Part 4 (1/2)

”I guess,” you said.

”Do you just kind of ... have your pick?”

”Well,” you said. ”It doesn't really work that way.” You tried to explain that being one of only two girls made you conspicuous. It made boys not want to be seen talking to you. They were afraid of being teased. They didn't want to stand out, to be different. In a way this was true. But in another way you knew, even as you were saying it, that it was wise-sounding bulls.h.i.+t. n.o.body minded being seen talking to Lily Joyce. The boys kidded her, exchanged loud insults with her in the halls, grabbed her green book bag and tossed it to one another over her head as she ran back and forth with her arms waving, trying ineffectually to retrieve it; they imitated her shrieks-”Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Waaah. I'll tell! I'll tell!”-and she laughed at the imitations while continuing to shriek that she would tell.

Lily Joyce was a small, cute, flirty girl. You were tall, heavy, serious-somehow not a girl at all. You were conspicuous but invisible. The boys who spoke to you asked how you had done on the math test, or if you understood this whole diagramming-sentences thing.

You couldn't tell this to your old friends. What's wrong with me? you thought, and tried not to think, all the time. You worried that there was some fundamental thing that might be missing, some difference between you and other girls that was just now starting to show itself but that would become more and more apparent as you grew up, like the progressive divergence of two nearly parallel, but not parallel, lines.

VON BRUYLING.

Once, though, a boy did say something to you.

”Any time you want it, I can give it to you.”

He was older, a ninth-grader (the school went up only through ninth grade), someone whose voice had changed, who shaved. He said it to you in a low voice, coming up behind you on the stairs and smoothly pa.s.sing you before you were sure you'd actually heard him.

But you did hear him. His name was von Bruyling. You hadn't liked him, even before he muttered to you on the stairs-he wasn't nice, he wasn't smart. You got that what he'd said had been a joke. A mean joke. You, he was implying, were the last person who would ever want it, and the last person he'd ever want to give it to.

Still, sometimes after that when you were home lying on your bed, with the door shut and your hand between your legs, you thought of von Bruyling's stupid face, and his low voice growling those words over and over.

THE STRING Ba.s.s.

Another embarra.s.sment: to play an instrument that looked like you. They'd a.s.signed it to you, or you to it, in your old public school, because you were tall and strong and could physically handle it. Now you were stuck with it. String ba.s.s players were rare, so you'd won a scholars.h.i.+p to take lessons at a conservatory. Your mother, almost maniacally proud of what she had decided must be prodigious musical talent, drove you there every Sat.u.r.day. The string ba.s.s lay across the backseat, its neck and scroll sticking out through the open car window; you wished for a tree growing a little too close to the road, or the sudden press of a tunnel wall. The ba.s.s decapitated; you and your mother safe; but your mother somehow knocked sensible, agreeing to let you quit.

Your ba.s.s teacher loathed you for loathing the instrument. Every lesson was the same: you would plunk out a few notes, and he would stop you. ”Did you practice?”

”Some,” you would say.

”You have to practice.”

”I know.”

Practicing was the most boring thing you had ever done. Plunk plunk plunk (rest). Plunk plunk plunk (rest). That was pretty much how the string-ba.s.s part went in every piece of music your teacher a.s.signed you. He was right, you never practiced.

Then one afternoon at school, a boy came up to you and said, ”I hear you play the ba.s.s.”

”Yeah,” you said, wary. You weren't expecting another von Bruyling incident-this kid was younger, and he seemed nice-but you had found that in this school humiliation lurked everywhere and jumped out when you forgot to look for it.

”Because I'm putting together a rock band,” the boy, whose name was Henderson, went on.

So then you were the ba.s.s player in a rock band.

During the whole time you were in it, the band played only one number, over and over, a song called ”Groovin' with Mr. Bloe”-which, in turn, at least the way your band played it, had only one phrase of music, repeated over and over. The ba.s.s part went: plunk plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk plunk; and so could not claim to be much more interesting than the ba.s.s parts your conservatory teacher a.s.signed you. But playing in a rock band felt strange and glamorous, out of character for you. Upstairs in your room you practiced ”Groovin' with Mr. Bloe” with a diligence and fastidious musicality that would have made your conservatory teacher cry if he had ever had the chance to see it.

After a few weeks you made up your own words to ”Mr. Bloe”-an incantation for Henderson to fall in love with you-and sang them softly in your room while you practiced, and silently whenever you played with the band.

TELLING.

Eventually you told Lily Joyce. ”Huh,” she said. ”Henderson?” She'd been waiting a long time for you to start liking a boy. In the time you'd known her she'd liked Stewart, Cook, Childs, McDonald, Chesborough, Hilts, and Sperber. They were all boarders at the school; they would get off-campus permissions to go to her house on Sat.u.r.days, mostly one at a time, but Chesborough and Hilts she invited together, because she liked them both.

”What do you do when they come over?” you had asked her once.

Lily Joyce shrugged. ”Swim. Listen to records. Sometimes we make out.” With Chesborough she had played something called Seven Minutes in Heaven. You didn't know what it was, and you didn't ask Lily Joyce to explain. But Chesborough was another one of those manlike, shaving ninth-graders; and Lily Joyce's exact words were ”I let him play Seven Minutes in Heaven,” so you sort of knew.

”Why Henderson?” she asked you.

You weren't going to give Lily Joyce a list of reasons. He's so clean. I like how his eyes are blue and his eyelashes are dark. I even like how his gla.s.ses are held together on one side with tape. He's a very serious, not very good guitarist. You didn't like him because of those things; it was more that you liked those things because you liked him. ”He's cute,” you told Lily Joyce.

This was a term she recognized and honored: it was valid currency with her. ”What are you going to do?” she asked.

”Do?”

”I know. You need to get Mrs. Sturm to put you with him at the dance.”

There are children who are too old to be children. It stops being a problem when they get older-they grow into themselves-but before that happens it's perpetually awkward. For you it was a mix of judgment and wistfulness. You thought all this stuff was stupid, but you also had no idea how to get it, and you wanted it.

”Oh, goody. Let's,” you said to Lily Joyce. She laughed; she liked it when you were sarcastic. Egged on, you grabbed her hand and started skipping toward the Sturms' house. The two of you skipped along the colonnade, laughing, just as the boys were trailing out of their dorms to go down to the gym for sports. You felt wildly happy, bounding forward with the wind blowing against your face and hair, with all those boys watching. (Later, though, you'd use the memory to humiliate yourself: it had felt like two pretty girls skipping along a colonnade, but it must have looked like big you galumphing along beside little Lily Joyce.) Mrs. Sturm made tea and put out the mysterious pale cookies on a flowered plate. You sat in her living room, where she always had a fire going on these winter afternoons. ”Well, ladies,” she said.

”Ask her,” said Lily Joyce to you.

”No, that's okay,” you said. You knew that Mrs. Sturm was in charge of organizing the upcoming dance, and that each boy from your school would be ”put with” a girl bused in from some girls' school. But asking her to put you with Henderson seemed cra.s.s to you, dishonorable. She liked you; didn't you owe it to her not to take advantage of that fondness by asking for a special favor? Maybe you would end up with Henderson anyway, either accidentally or because Mrs. Sturm, with her almost magical delicacy, would somehow know without being told to put the two of you together.

Besides, you were afraid to tell her you liked a boy. You didn't want to bore her, or make yourself look silly.

But Lily Joyce was pointing at you. ”Mrs. Sturm, she wants to be put with Henderson for the dance, and I want to be with Sperber.”

Mrs. Sturm went over to her writing desk-a small, many-compartmented thing that she had told you was an old campaign chest from the time of the Napoleonic wars-and came back with a pad and a tiny pencil. ”Lily Joyce, Jeff Sperber,” she said, writing. She smiled at Lily Joyce, and then at you. ”And Mark Henderson?”

You nodded, emboldened by her matter-of-fact feminine complicity: all right, you would throw yourself onto the conveyor belt and let it carry you toward the dance.

”Mark Henderson,” she said in her light, silvery voice as she wrote. ”Very sweet boy.” She smiled at you again. ”Muy bien, Marisol.”

AT THE DANCE.

Your band played. You were up on a platform, grooving with Mr. Bloe. Then suddenly Henderson lifted his head and yelled out, ”Drum solo!” and the kid on drums went crazy for a few minutes, banging out what sounded like a big collision of pots and pans and sandpaper all happening in a bowling alley. ”Keyboard!” yelled Henderson, and you started to realize that you were going to be next. s.h.i.+t. ”Ba.s.s!” shouted Henderson, and the other instruments quieted down and there you were-the lighting didn't change but you felt like it had and that you were suddenly standing in a cone of merciless brightness-and you didn't know what to do, but you settled for plunking out your usual sequence of notes with what you hoped was special emphasis, as loudly as possible, twice; and then you nodded at Henderson and he went into his own loud, squeally guitar solo which, you saw then, had been the whole reason why he'd accorded solos to the rest of you.

Seeing this-how badly he had wanted to play this energetic, incoherent solo, how transparently he'd tried to hide his desire to do it, how the tape on his gla.s.ses gleamed beneath the lights-made you tender toward him, and maybe a little less shy when Mr. Bloe finally came to an end and you laid down your instruments and joined the dance. Still, you were pretty shy.

”Mrs. Sturm put us together,” Henderson said, leading you over to the punch table.

You shrugged. Mrs. Sturm winked at you from her seat by the refreshment tray.

You and Henderson fast-danced. Then you slow-danced. He held one of your hands and put his other arm around your waist, leaving six inches between you: mannerly, respectful, correct, a relief, disappointing. Everyone else was hugging, barely moving. All these strange girls had arrived on a bus, pretty, in pretty dresses, and had gone in straight for the kill. Their faces were buried in the shoulders of the boys from your school. They were letting themselves be touched, and kissed, forgetting or not caring about the teachers who were chaperoning. Sperber's hands were moving lower on Lily Joyce's back; her dress was hiked up and you could see the striped cotton of her underpants. Mr. Sturm came over and said something to them, and they moved apart a little. The Sturms danced: majestically. They looked like ice skaters. It would have been funny, if they had done it with any less grace or dignity.

In the last slow dance Henderson pulled you gently to his chest and you were one of the hugging couples. ”I like you,” he said, low against your ear. ”You're my girl.”

IN YOUR BED.

You replayed it over and over. He holds you. ”I like you,” he says. ”You're my girl.”