People sometimes made the mistake of thinking that he was mentally slow, which he wasn't. They didn't hassle him, though. He was a competitive swimmer, and he was strong.
Which brings me back to the theme of the party. Lennie had been kept off his swimming team this term by an ear infection that wouldn't go away, so he hadn't wanted to go party with the other guys on the team. Just like I didn't particularly feel like standing around giggling and gossiping over the popcorn and stuff at Kim Larkin's big New Year's bash while my Gran was lying in the hospital.
Lennie was smiling now, but I could see the white cotton stuck in his ears.
It struck me, up there on the chilly roof, that I was really glad to be there, feeling sort of somber with Lennie on New Year's instead of feeling miserable by myself in the middle of a lot of other people having a plain old traditional blast.
I also realized that I didn't know him as well as I used to. You know how sometimes you just sort of drift away from even good friends? I'd done a lot of drifting after my first magical outing, and more since Gran's stroke. I wondered what it would be like to have a real date with Lennie, by way of catching up with each other again. Maybe this party was a step in that direction.
At the moment, however, I seemed to have a date with Joel. He had gone to a different school when he'd lived in New York and he didn't know anybody from Jefferson, so I introduced him. Then we all stood there. I had this sinking feeling: it had been a mistake to bring Joel.
He said, “Jee-sus. It's cold up here.”
“We came up because something moved us,” Tamsin said. My teeth curled with disgust. Something was always “moving” Tamsin. “We brought some blankets, if you'd like one,” she added.
Tamsin, a ballet freak, specialized in being the ethereal artiste with the intense gaze. Right now she was intensing at Joel, instead of observing that of course if you go up on a rooftop on Riverside Drive on New Year's Eve with nothing but a light jacket over your regular clothes, you are going to freeze.
Joel didn't seem to notice her. “Anything special to see from up here?” he said, looking over the parapet.
“We hoped to see the stars,” Tamsin said, throwing back her black ponytail. She was from Korea, and she had long, glossy black hair that she was very vain about.
“Well, not really,” Peter Weiss remarked. “You don't see stars when it's raining.”
“It's stopped now,” said the girl in the shadows.
Tamsin said, “We came up for stars. They'll come out for us.”
If only there was some way to turn her
off
.
Joel turned his jacket collar up and leaned against the parapet. He's bored, I thought desperately. He thinks we're just a bunch of nerdy kids.
“It's all a matter of concentration,” Tamsin said. She looked at Joel. “Do you meditate, or study yoga?”
“I'm a musician,” Joel said, stuffing his hands in his pockets, his hands that wouldn't play anymore. I felt bad for him. “I study scores.”
Peter said, “I don't think there are going to be any stars, Tamsin. Want some more diet Coke?” For Peter, this was actually regular human interaction. Being around Lennie sometimes had that effect on people. I wondered what Peter had to be sad about tonight. He'd won a prize at the Regional Science Fair, which had made him a kind of hero at school.
But there must be something, or he'd be hanging out with some of his computer-mad friends from school.
Mimi Mustacheâ
Mimi
, I shouldn't use the name they teased her with in schoolâsaid glumly, “I hate to go back down, even if it is cold. I wanted to do something special this New Year's.”
Word around school was that Mimi's mother had a bad case of Lyme Disease, which must be pretty rough for her whole family.
I thought of my Gran lying in her oxygen tent, and I got a lump in my throat. “Me, too,” I said.
“We could launch our own star,” Tamsin said. “Let's close our eyes and hold hands and think of people we care about. We could make a lot of golden light to send up into the night like a star, a star of love.”
Nobody reacted at first. Personally, I was too embarrassed. Then Peter said, “You're not talking about some fancy yoga posture, are you? I hurt my knee at soccer practice last week”
Tamsin said, “All we do is hold hands and think of light, Peter.”
The girl in the shadows said uneasily, “Is that something you learned from your, uh, guru? Because I don't think we should do anything off-the-wallâyou know,
occult
âwithout somebody who knows all about it. Is your teacher here, at your parents' party?”
Lennie said, “Tamsin's teacher couldn't renew his visa. He had to leave the country.”
“Lennie!” Tamsin flared. “That's nobody else's business!”
“Come on, Tam, it's no reflection on you,” Lennie said, sounding hurt.
Considering that he'd had his own problems lately with that ear infection, and considering some brothers and sisters I know, it was great that Lennie even noticed that Tamsin was having a hard time of her own. But that's Lennie for you: sweet. Though I guess Tamsin wasn't too thrilled with having her private sorrow spelled out to the world.
“So we'll try it without anybody's advice and see what happens,” Peter said energetically. “An experiment, right? Come on, let's do it.”
He grabbed my hand. I was too surprised to pull away. The girl I didn't know took Peter's other hand, and Lennie stepped between her and Tamsin, who turned to Joel.
“Sorry,” Joel said curtly, “I'm just a fiddle player, I don't do magic.”
He turned and left. We could hear his footsteps rattling quickly down the stairs from the roof.
I'd forgotten about his hands. No wonder he didn't want to touch anybody! I felt my face turning hot and red. God, why was I so clumsy and dumb around people? You'd think the grandchild of a great enchanter like Gran could manage not to keep stepping in it, socially.
“What's his problem?” Tamsin said, frowning. “We could have used another boy, to keep things more balanced. Oh, well.”
Her bony paw closed very delicately on my hand, which felt funnyâgirls holding hands, especially me and Tamsin. She stood with her head back and her hair lifting dramatically in the wind.
“We'll make a New Year's comet,” she announced, “falling into the sky from the world instead of the other way around. It's a present from us to the universe.”
All we needed now was Walt Disney. Maybe Tamsin
was
Walt Disney, reincarnated. Too bad her guru wasn't around so we could ask him.
“You mean, like a shooting star?” Mimi said.
“A lucky star,” Lennie said.
And the other girl murmured, “A wishing star.” I wondered who she was and what she wished for to make the next year better, but it didn't seem like the right time to ask.
I didn't say anything because I felt foolish, but not as foolish as before, maybe because Joel wasn't there to sneer out loud at Tamsin's theatrics.
I
knew magic was real if anybody did! I should have been the one to suggest doing something on New Year's, though not something as soppy as Tamsin's comet, shooting up into the night sky instead of down out of it.
Still, since the idea had come up, why not try? Maybe if I thought hard enough about Gran getting better, my share of the family talent would help make it really happen.
We stood around the glowing coals, holding hands. I shut my eyes, tried to think about golden light, and saw just darkness as usual behind my eyelids. I forced myself to think only about Gran. I gathered together everything I felt for her and just sort of beamed it at the sky. Words formed in my head like a chant, “This is for Gran. For Gran. For my Gran,”
Standing there holding Peter Weiss's hand in my right hand and Tamsin's in my left, with the wet breeze pouring past me and the hibachi heating up the knees of my pants, I began to feel as if I really was glowing. Right through my closed eyelids I saw bright light spread on either side of me through my hands and everybody else's hands, making a circle.
The light brightened and started to lift. There was this distant roaring sound, like flame blowing in a strong and steady wind, and a rushing sense of motion. It was so strong that I panicked, thinking, Oh, no, we've fallen off the roof!
By squinching my eyelids down hard, I kept seeing only the brightness of our circle of clasped hands. I sort of inhaled light and pushed it out again in a silent shout from my heart, “Fear, get away!”
Then I was flying. We all were, skimming up into the night sky like a bright ring of Saturn thrown from a giant's hand. I felt us turning and glowing and shining, filled with light instead of breath, as we sped up a curve of longing that ran ahead of us into the night.
I will never breathe again, I thought, so I can be like this foreverâbuoyant and bright as a star slung through the dark.
Then a bolt of wild, blazing heat came zooming out of nowhere and slammed into us, splashing huge licks of light and darkness in all directions and exploding us away from each other too fast for sound.
My back banged into something hard that knocked the breath out of me. My eyes snapped open. I stood spread-eagled against the side of the elevator housing on Lennie's roof. All around there was yelling and tooting of horns and music blasting from parties and from people on the street below, making my head ring.
I saw Mimi and Peter hanging on to each other a few feet away from me, and Lennie in his big coat stomping on coals scattered from the upended hibachi. Tamsin crouched in a corner of the parapet, and the girl I didn't know was picking herself up off the puddled roof in a dazed sort of way.
“What happened?” Mimi gasped.
Still trying to catch my breath, I looked up. There was a fine, misty drizzle and the gloomy night sky. No star, no light-trail. No trace of an explosion.
Peter coughed. “Nothing, what could happen?” he said. “We lost our balance, that's all. You know how dizzy you can get standing around with your eyes closed.”
He sounded very shaky, though.
Lennie kicked a glowing briquette into a puddle, where it sizzled out. He looked at me, his eyes huge. “Something happened, all right.”
Tamsin uncoiled from her crouch and struck a pose. “Sure something happened!” she said. “I told you it wouldâwe made a comet! We are the Comet Committee, and the New Year will be better because of us.”
I was impressedânot by Tamsin, who didn't know what she was talking about, but by whatever it was we had done. But I didn't know what it was or what it meant, and I needed to get away by myself to think about it. I felt jumpy and strange.
I said, “Listen, I'm going to take off now. I'm completely frazzled.”
Lennie said he would come down with me, but I just told him good night and happy new year and I ran on down the stairs. I avoided the Andersons' apartment so I wouldn't have Lennie's parents fussing about putting me in a cab. What I needed was to walk, to clear my head. It was only a few blocks, and after that weird energy flight and explosion I had just lived through, well, what could happen?
What happened was that somebody loomed at me right outside Lennie's building. Joel. Once past the initial heart-stopping effect, I yelled, “What are you doing lurking like that?”
“You think I was going to leave it to that
bowelbrain
to see you home safe on New Year's Eve?” he said. “I notice he's not down here with you.”
“Bowelbrain!” I said. “Is that what they teach you in that music schoolâcreative slander?”
This was not what I had intended to say, so I grabbed a breath and started over. “You should have stayed, Joel. Something incredible happened.”
“What?” he said. “You made a star, right? You all held hands and chanted a mantra, and on the count of ten the cotton plugs popped out of Lennie's ears and took off into the stratosphere on their own, laughing maniacal little alien laughs?”
Well, that did it. Any idea I had had of telling Joel about the successâif that was what it had beenâof the Comet Committee was wiped out by a surge of pure fury. Joel and I walked the few blocks to my house very fast, having a not very pleasant conversation.
“Joel, why are you acting like such a dork?”
“Your friends are the dorks. I'm just trying to rescue you from their babyish company.”
“Lennie is not babyish!”
“Lennie is a jerk.”
“Lennie is my oldest friend, almost.”
“I hope your newer friends are a better class of people.”
“You'll never know. I'll never let you near any friends of mine again, not after tonight.”
“Oh, for God's sake, Val!” he stormed. “What do you expect? You don't belong on a rooftop on New Year's Eve with that bunch of flakes!”
“A fat lot you know! I don't belong with anybody, as a matter of fact, except someone like my Gran, who has real stuff to teach me! So just shut up, Joel, or let me walk the rest of the way home by myself. And if I get mugged it'll be your fault.”
“Oh, sure, everything is my fault,” Joel said.
“You embarrassed me,” I said, “in front of my friends.”
“Why should you be embarrassed?” he asked the night at large, making a full-scale drama right there on the street. “You behaved perfectly. I'm the one who messed up, right? I hope I haven't spoiled things between you and wonderful Lennie.”
We stomped past three people strolling arm and arm and singing “Auld Lang Syne” softly together. Then we were at my building, thank goodness.
“Joel,” I said, “don't come around here after months of nothing, and then not bother to phone me when you said you would, and
then
throw some kind of tantrum because I want to spend a little time with a real friend of mine on New Year's Eve!”