Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

Shelby had lost her patience with me. And she was holding a knife. I shouldn’t have been pressing my luck. “Look, do you want me to cover for you or not?”

  Leave it to Shelby to turn the tables on me. “Yeah, I mean, yes. Absolutely. Thanks.”

  “Fine, now go ahead and bring these baskets out to the front desk.”

  I gathered the handles of four baskets and prepared to leave. As the kitchen door swung closed behind me I heard Shelby mutter, “You owe me one.”

  And I did. Only I didn’t get the feeling she actually cared if she ever collected.

  Chapter 19

  We caught the eleven o’clock ferry from Oak Bluffs. It was absolutely gorgeous out, the sky a clear blue, and there was enough of a breeze to keep us cool but not so much that we couldn’t sit up on the deck and soak up the sun on the way to Woods Hole.

  “So your parents didn’t have a problem with you coming with me for the night?” Henry asked, moving over to give me some room on the bench.

  “I didn’t exactly tell them it was just you and me,” I admitted.

  “So what did you tell them?”

  “I just asked if I could go to Boston to spend the night at Mona’s house. Technically that was true. Why, what’d you tell Izzy?”

  Henry gave me a sheepish grin. “That I was heading into the city to see Tom for the night.”

  Even if neither of us said it out loud, I knew we were both thinking the same thing. If our being together was so fine and normal and not such a big deal, why didn’t we tell anyone?

  “I thought we could have a little picnic.” Henry opened up his backpack and slipped a sandwich from a brown paper bag. “Turkey on French bread?”

  “Mustard?” It was midweek and the ferry was only half full, so I moved over to give us some room to eat on the bench.

  “Absolutely not. I provided explicit instructions—no mustard.”

  There were certain benefits of eating lunch at Henry’s house for the past ten years, one being that he knew what I liked on my sandwiches and what I didn’t.

  I took my half of the sandwich and looked overhead for hungry seagulls waiting to swoop down and take a bite for themselves.

  “All clear,” Henry told me, looking up himself.

  I took a bite. “Wow, that’s good,” I said, my mouth full. “Zilda makes a great lunch.”

  “I’m sure she’d like to hear that, but I didn’t get this from Zilda. I got it from the deli.”

  “As in . . .”

  Henry didn’t let me finish. “As in the Pot Belly Deli. Don’t tell me you haven’t eaten there before?”

  I shook my head and wiped my mouth on a napkin Henry had pulled from his backpack and handed over to me.

  Henry stopped midbite. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You haven’t even had the Santa Fe Gobbler?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh my God, are you kidding me? Turkey and pepper Jack cheese with guacamole and salsa in a wrap.”

  “Sounds different.”

  “It’s amazing. It’s Mona’s favorite. She even has Malcolm hooked.”

  “You’ve all been to the deli?”

  “Yeah. Everyone goes. Hasn’t anyone even brought you a sandwich home for dinner or something?”

  “Actually, I’ve been big on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches lately, and I have to make them myself.”

  “What’s that saying? The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”

  Yep, that was me, the cobbler’s child. Only I didn’t have a Santa Fe Gobbler. But Mona and her friends did.

  “Why haven’t you ever gone?” Henry asked. “And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

  Henry never let me get away with not answering when he knew I had my reasons. That was probably one of the downsides to eating lunch at Henry’s house for the past ten years. He knew better. “Remember when we were in junior high and we’d all have our parents drop us off downtown in the summer so we could walk around or see a movie or something?”

  Henry nodded.

  “One night Mona and I were in line at the movies and we were behind some kids ordering popcorn. And when the guy behind the counter was at the machine filling their buckets, the kids were so rude and nasty, yelling ‘More butter’ and ‘Don’t stick your thumbs in my popcorn,’ like the counter guy wasn’t even a real person, he was just someone they shouted their orders to.”

  “Come on, Kendra, they were just stupid kids.”

  “No, Henry, they were summer kids.”

  “Why do you always do that? You always talk about it like there’s an us versus them.”

  “Well, there is, isn’t there?”

  “If that’s true, then what am I?”

  “You’re an us, of course.”

  Henry laughed. “There are a lot of people who’d actually consider me a them.”

  I put down my sandwich, my appetite suddenly gone. “You mean Emily and Jilly and Devon?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “Then what did you mean, Henry? Because if you’re saying that you’re one of them, that you wouldn’t mind being with a girl who wears make-up to the beach and tells her friends to get plastic surgery, then just say it.”

  Henry laid his hand on my knee but I pushed it off.

  “Hey, what’s going on with you? Why are you so pissed at me all of a sudden?”

  “Because you’re acting like I’m the bad guy.”

  “I didn’t say you were the bad guy, Kendra, I was just saying I’m not sure there are any bad guys in all of this.”

  “Look, I just don’t like the idea of my family catering to a bunch of people who bitch if their Swiss cheese isn’t imported.”

  “Come on, somebody really did that?” Henry asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “It was just an example.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that all those people you think are bitching just might actually think the deli is pretty damn good?” Henry shook his head at me. “There is no us and them, Kendra. There’s just people you know and people you don’t, and I think you’re making a way bigger deal out of it than it really is. You should go down to the deli and see for yourself, I’m sure your family would really like you to.”

  He placed his hand on my knee again. “Can I do that, or have I lost all touching rights?”

  I let his hand stay there. “You’re making me feel like a shitty daughter and sister.”

  “Don’t feel shitty, just do it. We can go together when we get back. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Maybe Henry was right. Maybe I was being oversensitive, or even just underestimating what Lexi, Bart, and my parents were capable of.

  “Hey, Henry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have any potato chips in your backpack?”

  He reached in and pulled out a blue and gold bag of chips and handed it over to me. A large black oval in the upper right-hand corner of the bag screamed “no trans fat” in gold lettering. Only instead of thinking my sister was a fruitcake, I realized they must have sold six hundred bags of the other brand of chips. And that didn’t make me think Lexi was nuts; it made me think she might know what she was doing with the deli after all.

  “Let’s drop our stuff off at home and then we can walk around,” Henry said once we’d parked the car in the underground garage.

  The town house was just one of many brownstones lining the narrow street. Unlike Malcolm’s Vineyard house, which was only designed and built to look like it had been there forever, the town house actually had been there for hundreds of years, which I learned from the plaque beside the front door stating the year it was built. I prepared myself for the scrutiny of a doorman, but inside the lobby was just a small beige room with a deep emerald green area carpet in the center of a tiled floor. So far Henry’s Boston home was way more normal than the one on the Vineyard. And if I had any trepidation about entering Henry’s Boston world, the town house’s nondescript lobby put me at ease
.

  Because the building was so old, and only four floors, I figured we’d walk up some stairs, but instead Henry went to what looked like an antique elevator and pressed the up button. “It’s too hot to walk,” he explained.

  When the elevator doors opened, we got in and Henry pressed the button for the third floor. It didn’t take very long, and about a minute later a little bell went off and the number 3 above the door lit up.

  Henry stepped back as the doors slid apart, letting me get out first. I had expected a hallway with a bunch of doors to choose from. I was entirely unprepared for what I got instead.

  “Holy—”

  “Yeah, I know.” Henry stepped around me and put his backpack on the floor.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you lived like this.”

  The elevator didn’t open into a hallway, it opened into the foyer of Malcolm’s home. A huge, marble floored foyer with a round table in the center and the biggest arrangement of flowers I’d ever seen, even bigger than the arrangements people sent to the funeral home when Poppy died.

  “You live on the entire third floor?”

  “And the fourth.” He pointed to the sweeping staircase over to our right. “Anyway, I can show you around, but it’s pretty much a house. The living room, kitchen, et cetera. My bedroom’s upstairs.”

  “This is not a house, Henry. It’s a mansion.”

  Henry ignored my observation. “Come on, I’ll take you upstairs and you can put your stuff away.”

  I followed Henry upstairs and down a long hallway to his room. Even when Henry and Mona lived in Poppy’s house, we didn’t go into Henry’s room that often. We just didn’t expect anything terribly interesting to be in there. But now going into Henry’s room felt personal, like an inside look at who he was, the things he cared about, much the same way Mona’s room at Poppy’s once said so much about her.

  “That’s Mona’s room,” Henry told me as we passed a yellow room on our left.

  I couldn’t help it, I had to look. I paused in the doorway and peeked my head inside, expecting a room similar to the one in Malcolm’s house, only done up in a different color palate. But what I found was nothing like the tastefully appointed lavender and green designer extravaganza. Not to say it wasn’t nice. It was, with beautiful cream-colored furniture and a four-poster bed. It was just that this room actually looked like Mona lived there.

  “Are those her pictures?” I asked Henry, stepping inside the room. Plain white wooden frames with black mats set off the black-and-white photos staggered on the walls.

  “Yeah. That one over there is the one that won the award.”

  I walked over to the eight-by-ten photo and stared at it, trying to see what Mona must have seen when she snapped the picture. It was a little girl looking at herself in the reflection of a building, only it must have been shot from the ground with Mona looking up, because while the real-life girl was small, her reflection seemed ten times her size.

  “It’s cool, isn’t it?” Henry came over and stood next to me. “That’s the John Hancock building. It looks like a huge mirror, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Who’s the girl?”

  “I don’t know. I think just some random little girl Mona found standing there.”

  There had to be at least fifteen other photos on the wall and I stood in front of each one, wondering why I’d never known, how I could have no idea that Mona was so good.

  “When did she start doing this? They’re amazing.”

  “In the fall she took a photography class. She hadn’t made any friends yet so she’d take her camera around the city and snap pictures.”

  Without even saying it, we both knew that if Mona had stayed on the island she never would have done this. Instead, she would have been on the sidelines of my field hockey games, cheering Henry on at the rink. It was almost as if moving away from the island had forced Mona to finally figure out that she could care about something, be good at it, instead of thinking she had to wait for someone to come back so she could begin.

  “Come on.” Henry took my hand and led me out of the room and down the hall. “This is my room.”

  We stopped in his doorway and I scanned the room for signs that this Henry, the one who lived in a town house the size of a small town, wasn’t the same guy I knew on the Vineyard, much in the same way the Mona I just saw was so dramatically different from the girl I thought I knew. I looked for bottles of expensive cologne on his dresser, a poster of expensive sports cars on his wall, but all I found was a photograph of Henry and Poppy holding a trout and tape measure, which read a very unimpressive thirteen inches.

  “I like your room.” I stepped inside and walked over to the bed, a very basic bed with a very basic brown headboard. It looked like any guy’s room, like his room on the Vineyard, only the walls were a little paler blue and the bedspread matched the blue and brown plaid curtains.

  “I know we didn’t talk about this, but if you want, you can stay in the guest room,” Henry offered.

  We hadn’t discussed our sleeping arrangements, probably because neither of us wanted to bring up what was so totally obvious. Here we were alone in his house for the night, and we could do whatever we wanted. Wherever we wanted, including Henry’s bed.

  “Why don’t you just drop your bag in here and you can decide later where you want to sleep,” Henry suggested, putting his own backpack on the dresser.

  “Okay,” I agreed, thinking how different this felt than the times I’d been alone with Robbie, and not just because all of Henry’s light fixtures seemed to be in working order.

  “So are you considering Princeton?” I asked Henry, touching the orange tiger decal on his mirror.

  “I guess, among others.”

  I sat down on Henry’s bed and lay back, staring at the white ceiling and the thick crown molding running the length of each wall. “You’re probably a lock, considering Malcolm makes you a legacy.”

  “I doubt anyone is a lock at Princeton, Kendra.” Henry lay down next to me, but rolled over onto his stomach so he could look at me.

  “Where else are you applying?”

  “Dartmouth, Williams, maybe Tufts, a few others.”

  “Must be nice to have so many choices.”

  “What are you talking about, you shouldn’t have any problem. I went to school with you, remember? I sat behind you in English, it was like watching those contestants on Jeopardy! The only thing missing was the buzzer on your desk.”

  I’d almost forgotten that Henry was in my honors English class freshman year.

  “Yeah, well, I doubt I’ll be applying to that many schools.”

  “So where are you applying?”

  “Stanford.”

  “Safety school?” Henry asked, nudging me.

  I didn’t laugh.

  “So why Stanford?”

  “Because it’s a great school.”

  “So are a bunch of other schools.” Henry reached over and started circling my belly button with his finger.

  “It’s in California.” I may as well have said that I liked the school colors, it sounded about as discerning.

  “Is that the point, to get away?”

  “Maybe,” I admitted, trying not to let Henry’s touch tickle.

  “You know, Princeton is good, too, and it doesn’t require crossing two time zones.”

  “Come on.” I laughed, grabbing his finger. “That tickles.”

  Henry sat up and moved over me, straddling my stomach and then reaching down to hold my hands over my head.

  “So you’re ticklish? Where, here?” He kept my hands over my head with one hand while he took the other and ran it lightly around my waist. “Or here?” His fingers moved around to my back.

  “Come on, that’s not funny.” I giggled, struggling to get loose.

  “Tell me you’re not going to California.”

  “No!” I tried to yell, but Henry already had his han
ds just above my hips.

  “Say it,” he ordered, but at this point I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get a word out even if I wanted.

  “Say it, Kendra, and I’ll stop.”

  “No California,” I gasped between fits of giggles.

  “Much better.” Henry rolled off me.

  “That was mean,” I told him, trying to tuck my shirt in and get myself back together.

  “I’m mean? You’re the one who wants to go to California for four years. Are you trying to punish me?”

  “I’d never punish you,” I told him, and he bent down to kiss me.

  “Come on.” Henry held out his hand for me to take it. “Let’s go out and I’ll show you the city.”

  Beacon Hill was a collection of small, narrow streets surrounding the statehouse. I couldn’t imagine how Henry knew his way around, but he did, and after a few twists and turns we were back on Charles Street, which I recognized from when we drove by on the way to Malcolm’s.

  “What smells so good?” I asked Henry as we walked down the street holding hands.

  “Probably the school.”

  “The what?”

  Henry pointed to a graystone about ten yards ahead of us. A navy blue flag with the initials BCI fluttered in the breeze. “The Boston Culinary Institute. It’s a cooking school. You can even eat there one night a month, my mom and Malcolm have been a few times. They say it’s great.”

  We continued walking, and when we reached the front door to the school I stopped, and not just because it smelled so good. “Can you wait here a minute, I just want to run in.”

  I left Henry on the sidewalk and took the steps two at a time.

  Inside the lobby I found a desk with literature on it and grabbed a brochure. “Are you interested in dining one night?” the security guard behind the desk asked.

  I folded the brochure and stuffed it in my pocket. “No thanks, just grabbing something for a friend.”

  On my way out I opened the pages, curious about what exactly they’d teach at a culinary school. The school had an entire program for baking and pastry arts, including classes completely devoted to cookies, tarts, and mignardises, whatever those are. I continued reading. Topics included methods of mixing, shaping, piping, baking, filling, finishing, and so much more. I had no idea there was anything more to baking than tossing some sugar and eggs in a bowl and mushing it all together with a wooden spoon. It was perfect for Shelby.