The Girl Who Invented Romance

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Sure.”

  For a while there was no sound except the scrawl of pencils and the occasional whisper, “I need another name. Think of another name for me.”

  Parker carried a tray of sodas around while Faith stooped over each person with a bowl of chips and dip. Nobody wanted food. They were too involved with future boyfriends and girlfriends.

  When all the players had straightened up and had a sip of their drinks, I said, “Okay. Turn your boards over.”

  There before them lay my precious game. Interlocked hearts, bouquets of flowers and the elusive Happily Ever After.

  “Oh, Kelly, it’s beautiful!” cried Katy. “It’s a match for my cake.”

  “It’s fabulous,” said Wendy, unable to believe that I could be capable of anything fabulous.

  “Oooooh, this is going to be so much fun,” said Julie.

  The boys remained silent.

  “Now, the game is played with one die. Each turn, you’ll throw it two times,” I said. “The first throw is the number of spaces your game piece moves. Let’s say you throw a three and you land on a heart card. You take a heart card from the pack and it will list six things. You throw your die a second time and the number that comes up is the number of your date. So if you wrote Jody under number one and you throw a one, then number one on the card describes Jody. Number one might drive a Humvee or be rated medium sexy. But number one might have eight hundred zits or never brush his teeth. You have to list that under your date and build your date’s personality as you go.”

  “Can we discard dates that never brush their teeth?” said Wendy.

  “You cannot dump anyone,” I said. “You can only be dumped.” Actually, this wasn’t true, as some of the Broken Heart cards called for disposing of hitherto perfectly delightful people. But I couldn’t resist.

  “Stop talking,” said Donny crossly. “I’m ready to play.”

  “Wait, wait. I have more directions. There are also yellow rose spaces. Each of these is a date, not a trait. The date cards describe what you do on this date. The object of the game is to reach Happily Ever After. You can’t go to Happily Ever After with a person you have not dated, so if you never have a date with one of your names, you can’t end with that date no matter how terrific he turned out to be.”

  They were all studying the board, calculating what might happen to this name or that one, reaching for the cards to shuffle through the possibilities and see what was in store for them.

  “What are the hearts with the slashes?”

  “Broken Hearts. That’s when things go bad. You roll your die and whatever number comes up, it applies to that number date.”

  “Oh, no,” said Katy. “This is too real.”

  “Stop talking,” said Donny again. “Let’s play. I’ll go first at my table.”

  So they played.

  I hoped for a good verdict on my game. I knew my premise was good. I just didn’t know if my game itself was good. Would they get sick of writing things out? Would it go too slowly or would they fly on to the final square without managing to build characters for their dates?

  But I already had one verdict that mattered.

  Will was on my side.

  And I already knew a bit about his character. And about Parker’s, and Faith’s, and now Katy’s, and Kevin’s, and Donny’s.

  I looked over at Will.

  He had been looking at me all along.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Did any hostess ever give a more successful party? How many people can dish out love and romance along with cake and ice cream?

  We finished one round of games and Parker and Faith joined the next round.

  Katy had a splendid date named Zane, whose personality developed so well that Katy wanted his phone number, and we were cheering her on to Happily Ever After.

  Faith had two nice young men with a relatively low number of vices, Adam and Brandon. Adam took her on outstanding dates while Brandon showered her with gifts and flowers. But she ended up in Happily Ever After with Clarence, about whom nothing was known except that he had a nice smile and large feet.

  Wendy’s dates were glorious. She was always off mountain climbing or partying with famous rock stars. But in the home stretch, she landed on Broken Hearts and was out of the game.

  Parker drew a very nice and strikingly lovely girl named Celeste, but she had one awful characteristic: She put him down in public. But she was the only one of his dates who could go with him to Happily Ever After. “I am not going to Happily Ever After with a girl who puts me down in public,” Parker kept yelling. Then, with his last throw of the die, he landed on a Lose All Vices square, so Celeste became perfect, and sighing with relief, Parker took Celeste on to Happily Ever After.

  “I had a great time, Kelly,” said Donny, when the game was over. “I wish I really knew Christie and Bitsy. I wouldn’t have minded going around the board a second time with them and having a few more dates. Thanks for including me.”

  “Me too,” said Katy, who was getting a ride home with Kevin instead of calling her parents. “A great game, Kelly. Parker is right. You have to get this thing produced by a real game board manufacturer.”

  I beamed at her. “Thanks for the cake.”

  Wendy surprised me the most. “It’s good, Kelly. Sometimes you don’t step forward when you ought to. Stop being a wallflower. Get out there and accomplish things. You’re good. This game is more than good; it’s wonderful. Go for it.”

  When she and Jeep were gone, Will said, “I don’t like to side with Wendy, but she’s right. Go for it.”

  Are you it? I thought. Are you what I should go for? Or is everybody referring to the board game?

  “How did you fare, Will?” asked my mother. “Did you fall in love and arrive at Happily Ever After?”

  Will’s eyes never left mine. “I didn’t progress quite that far.”

  Don’t play games, Will, I thought. I want this to be real.

  “It’s not that late, Kelly,” said Will. “I feel like a movie. There must be something at Cinema Six we could go see.”

  I didn’t even have time to shriek with joy. My father, who had kept a low profile during the party, interrupted. “Nobody is going anywhere until this room is cleaned up. You may not leave this mess for us.”

  I hadn’t noticed the mess, because to me the room was a thing of beauty, filled with laughter and friendship and fun. But how right he was. Pencil stubs and empty soda cans and broken taco chips were everywhere. There was a lot of work to do. My heart sank.

  “Kelly and I will clean it up,” said Will. “You guys go on into the kitchen and play another round of Romance.”

  “Good idea,” said my father, herding Mom and Parker and Faith ahead of him. “I haven’t played it yet.”

  “I’ll pick your names for you,” said Faith. “Yolanda. Eunice. Bunny.”

  My father laughed. “I’ll pick my own names, thank you. Number one will be Vi. Number two will be Violet. Number three will be Viola. Number—”

  “That’s against the rules,” said Faith.

  “Well,” said my father, “in real-life romance, as opposed to board games, you get to make your own rules. And I play the game of romance with Violet.”

  When the door was closed, Will was frowning at it. “Your father didn’t care enough about your board game to try it?”

  “I didn’t show it to him. He’s been kind of negative toward romance lately, remember.”

  “Oh. I like him again, then. I was afraid he didn’t want to bother with what his daughter did and then I wouldn’t have any use for him. On the team, three of us have parents who never miss a game. It can be thirty miles away in the hills during a snowstorm and our parents get there. My parents come, and my stepparents and usually my ex-stepparents. They even sit together. My ex-stepmother is the one who always knows my stats. But some guys, their parents never come. Like Angie. I don’t know his mother and father.” Will reflected. “But I know they’re no
good.”

  I was staggered.

  Poor Angie! A mother and father who cared so little, they couldn’t be bothered to show up when he played varsity? No wonder he was jumpy with girls. He must not even know what love really is.

  How lucky I am, I thought. I know what love is. And Will, whose parents and stepparents seem to come and go, he knows what love is. They’ve never stopped loving him.

  I have to redesign the board, I thought. There’s so much that I left out. All that I’ve learned from Will, my parents, Parker, Faith—even Wendy. But perhaps on a mere piece of cardboard there isn’t room for even a fraction of what love is.

  Will and I cleaned up.

  I vacuumed.

  He took out the garbage.

  We surveyed the room.

  We sat down on the sofa.

  We looked at each other.

  “Aaaaaah,” said my brother. “Come into the living room to find a little privacy of our own and what do we find instead, Faith? People making out all over the place.”

  Will and I hadn’t even touched yet.

  “So how about the movies after all?” said Parker. “The four of us.” He grinned at me. “You still get the backseat, Kelly.”

  “But the company in the backseat,” Will assured me, “will be pretty good.”

  We headed for the front door, and I looked in on my parents as we left. They were playing the game. They were laughing. They were back at the Start Heart. I liked them in that square. It fit.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Parker said, “I was on the phone with Wendy.”

  “Wendy!” I said. “I thought you were over her!”

  “Relax. She and I are in charge of fund-raising for the class trip. Car washes, bake sales and dances are not going to bring in enough money. So Wendy had a fantastic idea.” My brother put both his hands on my shoulders. Since Will was standing behind me with both his hands on my shoulders, I was trapped.

  “I’m not a senior. What do I care whether your class takes a trip?” I said.

  “Wendy wants us to act out the board game. Real people will pay for tickets and be real players. We’ll chalk the board game out on the high school parking lot. We’ll set up Romance booths. We’ll sell roses and balloon bouquets and raffle off dinners for two. Wendy thinks we can make a ton of money, because people will pay anything to get a little romance in their lives.”

  Who could resist?

  Wendy organized it all.

  Make a note of this: If you want publicity, choose a girl who loves the sound of her own voice. Wendy got free radio spots and local TV spots because sponsors loved the concept. We had four newspaper interviews and the usual posters tacked to every telephone pole for miles. And when the day came, practically the whole town showed up. Every senior, junior, sophomore, freshman—and all their parents.

  I guess nobody outgrows romance.

  More adults than teens played.

  More husbands than boyfriends bought roses.

  People walked so carefully around the squares, as if afraid of destroying romance with a misplaced step. They moaned when they hit Broken Hearts and cheered when they had dates.

  I did this, I thought.

  “There you are,” said Will. “Come on over to Happily Ever After and I’ll buy you a soda.”

  We circled a fifty-foot heart and shared the soda.

  And whether it was Happily Ever After, I wouldn’t know for years and years. But I was in love with Will and he was in love with me and the game of romance went on.

  About the Author

  Caroline B. Cooney is the author of the following books for young people: The Lost Songs; Three Black Swans; They Never Came Back; If the Witness Lied; Diamonds in the Shadow; A Friend at Midnight; Hit the Road; Code Orange; The Girl Who Invented Romance; Family Reunion; Goddess of Yesterday (an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book); The Ransom of Mercy Carter; Tune In Anytime; Burning Up; The Face on the Milk Carton (an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice) and its companions, Whatever Happened to Janie? and The Voice on the Radio (each of them an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults), What Janie Found, What Janie Saw (an ebook original short story), and Janie Face to Face; What Child Is This? (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults); Driver’s Ed (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a Booklist Editors’ Choice); Among Friends; Twenty Pageants Later; and the Time Travel Quartet: Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, Prisoner of Time, and For All Time, which are also available as The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II.

  Caroline B. Cooney lives in South Carolina.