The Beautiful Between (9 page)

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

He kisses me on the cheek goodbye and walks to the corner. I watch him get into a cab. I don’t know exactly how this has happened, but it turns out that Jeremy is the first best friend I’ve ever had.

12

At school on Monday, I feel like everyone is looking at me differently. I wonder if they think I’m Jeremy Cole’s girlfriend, or if that would ever even occur to them—because what would Jeremy be doing, dating me? But I feel like more people are smiling at me in the hallways, rolling their eyes at me when a teacher assigns a lastminute paper, exchanging looks with me in between classes. Something is different, I’m sure of it.

Before first period, Emily Winters comes up to me.

“So what’s going on?”

I look at her blankly. I’m sitting on the floor by the lockers, going over our English reading. I know what she’s getting at. In a minute I’m going to have to say “just friends,” and I’m fine with that, I’m happy about that—but once I say that, the significance with which she’s looking at me, the importance she’s attaching to me, will go away.

“I heard you went to Fisher’s party with Jeremy Cole. I didn’t even go!”

I’m not sure what to say. That isn’t really a question.

Emily sits down next to me, leans in conspiratorially. “Why didn’t you tell me you guys were hanging out?”

What would I have told her? I didn’t even know what we were doing at first; whether we were hanging out, how long it would last. There might have been nothing to tell.

Emily continues without waiting for an answer. “So come on, tell me—you guys hooking up or what?”

My hands start to sweat. I don’t know how I feel about the fact that people are talking about me. It’s strange enough that people I never talked to before are now talking to me. I feign nonchalance. “Emily, no, that’s gross—he’s a friend.” I purposely don’t say “just a friend,” because the word “just” doesn’t feel accurate.

“Honey, ain’t nothing gross about Jeremy Cole.” I notice for the first time that Emily is actually only trying to sound older and wiser; before, I always felt like she really was.

Nonetheless, I feel my face turning bright red. Not because I have a crush on Jeremy—yes, of course, he’s gorgeous and a girl would have to be blind and deaf not to have some kind of crush on him—but it’s more than that. There is so much that’s private and there’s so much I don’t want to give away, that I want to keep for just Jeremy and me.

“Dude,” Emily says before heading off to class, “it is so not fair not to dish.”

I wonder if Emily will spread gossip about us. It doesn’t matter, because the gossip she’d spread wouldn’t be the truth—the truth is way too complicated for gossip.

Jeremy isn’t in physics class, and I don’t see him at lunchtime. I think something must be wrong—maybe Kate has taken a turn for the worse—and I want to call him. I go so far as to sneak into the nurse’s office to use her phone (she never seems to notice that the entire student body uses her phone for personal calls, since we’re not allowed to use cell phones in school) when I realize I’ve never called him before. I don’t even have his home number, though it would be easy enough to get it from the class directory, where I imagine he got my number. But I can’t imagine calling when he’s never actually given me his number—it seems an invasion of privacy. And maybe if there is something wrong, I should wait until I hear from him—he would tell me if he wanted me to know. Maybe I shouldn’t assume that whatever it is that’s keeping him out of class today is any of my business.

I leave the nurse’s office and head back to the cafeteria. I’ll grab something and bring it up to the library to eat there. Mike Cohen comes up to me as I’m spreading peanut butter over a bagel.

“Sternin, hey, you seen Jeremy?”

“No, I don’t think he’s here today.”

“Oh, dude. I’ll give him a call.”

I don’t know if I’m supposed to answer that like, Yeah, good idea. How come Mike can just go ahead and call like it’s nothing, while I’m completely paralyzed by the possibility?

“Hey,” Mike continues. “You know what? Just tell him I was looking for him, okay?”

“Sure.” Mike assumes that I’ll be talking to Jeremy sometime today, so he needn’t call. I feel like I’m lying to him. But I like the way everyone is treating me, now that they know I’m friends with Jeremy Cole. So I don’t tell Mike he should go ahead and call Jeremy; I let him think that I’m in a position to convey his message.

And maybe I am; Jeremy will probably still come over for our bedtime cigarettes later.

Mike surprises me by asking, “Do you know—have you seen Kate lately?”

“What?” I say dumbly.

“We were just wondering how she was doing.”

“We?”

“You know—the guys and stuff.” Maybe Mike Cohen’s position as the host of every party makes him the student body ambassador too.

“Oh.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

I pause. I guess by now everyone knows that Kate is sick, but maybe they’re actually being sensitive about it. Mike sounds genuinely concerned, so I say, “Yeah. I saw her the other night. She’s doing okay.”

“Thanks. I’ll let everyone know.”

I nod and smile. I guess one of the nice things about being the prince is that your subjects really do care about you and your family.

When I get home, my mother suggests we have dinner together. This doesn’t happen often—mostly she leaves me money to order in or I make something for myself, usually ramen or something like it. We go to the diner across the street, where my mother insists on waiting for a booth even though there are plenty of tables with chairs available. When we do finally sit, I order a grilled cheese. It arrives greasy and lukewarm. My mother gets a hamburger. I eat her fries.

“So, how’s school?”

“Fine. You know, physics is killing me, but I’m bringing up my grades.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?” I ask.

“Is that Jeremy’s help, do you think?” I wonder if this is why she suggested dinner, why she opened the conversation by asking me about school. Maybe she thinks that Jeremy and I are dating but she wants to hear it from me, if for no other reason than to say, “Well, I knew that.” It makes me sad, how little she knows me.

“Maybe. He’s a good tutor.”

“Well, he’s more than a tutor.”

Here it comes.

“I notice he comes over late at night.”

“Oh?”

“Why don’t you invite him up? You know, at a more reasonable hour. I could make us dinner.”

“You don’t cook.”

“Sure I cook!”

“When? You never cook.”

“I do too; I make chicken and pasta and mashed potatoes.”

“Not all at the same time, I hope.” I’m laughing, because I can’t remember her ever having cooked a meal for me.

“Connelly.” My mother puts her hamburger down on its plate and looks at me seriously, and I wonder when this became a serious conversation. It had seemed like I was just teasing her a second ago. “I cook.”

“Maybe you used to,” I say quietly.

“What?”

“Maybe you did a long time ago, when I was little or before I was born, and you just don’t realize that you stopped.”

She surprises me by considering this. In the silence, something occurs to me, and I surprise myself by asking her, “Did you cook for Dad?”

“For your father?”

“Yes.” I can hear the panic in her voice. I don’t know why it seemed natural to ask about him now.

“Yes,” she answers, speaking slowly, not looking at me. Then she smiles, looking at her plate as she says, “He liked my spaghetti with meat sauce.”

She continues before I can answer.

“You liked it too.” She looks up at me, smiling. “I have a picture of you eating it. You’re covered in tomato sauce.”

I should stop asking questions before she gets upset, but I want to know more—even just a little, but more. “If I was covered in tomato sauce, I must have been pretty young in the picture, right?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“So it was when Dad was still alive?” I press.

“I don’t remember,” she says, and she’s looking at her plate again, not at me.

“I think,” I say carefully, “that you must have stopped cooking after he died. Maybe you just forgot.”

“Maybe,” she answers, still not looking at me. When she speaks again, she changes the subject. She looks straight at me and her face is bright: “Will Jeremy be coming over tonight?”

“I don’t know.” I suspect it’s the doormen who’ve been telling her that it’s him—otherwise, how would she know? It could be anyone, for all she knows.

“Well, you can invite him up. We have a terrace, you know.”

I shrug.

I find it surprising that she’s acknowledging that we’re smoking—the doormen, I guess again—but doesn’t seem to mind it. I suppose that the fact that Jeremy is a Cole makes up for his smoking. I wouldn’t want Jeremy coming up. Jeremy and I smoke downstairs. But my mother doesn’t need to know that I feel that way, especially since I can’t explain it. He’s been up to study often enough. But the smoking, my coming downstairs, all of that—it’s our ritual. Or maybe there’s something about having him come up when I’m in my pajamas, ready for bed, that makes me nervous.

We’ve finished eating. I ask for the check, hoping to speed up our exit; to get back to my room, where Mom usually doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to talk about Jeremy. I don’t want to tell her about our friendship, about Kate’s illness, about what I’ve found out about my father. If it’s okay for her to keep something like that a secret from me, then I suppose I’ve earned the right to keep pretty much anything secret from her.

My mother and I never fight. I can’t remember any major fights or childhood temper tantrums. She never assigned me a curfew and I never came home late until the other night, after Brent’s party, and then she didn’t ask where I’d been. We get along fine this way.

13

“What’s your middle name, Connelly?” Jeremy asks me later, when we’re smoking. He hasn’t explained why he wasn’t in school today, and I don’t ask.

“My middle name?”

“Yeah. In the handbook, it just says Connelly J. Sternin.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second.”

“Staddler.”

“Jeremy Staddler Cole?”

“Yeah. My mom’s maiden name.”

“Mine’s Jane.”

“We have the same initials,” Jeremy says, exhaling smoke.

“CJS.”

“JSC.”

“That sounds like the name of a college.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, like … Junior Southern College.”

“Doesn’t sound like it’s a particularly good school.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Yeah, it’s where the students who got rejected everywhere else end up.”

Jeremy puts on a fake newscaster voice. “Yes, at JSC we say YES to YOU.”

I giggle.

“You know, it’s funny, I keep thinking about applying to school next year,” he says.

“Well, we know you’ll get into JSC.”

He smiles. “At least I have my safety all set.” He lights a second cigarette, but doesn’t offer me one because he knows by now that I only smoke one, and more to keep him company than for anything else. “I just mean … I keep thinking about applying. I’m not worried about where I’ll go and things, but I just keep thinking about doing the applications.”

Well, of course Jeremy isn’t worried about where he’ll go. Royalty is very well connected. He’ll get in wherever he wants.

“I keep thinking about it because everyone around me is worried about it, studying hard for the SATs, going on college visits, calling in favors, all of that. So here’s this thing that’s still a year away and everyone is thinking about it and so am I, even though it’s a year away and I don’t want to think that far ahead. But I can’t stop.”

I wonder for a minute why he’s trying to stop himself from thinking so far ahead. I figure it out just as Jeremy explains it.

“So I’m thinking about doing these applications and I’m thinking about whether Kate will be there while I do them.”

Jeremy presses at the corners of his eyes with his fingers. I imagine that in his head he’s thinking: She’ll be okay. She’ll be okay.

“Anyway,” he says finally, “I wish everyone would just shut up about them so I could stop thinking that far ahead.”

I feel bad. I’m one of those people, obsessing about my grades and the SATs, joining clubs at the last minute so I’ll have interesting extracurricular activities on my applications. But Jeremy says, “I don’t mean you, Sternin. Just that overall buzz at school.”

“I don’t think we can do anything about the buzz, Jer.”

“I know.”

I wait a second before asking: “How is Kate?”

“I don’t know. Worse, but I can’t tell. She’s still just Kate. I’m at school when she’s at the hospital, and she’s usually home when I get home.”

“The school must know—the administration, I mean; they know why she’s absent?”

“Yeah, of course they know. Everyone knows. Can’t keep a secret at that school.”

I nod, thinking of Mike Cohen in the lunchroom.

Jeremy continues, “It’s hard enough to keep a secret in this
town.”

“It’s okay if everyone knows, Jer; there’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s okay. They really do care about you, and about Kate.”

“I know, but it’s just … I don’t want to accept anyone’s support yet. I don’t want to worry about being polite and saying the right thing. I just want to hang with Kate.”

“Jeremy, I know it’s frustrating to think everyone knows your business. I mean, imagine how I felt. We’d never said two words to each other and you knew how my dad died—that my dad died.” Jeremy looks apologetic, so I finish the thought quickly; I hadn’t meant to make him feel bad. “But it was okay. Because it doesn’t really matter that you knew.

“And anyway,” I continue, “maybe it was a good thing, because it’s why we became friends.”

“Sternin, it’s not why we’re friends.”

“No, but it’s why you befriended me to begin with.” I pause before asking, “Right?”

Jeremy looks guilty.

“It’s okay. You thought I might know something—that I might, I don’t know, be able to give you advice or something.”

“I did. My parents—I should have told you this sooner—they’re friends with the doctor who treated your father.”

I don’t say anything. I wait for Jeremy to explain.

“He was over one night for dinner, giving my parents advice, and he said he thought there was a girl in my class who’d been through it—he said he remembered; he used to work with the guy. Your dad was a doctor, right?”

I nod. That sounds right. I think I’ve heard that.

“He said it was a real tragic story, the kind you don’t forget—” Jeremy stops quickly. “He didn’t get into specifics,” he says quietly. “He just assumed I must have known your dad had had cancer. Thought I might want to talk to you.”

“Oh.”

“But really, I promise, I wasn’t thinking about it like that. I thought it was a weird thing for him to suggest, really. But then, I don’t know. I guess I thought, Maybe there is something she knows, something she could tell me.” He pauses and looks straight at me—he’s much braver than I am when I’ve done something I’m ashamed of. “I’m sorry, Sternin. It was rotten.”

“It’s okay. Really.” Jeremy looks so sad, I decide to make a joke. “Hey, I was just glad when I figured it out. I was beginning to think your talking to me was part of some elaborate prank.”

Jeremy grins. “Still could be.”

“Nah, I know you like me,” I say, smiling back, looking straight at him. I know that he likes me, however unlikely that seemed before.

His grin turns sheepish, and he puts his arm around me. “You’re a good friend, Connelly Jane.” He pats my shoulder.

“So are you, Jeremy Staddler.”

“Kate could be gone by the time we get into college.”

He says that quickly, and I think it’s the first time he’s said it out loud. I don’t know what to say. I won’t agree with him. There are always more treatments, more chances. I’m quiet.

Jeremy’s face betrays nothing. We could be talking about the weather.

“I never thought I would wish—I was always looking forward to going to college, and now I just want every day to go at a slow crawl, you know?”

“I understand.” But my muscles are tense, like I’m angry at Jeremy. Angry because he’s already given up, and I feel like he has no right to.

“It’s strange to think you went through this and you don’t remember it.”

“I don’t know anything about it, Jeremy.” Even though I don’t agree with him, I want to say something comforting. “But I guess I’m living proof that you survive it.”

Jeremy nods. “Yeah, I guess you are.” He drops his cigarette to the ground and crushes it with his heel.

“See you tomorrow, CJS.” He gives me a kiss on the cheek and hails a cab at the corner. I shuffle back up to my apartment and into my bed. I fall asleep without thinking. In the morning, my alarm surprises me, like I didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep at all. It occurs to me that ever since that night, the night when I found out about the cancer, I’ve been falling asleep faster. Maybe it’s just the fact that Jeremy keeps me up later, so I’m more tired by the time I actually get into bed, or maybe he’s keeping my mind busy—I’ve always fantasized about something or other before I could fall asleep, played a fairy tale in my head to entertain myself. But I haven’t for a while now.

On Friday, Jeremy invites me over for dinner.

“Just come home with me after school.”

I hesitate. “Will your parents be there?”

“Wouldn’t you come if they were?”

“Well, yeah, I’m just … I’d like to know what I’m getting into.” I’ve never met Jeremy’s parents, beyond seeing them at school events. I wouldn’t know how to act. Like, before people meet the Queen of England, aren’t they schooled in the proper etiquette: the way they’re supposed to address her, look at her, that kind of thing?

“My parents will be there. The food will be good. And Kate will sit at the dinner table and look skinny and pale and bald.”

My face falls. “Jeremy, that’s not fair. You know I don’t care—I mean, I care, of course I care. But you know that doesn’t make me uncomfortable—except for, you know, being upset that Kate is sick. But you know that that wasn’t why I would hesitate to come to your house for dinner—not that I was hesitating, I’d love to come. But you know that I just get nervous—”

“Jesus Christ, Sternin.” Jeremy looks hard at me. “I know.” And then he launches into his own rambling tirade. “It’s okay. I’m just defensive for her; her hair’s almost really gone now, and I know she’s embarrassed about it. I know you would never look at her like that, but believe me, you might, without even meaning to. Sometimes I find myself looking at her—she just looks so different, and I’m not used to it. But you wouldn’t stare at her; I should know that.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jer.”

“Meet me out front after your last class.”

The Coles sit at their dinner table in sweats. Well, not Mrs. Cole, but everyone else. I don’t know what I was expecting—that they’d dress for dinner? Jeremy changed into sweats almost as soon as we got there—in his bathroom while I sat on his bed, comfortable now, flipping channels.

I don’t see Kate until dinnertime. Jeremy said she was sleeping when we got there. She does look like she’s just woken up. She’s wearing a scarf wrapped around her head; actually, it’s pretty stylish, and would look cute if not for the bags under her eyes, the sallowness around her mouth. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room with someone so sick before. Except, perhaps, my father, when I was too young to remember.

Jeremy says that on Friday, they order in Chinese food. We sit in the dining room, not the kitchen. The wooden table is glossy beneath our food, and the five of us only take up half of it. The chairs, which are surprisingly comfortable, are covered in what I can tell is very expensive fabric, and I’m scared that I might spill something on it. Usually I douse my Chinese food in soy sauce, but tonight I’m trying to stick to foods I’m least likely to spill. But Kate is sitting across from me, and when she sees my sauceless plate, she says, “Jeremy, pass Connelly the soy sauce.” Looking at me, she grins. “It’s the best part.”

Mrs. Cole says, “Jeremy tells us you’ve been helping him with his SATs.”

I look up from my beef with broccoli, which I’m nearly leaning over the plate to eat. My grandmother always said that I should bring myself to the food, not the other way around, to prevent spilling. Only now do I realize this means that I’m eating without sitting up straight.

“Umm, yes. I mean, it’s not like he needs much help.”

“You know, we hired him a tutor last year, but he hated it.”

Most people I know had SAT tutors. Even I had one, for the math section.

I nod. “Yeah, mine always made me do practice tests.” I cringe, thinking that I should have said “yes” instead of “yeah,” but I continue: “I felt like I could have done that on my own.”

“That’s exactly what Jeremy said. And the truth is, he didn’t need help with the math, so it was just a matter of vocabulary, that kind of thing.”