Pretend She's Here(17)

I wondered if Mrs. Porter was climbing into the blue minivan, driving south toward Connecticut, toward my house, toward my mother. The realization that through my stubbornness I might have put my mother in danger made my knees buckle, and I fell down to the ground crying.





For one week, Mrs. Porter didn’t speak to me. We sat in silence while I ate my food. Even though I was dying to get that TV, I clamped down and told myself that watching the news, even the possibility of seeing my family on the screen, wasn’t worth it. There was no way I was ever writing that email.

Mrs. Porter didn’t have to tell me she was furious at me for my refusal. I saw the darkness in her furrowed brow, her pursed lips. I flashed, as I so often did these days, on how she used to like me. She’d always greet me with open arms and her unusual smile—not full-on, like most people’s, but three-cornered, as if her warmth contained a secret, as if half of her face was in on it and the other half resisting.

“You think she’s so great,” Lizzie said once. Her mother had taken us to Paradise Ice Cream, the little stand overlooking the Black Hall marshes and the mouth of the Connecticut River. Mrs. Porter stood by the window, drinking iced tea and chatting with Jordan Shear’s mother, and Lizzie and I sat at one of the picnic tables, under a yellow-and-white-striped umbrella, eating our ice cream cones.

“She is,” I said, raising my black raspberry, clinking Lizzie’s toasted coconut cone in a sort of toast.

“She’s a street angel/house devil,” Lizzie said. “She shows one face to the world, another to our family.”

“You’re pure angel,” Jeff Woodley said, overhearing her say that as he walked over to sit with us. He liked Lizzie; she was trying to decide how much she liked him back. He was tall, with ginger hair and a sparse beard, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders and nuzzled her neck. Then he licked her ice cream cone and she made him miss and dabbed his nose with it.

“Are you sure I’m so angelic?” she asked, laughing.

“Yep,” he said. “Positive.”

That June, Jeff asked her to the Full Moon Dance at the beach club. I’d been hoping Dan would ask me, but he showed up with Gillian Bowen instead. Jordan and Alicia, each single at that time, drove together. I went solo—well, actually I tagged along with Lizzie and Jeff. By then Lizzie had decided she liked him—in fact, more than that.

At one point, Jeff stood talking to Slater Jones and a bunch of other boys, and Lizzie and I took a spin on the dance floor. She wore a black dress with a tulle skirt twinkling with rhinestones; my dress, an Anne hand-me-down, was strapless taffeta, dark green-and-red tartan. While Lizzie wore a pair of black silk ballet flats, my favorite Doc Martens complemented my ensemble.

“How do you know if you’re in love?” Lizzie asked me.

I shrugged. “When you think about him, you see stars.”

“Well, that happens when I kiss him.”

“Enough said.”

“Do you feel that way about Dan? When you think about him?”

“No,” I said—even though I did—watching him slow dance with Gillian, never mind the fact the song was fast.

“Way to lie,” Lizzie said, twirling me. We’d practiced dancing from watching my brother Mick and his girlfriend, Fiona. And Mick had learned from my parents—a couple who seemed like one single creature when they danced: They moved so well together, in grace and unison.

That night Lizzie and Jeff had wandered down the beach. I watched them disappear into the shadows and wondered if that would ever be me and Dan, or me and someone else. The sad thing, and it really made me mad at myself, was that even seeing Dan with Gillian didn’t make the stars go away. I had written that play. The kiss hadn’t been real, but it had happened.

“Hey,” Dan said, walking over to the refreshment table, where I’d wound up serving lemonade because why not.

“Hey.”

“Pretty cool night, huh?” he asked. He was wearing surfer-boy formal—pink hibiscus-emblazoned board shorts with a white shirt and tux jacket.

“Yeah. I like the DJ.”

“Why aren’t you dancing? Where’s Trevor?”

Did he mean Trevor Griffin, from Patrick’s class? “No idea,” I said. “Why?”

“Uh, because I thought you guys were dating. I’ve seen you in his car.”

“No, he just gives me rides sometimes. He’s my brother’s friend.”

“Hmm. My mistake. Too bad.”

I handed him a paper cup of pink lemonade to cover my mad blush. He sipped it, looking into my eyes. At that moment I saw not just stars but a whole galaxy. Too bad. Was he saying that if he hadn’t thought I was with Trevor, he would have asked me to the dance?

“You going to write any more plays?” Dan asked.

“I’m always writing one,” I said.

“Bring back Ada and Timothy,” he said, referring to the characters he and I had played onstage, in front of the whole school. The characters who had kissed. I turned even redder.

Then Gillian walked over in her slinky white slip dress, straight blond hair spilling over her tan shoulders. Dan reached out for another cup of lemonade, handed it to her, and slipped his arm around her waist. They walked away, and in a move designed to torture me, Dan glanced back over his shoulder with a small head shake of regret.