Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

  “All set?” Henry asked when I returned. I nodded.

  We were meeting Henry’s friend Tom at five, so we had some time to kill. After taking me to the Boston Common to show me the swan boats and the famous Make Way for Ducklings statues, Henry led me out of the park and toward Newbury Street.

  “All the girls in school love this street,” Henry told me as we walked past small boutiques with names I didn’t recognize and larger stores with names I did.

  When we came to a tiny storefront with sand piled in the front window and a mannequin wearing a beach pail on her head, Henry stopped walking.

  “You’d look good in that,” he told me, pointing to the sundress on the mannequin. “Do you like it?”

  With thin spaghetti straps that tied in bows, a tight elastic bodice, and a sort of Indian-inspired print in browns and burgundies and golds, it wasn’t something I’d normally choose for myself, but it was pretty. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then let’s go in.” Henry took my hand and led me inside.

  The boutique was empty and the sales clerk looked relieved to see us, which was probably why she fawned all over me when Henry pointed to the dress in the window and asked for it in my size.

  “Go try it on,” Henry urged, and before I could stop her the saleswoman had me in a dressing room and half naked behind a heavy velvet curtain.

  After tying the straps and making sure the elastic across my boobs was straight, I pushed aside the velvet curtain and stepped out.

  Henry smiled. “Wow.”

  “You like it?”

  “Like it? I love it. We’ll take it.”

  I reached under my armpit, where the price tag dangled off the side seam: $275.

  “Henry, it’s almost three hundred dollars.” And that’s when I remembered what Henry had said. All the girls at his school loved this street. He was used to seeing girls in three-hundred-dollar sundresses. And he was used to girls who were spending their daddy’s money, not their own tips.

  The saleswoman must have seen the conversation coming, because she suddenly found something she needed to tend to at the front of the store.

  “Henry, I can’t spend three hundred dollars on a dress.”

  “So don’t. I will.”

  For the first time the full impact of Henry’s situation hit me. It wasn’t just a new town house on Beacon Hill, a new summer estate on the Vineyard. It was the ability to do whatever he wanted. To have whatever he wanted. Including me.

  “I can’t let you do that, Henry.”

  “You could, if you wanted to.” He stepped forward and spun me around to face the full-length mirror on the wall behind me. “You look great.”

  Okay, he wasn’t lying. The browns and golds of the dress made my hair seem even blonder and brighter, and even though I didn’t exactly have a tan, the thin straps made my shoulders seem creamy and smooth.

  “Really, Henry, I can’t.” I know he didn’t intend to make me feel bad, but I didn’t want Henry spending three hundred dollars on me. I almost wished I hadn’t tried on the dress in the first place, then I wouldn’t know how hard it would be to take it off.

  Henry reached over and pulled the bow over my right shoulder tighter. “Consider it a present. You can wear it tonight.”

  “No, Henry. Really.”

  “Then I have an idea. How about you pay half and I pay half. That way we’re both happy and you don’t have to feel like you’re a kept woman.”

  I smiled at this. Henry always seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “Okay,” I agreed, even though I shouldn’t have been spending even half of three hundred on a freaking dress. But I couldn’t say no, because, honestly, I didn’t want to take the dress off. I loved it. And I loved the way Henry looked at me when I was wearing it.

  “Excuse me,” I called out to the saleswoman, and she came back to the dressing area. “We’ll take it.”

  We were meeting Tom at some burger place in Back Bay, and it wasn’t until we were on our way there that I started getting nervous. I’d never met any of Henry’s Boston friends. Sure, I knew the guys Henry hung out with on the island, but I also knew who Mona hung out with, mainly me, and I was nothing like her new friends.

  “You look really pretty, don’t be so nervous,” Henry told me as he pulled the restaurant door open and held it for me.

  I pulled the elastic top up one more time and went in.

  Tom was waiting for us at the table. He stood up as we approached.

  “You must be Kendra,” he said, giving me an appreciative glance that was obviously meant to signal his approval to Henry. “Nice dress.”

  “See,” Henry said to me, and then turned to Tom. “We just bought it today.”

  In jeans and a T-shirt, Tom looked like a totally normal guy, but it wasn’t like he’d be primped and polished like Mona’s friends. I mean, he was a guy. And he was even nice, asking me about where I was applying to school and what it was like having Henry back for the summer. It was more what he didn’t say that left me a little uneasy. Like when the waitress came to take our order and he didn’t even flinch before ordering a twelve-dollar cheeseburger. Or how he didn’t even look up at the waitress when he ordered, instead staring at the menu, trying to figure out if he wanted steak fries or onion rings.

  I had more in common with the waitress taking our dinner order than I did with Tom and his summers spent splitting time between Europe and Santa Barbara. All I wanted to do was go back to the house and be alone with Henry, for it to be just the two of us like it was on the island, where we didn’t have to try to straddle our two vastly different lives over overpriced burgers and pictures of his friends in front of the Eiffel tower.

  To anyone in the restaurant looking at us, the table of two guys and a girl, we probably would’ve seemed like we belonged, like we were the same. But even if I had the right dress on, and I was with the right guy, there was a part of me that felt like a poser sitting there with Tom and Henry in that restaurant. Like I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. And when the bill came and Henry reached into his wallet to pay for us, I realized that it didn’t matter if I paid for half my dress or if Henry thought I had all the college choices in the world, he’d still leave on the ferry come Labor Day weekend, and I’d still be left behind.

  “So what’d you think?” Henry asked on our way up the stairs to his room. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

  “Tom seems nice.”

  “You’re quiet because you’re thinking about Tom?” Henry nudged me. “I hope I shouldn’t be worried.” But I knew if anybody should be worried it was me.

  When we reached Henry’s room we both kind of stood there, trying to decide what to do next.

  “So, I guess this is when you tell me where you want to sleep.”

  I was feeling better since we left Tom, but it was always better when Henry and I were alone. “This is fine,” I told him. “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” I walked over to the bed and picked up my bag. Even though I’d decided to stay with Henry, I hadn’t yet decided I was ready to have him watch me undress. “I’m just going to change in the bathroom.”

  When I returned wearing a T-shirt and boxers, Henry was already lying in bed, the covers pulled up to his waist. Which was naked.

  He must have seen the flash of terror cross my face because he laughed and lifted the sheets. “I have boxer shorts on, Kendra.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh, at myself. I went to the bed and Henry moved over so I could crawl in next to him. “Queen-size bed, can’t beat it,” he commented.

  “A king-size bed,” I told him, and he smacked his head as if he hadn’t even thought of it.

  “Touché.” He turned onto his side and fit his body against mine. I felt my body stiffen.

  His chest was even darker than that first day at the beach, when I saw him surfing, and I realized he never talked about surfing with me, just fishing, almost as if he knew I couldn’t relate to
learning a new sport in Hawaii, only sitting beside a pond I’d known my whole life.

  Henry propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. “What’s wrong, Kendra?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know.”

  “Why’d you let Tom believe you bought me the dress?” I asked him, before I even realized what I was saying.

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “Yeah, you did, you told him we just bought it.”

  “Yeah, we, as in you and me.”

  I frowned. “That’s not what he thought you meant.”

  “Kendra, he’s a guy, he probably didn’t hear anything I said, we were talking about a dress.” Henry moved away from me, creating a space between us that was eerily reminiscent of how we used to sit in Poppy’s truck. And I didn’t like it. “What’s going on, Kendra?”

  “I felt like some girl you had to teach to dress up, like in My Fair Lady. Like Tom thought you took pity on me.”

  “Kendra, I would never make you feel like that, and if I did, I’m sorry. As for Tom, he wouldn’t know if you were wearing curtains.”

  “That’s Gone with the Wind, not My Fair Lady.” I thought Henry would laugh, but his expression was dead serious.

  “Whatever it is, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  The thing is, I believed him. I did, so why was I feeling like this? “It’s just complicated, you and me.”

  “I think you’re making it more complicated than it is. At the end of the day it’s just you and me, and I think it’s as simple as that.”

  How did he always see things so simply?

  “Why’d you ask me to get ice cream with you that first day?” I asked, almost hoping Henry would tell me he’d always had some deep-seated feelings for me. At least that way I’d see it like Henry did, simply. We were two people who grew up friends and realized one day that we wanted to be more than friends. The reality wasn’t as black-and-white.

  “I guess I just wanted to get ice cream with you,” Henry answered.

  “That’s it? Nothing more?”

  “I liked spending time with you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did you plan on kissing me that night?”

  “No.” Henry shook his head, then slowly changed it to a nod. “Well, maybe I’d thought about it, but not planned it.”

  I laid my head on his chest, exhausted, and looked up at the ceiling. There was no canopy, but the crown molding above us was beautiful, thick, intricately carved steps of dark wood that seemed to be making their way down to us.

  Henry leaned over and started kissing my neck, which felt amazing. I arched to the left, giving him more skin to kiss before turning my head toward him and offering my lips instead.

  “You feel amazing,” Henry whispered, moving his face down along my collarbone.

  “If you were not planning to kiss me on the ghost tour, were you not planning to sleep with me tonight either?”

  He looked up at me. “Look, I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. We can just sleep, okay?”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more than sleep with Henry, it was just that, given all that had happened that day, from our talk on the ferry to the dress and dinner, it wasn’t the way I wanted it to be.

  I turned on my left side and Henry curled up behind me, his knees tucked inside mine until we were spooning. He draped his arm around my waist and laid his hand against my bare stomach. It was the same spot he’d touched earlier, when he was tickling me, but this was entirely different. This time I didn’t want him to move his hand away.

  “I can’t believe that after all those years listening to you and Mona talk until two a.m., you and I are finally having our own sleepover,” he said.

  “Finally?”

  “Yeah.”

  I turned over onto my back and looked at Henry. “Finally, as in you’ve actually thought about this before? I mean, even before we went fishing?”

  “Come on, how could I not?”

  “Because you saw me throw up beef stew,” I reminded him.

  “Okay, there is that. But I also watched you get ready to go out and there were those nights when Mona fell asleep on the couch and you and I would just sit there and watch TV.”

  “We’d watch those shitty old horror movies,” I told him. “Like the one where that girl was attacked by the creature who looked like a guy in a frog suit.”

  “They weren’t shitty. They were classic.”

  “We obviously do not remember things the same way at all. What else do you remember about me?”

  Henry reached over and stroked my hair. “You chew your cereal too loud.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Would I kid about something that annoying? Every time you spent the night I knew I’d have to listen to it the next morning, you at the table crunching on Honeycomb or Chex or whatever we had in the house.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “You hum when you brush your teeth.”

  I laid my head on Henry’s chest and he kissed my head. “Do not.”

  “Really, I guess we’ll find out tomorrow morning, won’t we.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sound of Henry’s heart beating, the feeling of his fingers lightly going through my hair, the heat coming off his chest.

  Just as I felt myself begin to nod off, Henry pulled me into him. “If you want to go to Stanford, go to Stanford,” he whispered, his voice soft and low in the dark. “Just don’t do it for the wrong reason.”

  I lay there, pretending to be asleep so I didn’t have to answer. Because he was right.

  “Princeton has a better mascot,” he muttered, his voice fading as if he was struggling to stay awake. “So remember that when you’re making your decision.”

  Chapter 20

  The next day we drove straight to the deli from the ferry.

  “I’m starving,” Henry told me, patiently following a car with New York license plates into Edgartown. “I am so getting a Santa Fe Gobbler.”

  Since I didn’t know the menu, I had no idea what I was going to get, but I was starving, too.

  It was prime lunchtime, which meant we weren’t the only people who thought it was a good idea to go to the deli. The line had to be twelve people deep and we couldn’t even stand inside the store until the next round of customers left and there was space for us. While we waited outside, I cupped my hands around my face and peered into the plate-glass window. Behind the counter on the large blackboard Lexi had written the menu out in chalk, along with a brief description. I squinted until I could read the list.

  I saw the Santa Fe Gobbler Henry had told me about as well as the Hot Tuna Meltdown. As I went down the list I saw something called an Alice ’n’ Jack (turkey on multigrain bread with Jack cheese, green apples, and cranberry mayonnaise—my mother’s favorite) and a Charlie Tuna (tuna on a bagel with Swiss cheese and relish—my dad’s favorite). I didn’t see anything with my name on it until I got to the very end, where Lexi had written “Kendra with a Pickle on Top” (roast beef, Cheddar cheese, lettuce, pickles, and “NO MUSTARD” in Lexi’s round, bubbly writing).

  “Come on, there’s room.” Henry held the door open for me and we stepped inside to take our place in line.

  I was so busy reading and rereading the description for the sandwich Lexi had named after me, I didn’t even see the group of girls up front at the counter placing their orders.

  But one of them saw me.

  “Kendra?” When Mona said my name Lexi looked up from the register and waved to me, a smile on her face.

  Before I could even react, wave back at Lexi, or warn Henry that his sister was about ten feet from us, Mona was pushing her way past the line back toward me and Henry.

  “What are you two doing here?” Mona wanted to know, only she wasn’t addressing just me or Henry, she was asking both of us. She turned her attention to Henry, seemingly knowing I didn’t have an answer. “Henry, I t
hought you went to the city.”

  “I did,” he told her. “I just got back.”

  Apparently satisfied with Henry’s answer, Mona turned to me. “What are you doing here with him? I thought he just got back from the city.”

  “We’re just getting lunch, Mona, it’s no big deal.” I could see Jilly and Emily up front watching us.

  “I don’t get it, what’s going on with you two?” Mona asked me again.

  I could have told her, right then and there. She’d asked, she’d given me the opening, but I couldn’t. Not like this, in line at the Pot Belly Deli.

  “Nothing, Mona, we’re just friends having lunch.” I didn’t look over at Henry because I didn’t want to see the look on his face after hearing that I’d just reduced us to friends.

  “Really. Are you sure that’s it, because Emily talked to Tom this morning and apparently Henry and his new girlfriend had dinner with him last night.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. Mona kept talking, her voice getting louder and louder. “God, how can you stand there and lie to my face, Kendra? Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Or were you hoping I did, hoping everybody heard you spent the night in Boston with my brother?”

  “Mona, this is ridiculous, cut it out.” Henry stepped between us and pushed Mona away from me.

  By now the entire deli was staring at us. Behind the counter Lexi wore a quizzical expression, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But before Lexi could even ask for an explanation, before my parents realized I’d gone to the city with Henry, not Mona, I turned my back to them, pushing my way out the door.

  “Kendra!” Henry called after me, but I continued running up Winter Street, away from town, away from the crowds of people and the deli and Mona and her friends and my family, who by now had to be getting the full story from Mona.

  “Kendra, come on.” Henry was right behind me, his footsteps just over my shoulder. “Stop!” He grabbed my arm and I had no choice but to do as he said.