Twerp (9 page)

“Say what like what?”

“Don’t say ‘friend’ like you think I’m talking about myself.”

She smiled. She didn’t believe me for a second. “So your friend, who’s not you, is really into this Jillian chick?”

“Yes.”

“Does Jillian like him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wrote her a letter.”

“And?”

“She never even answered him.”

“That’s not a good sign,” she said. “What did you write in the letter?”

“Just some stuff about how nice she is.”

“So you admit it’s you!”

“What? No!”

“C’mon, you just admitted it—”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I asked what
you
wrote in the letter, and you said you wrote about how nice she is.”

“Maybe I wrote it for someone else,” I said. “Did that ever cross your mind?”

“Did you write it for Quentin?”

“What difference does it make who I wrote it for?”

“I’m guessing you didn’t write it for Lonnie. He would’ve written his own letter.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters,” she said. “Quentin is cute. Lonnie isn’t.”

“Guys aren’t
cute
.”

“Not to other guys. But to girls they are. Some of them.”

“Why is Quentin cute, but not Lonnie?”

“Quentin has doe eyes. Lonnie is more of a schemer.”

I thought about what she was saying, about whether it could be true. “But you’re seventeen. Girls my age might have a different opinion.”

“Trust me on this one, Julian. I remember what it’s like to be twelve. You have
no idea
how well I remember what it’s like.”

“All right.”

“So did you write the letter for Quentin or not?”

“Let’s say I did.”

“Did you try to sound like Quentin, or did you just write it in your own voice?”

“I wrote a letter saying how nice she was. I wasn’t trying to sound like anyone.”

“Can I read the letter?”

“No!”

“All right! No need to get hostile!”

“Amelia—”

“I’m only trying to figure out if you fooled her. Quentin wouldn’t use the same words you would use. He doesn’t have your vocabulary. What I mean is … Look, I love Quentin. He’s my favorite of your friends. But let’s face facts. He’s not Einstein. Every girl who knows him knows that. The fact that he’s sweet makes up for it, but it’s still the truth. So if Jillian has figured out that Quentin didn’t write his own letter, she’s not going to answer him. Why should she? Quentin hasn’t put himself out there. He hasn’t made himself vulnerable.”

“Then you don’t think she’s ever going to write back to him?”

“Why would she write back if she knows it wasn’t his letter?”

“Because it’s wrong to leave a guy hanging like that,” I said.

“Then tell me this: Are you sure she
got
the letter?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m the one who handed it to her.”

“
You
handed it to her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell her who it was from?”

“I told her I didn’t write it.”

“Except you
did
write it,” she said.

“Yes, but I told her I didn’t.”

“Did you specifically tell her it was from a secret admirer?”

“I didn’t use the exact words. But she knew what I meant.”

“Interesting.” Amelia tapped her left index finger against her chin. “Has she talked to you since then?”

“She talks to me all the time,” I said. “I think she talks to me more now than she ever did before. That’s what makes the situation so annoying. If she just gave me a hint what she thought about the letter—”

Suddenly, Amelia brought her hands to her face. “Oh my God! You’re an idiot!”

“Why am I an idiot?”

“The reason Jillian hasn’t answered the letter is she thinks it’s from you.”

“But I
told
her it wasn’t from me.”

“She’s given you her answer in person,” Amelia said. “The answer is that she’s interested … in
you
. You stole Quentin’s girl.”

“I did not!”

“I’m not saying you did it on purpose. I’m saying that’s what happened.”

“I knew this was a mistake!”

“It’s three mistakes,” she said. “Quentin never should have asked you to write a letter for him. You never should have done it. But you
never
should have handed Jillian the
letter yourself. That’s the dumbest mistake. Of course she thinks you wrote it. What else is she going to think?”

“I meant it was a mistake to ask your advice.”

She raised her palms in the air. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.”

“There’s
no way
Jillian thinks I wrote that letter.”

“There’s no way she doesn’t, Julian.” She narrowed her eyes at me, then began to laugh. “Hmm, Julian and Jillian. Sounds to me like the two of you were meant to be together.”

She was still cracking up as I walked out of her room.

March 31, 1969

As stupid as what Amelia said was, it’s
the kind of thing that gets under your skin. I couldn’t let go of it. The conversation I had with Jillian when I first handed her the letter—I must have replayed it a million times in my mind. (It helped that I wrote most of it down. I guess that’s another advantage of doing this kind of assignment. Not only does it get you out of writing a report on
Julius Caesar
, it’s also a great reminder.) So I read back what I wrote, and there it was in black and white: I told Jillian flat out I didn’t write the letter. She would have to be as stupid as Amelia to think I did.

So I had what Amelia said under my skin, and I had that wink from Eduardo under my skin, and there’s just
so many things that can fit under your skin at a given moment without driving you crazy. I had to get rid of something. I decided just to ask Jillian about the letter. But deciding to do it and doing it are two different things. I must have taken a first step in her direction a half-dozen times and chickened out. That was another two weeks of grief. But then, at last, I caught up with her while she was waiting for the yellow bus to Bayside. The fact that she was standing off by herself, not quite in line with the rest of the kids, seemed like a good sign. I gritted my teeth and came up behind her.

I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around. Then she gave me that same wide-eyed look as when I first handed her the letter.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I said.

Her eyes got even bigger. “Yes.”

“Do you remember that letter I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think about it?”

“I thought it was beautiful,” she said.

“That’s it?”

“I thought it was very beautiful.”

“But what did you think?”

“I just told you.”

“What I mean is, do you think …”

I couldn’t figure out how to finish the sentence.

“Say what you want to say, Julian.”

“I don’t know what I want to say.”

“You don’t have to be shy. I won’t bite.”

“Look, my friend just wants to know—”

She spun around and turned her back to me.

Before I could think what to do next, I heard a voice behind me. “
Hola
, Jillian!”

She turned back around and smiled. “Eduardo!”

He trotted up to the bus stop. Even at a slow trot, he seemed to glide.
“¡Julian! ¿Cómo estás?”

As shocked as I was to see him, what happened next shocked me even more. He slid his arm around Jillian’s waist and gave her a kiss on the right cheek. Then he gave her a kiss on the left cheek. Then she turned to me, smiling again. His arm was still around her waist. “Do you know Eduardo, Julian?”

“What? No … um, yes.”

“Eduardo, this is Julian.”

“Mi amigo,”
he said.

“Eduardo is my brother.”

“What?”

“He’s not my real brother,” Jillian said.

Eduardo cracked up but didn’t speak.

“He lives with us. He’s from Guatemala.”

He let go of her waist and put out his hand. I shook it again.

“My parents want to adopt him,” she said, “so he might be my real brother by next year.”

“No one knows what the future will be, Jillian.”

“Eduardo is a great soccer player. He could be a professional.”

He wagged his finger at her. “What is this word, ‘soccer’?”

“All right, I mean
fútbol
.”

“
Muy bien
, Jillian.”

“Gracias.”

“De nada.”

“Eduardo is teaching me Spanish … 
español
.”

“So Eduardo lives with you?” I said, even though she’d just told me that he did. I wanted to hear her say it again.

“Yes, my dad made a room for him in the cellar. He sleeps on a sofa bed. He doesn’t even have to make it in the morning. He just folds it up and puts the cushions back in place. Plus, he has his own bathroom.”

“It’s excellent,
Julian
. You must come over and see it.”

Jillian’s eyes just bugged out when he said that. “Yes!”

“Yes, what?” I said.

“You must come over and see Eduardo’s room.”

“Yes, you must,
Julian
!”

My mind was a blur at that moment. Up until then,
I had Eduardo worries, and I had Jillian worries, and the two were separate. Like two rivers running through the back of my mind. But now, at once, they came together. It was like a rushing, tumbling waterfall of confusion, and I was trying to keep an expression on my face that looked as if nothing was going on.

I heard Jillian say, “What about this Saturday?”

“¡Sábado!”

The two of them were right in front of my face, smiling, hopeful that I would say yes, and I was figuring out an excuse—grasping for one, to be honest, no matter how fake, no matter how lame. But then I had a moment of inspiration. The scene at the bus stop seemed to slow down, and the roaring waterfall inside my head became a normal stream. It was me again, my voice, not a waterfall. I knew what I was going to say. “Can I bring a friend?”

The question seemed to catch them both off guard. They glanced at one another out of the corners of their eyes. They were still smiling at me, but I could tell that neither of them knew what to say next, whether to answer the question alone or come up with one answer together. It felt good to mess them up. Then at last Jillian said, “That depends who your friend is.”

“Just a guy from the block.”

“A boy?”

“Why would I bring a girl?”

That made Jillian smile again. “Sure, you can bring your friend.”

“¡Bien!”
Eduardo said.

Jillian whipped out a piece of loose-leaf paper and wrote down her address, then handed it to Eduardo, who handed it to me. It was like she was saying the invitation was from both of them.

“That’s the address,” she said. “It’s on Twenty-Ninth Avenue, a block from Francis Lewis Boulevard. Do you know where that is?”

“I know it’s way out in Bayside.”

“Do you know how to get there?”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said.

The yellow bus turned the corner and rolled up the street toward the stop. Jillian nodded at it. “You should come over for lunch. One o’clock? If it’s warm enough outside, my dad might even barbecue. That’s what he loves doing. Is that all right? Do you like barbecue?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Which was the truth.

The bus pulled up at the stop, and the driver cranked the doors open. Eduardo thrust out his hand. That seemed to be his thing, shaking hands—first at Memorial Field, when it made sense, and now here, for no reason. But what the heck? I shook his hand again. For no reason. Then Jillian put out her hand, and I shook hers too. It felt
real soft, real weak, with nothing behind it, almost like it wasn’t there. I wasn’t certain if she was making fun of me, or of Eduardo, or of both of us, but I shook her hand regardless. Why not?

I watched them climb onto the school bus. They took the first seat behind the bus driver, which no one in his right mind ever does, and they were chattering away when the yellow doors slammed shut. As the bus drove off, I turned and headed home.

April 6, 1969

You should’ve seen the look on Lonnie’s
face when I told him the two of us were invited to Jillian’s house for lunch. He thought it was an April Fools’ joke at first—which I would never do, given how he feels about her. But I convinced him it was real. Except then I figured he needed to know about Eduardo. That brought him back to earth fast. We were in front of the Hampshire House, waiting for Quentin to come downstairs. As soon as I told him about Eduardo, Lonnie started pacing back and forth. He didn’t like the sound of Jillian’s Guatemalan “brother,” not one bit, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him.

It just didn’t seem right, the two of them under the same roof. There are things that happen when you live
with someone, accidental things. For example, and it grosses me out to mention it, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen Amelia in her underwear. It just happens. Like we’ll both shuffle out to the refrigerator from opposite ends of the apartment in the middle of the night, and one of us will turn on the kitchen light, and then there we are … and I’m in my pajamas, and she’s in her underwear. Then, of course, she runs back into her room and yells at me to get lost, which wakes up my mom and dad. But it’s not her fault or my fault. It just happens because we live under the same roof.

Now think how weird it must be for Jillian and Eduardo, who aren’t even related to one another, to meet up in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Plus, you just
know
Eduardo’s the kind of guy who sleeps in his underwear, not in pajamas. If I were Lonnie, that thought would bug the heck out of me.

Lonnie started pumping me for more information about Eduardo, and I told him what I knew—everything except him being fast, which I figured was between me and Eduardo. But I told Lonnie how likable he was, how he stood up to the junior high school kids—though I didn’t go into details—how he looked you straight in the eye and smiled, and how he called you
“amigo.”