The Funeral Singer (24 page)

But before I can contemplate why Michael would play knight in Ralph Lauren-designed armor for me, I hit the laptop and find that he has sent me a Friend Request on Facebook. I accept it and moments later receive this IM:

How are you feeling?

I type: “Like a truck backed over me. But thank you for taking me home in my appalling and shameful state.”

He types: “All in a day’s work, ma’am. See you in school.”

As I contemplate our new, official, sanctioned-by-Facebook public status (Georgiana Barrett is now Friends with Michael Endicott), Shondra IMs:

“What happened since I last saw you? ”

I pretend not to see it. I still feel too much like there’s a jackhammer pounding on my brain to comprehend this new social development myself.

But back in school two days later, things are definitely friendlier between Michael and me. In English we get into a happy debate over whether Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver was truly an idiot in thinking the Houhnhyms (the horse people) were better than humans; Michael accuses me of having the same conviction in the superiority of animals over people since I’m a vegan and an animal rights person. But he’s not smirking for once when he says it. He’s actually smiling.

The change between us must be noticeable to others, too, because after class Shondra walks me to Spanish and says, “I’m glad you guys worked things out.”

“I have to admit that Michael was really great at Jason’s party. And after.”

Shondra rolls her wide eyes and laughs. “Yeah. I heard about that party. And I heard about you and Jeremy Wrentham, too.”

“Oh, God. There he is.”

Jeremy walks toward us, in all his golden-haired, cashmere-sweatered glory, carrying a few books so loosely under his arm they seem to stay aloft through the sheer force of his personality. He’s chatting and smiling at everyone as he makes his way down the hallway, like a celebrity showing up in a small town, being gracious to all the little people as he makes his way to his car and driver.

To me he nods and says, “Hey, Dutch,” as he walks by.

And that’s it.

The boy who was so desperate to “ring in the New Year” with me couldn’t get past me faster if he’d had a rocket stuffed in his boxer shorts.

“Well, obviously our New Year’s Eve together represents a golden memory for him, too.” I think I sound normal, but my stomach is clenched like a fist.

At the door to Spanish class, Jason Antin punches my arm lightly as he goes in, saying, “Hey, Georgia, glad you’re still with us!”

Shondra takes my arm before we walk through the classroom door but she can’t seem to speak. She just looks at me with sad eyes. Her mouth is slightly open but someone’s hit the “mute” button.

“What?” I demand when I can’t take it for another nanosecond.

“I don’t know how to say this … ”

“So just say it.”

“I heard Jeremy took Amanda Anderson home after you left Jason’s party the other night,” she says in one breath.

I throw my arm against my forehead and mock wail, “Oh, no! And I was having our wedding invitations engraved!”

But as I walk to my seat in class, I’m on autopilot and my stomach feels even tighter, like it’s trying to fold itself up into an origami bird. The feeling remains through the rest of the day, until the
Alt
meeting, where Gray shows me pictures on his phone of their band’s New Year’s show. He promises to make me a mix CD so I’ll be prepared for their next show.

“I promise I’ll be at the next gig,” I swear, raising three fingers in the Girl Scout salute.

I would have been so much better off seeing the Cryptic Pigs from Hell than at Jason’s party with Jeremy. But since nothing ever really happened with Jeremy, and I never
really
liked him, it’s not hard to brush aside the whole night. Even if I
had
discovered a surprisingly sweet side to Michael Endicott.

That Saturday afternoon, Michael continues to surprise when he shows up at our house with Trey. While I’m hardly expecting him, it’s not as weird as the first time he showed up and made fun of my groceries. Somehow he and Trey and Tori and I end up in the family room watching the most recent
vampire romance flick. Cassie’s the one who loves these movies, but she’s at the mall with her friend Jenny while Leigh declines to watch anything about vampires and other unholy creatures. Dating Alistair the fundamentalist minister’s son has made her even more conservative and Jesus-freaky than she was before, when she was content simply to dress like a rejected character from
Breaking Amish
.

I excuse myself to go to the kitchen since I can’t really last through the whole movie without making fun of it, and I know that would upset Tori, who can find romance in a can of tuna. Besides, as part of my vegan food allowance from my parents, I have to make dinner for the family once a week, and tonight’s the night. It’s never come in handier as an excuse to leave a room.

But as I pull a tub of tofu out of the refrigerator, Michael pops up behind me, asking, “Can I help?”

I’m startled, and when I recall my breath, I ask, “Don’t you want to watch the rest of the movie?”

He snorts. “No, believe me, I don’t. One more scene of those pale people flying over trees and I will have to be hauled out of here in a straightjacket,” he says.

I shrug and hand him the tofu and point to a bowl and potato masher on the table. “You can start mashing the tofu. We’re making dairy-free ricotta.”

He scratches his head a little like a cartoon character and I have to laugh at him.

“Mash the tofu?” he asks. “Isn’t it mushy already?” But he literally rolls up the sleeves of his maroon long-sleeved T-shirt to get to work. After a few seconds of consideration, he takes a knife to the covering of the tofu carton, cuts an expert slit around the rim, and then dumps the whole brick of tofu, including its water bath, into the big blue bowl I’d set out. Now I really laugh, and he grins ruefully, shaking out his fingers and wringing out his shirt.

“Um, you have to
drain
the water first,” I say. He watches me take the bowl over to the sink and let the water stream out as I hold back the thick white brick of soybean curd with one hand. He nods as if very impressed by my mad culinary skills. Moments later, he manages to chop onions well enough and takes a childish delight in squeezing the garlic through the press, then sits to watch me sauté them in a pan and add them to the tofu with some vegan parmesan cheese and olive oil. No one on the Food Network has ever had a more attentive audience, and for once he’s not even making fun of me.

“What is this going to be again?” he asks as he sniffs the bowl of mushed tofu and seasonings.

“Vegan stuffed shells.”

“So … you really like to cook.”

I turn off the burner on the cooked shells and drain them into a colander, releasing a cloud of steam that Michael bats away like he’s in a four-alarm fire.

“Yeah, I do,” I say. “I like making something out of nothing. Baking’s my favorite. It’s like … alchemy. You start with a bunch of really unappetizing things—flour, salt, baking powder, cocoa powder—stick it in an oven and it turns into something great.”

He nods and makes a face. “I once refused to believe my mom when she was making a birthday cake and told me not to eat the baking chocolate. I never want something that nasty-tasting in my mouth again.”

“Cassie still falls for that one at least once a year.” I hand him a spoon and show him how to stuff the pasta shells and line them up in the baking dish. “You seem surprised that I like to cook.”

“Yeah, kind of,” he admits.

“Why?” I ask as I get up to stir the marinara sauce I had put on the stove earlier.

“I don’t know … because it seems so domestic, I guess.”

I nod knowingly, saying, “And rabid feminists are not domestic.”

He laughs, and it’s a good sound, like water tumbling over rocks. Especially since he’s laughing at himself for once and not at me.

“So how are the virtual dissections going?” he asks as I hand him the bag of shredded mozzarella soy cheese to open, and pour the sauce over the shells. Michael and I had met at the beginning of the school year when he’d just started at LHS and we’d been paired as lab partners in biology. He’d been livid when I’d told him I was taking a principled stance against the animal dissections, and I ended up getting to do virtual ones on an iPad with a sophomore genius who is deathly allergic to formaldehyde. But I still help with the labs in class since Michael can’t even draw the simplest parts of a plant and make them recognizable to anyone who’s ever actually seen a real live specimen of flora.

“It’s not bad,” I tell him. “I do the virtual dissections in the library during study period. I was sort of worried that Miss Grogan would report back that it isn’t working, since she seems so dead set against it, but Barry says she has to go along with it if she doesn’t want to deal with a lawsuit. His uncle is some major Boston litigator, I guess.”

Michael smiles and seems to enjoy raining shredded cheese over our whole concoction. “Well, thanks for sticking around for the labs. I know it’s really disgusting to you, but your drawings really help.”

I unroll some aluminum foil over the pan and then pop it in the oven, saying, “The formaldehyde is disgusting. That smell—I can feel my nose hairs curling up and dying every time you open the dissection tray. The dead animal is heartbreaking.”

Dad comes in then and registers his surprise at seeing me in male company. He says hello to Michael who answers, “Hi, Dr. Barrett.” I know the use of his title pleases my dad no end.

“Is my daughter trying to convert you to a tasteless but conscience-free diet, too?” he asks as he sniffs the pot with the marinara sauce.

“I’m here voluntarily,” Michael assures him.

Dad raises his bushy eyebrows into his graying hair and says simply, “Huh,” before leaving the room again.

Michael sits down at the breakfast table and begins, “So … vampires? Tell me why women love those books so much.
Grown
women. And tell me why a girl would want a vampire.”

“I don’t know. Because they’re tormented and mysterious and, occasionally, sparkly?”

“
Really
?” He wears skepticism the way some women in Longbourne wear Chanel.

I shrug. “It’s not really my kind of thing,” I admit. “But Trey seems to like it enough.”

Michael grins crookedly.

“Trey is more than willing to like anything that Tori likes. Even if it’s a girl’s idea of a hottie vampire.”

I give him a sly look. Maybe this is my chance to get him to reveal why he got kicked out of the Pemberley School last year and ended up in a public high school with the rest of us plebes. He is, after all, being unusually chummy today, so I say, “I don’t know, Michael. Most girls can’t resist a guy with a secret, or a
mysterious past.
”

But he just scowls. And I don’t pursue it, because it’s really none of my business, no matter how much I want to know.

“Do you read those vampire books?”

“I read some of them a couple summers ago. They’re pretty fast reads and Tori had a bunch of them.”

He accepts the glass of lemonade I offer him and says, “I’m surprised you’d read books like that.”

I frown. “Why? They’re not `fine literature’?”

“Because your dad’s an English professor and the books seem a little … lame.”

“
I’m
not a book snob. Or any other kind of snob.”

Michael’s jaw tightens for a second, but then he says lightly, “Don’t be so sure, Ms. Healthier-Than-Thou,” and shakes the canister of vegan Parmesan cheese at me.

Cassie bounces in, does a double take at seeing Michael there, wrinkles her nose and asks, “
You’re
making dinner tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Is it another one of your save-the-world-one-cow-at-a-time experiments? Because I am
so
over that,” she says. Michael laughs, which makes her smile at finding an unlikely ally. “You should taste some of the stuff she’s come up with. The braised Satan?
Gag
.”

“First of all, it’s seitan, a protein, not the lord of darkness, you ditz. Second, it’s not an ‘experiment’. It’s an
ethical choice
.” As I catch the last words, I roll my eyes to show him that I get it: my vegan evangelism
could
be construed as a little snotty, I guess.

“It’s an excuse for me to go back out to McDonalds, that’s what it is,” Cassie declares.

“Cassie, did you come in just to annoy me with your ignorance?”

“No,” she says happily, grabbing a soda and setting it on the table by Michael. “I
was
going to tell you that there is a party tonight at Jeremy Wrentham’s. He just found out he got into Yale and he’s celebrating.”

“He got into Yale?” I guess
his
expulsion from Pemberley didn’t have anything to do with grades, at least.

“He’s a legacy,” Michael says tersely, and then explains to Cassie, “His dad and his brother went there.”

“Whatevs,” Cassie says, completely uninterested in this information. “Are you going?” she asks me.

“Not a chance.” I say, giving a quick look at Michael that reveals he is smiling now.

“Really? It’s going to be sick.”

“Just don’t drink anything Jeremy mixes up himself,” I call after her, then mutter, “Well, she’s off to plan her strategy.”

Michael laughs. “I think that whatever conquest she’s planning isn’t going to take much strategy. She just needs to show up.”

“What does that mean?” I demand. Things had been going so well. Michael had seemed so human all afternoon, making fun of movies and helping with dinner, but now I couldn’t tell if he was calling my sister a slut—or belittling my having raised Jeremy’s fleeting interest.  Or both. Either one was pretty insulting.

“I mean that Jeremy is not very discerning, that’s all,” Michael explains.

“I’m so flattered.”

“I didn’t mean you.”

“So you meant my sister?” He just looks at me blankly as all the blood in my body seems to rush to my face, and not because the oven’s been on for a while. “You have to mean either my sister is a dumb slut or
I
am for having gotten mixed up with Jeremy on New Year’s Eve? Which is it?