“That's good. It's good she's happy about something,” I muttered.

I looked back as other students poured out of the building. The three bitches from
Macbeth
looked my way and then laughed as they piled into Joyce's SUV. I had hoped that my answers had discouraged them from having any more interest in me and what I did and didn't do, but as it turned out, my responses had resulted in quite the opposite reaction. I wouldn't learn about it until that night, however.

When Julie picked us up, she had almost the identical question waiting on her lips.

Yes, I had received compliments, I told her, and yes, I felt better about myself. She drove with a smile of self-satisfaction planted on her face all the way home. But thanks to the bitches from
Macbeth
, that would quickly disappear later.

Just before dinner, I could feel that something was up, but I didn't pursue it. When we all sat at the table, she didn't say much to either Allison or my father and avoided looking at me. My father went on and on about how much he enjoyed my new appearance and then talked about some big new business achievements. The whole time, Julie kept herself from looking at me. She seemed to be in very deep thought about something.

Maybe she thought I didn't show enough appreciation, I concluded, and left it at that, but about a half hour after dinner, my father called me on the intercom from the den and asked me to come down. When I walked in, I found him and Julie sitting on one of the leather settees. Both of them looked rather glum.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

My father nodded at the settee across from them. “We'd like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

I hadn't done anything with Allison, nor had I spoken much to her since the sex manual incident, so I was curious about what would turn their faces into prunes.

“What's this about?” I asked after I sat.

My father looked to Julie, giving her permission to begin.

“Lauren Hartman is a good friend of mine. Maybe
was
,” she added, glancing at my father.

“So?”

“You know her daughter Denise.”

“I know who she is. I don't have enough interest in her or her friends to know any of them, Julie. Please stop the dramatics and tell me what this is all about.”

“Lauren is very upset with something Denise and the other girls told their mothers.”

“They're all pregnant?”

“This isn't funny, Mayfair,” my father said.

“I don't know what it is, so I don't know if it's funny or not, Daddy.”

“They claim you've been . . . I have trouble even saying it,” Julie said, shaking her head.

“Write it out, then,” I said.

“Mayfair.”

“Well, I'm not going to sit here all night waiting for the dramatics to end, Daddy. What is it, Julie? Speak your piece or forever remain silent.”

“They claim you've been watching them undress in the locker room,” she rattled off quickly.

“What?”

“They said you admitted to doing that. They also said that one of the most popular and good-looking boys in the school showed interest in you, after I helped you with your hair, makeup, and clothes, and that you showed no interest in him at all. You drove him away after he issued an invitation to spend some time with you, as a matter of fact.”

“Is that it?”

“Isn't that enough?”

I looked at my father. “You believe this stuff, the implication she's making?”

“Why shouldn't he believe it? You have no interest in going to parties or on dates, and we know you've been invited to some parties in the past and turned down the invitations.”

“They weren't really invitations, and I know they were offered reluctantly and not sincerely,” I added, looking at my father. I knew both he and Julie had engineered some of the most recent ones.

“What was the point of my doing all this for you,” she said holding her hands out toward me, “if you're not going to take advantage of it? The money spent, the time and effort, why do you want this if you're going to avoid opportunities and drive away any interest in you? When I was your age, I couldn't wait for the weekend. You seem to be disappointed that school isn't seven days a week.

“And,” she added after a pause, “you showed Allison that disgusting book that has a whole chapter on masturbation, even showing techniques.”

I simply glared at her. Inside, my stomach felt as if a hive of wasps had broken and in their fierce anger they were stinging every organ in my body.

“As Julie said, Mayfair, Lauren's daughter claims you didn't deny their accusations,” my father said. “Is that true?”

“Of course I didn't. I didn't take them seriously. I wouldn't take anything they said seriously and waste my time answering them. Who do they think they are, anyway? If there weren't any mirrors in the girls' room, they wouldn't go to the bathroom. They'd all be constipated.”

He continued to stare at me. I saw a different look in his face, a mixture of worry and fear.

“You don't really believe any of this stupidity, do you, Daddy?”

“What either of us believes isn't important right now,” Julie said.

“Excuse me? What my father believes about me is very important,” I said.

“You're missing the point.”

“That's because there isn't any.”

“Let her speak, Mayfair,” my father said, his voice full of fatigue and defeat.

“Okay, Julie. Speak. What else do you have to add to this idiotic conversation?”