I turned the box over and read out loud, “‘These elegant treats come in three delicious flavors: venison, organic filet mignon, and free-range chicken.’” I tore off the plastic wrap and lifted the cover. Inside were nine dog biscuits in three shapes—deer, cow, and chicken. I looked at the plastic wrap again. She had paid seven dollars for an excuse to come over.
I found myself feeling sorry for her. “Thanks. Here, Reggie.” I gave him a deer, and he trotted off with it.
“What’s happening?” Suzanne asked.
“Nothing,” Ardis said. “We’re just hanging out.”
“That’s cool.” She looked around the kitchen for a second.
Then she leaned toward us and her eyes gleamed. “Did you hear that Mr. Pike sent Daphne to the principal because of her b.o.? And Mr. Winby sent her home?”
I stopped feeling sorry. The worst part of Suzanne’s gossip was that I sort of enjoyed hearing about other people’s problems. I didn’t enjoy the enjoyment though. And I hated knowing that I’d never forget the tidbit. I could forget what six times seven equals or the name of Hamlet’s girlfriend, but I’d remember Daphne’s body odor forever.
“No, I didn’t hear—”
“Thanks for sharing,” Ardis said. “But Wilma and I were talking about some personal things, and you won’t mind, will you, if we all get together another time?”
“I can’t stay anyway. We’re having dinner soon.” She left the kitchen, but instead of going to the door, she went into the living room. “I heard your mom say you were getting a new TV. How big is the—”
We raced to get to the couch first.
“What’s this?” Suzanne picked up the caricature and unrolled it. First she held it out so she could see it better, and then she brought it near for a closer inspection.
“She’s memorizing it,” Ardis whispered to me.
“This is so neat,” Suzanne finally said. “Where did you get it? Who’s Antoinette? You’re a genius.”
“We got it in Central Park.”
“You and Ardis?”
“Me and Jared.”
“Jared? You mean . . .” She put her finger across the bridge of her nose. “That Jared?”
I nodded.
“You like him?”
I nodded. No hesitation at all.
She nodded with me. “You make a cute couple. He’s cute, except . . . He’s cute. I could go for him.”
“You like the caricature?” I think Ardis tried to keep the astonishment out of her voice, but I heard it.
“Don’t you? I mean, I’m no art critic—”
“I love it,” Ardis said firmly. “I think it’s a riot.”
“It’s funny? Right. I knew that.” She made herself laugh.
“’Bye, Suzanne,” I said.
“’Bye.” She stopped at our door. “Ardis and I are the first ones to see it?”
“Except Jared.”
“Are you going to show anybody else?”
“You’ll see,” I said.
“Well, ’bye,” she said. “I have to go. Dinner.” Now she couldn’t wait to leave. If her phone was more than two minutes away, she would have a heart attack before she got there.
I locked the door and came back to the living room. “Tell me what you were going to say before.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.” Ardis shook her head. “I don’t believe that. She liked it. I thought she’d start destroying you the second she saw it.”
“You know Suzanne. If she thought she could hurt me, she would.”
“But she can’t?”
Oops! I thought fast. “With you here? With you saying you liked it?” Would she believe me?
“I guess.” She grinned. “I like being your fairy godmother.”
Jared called that night. The first thing he said was “My brother’s going to give me kissing lessons tomorrow. He already told me the Five Rules of Kissing.”
“What are they?”
“You’ll see.”
“Come on. Tell.”
“No. I’ll tell you after we try them out. Could we do it after school on Wednesday? That’ll give me time to practice.”
Try out kissing? That meant kissing. You couldn’t try it out without doing it. My heart started pounding, three days ahead of time. “Okay.”
“Good. What did your family think of the caricatures?”
“Maud—she’s my older sister—thinks we’re crazy. She said I should bury them in Central Park, six feet down and under a boulder.”
“What did your parents think?”
“My mom wants to get a wallet-size one of me to carry around with her.”
“How about your dad?”
“They’re divorced. What about your family?”
“Dad says I have good taste in girls.”
“What did your brother say?”
“Which one? My older brother, Brad, said he wished he knew a girl like you. Andy—he’s five—started to cry when he saw my picture. But he liked yours. He wanted to know if your teeth are really that big.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said they were bigger, and he can’t wait to meet you either.”
I laughed. “The saber-toothed tigress.”
It was fun having a boyfriend.
Chapter Sixteen
Monday. Two more weeks of popularity.
Suzanne must have been on the phone all night, because the first kid I saw in the morning knew about the caricatures. I was mobbed on the way to school. Everybody was dying to see them, and they had a million questions about what it was like to have a caricaturist draw you.
Boys told me they liked the drawing, and it was funny. Girls told me they liked the drawing, and I was brave. Almost everybody told me I was much prettier than the caricature. And I kept saying that was lucky, because you couldn’t get much uglier. Then lots of them said, No, you really are pretty.
Maybe everybody should have a caricature done. Then we’d all see how everybody else actually looks. But maybe kids only thought I was pretty because of the spell.
The girls wanted to know all about Jared. I had to repeat the events of our afternoon together at least a dozen times. Research in case we broke up, I guess.
Then at lunch, when I thought I’d said everything anybody could possibly want to know, Evadney asked, “But what’s Jared really like?”
“What do you mean?”
BeeBee said, “I know what she means. It’s like Carlos is a total jock, but every so often I see something else inside him. The little boy, maybe.”
Evadney nodded.
BeeBee had seen the jock, not the jerk, in Carlos. She hadn’t seen the inner creep who’d asked me to Grad Night. The Grad Night date bigamist.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The real Jared doesn’t seem to be hiding. He’s out there.”
I had computer lab for eighth period, and Ms. Jacobson asked BeeBee to show a computer graphics program to a bunch of us while she helped some other kids. Daphne, Nina, Ardis, Suzanne, and I crowded around BeeBee. I was the last one to get there, but Nina made room for me, and I wound up with the best view of what BeeBee was doing.
She had scanned our class picture into the computer and was fooling around with it. She took Geoff, the shortest boy in eighth grade, and stretched him out, making him so tall that the photo lopped off the top of his forehead. Then she cut out my head and moved it onto the neck of Mr. Winby, our principal.
“Could you do the caricatures?” Ardis asked.
“Sure. Hand them over, Wilma.”
I did, and BeeBee showed us how to use the scanner. Suzanne, who had wormed her way in between me and Ardis, kept complimenting BeeBee on everything she did. Then I realized after the fortieth compliment that Suzanne wasn’t only sucking up. She was also pointing out that this was a rare event—BeeBee catching on to something ahead of anyone else.
Poisonous.
I wanted to neutralize Suzanne, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
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Luckily, BeeBee didn’t seem to care. She brought Jared’s drawing up on the screen. “Watch.” She added shading to his forehead, so it didn’t seem to stick out, and she made his hair more natural. Then she moved the cursor to his eyebrow.
She was going to separate his one eyebrow into two. “Don’t!” I said. He wouldn’t be Jared anymore. “I like that eyebrow.”
“It’s sexy, isn’t it?” Nina laughed.
“It grows on you,” I said, laughing too.
“The longer it is, the better it is,” Daphne added.
And we all started laughing so hard, we couldn’t catch our breath. As we wound down, I noticed that Daphne was looking very pleased with herself for making us laugh.
That is, till Suzanne said, “Jared may have only one eyebrow, but at least he smells better than some people.” She looked straight at Daphne.
Daphne went on smiling, but all the fun seeped out of it, and a raspberry blush spread across her pale face.
BeeBee said, “Suzanne! That was so mean. That was obno—”
I interrupted. “Does everybody know that Suzanne and I live in the same building?”
“Yeah,” Suzanne agreed. “We’ve known each other forever.”
“Well,” I said, “last week I was going into the laundry room, and I heard her mother ask a neighbor what to do about Suzanne’s bed-wetting.”
“That isn’t funny,” Suzanne said. “You shouldn’t tell lies like that about people.”
“Points, Wilma,” Nina said. “A thousand points.”
I looked at Daphne, who was grinning. I saw her take a deep breath. “You’re all standing near me. Do I stink? Do I?”
“No,” Ardis said. “You don’t.”
Well, I had done something. I had struck a blow at Suzanne. Funny how I could do it for Daphne when I had never been able to do it for myself. But maybe I would be able to in the future.
When I got home, Maud told me I’d have to walk Reggie after school on Wednesday because she was going to her best friend Portia’s house to study for a big exam. Maud didn’t have just plain exams, they were always “big.”
“Okay.” I never minded walking Reggie. “No. Wait.” Jared and I were supposed to practice kissing. “I can’t.”
“You’ll have to. My grades are more important than your social calendar.”
I couldn’t win. Mom would agree with Maud, especially if I said I couldn’t walk Reggie because it would interfere with kissing Jared. “All right,” I said.
The phone rang. It was Daphne calling to thank me for helping her out.
“Somebody had to do something about Suzanne,” I said, feeling like a hero.
“Uh, how’s Reggie?”
“Fine. He’s sleeping.” I remembered that Daphne had shown me a picture of her sheepdog. “How’s your dog?”
“Samson’s good. He’s chewing on a rawhide bone.”
So then we talked about dogs. I found out Samson was ten years old, and they’d gotten him from the sheepdog rescue organization when he was two.
I found myself asking her if she wanted to walk our dogs together sometime. She did, and we agreed to meet in the park next Saturday morning.
Tuesday. Thirteen more days.
In the morning I left home early so I wouldn’t meet anybody on the way to school. The old lady was my best bet for staying popular, much better than the odds of discovering an unmagical way to do it.
The train was almost full, but I found a seat. More people got on at the next stop. The man who stood in front of me seemed healthy. It didn’t seem possible that the old lady had taken his form. But maybe she had, and he had stationed himself near me because he wanted to see if I’d recognize him—her.
I caught his eye. “Would you like to sit down?”
He nodded. I stood up, and he slid into my seat.
“How did you know?” he asked.
He was the old lady!
“These shoes are new.” He extended his left foot. “I have a blister already.”
He wasn’t the old lady. I smiled weakly at him and turned to face the pole I was hanging on to.
Anybody might be the old lady, and how would I know? I couldn’t ask people if I had met them before when they were in the shape of an old lady. They’d call the police, who’d take me to a psychiatric ward for observation.
I must have seemed upset at school, because everybody kept asking me if something was wrong. A sixth grader stopped me in the hall and told me she was there for me. Three girls asked me if I was getting my period. Even Nina got emotional and offered me both her shoulders to cry on.
And I got another poem from Anonymous, the poet who had written to me on the first day.
No smiles today.
Today her long teeth
Are shrouded.
And her eyes
Are quenched.
Even the shape
Of her ears
Is sad today.
My boat will not
Sail today.
Today my kite
Will not fly.
And I am earth
Bound as a stone.
At least I could keep the two poems and show them to my grandchildren as souvenirs of the nanosecond when Granny was popular.
Chapter Seventeen
Wednesday. Twelve more days. In language arts I told Jared that we couldn’t have our kissing session because I had to walk Reggie after school.
“Where do you take him?”
“Central Park.”
“Ideal.” He grinned wickedly. “I was worried about Rule Number Two.”
So we agreed to meet under the clock in the lobby after school, and I spent the rest of the day being excited and terrified about my first real kissing experience. I hardly thought about the end of the spell . . . hardly.
“Who are you looking for?” Jared asked in the train on the way home.
“Nobody.” I turned to face him.
“I guess I like Rule Number One best,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see.”
On the walk home, he told me about his brother’s first kiss. “In the second grade Brad had a crush on this girl named Tina Delphina. She—”
“That was really her name?”
“You interrupted.”
I giggled.
“Yes. That was her name, and she had pigtails and he loved her. On Valentine’s Day he decided to kiss her. They were in the school playground and she was talking to her friends. He ran to her, meaning to kiss her cheek. He didn’t know about kissing on the lips. Just as he got near her, she turned— Maybe this is the wrong story to tell right now.”
“You can’t stop now. Tell.”
“All right. She turned. He didn’t know she was chewing bubble gum. And while she turned, she blew a bubble.” Jared started laughing, and I was laughing already. “So he kissed the bubble, and it burst and he had . . .” He was laughing so hard, he had to stop talking. “. . . and he had her bubble gum all over his mouth.”
“You’re making it up,” I gasped between laughs. We were crossing Amsterdam Avenue. My house was a block away.
He shook his head, tears streaming. “No. It’s true. When he pulled away . . . Brad can’t stop laughing when he tells this part. When he pulled away . . .” Jared tried to catch his breath. “. . . a long pink strand stretched between them. They were connected by this long pink strand till he got about five feet away from her, and then it broke.”
“Then what happened?” We walked into my building.
“I don’t know. But Brad hates gum to this day.”
Upstairs, Jared was good with Reggie. He didn’t mind when Reggie went wild, jumping on him and licking his face all over.
“My sister hates it when he does that,” I said. “You can rinse your mouth before we go.”
“It’s okay. We’ll have a three-way saliva exchange.”
Please, please let him keep liking me after graduation.
; “Rule Number One Hundred,” I said. “Always kiss your girlfriend’s dog.”
“Right.”
Were there always so many people in the park? Bikers, strollers, dog walkers, skaters, joggers, toddlers. A clown walking on stilts. People were sprawled across every patch of grass we passed. Jared started whistling.
“We need to be near something I can tie Reggie to.” I had brought rope to attach to his leash so he could roam around after I tied him up.
“I’m looking.” He went back to whistling.
“What’s over there?” I pointed at a rocky hill.
We climbed it. As Nina would have said, points for privacy, points for a small tree to tie Reggie to, and points off for everything else. Dirt and rock, no grass. And we faced the ugly brick side of a park building.
“Is this okay?” Jared asked, kicking away a jagged piece of beer bottle.
I was still wearing my Claverford uniform, which was going to get filthy and gritty. “Perfect,” I said.
“At least we don’t have to get dirty.” Jared opened his backpack and pulled out a sheet, which he spread on the ground.
I tied Reggie to the tree. He sniffed along the building wall. Jared sat on the sheet and leaned back on his elbow. He patted the spot next to him.
I sat. My heart was beating too fast.
He tugged at my arm to bring me down to him. I lay next to him on the sheet. My hair swung over part of my face. He pushed it away and tucked it behind my ear. I felt hollow with expectation.
And Reggie landed between us, barking and growling. Jared jumped up.
“Reggie! It’s okay, boy.” I rubbed his ears, which he loves. “Nobody was hurting me.” He licked my face and wagged his tail. “It’s safe now.”
Jared came toward us and Reggie growled again.
“Bad! That’s bad! Bad boy!”
Reggie’s tail went down, and he licked my face again.
“Now he knows better,” I told Jared. “He won’t do it again.”
“You’re sure?” He took a step.
Reggie growled.
I stood up and walked about four feet from the sheet. Reggie followed me, tail halfway down, wagging madly, completely apologetic.
The Wish Page 7
