“I want to see it on the big screen, Dolby sound and everything,” he said. “It’s supposed to be really good. Karen and Brian and Penny and a bunch of us are going.”
I was silent.
“Alice?” he said.
Maybe I should just go, I thought. Maybe I should forget the homework for once and go, be spontaneous, but I knew I couldn’t. I should have planned better. I should have checked my assignment due dates. “I can’t,” I said flatly. “Have a good time.”
“Sure?” he said.
“I’m positive. I’ve got a billion assignments, Patrick. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Talk to you later.” And I heard him hang up.
I tried not to think about Patrick at the movies with Penny. There would always be a Penny. No matter what happened in life, there would always be a girl or a woman who was pretty and fun and popular and clever, and I had to get used to it. Patrick and I were an “item,” so why did I worry about it so much?
I was relieved that I actually got through the first section of the algebra assignment by myself. The remaining problems were so hard and my patience
so thin that I put them off until later to ask Lester. Then I read a chapter in history and started the essay questions at the end.
Elizabeth called to see if I had gone to the movies with Patrick. She’d stayed home to do her English assignment, too. I told her that I was uneasy about Penny being there with Patrick.
“It’s broad daylight!” she said. “You never have to worry about a guy and a girl going anywhere in the afternoon, even the movies. That’s so uncool, it doesn’t even count.”
I felt better, and made myself a peanut butter sandwich with bacon bits. After I was finished with history, around five o’clock, I ate an apple and painted my nails, and then I started the paper for English. I figured Patrick would call later and tell me about the movie, what I’d missed and what everybody did after. But the phone didn’t ring. Just before I went to bed I checked my E-mail. No messages at all.
Patrick wasn’t on the bus the next morning. Sometimes he has band practice before school, and his dad drives him over. Penny was there, though, talking about the movie and how scary it was.
Brian guffawed loudly and interrupted. “There was this part where the woman’s in the cave, afraid to come out because the creature with all the tentacles is around somewhere, but she doesn’t know
it’s been cloned, and there’s another one back in the cave, and you see this tentacle sort of oozing, sliding across the rocks behind her …”
“And then Patrick puts his hands around Penny’s neck!” laughed Mark.
“You should have heard her scream!” Brian said.
“Everyone in the theater turned and stared at me!” Penny went on, laughing at herself. “He was horrible!”
“A hundred-decibel scream,” said Justin.
“Well, he
scared
me!” Penny said, laughing some more.
I slid onto the seat beside Pamela.
“I think you should have come,” she whispered tentatively.
“
You
went?”
“Sure. I thought everyone was coming.”
“I had tons and tons of work to do.”
She just shrugged. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” she said.
“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”
“Just that Patrick was fooling around. He was sitting right beside Penny.”
“Well, he had to sit somewhere.”
“I know. I’m just telling you.”
I felt I was swimming against the tide. I felt as though a big steamroller was coming at me, or an avalanche or something.
“So … what else happened?” I asked. “Nothing. That I know of.”
“Meaning … ?”
“I don’t
know,
Alice. I can’t watch them every minute.”
“Well, I can’t, either,” I said. “And what’s more, I shouldn’t have to.”
“Right,” said Pamela.
I felt flat all day. Irritated. Anxious. But I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to ask Patrick about it. I wasn’t going to nag and question and put him through the third degree. If you had to do all that to keep a guy, what good was it?
He called that evening. He told me all about the movie, but he didn’t mention Penny. Didn’t say how he’d slipped his hands around her neck at the critical moment, made her scream. How he happened to be sitting right beside her.
I was proud of myself that I didn’t ask. “I’m sorry I missed it,” I said.
“Yeah, it was great,” he said. “You want to stop by the band room after school tomorrow? Levinson’s going to decide between me and another guy as to who gets to do the drum solo at the winter concert. We both have to audition, and I figure it wouldn’t hurt to have my friends there.”
“What time?”
“Three.”
“Oh, Patrick! I’ve got an editorial meeting for the school newspaper! We get our assignments for the next month. Darn!”
“You can’t skip?”
“If I do, I’ll get stuck with the assignment nobody else wants. I’ve heard it’s really, really important to be at the first meeting of every month.”
“Well, that’s the way the ball bounces,” Patrick said.
“Look. I’ll see if I can’t get my assignment first and come right down to the band room,” I told him.
“Okay. See you,” he said.
I loved being one of the two freshmen roving reporters, and looked forward to the weekly meetings. Sam Mayer was only a freshman, too, but he’d moved right up to photographer. He was so good that he was sent to cover the first football game. The roving reporters got the fluff assignments, we call them, the kind you could either put in or leave out and it wouldn’t make much difference. But some assignments were better than others, and they were fun.
Nick O’Connell, a senior, was editor in chief, and when I got to the meeting, there was a big argument in progress. Sara, the features editor, was
complaining that none of her ideas were taken seriously, and that it was obvious to her that guys ran the newspaper, and girls didn’t get much say about the way it was done. In spite of myself, I was about five minutes late coming in, and wasn’t sure what the issue was. But Sara was so upset that her chin quivered, and I knew it sure wasn’t the time to ask if I could choose my assignment and leave.
Some of the kids were taking Nick’s side and some were taking Sara’s, and then somebody brought up an issue that seemed totally unrelated to the problem, and everyone went off on that. By the time Nick got to the assignments, he started with the seniors instead of the freshmen, and finally—the very last—I got mine: I didn’t even get a choice. Something about the “mystery meat” served in the school cafeteria.
Nick said it was okay for me to go then, so I grabbed my coat and book bag and ran down two flights of stairs, then the long corridor to the band room. But everyone had gone. The janitor was sweeping up. I took a city bus home and tried calling Patrick, but no one answered. When I called again around ten, his mom said he’d gone to bed.
Lester had to drive me to school early the next morning because I’d forgotten to pick up the new layout instructions for the school paper. At noon, they served the mystery meat again, and
luckily I had my camera ready. There it was, the gray-looking patty swimming in a pool of greasy-looking gravy. I was careful not to take pictures of my friends—the newspaper frowns on cliques taking over the paper, the same kids getting their pictures in again and again. So I spent my lunch period walking around the cafeteria, going up to kids I didn’t know and asking them what they thought they were eating, then photographed them taking a bite.
“Soy delight,” said one girl.
“Squid,” said another.
“Roadkill,” said a guy.
“Skunk au jus.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” said the last girl, and I hoped I got the face she made when she took a bite.
I stopped at a one-hour photo shop on my way home that afternoon, and at least four of the five pictures turned out well. The fifth was a little fuzzy—I think she moved—but I wrote her up, anyway, and did a layout for the paper. It was a lot of fun writing the piece, actually. I started off quoting Lester: “There’s a rumor that the food in the cafeteria is leftover from the prison infirmary… .”
Later, I was just getting ready to take a bath when Jill called.
“What’cha doing?” she asked.
“Something really exciting: getting ready for a
bath. Maybe even a pedicure. What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Just resting up. Finished a paper for social studies… . We missed you at lunch.”
“Yeah. I was doing an assignment for
The Edge,
” I told her.
There was a pause. “You should have been in the band room yesterday,” she said.
“Yeah? How did Patrick do? I haven’t seen him all day.”
“Great. He got the solo. We were cheering like mad.”
“I wish I’d been there! I had a newspaper meeting. Who all came?”
“Penny.”
A panic spread through me, sharper than anything I’d felt so far. “Only you and Penny?” I asked.
“Well, there were a few of us, Alice, but, like I said, you should have been there.”
“What are you saying?”
“Penny went up and hugged him after Levinson said he got the solo.”
“She did?”
“I mean, you could have just called it a friendly hug, but … well, he didn’t push her away, that’s for sure.”
“Well, of course not. Patrick’s not rude,” I told her.
“But she was
there
for him, Alice! That’s what
I’m saying. She was there at the movie the other day, too, and you weren’t.”
“Well, that’s just great! I happened to have a ton of homework then, and it was important I be at that meeting today. There have been plenty of times I’ve wanted to do things with Patrick and
he’s
been busy. That’s life. We just have to make time for each other when we can.”
“I understand! I understand! I’m just telling you as a friend, that’s all. But things do happen, and I didn’t want you to be the last to know.”
“Well, thanks, but it’s just something Patrick and I have to work out ourselves,” I said.
“I guess I shouldn’t have bothered,” Jill said, and hung up.
Oh, boy. I slid down the wall and sat hugging my knees. I imagined Patrick auditioning for the solo, looking around to see which of his friends had shown up. I imagined Penny hugging him afterward. Patrick not pushing her away. Patrick hugging back. Patrick looking down at her and smiling.
And I wondered if, in the long run, it would have made any difference if I’d been there or not. If I’d been at the movie and the audition both. And for the first time, I sensed Patrick slipping away from me, and felt sick.
I probably sat on the floor without moving for twenty minutes, and then I picked up the phone and called Patrick.
“Oh, hi, Alice,” Mrs. Long said. “Just a minute. He’s practicing.”
I could hear Patrick’s drums going in the background, booming up from the basement. I remembered with a pang the drum lesson he’d given me down there once, the way he’d touched me, the tingle I’d felt, the way I’d wanted him to touch me again. I swallowed.
The drumming stopped. I heard Patrick’s footsteps on the stairs, the fumble of the phone in his hands. “Hello?”
“Hi, Patrick. I’ve been hearing good things about you,” I said.
“Yeah, I got the solo part. I get about four minutes to improvise.”
“That’s wonderful! I really wanted to be there,
but there was some big crisis at the meeting and I was the last one to get my assignment. I ran all the way down to the band room afterward, but everyone was gone. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Well, I’ve been really busy.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. Me, too. I wondered if you wanted to come over some night. Just hang out.”
“Tomorrow, maybe. We leave for a band competition Friday afternoon.”
“I know. Tomorrow’s fine.”
We talked about this and that for another twenty minutes. Neither of us mentioned Penny. Maybe when you like a really popular guy you have to get used to groupies—to other girls liking him, too. Maybe it goes with the territory.
Patrick was on the bus the next morning, joking around with the guys in back like always, and Penny and Jill were sitting together when Elizabeth and I got on. Jill looked the other way when I said, “Hi.” Penny said, “Hi,” and went on talking to Karen, who was hanging over the back of the seat. Pamela and Brian and Mark were all squeezed together in one of the seats. She kept trying to wedge in between them, but they made her sit on their laps.
Elizabeth and I slid in a seat together behind some seniors who were arguing about a movie review.
“What’s with you and Jill?” Elizabeth whispered. “You noticed.”
“Yes. She was, like, ignoring you.”
“I don’t know. I guess you’d have to ask her,” I said.
I was miserable all day, and somehow the thought of seeing Patrick that night didn’t help. I didn’t feel as though he was mine anymore, and even though I knew he didn’t
belong
to me—he wasn’t a possession—I just didn’t feel special any longer. The Snow Ball—the first formal dance of the year—was coming up in the middle of December, and I wanted to feel that we were that same special couple we used to be, comfortable in knowing we’d be going to it together.
I put on my best jeans and a rust-colored sweater that night, the gold locket that used to belong to my mom, with a little lock of her hair in it, and tiny gold earrings.
“Hello,” Patrick said at the door, and smiled down at me.
I reached up and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Want to come in?”
“The leaves are blowing around like mad, and it’s actually warm out. Let’s walk,” he said. “Have a leaf fight or something. Go get some ice cream.”
I laughed and stepped out on the porch to check the temperature. It was warm for November. I put on my white windbreaker, and we went down the steps.
“Didn’t you ever do that when you were little? Have a leaf fight?” he asked.
“I think I just jumped around in them. No natural aggression,” I said.
“We used to try to stuff them down girls’ necks.”
“Typical,” I said. “Always trying to get in a girl’s shirt.”