by Nancy Thayer
“Ha. Right.” Sebastian gave Keely a look that seemed almost friendly. “My parents want me to play team sports. Not sit alone in my room doodling.”
“But that’s not doodling! That’s art!” Keely protested. “And Izzy and I sit in our own rooms all the time. We’re writing a book.”
Sebastian’s mouth crooked up in a half-smile. “Cool. So just keep it a secret for me, okay, Keely?”
He said her name.
Keely went hot all over, pleased and surprised and funny feeling. Of course he knew her name! She was such a total freak!
Too embarrassed to speak, she nodded and left the room—pulling the door shut tight. She returned to her paper doll dress with the tape and also with an odd happiness in her stomach. She shared a secret with Sebastian, one that not even Isabelle knew.
Keely and Isabelle started high school. Big change, Keely thought. Like a bucket of water thrown at her face. The door to her grown-up life was opening.
Her classes fascinated and terrified her. She was torn between wanting to be smart and wanting to be cool. Girls who’d been boring in first grade were suddenly super cool. Cool was hard to achieve. Everything was so new, so weird, so funny! Keely and Isabelle always got stern looks from teachers when they giggled behind their hands in class.
She still had a powerful crush on Sebastian. Worse, as she grew older, her infatuation grew into an obsession. When she was at Isabelle’s house, she locked the bathroom door and picked up his toothbrush. It was like a holy icon. Sebastian had touched it. Sometimes she saw his boxer shorts in the bathroom laundry basket. Seeing something so intimate made her heart pound.
It helped keep her steady and sane that they had to concentrate on their homework in order to make good grades—and Keely especially needed good grades so she could eventually get scholarships for college.
The homework was hard, the social stuff was harder. Just walking from class to class was like taking some kind of bizarre test. More kids, more teachers, more staff crowded the halls. Everyone was so much older.
“I feel like a gazelle caught in a stampede of elephants,” Keely told Isabelle.
“I know, right? The seniors are so big.”
“Hi, Isabelle!” A junior, Diane, one of the cheerleaders, all glossy and cool, came right up to Isabelle. “How do you like it here so far?”
“It’s great, I guess.” Isabelle flashed an SOS at Keely.
Another cheerleader, Daisy, with such perfect makeup Keely couldn’t help staring, elbowed her way between Isabelle and Keely. “Hey, Isabelle, listen, if you ever need help with your homework or anything…”
“Plus we could give you the scoop on which teachers are cool.” It was another junior, Kyra.
Isabelle faked a smile. “Um, well…”
Diane pounced. “You could come to our houses, or we’d be glad to come to yours.”
So that’s their strategy, Keely realized. They were fawning over Isabelle so they could get access to Sebastian. She wanted to share her thoughts with Isabelle, but by now Keely had been nudged too far away even to see Isabelle.
What would Isabelle do? Keely knew these unctuous juniors with their long, silky hair were powerful. She would understand if Isabelle joined them. She’d be miserable, but she would understand.
“Thanks,” Isabelle said. “But I do my homework with Keely. We’ve got a perfect system set up.”
“Oooh.” The juniors made disappointed little chirping noises.
“Plus, I help them,” Sebastian said.
The hair on Keely’s arms stood up. She hadn’t heard him coming.
Before she could turn to speak to him, Sebastian put his arm around Keely’s waist and pulled her close to him.
“I help you learn a lot of things, don’t I, Keys?” Sebastian’s eyes danced with mischief as he looked down at her.
Keely was breathless. Sebastian had gotten so tall. His shoulders were so broad. The heat of his body ran all up and down her torso.
She was surprised she didn’t melt into a puddle right there and then.
The three cheerleaders did about-faces, flipping their short pleated skirts.
“Oh, Sebastian, hi!”
“Hi,” Sebastian said.
He leaned down, put his mouth next to Keely’s ear, and whispered, “Just go with this, right?”
Keely nodded.
Diane, the leader of the pack, cooed at Isabelle. “If you ever think you’d like to try out for cheerleader next year, we’d love to teach you the basics. And you, too, Keely.”
“Thanks,” Isabelle said. She was turning burgundy, and Keely knew Isabelle was holding her breath to keep from laughing.
Sebastian said, “Keely won’t have any free time.”
He bent down, getting his face right in front of Keely’s, and kissed her sweetly, but firmly, on her mouth.
On her mouth!
His lips were soft and warm. He smelled like the Ivory soap all the Maxwells used, mixed with a very enticing aroma of warm male.
When he pulled away, Keely kept her eyes on the ground, knowing she didn’t dare look at Isabelle. Sebastian pulled her tighter against him, so her cheek nestled against his chest. She knew her face was red.
She could hear his heart beat.
“Okay, then,” Diane said pertly. “Isabelle, give us a call. Byeeee.”
The three cheerleaders sauntered away, chattering.
“OMG, you guys!” Isabelle whispered. “Sebastian, you are the most fabulous brother in the world!”
“Those girls are witches,” Sebastian said. “Don’t let them get to you.”
“You can let go of Keely now,” Isabelle said. Reaching over, she put her hand on Keely’s arm and yanked her away.
Isabelle’s expression jolted Keely from her state of shock.
“Yeah, thanks, Sebastian,” she croaked.
“Anytime,” Sebastian said with a sideways quirk of his mouth. He loped away.
Keely did a few yoga breaths and gathered her thoughts. “You could be a cheerleader!”
“I don’t want to be a cheerleader,” Isabelle said stormily. “I don’t want to be a cutesy snob.”
“I don’t, either,” Keely said, still so stunned she could scarcely speak. She opened her locker and took out her backpack, organizing what books she had to take home. She couldn’t begin to think what to say to Isabelle about Sebastian kissing her. If Isabelle weren’t Sebastian’s sister, if Isabelle didn’t kind of own Sebastian, Keely might have been honest. Sebastian kissed me, she might have said.
Isabelle stood with her hands on her hips, like a mad mom or a soccer coach. “And I hope you’re not going to get all stupid because my brother kissed you. You know he was only pretending so those girls wouldn’t dis you. He only did it because you’re my friend and he knows how much you mean to me.”
“I know that!” Keely couldn’t say his name without blushing. She rolled her eyes. “Those girls. What brats.”
They shouldered their backpacks, slammed and locked their lockers, and strolled to Keely’s house. Her mother had the day off and always made chocolate chip cookies.
* * *
—
In December, along with their friends, Keely and Isabelle were allowed to go to the Cape on the Iyanough ferry by themselves, without parents. During the trip over, they snickered like excited five-year-olds. They took a cab to the mall and shopped for Christmas presents and had fattening French fries and enormous Cokes at the food court. As they ate, they watched the other shoppers, especially the terrifyingly cool Cape girls, walk by. These teens wore jeans with high heels. They wore shirts that stopped at their midriffs even though it was winter. They tossed their long hair carelessly and bent toward each other, whispering. Tall, cool boys in down jackets and hoodies came along and they clustered together, sometimes brea
king off in pairs, a boy running his hand up beneath a girl’s shirt.
Keely had never felt so immature. During the ferry ride back to the island, Keely and Isabelle were quiet, absorbed in their own thoughts. They’d always thought they were so cool, and they were, but they were only fake cool. They yearned to be cooler.
And dreaded it.
Over the winter and spring, they spent more time with their other friends, Janine and Theresa and Ceci. They became a clique, which they proudly designated as the Smart Girls. The ones who wanted to go to college, who did not want to get pregnant in high school, who cared more about books and volunteering and cleaning the beaches than flirting with guys or getting drunk or choosing the color of their nail polish. Of course they were hiding their interest in boys, or at least pretending to. The girls were dealing with changing bodies, zits and menstrual periods, mood swings that came upon them without warning, like a gale force wind. They cried a lot, and didn’t really know why. They ate a disgusting amount of junk food, sometimes the five of them devouring Cheetos and Ben & Jerry’s and a Pepperidge Farm cake in the same evening.
Suddenly summer arrived. Windows and doors all over town opened. They were freed from school! Everyone but Isabelle took a job to save money for college. Isabelle went off with her family to Scotland.
“She’s so lucky,” Ceci complained one hot afternoon when she and Keely had finished their work for Clean Sweep house cleaning. They were gathered in Ceci’s air-conditioned family room. “She always gets to go someplace amazing. Paris last year. Scotland this year. It’s hard to like her sometimes.”
“Don’t be mad at her,” Keely replied. “It’s her parents who make her go away for the summer. They always have a big family trip. Izzy never comes home bragging about it or being all la-de-da. Plus there are worse places to be in the summer than Nantucket!”
“Maybe we all want what we can’t have,” Ceci said.
“Well, listen to you, Ms. Philosopher!” Theresa laughed.
“What do you want that you can’t have?” Keely asked.
Ceci grinned. “Tommy Fitzgerald.”
“Damn, girl, you dream big,” Theresa said.
“It doesn’t hurt to dream.”
Tommy Fitzgerald came from a gigantic family, one that had been on the island for decades, even centuries. Part Cape Verdean, part Wampanoag, part Irish, his black hair and black eyes in his craggy face were compelling. He was tall and lean and quiet. In school, Tommy seldom smiled, always walked hunched with his hands in his jeans, staring at the ground as if expecting it to fall away from him at any moment. But he was a great athlete, and quarterback for the junior varsity football team. All bets were on Tommy making varsity his sophomore year.
“Could we talk about something other than boys?” Keely asked.
“Do you mean there is something other than boys?” Theresa laughed.
For Keely, there was definitely something other than boys. Books. She had always cherished the dream of being a writer, and all the books she’d read about writing advised her to read, read, read. That was exactly what she did whenever she had any free time that summer. She kept a record of what she’d read and what she thought of each book in a plain three-ring binder. As the summer passed, the pages filled with titles. Wuthering Heights. To Kill a Mockingbird. Peyton Place. The Good Mother. The Giver. Bleak House. Lives of Girls and Women.
Sunday was her favorite summer day. She didn’t have to work, so she got to lie in bed reading, only venturing out occasionally to fetch a bag of potato chips or an apple. Many summer days her father took her out to Great Point to surf cast, but on this Sunday in late August, her father was out deep-water fishing with a friend. Her mother was at work. Keely was lazing around in boxer shorts and a tank top with a novel in her hand. She heard someone knock on the front door, and her first thought when she opened the door was that she hadn’t brushed her hair yet.
“Sebastian!”
“Hey.”
For a moment, she could only stare. He was tall, big-boned, his hair white-blond, his skin tanned, his nose sunburned. He wore board shorts and an old rugby shirt, so many times washed it had faded from red to pink.
She gathered herself enough to speak. “Are you back from Scotland?”
He held his hands out to his sides in a duh gesture. “Probably.”
“Oh, well—is Isabelle home?”
“She is. I’m sure she’ll be phoning you any minute now. But I wanted to give you something before she hogs all your time.”
“You want to give me something?” Keely echoed.
Sebastian held out a book.
The Mysterious Benedict Society.
“Oh!” Keely’s heart sparked when their fingers touched as she took the book.
“Have you read it?”
“No. No, I don’t know about it. Why—” Keely was so moved she was about to cry.
“Because you and Izzy like to read and write.” He leaned on the door jamb, his face close to hers.
“Um…do you want to come in? Have…a Coke?”
“No thanks. I’ve got to get back.”
“Oh. Well…thank you for the book.” She ran her hand over the cover. “It’s really…nice.”
Sebastian leaned forward and kissed her forehead quickly, lightly, and moved away, smiling. “See you.”
She watched him walk away. After a moment, he broke into a jog and disappeared down the street.
She shut the door and sank right down onto the floor, cradling the book to her rapidly beating heart. What did it mean? It was only a book, but it was a present.
Had Sebastian really thought about her when he was in Scotland?
Did Isabelle know he’d brought Keely the book? Oh, she wished she’d asked him, because either Isabelle would tease Keely unmercifully or she’d be furious that her brother had given her a gift.
She wouldn’t tell Isabelle. She’d let Isabelle bring it up, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t put the book, in its distinctive British paperback version, on her desk or shelves. She’d hide it under her mattress and bring it out to sleep with her at night. And what dreams she’d have.
* * *
—
Isabelle never mentioned Sebastian and the book. She gave Keely a green tartan headband that looked great with Keely’s brown hair. This year they were sophomores, higher up the coolness ladder. They went with a group of friends to shop for clothes on the Cape, and school started, and everything was easier than the year before. They knew their way around the school, which teachers were super strict or boring. School was easier, yes, but Keely’s nerves were tuned up to super sensitive. She knew from her mother, the nurse, that adolescents were crazy from hormones, but knowing that didn’t soothe her.
It helped to keep a diary. Almost every night, Keely wrote in her journal, pouring out on the lined paper of the red leather Daily Diary with its brass lock and key—she had bought it herself, needing the privacy, not that she thought her parents would ever pry. The actual facts of the day, the grade she’d gotten on a test, the after class pep rally for the high school football team, the Whalers, all that she mentioned only briefly. It was her emotions that came spilling out of her onto the page. The embarrassment she’d felt when the math teacher called on her and she didn’t know the answer. The odd force field of physical sensations that shivered around her when a senior on the basketball team said, “Hi, Keely,” as he passed her in the hallway. The jealousy she felt when she saw Isabelle and Paige, who was kind of slutty, whispering to each other at lunch. The pages of her diary were not long enough to contain all she needed to write. She also used a three-ring binder, where, for privacy’s sake, she wrote about her life in the third person, as if she were writing a novel about a tenth grade girl. The tenth grade girl, who Keely named Trudy, endured all manner of humiliations. Huge red zit
s on the end of her nose. A senior she had worked with on a community Clean Beach project striding past her in the hallway, giving “Trudy” a blank-eyed stare, as if she’d never seen her before. Her growing awareness that her clothes, even her shoes, were not what the best of the cool seniors wore.
And, shamed to put it in black and white, she wrote about her envy of Isabelle, who was popular with all the girls in every grade, even though Isabelle said it was only because Sebastian was her brother.
Keely and Isabelle and the Smart Girls sometimes went places with a bunch of guys—to the movies at the Dreamland, to beach parties on autumn nights, to talks at the library. Out for pizza. Up to Boston to visit the MFA and see a play, with adult supervision, of course. Sledding at Dead Horse Valley at night, with a full moon.
Keely waited every day for a phone call from Sebastian, maybe asking if she liked the book. It never came. She even, hopelessly, ridiculously, checked the snail mail every day—nothing. She lingered in the school halls, hoping to run into him, but no such luck. She spent more time than ever at the Maxwell house, but Sebastian was always out—soccer practice, swim team, basketball practice. When she did catch a glimpse of him in his house, he quickly said, “Hey,” before running down the stairs and out the door. She didn’t know what to think. Why would Sebastian bring her a present and then ignore her?
Maybe he had liked her, just a little, but now he was a senior, dating popular senior girls.
During the long Christmas break, Mr. Maxwell took his family to New York to see all the new plays. The old familiar jealousy stung Keely. She didn’t care about Europe that much, but how she longed to see New York, the city packed skyscraper to skyscraper with writers, editors, and publishing houses!
She shoved away the jealousy and allowed herself to enjoy the familiar traditions in her own home. Her parents rarely had free time, but the Christmas season was one they cherished. Two weeks before Christmas, the Greens had a tree-decorating party, with friends of all ages enjoying eggnog—spiked and natural—and bacon-wrapped scallops and pumpkin spice cookies. Christmas Eve they watched Home Alone, which never got old. They raced off to church for the “midnight service,” which started at ten-thirty and made Keely cry (quietly) at the laurel-decked sanctuary and the soaring hymns. Christmas morning they opened presents, nothing surprising now that Keely could no longer be thrilled by the sight of a doll or a bike, but a fun tradition all the same. Of course Keely received books. She helped her mother stuff the turkey and set it in the oven. For the rest of the day, the three of them did exactly what they wanted, where they wanted. Her father watched football on the living room television. Her mother luxuriated in bed, watching the Hallmark Channel. Keely curled up in her own bed, reading. She thought they were like a kind of bee family, each with its own cozy spot in the same honeycomb. The family sat formally at the table to eat the extravagant turkey dinner, but her father ate his pumpkin pie in front of the TV. It was a lazy, cozy, luxurious time, when Keely felt as safe as a little bear cuddled by her parents in a warm cave.
