Enthusiasm (15 page)

Some of the others came over to watch the dean and me while they waited for Ned to listen to their songs. “Oh, well done, well done, my dearest Julia,” cried Ashleigh. “And you too, Dean—well done! Julia, you are indeed fortunate that the dean himself, at heart, shares those qualities which make his character so infuriating to the headmistress. It must greatly ease your task of acting stern. For my part, I find it difficult to maintain the necessary anger at Xander’s coldness, since Ravi himself is the soul of kindliness.”

“That’s nice of you to say, but ouch!” said Ravi. “You certainly slapped me like somebody angry.”

“That’s just Ashleigh’s natural enthusiasm,” said Ned. “She gets carried away.”

“It was my duty as an actress—it was the least I could do,” said Ash. “If it’s any comfort to you, I slapped Chris harder. Speaking of which, some charitable soul ought to go rescue Yolanda. I saw Chris follow her into the lighting booth.”

“Not me,” I said. “You’d just have to send someone else to rescue me next.”

“I’ll go,” said Parr quickly. “Yolanda and I should be practicing anyway.”

Amy’s meeting ran late, making me the last of the girls left at Forefield after rehearsal. Parr and Ned sat with me on the Robbins Center steps to wait for her. The dregs of pink drained from the sky and a cold wind started up; Parr moved down a step to put his body between me and the wind.

“Why are you at Forefield if you’d rather go to a coed school?” I asked him.

“It’s a family tradition. My father and his father and his father and
his
father and the rest of their fathers went to Forefield, back to when it was just five pupils and a scandalous headmaster. Did you know the first head got thrown out of England for killing a horse in a duel? The man he was fighting survived, but the horse died. Apparently it was a very important horse.”

“Parr’s great-great-great-great-grandpa, I mean great-great-great-great-grand-Parr, is one of the boys in the frieze carved over the fireplace in the Great Hall. He’s the one on the far left, with the funny ears. Hard to get a hat over them,” said Ned.

“Hey, Noodles, quit putting hats on my ancestors—I mean it,” said Parr, cuffing Ned gently.

“I never put a hat on your ancestor,” said Ned. “Like I just said, his ears stick out too much.”

“Anyway, though, Dad would be heartbroken if I didn’t go to Forefield,” continued Parr. “We don’t exactly see eye to eye on everything, so I assume I’m going to be disappointing him enough later on—I might as well let him win what he can now, before the real battle starts.” He paused, then added, “The boy-girl ratio isn’t so bad at Forefield this year, though, with the play.”

“What about you, Ned—do you mind the all-boys thing?” I asked.

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t say I
like
it, but I can’t really complain. They’re giving me a scholarship. Apparently Grandison’s great-great-grandpa—or somebody’s great-great-grandpa, anyway— thought the gramophone was destroying society by letting people play records instead of musical instruments. He endowed a scholarship for musicians. The only catch is that I’m not allowed to make any records while I’m at Forefield, or even listen to them.”

“No records?” I exclaimed. “Does that mean no CDs? How can you stand it?”

“Fortunately, the trustees interpret that to mean ancient stuff like wax tubes and 78s—the kind of records that were around when the scholarship was started. They said it’s fine for me to listen to anything digital.”

“That wasn’t my ancestor,” said Parr. “Can you imagine anyone related to my father endowing a scholarship for music? Tin-ear Charlie himself? Although it would be almost like my grandfather to make sure a musician wasn’t allowed to listen to music. He has strong ideas about what’s worth spending time on. My father too, but he’s not as mean about it.”

“My father’s kind of like that too,” I said. “He’s always bugging me to do more extracurriculars so I can get into college, and then telling me that my extracurriculars are bringing my grades down.”

“Is he why you tried out for
Insomnia
?” asked Parr.

“Yes—sort of, pretty much,” I said.

“Thank God for our fathers, then,” said Parr. “Otherwise—”

Amy drove up just then and honked, so I didn’t get to hear why Parr was grateful for our fathers. He opened the car door for me, extracting a sour smile of approval from Amy, who sets great store by courtesy. As we drove off, I wondered what he had been about to say.

Chapter 13

My mother gives up
~
Thanksgiving
~
yet another Turkey
~
an Identity Crisis
~
a Comeuppance.

W
hen I got home from school the next day, my mother was packing away the Halloween merchandise and bringing out the Christmas things.

“Don’t we usually do that after Thanksgiving?” I said.

Mom finished unwrapping a tin Santa and sat back on her heels. She looked up at me seriously. “Hi, honey. I thought we’d better try to catch whatever traffic there is from the Thanksgiving weekenders while we still can. I didn’t get that job I was hoping for, so I’m going to work for the Nick-Nack Barn. They may not pay much, but it’s steady and I get health insurance. They want me to start right after Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, God, Mom, I’m sorry,” I said. The Nick-Nack Barn, a heartless, tasteless chain two towns south, was my mother’s ugliest rival.

“I’m not,” said my mother. “Don’t look so gloomy. It’s just until I find something better. It won’t be so bad—the manager’s a nice woman, she’s letting me do the window displays, and I can open Helen’s Treasures on weekends. Want to give me a hand with these things?”

“Sure,” I said. “I just have to send some e-mail first. I promised Eleanor—she’s our editor at
Sailing
—that I’d let her and Seth know what I think about a couple of poems we’re considering.”

Mom and I didn’t have long to set up and sell the Christmas stock before Thanksgiving was upon us.

I won’t dwell on this bitter holiday, which I spent with my stepmother and her family. I would naturally have preferred my mother’s company, but I wasn’t given a choice: it was Dad and Amy’s turn to have me. I biked over, envying the wild turkeys that vanished into the trees in a pale whir of feathers as I passed. If they had been shot, plucked, roasted with rosemary and lemons, and set on the table to be torn to pieces by Amy’s critical mother, her prune-faced brother, his cowed wife, and their four boisterous, self-satisfied little boys, would the turkeys have had a worse time than I had?

I will admit that the food was good. Of course it was: Amy made it. No soggy Brussels sprouts and cardboard stuffing for her. We had vegetables that snapped gently when you bit them, squash roasted to melting depth, fresh citrus-cranberry sauce, and turkey whose tenderness remained uncompromised by the crispness of its skin.

“Amy, when are you and Steve going to give me a grand-daughter?” asked my stepgrandmother, helping herself to the last slice of white meat. “It looks like I’m getting nothing but boys out of Mark and Susie.”

Amy went pale. Taking pity on her, I spilled some lemon-rosemary gravy on her mother’s blouse.

The distraction worked. Beneath Amy’s scolding, I detected a wisp of gratitude. But my act of generosity put me in disgrace with the family for the rest of the weekend, so I was doubly glad to get home that Sunday, especially after a weekend in my new, dark basement room.

I found my mother on Ashleigh’s roof with my friend and her father, helping install their annual Christmas display. This invariably involved Santa and his sleigh, but the Rossis relied on my mother to give each year’s display a distinctive character. During Ashleigh’s King Arthur phase, for example, Mom had made Santa into a knight and the reindeer into unicorns. Last year she had made Santa fly over the Manhattan skyline, which she outlined in Christmas lights. When I arrived, Joe Rossi was urging Mom to make the reindeer’s antlers into menorahs, in honor of our family’s heritage. She thanked him, but declined.

This year Santa was much slenderer than usual. He was wearing a top hat and a tall collar.

“Looks crisp!” I called up to them.

“Oh, honey, you’re back! You look so short down there,” my mother called down.

“The door’s open—come on up,” shouted Joe.

“No, that’s okay, I’m done up here,” said Mom. “Hang on, I’ll be right down. Oh, Ashleigh, are you coming too?” The two of them vanished through the roof’s trapdoor (I could have told her, but didn’t, that the tree made a quicker and easier route), and emerged at the front door. Joe waved at us from the roof, where he stayed to admire their handiwork.

“How do you like Mr. Darcy as Santa?” said Ash as the three of us went into Helen’s Treasures. “Ned suggested putting bonnets on the reindeer, but when your mother tried it, they wouldn’t go over the antlers.”

“Oh, that’s Darcy? Do you think playing Santa is really in character for him? Seems more like something Mr. Bingley would do,” I said.

“Very well, Mr. Bingley, if you prefer,” said Ash. “Most people seem to think it’s someone from
A Christmas Carol
, anyway. Philistines! So how was your Thanksgiving? Were your step-cousins there? Was it utterly unsupportable?”

“Yes, did you have a nice time, honey? Aunt Ruth sends her love,” said Mom. “She gave me a new coat that Molly’s grown out of already. It should fit you. That girl’s growing even faster than you are. Oh! and one of your friends came by the shop on Wednesday and left something for you. Wait a sec, I think I put it in the desk.” She rummaged around for a while and came out with a small package.

“Who was it?” I said. “One of the Gerard twins?”

“No, a boy. Nice-looking young man. He introduced himself, but I’m sorry to say I was a little distracted and I don’t remember his name. It was busy here Wednesday. I sold all the reindeer soap.”

“What did he look like?” said Ashleigh. “Was he of middle stature, about Julia’s height, with lightish brown hair and deep, soulful brown eyes?”

“Um, he could have been. I’m sorry—I should have noticed better. I forgot you girls are getting to the age when you need all the details you can get about boys.”

Casting reproachful glances at Mom, Ashleigh and I carried the package upstairs to my attic.

“It’s from Ned, I know it is! Does it have a note? Open it!” cried Ash, bouncing wildly.

“No note, but there’s writing on the box.” I read: “
Had enough wattles this season? If not, here’s sweets for the sweet. Yours ever—
I can’t read the name.”

“Let’s see! That must be
E-
something-
D—
what’s Ned’s middle name?”

“Does he even have one? That looks nothing like an
E.
More like a
C.
Chris Stevens? Could that be possible? Too bad it’s so smudged,” I said.

“Of course it’s an
E—
well, I guess it could be an
N—
N, E, D, maybe?”

“How do you get an
N
from that? It’s got to be a
C
or a
G
, or maybe a sloppy script
A
—something open on the right—well, I guess it
could
be a really messy capital
E
, but for sure it’s no
N.
Here, give it back, let’s see what’s inside.”

The box contained a gorgeous chocolate turkey, its plumage delicately marked in three colors of chocolate: dark, milk, and white.

“Sweets for the sweet! Is that not a chivalrous thought? That settles it—it must be from Ned.”

“Or whoever sent it could be calling me a turkey,” I said.

“Nonsense, Ned would never suggest such a thing. He has too kind a heart.”

“Why would Ned give me a chocolate turkey?”

“Oh, Julia! Do not pretend you do not know! Chivalrous young men courted their chosen ladies with gifts of sweetmeats even in King Arthur’s time. As for the turkey—well, it
is
Thanksgiving.”