A Good Yarn (Blossom Street #2)(86)

Julianna, who was back at school and on a tight budget, broke down and phoned Courtney. They talked for twenty minutes.

“I miss you so much,” Courtney told her sister, struggling not to weep. She clutched the telephone receiver to her ear, as if that would bring Julianna closer.

“How’s school?”

Her sister would ask. “It’s okay.” Courtney tried to brush off the question because they had bigger concerns than her inability to make friends, other than Annie Hamlin, and her sense of being alone.

“Don’t give me that,” Julianna said sternly in a voice so like their mother’s that it took Courtney’s breath away. “I want to know how you’re really doing.”

“Awful.” It was the truth. “I thought if I lost weight I’d be instantly popular,” Courtney confessed. “I thought boys would be asking for my phone number, but it isn’t like that at all.” Of course, there was only one boy who interested her, and that was Andrew Hamlin. Unfortunately, he had a long-standing girlfriend.

Annie claimed Melanie was living in a dreamworld, and Andrew was no more going steady with her than he was with Britney Spears. The evidence, which Courtney had seen for herself, said otherwise.

“Twenty-five pounds is a lot to lose, and I’m proud of you. You feel better, don’t you?”

“Health-wise, you mean? Yeah, I guess.” She did feel better now that those pounds were off. She, too, was proud of that accomplishment, but she’d hoped for certain things that hadn’t come to pass. In fact, everything remained exactly as it was before. When you came right down to it, all that had changed was the number on Grams’s antique scale. Oh, and some of her pants were looser around the waist.

“Call if you need me,” Julianna said. “I mean it, Court.”

“Okay. Keep in touch about Dad.”

“I will,” her sister promised.

Courtney was grateful for her sister’s call. She wished they could talk regularly. Although Julianna was older and had been away from home for nearly three years, she was close to their dad. Caught up in her own woes, Courtney hadn’t spent enough time considering her sister’s feelings.

Wednesday morning, eight days since her last communication with her father, Courtney didn’t feel like going to school. Grams said she understood, but encouraged Courtney to go anyway.

“You won’t resolve anything sitting by the phone all day,” Grams said with perfect logic.

After sleeping fitfully for two nights, Courtney had hoped to rest, but she knew her grandmother was right. While she might not have made a lot of friends yet, she was better off at school than hanging around at home, waiting and worrying.

Mike, Andrew’s friend, picked her up to drive her to school. Courtney paid him ten dollars a week and appreciated not having to take the bus. The only problem was Mike himself, who seemed inordinately shy. He rarely said a word, either on the way to school or on the way home. At first she’d tried to carry the conversation, but after a week of minimal responses, she’d given up.

Wouldn’t you know it? This was the morning Mike discovered he had a tongue.

“Did you hear from your dad?” he asked as she climbed into his fifteen-year-old Honda.

“Not yet.”

“Are you worried?”

“What do you think?” She didn’t mean to be sarcastic, but that was a stupid question if she’d ever heard one.

“I think you’re worried,” he concluded.

Courtney closed her eyes and leaned her head against the passenger window, just praying there’d be an e-mail from her father when she got home from school.

“Are you ready for the English test?” he asked next.

She straightened abruptly. “There’s a test?” Preoccupied as she’d been with her father, she hadn’t paid attention. “On what?”

“Poetry.”

She groaned. Perhaps if she showed up at the office and claimed she had the flu, they’d believe her and let her go home.

Home. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t think of her grandmother’s place as home. It was Grams’s house, not hers.

Mike parked and they walked wordlessly into the school. Once in the building, they went their separate ways, Mike to the left and Courtney to the right. She had, at best, five minutes to leaf through her book of poems and her English notes before the bell rang. Dickinson. Whitman. Who else?

She stood outside her homeroom, leaning against the wall, as she flipped desperately from one page to the next.

“Hi.” Andrew sidled up to her, books under his arm.

Surprised, Courtney nearly dropped her own book. “I didn’t realize we had a test today,” she declared, her nose in the book as she tried to take in as much information as possible.

“In what?”

“English—poetry. Nineteenth-century American. I think.”

He didn’t seem to know about it, either.

“Mike told me.”

“That explains it,” Andrew said. “He’s in regular Senior English, we’re Honors. Mr. Hazelton didn’t mention a test. I don’t even think we’re studying the same material.”

A wave of relief washed over her. “Thank you, God.” She raised her head toward the ceiling.

“And they say school prayer is dead,” Andrew teased.