by Susan Shreve
Tommy and I are in the potting shed, which my mom uses for gardening, looking for seeds—zucchini or corn or squash or even flower seeds—but we can't seem to find any on the shelves.
“We can buy some at the drugstore,” I say as I look through a tool case.
“We'll find some.” Tommy is rummaging in the back of an old bookcase where my mother keeps her little cardboard pots, which she fills with seeds every spring and puts in the ground in summer after the seeds have sprouted. “Here's one,” he says, handing me a package of zucchini seeds.
I slip it into my pocket.
“Aren't you going to open it to see what they look like?” he asks. “They could be rat poison, you know. I read about a boy served rat poison in his cereal.”
“Seeds are seeds,” I say, heading for the door, planning to go with Tommy into our empty house, get out the wine-glasses and lemonade and chocolate chip cookies my mom made last night for a snack, and sit on the front porch with our feet on the railing.
But I'm just out the potting shed door when I hear my mom screaming “El-ea-nor!” and all this time I've thought she was at school with my dad packing up for summer.
El-ea-nor means bad news, so I tell Tommy I've got to go and so does he and I'll call him from the sunporch as soon as I know what's up with my annoying mother.
“My mom is always changing her mind,” I say. “She promised she'd be at school with my dad all morning. And she's here.”
“And you can't bring me in the house like an ordinary friend because your parents think I'm a criminal?” He's standing outside the potting shed, his hands in his pockets, in full view of my mother who's probably in the kitchen looking out the window at us.
“Something like that,” I say.
“Tell them I'm only a petty thief,” he says, and takes off, jumping over the fence.
As it turns out, only my father has gone to clean his classroom. My mother is on the telephone with Clarissa Bowers.
“Have you seen Tommy Bowers?” she asks when I burst into the kitchen.
“No,” I reply. “I saw him earlier. He was headed up to the shops.”
“He's headed up to the shops,” my mom says to Clarissa Bowers.
Probably at this very moment while Clarissa is standing in the kitchen with the telephone in her hand saying goodbye to my mom, Tommy is walking in the back door.
“I thought you were going to school today,” I say, reaching into the cookie jar.
“Well, I didn't.”
“Evidently,” I say.
“Why don't you have some carrots?” she says. “I've got a fresh bag of the tiny ones in the fridge.”
“Because I want a cookie,” I say, sitting in a chair, looking sullen I imagine. “Sullen” is my mom's favorite word for me since Christmas. That and “don't eat this, eat that.” Mom is on a healthy food kick and it makes me want to eat cookies and hot dogs and ice cream for every meal.
“We need to talk about camp,” she says, sitting down at the table with the bag of carrots she's recommended for me.
“When Dad gets home,” I say, putting my feet up on the kitchen table, which drives her crazy.
“We'll talk now,” my mother says, reaching over to push my feet off.
“What did Clarissa call about?” I ask.
“Tommy's in trouble. That's all I know.” She gathers a pile of clean towels that she's just folded and heads out of the kitchen. “She sounded upset. I don't know whether she can handle a boy like Tommy.”
I follow her upstairs to my room where she collapses in my flowered rocking chair with the towels in her lap.
“El,” she begins, and already I know the conversation that is coming and brace myself for it. “Any plans you may have about a job this summer are kaput.” She likes the word “kaput.”
“I have a job already,” I say.
“What job?”
“A day camp on Saturdays for the little kids around here so parents can get stuff done.”
“No,” my mom says, getting up with the laundry, putting it away in the linen closet. “Next year we'll talk about jobs.”
“Maybe so,” I say, “but this year I'm running a camp for little kids.”
“There's nothing, really nothing for you to do in Toledo this summer,” my mom says. “And Saturday is only one day in the week. Six more days for you to do nothing and that doesn't work.”
“I won't be going to camp,” I say.
It's beginning to occur to me that I am too old for my parents to make me do anything except go to school.
“I'm perfectly capable of figuring out what to do with six days a week without help,” I say.
“We'll talk to your father when he gets back.”
“That's very good news,” I say. “Your husband, my father, agrees with me. He told me so.”
She's walking down the steps now and I think I hear my father's car in the driveway, so I slip across the room to the sunporch and lie on the cot hoping to catch a glimpse of Tommy Bowers.
* * *
It's sunny and softly cool on the sunporch, the heat of the early summer sun warming my skin and the only sounds I hear are birds and an occasional airplane overhead or a child crying. For some reason, I can't hear the street traffic or the sound of kids racing up and down the sidewalk. Next door Miranda is playing the violin.
I press my back into the cup of the cot, watching the trees with just the slightest of wind bend toward the Bowerses' house, keeping very still so I'll hear if someone calls.
Later I'm going to ask Tommy if he's my boyfriend, if this is what a boyfriend means. Maybe on Saturday when we go to the malls outside of town where we shop for camp clothes, which I won't be needing, I'll buy him a commitment ring.
A commitment ring is silver, sometimes plain, sometimes with engraving, and a girl and boy wear matching ones on the ring finger of their right hands. It doesn't mean they're engaged. It's like an almost ring.
Almost is how I'm beginning to feel about Tommy. Which means today, this afternoon, June 15, on the sun-porch of my house in Toledo, Ohio, he's almost the most important person in my life.
The silky feeling running across my skin isn't a crush. “Crush” is my mother's word for Big-Time Romantic Interest. I've had a lot of crushes, twelve at least, since the beginning of kindergarten when I let Rusty Fairstein kiss my fingers while we were standing in line to go outside for recess.
This is something else. I feel as if I've swallowed a space capsule and I'm launched in a flash of light, my stomach full of Day-Glo or sequins or something sparkling inside out.
At first I don't hear Tommy call my name. And then I do.
He's standing at the window of his bedroom and his voice is a whisper merging with the street sounds.
I run over to his side of the sunporch.
“I may be detained quite a while,” he says.
“Detained?”
“I'm locked in my room.”
“How come?”
“I'm in trouble, so Clarissa locked me in here.”
“What kind of trouble?” I ask.
“I'll tell you when I see you in person.”
“You have to escape,” I say.
“What would you suggest?”
“I think the only thing you can do is climb out the window. I did it once when I was punished for putting my baby tooth in Milo's mouth and he swallowed it. I tied a sheet to the doorknob and shinnied down and went over to my friend P.J.'s house and called my parents to say I was moving in with P.J.”
“But you didn't.”
“Of course not.”
He opens the window and leans out, checking the height from his bedroom to the cement driveway.
“Maybe I can do it,” Tommy says.
“When will I see you then?” I ask.
But he has closed the window.
And now he's gone.
When I go downstairs, my mother is going through some family photographs to frame. My father is gone again, this time
to the market with Milo.
“We're going camping in Vermont this summer,” she says cheerfully, as if what I said earlier to her about camp made no difference. “Daddy and I just decided.”
“Why?” The only reason they'd be coming to Vermont is to see me at camp.
“We love Vermont.” She puts a picture of Puss in a wood frame. “Did Tommy mention to you what kind of trouble he's in?”
“I didn't see him,” I say.
“That's funny. I thought I heard you talking to him just a little while ago.”
“That wasn't me,” I say.
She has a picture of Milo and me in Vermont last summer. Milo's on a pony, I'm sitting on a fence, the sign for Camp Farwell is behind us.
I put my head down on the kitchen table, resting it on my folded arms, my face turned away, and I'm thinking that I'd like to tell her things the way I used to do when I was younger, even last year when I'd tell her everything important to me.
But now if I tell her about Tommy Bowers, I'll probably be shipped to Thailand just to keep me away from him.
She must be looking through my brain as usual because she reaches over, pulling the hair away from my face, and says, “Tell me what it is you like so much about Tommy Bowers.”
“Tommy Bowers?” I act surprised, as if I have a lot of Tommys in my life.
“It's clear you like him very much.”
“I do,” I say. “We disagree about a lot of things lately.”
“Not necessarily,” she says. “I'm interested in your friendship with Tommy because you're very picky about friends and, even though I know you'd like to be popular like Rosie O'Leary, you're really too particular to be popular.” She finishes putting the picture of me with Milo in the frame and sets it up on the table. “I admire that.”
“Admire?” I ask.
Truthfully I'm pleased but I can tell she's trying to get in my good graces after our camp fight and I'm not ready for that. Moms have a slippery way about them. At least mine does.
Of course I want to be popular, and “particular” is just an excuse for not being popular.
“So what do you think? I've never seen you grow fond of someone new quite so quickly.”
I wonder how much she knows, whether she knows that I've seen Tommy a lot or is just guessing, whether she can tell how much I like him.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Why do you think?” she asks.
I rest my chin on my fists and watch her working.
“You've never had a good friend who's a boy. Because he's had a hard life—I've never known a child to have a harder one and perhaps you haven't either and that's interesting to you.”
“His hard life?” I ask. “I don't think so.”
But that's not exactly true. I like Tommy's story. It's like a story in a book about a boy abandoned by his mother, who can't find a family, and even though he now lives with Clarissa Bowers and her husband, Mr. Bowers, he is really alone.
And I like that he's unafraid of trouble.
I'm quiet, knowing that part of what I like about Tommy Bowers worries my mother. He's what my grandmother Puss calls “a bad boy”—she's even said with a twinkle in her eye that when she was young, she liked “bad boys” because they were exciting. Once I asked if my father had been a “bad boy” and she said no, and when I asked what he had been like when he was young, she used words like “good” and “responsible” and “loyal” and “hardworking.” And my mother, who was with us at the time, said, “He was exciting to me, Puss.”
Grown-ups are weird and luckily I can't understand them.
“I suppose what I like about him is that he likes me,” I say finally.
My mother smiles, fixing a picture of my father in another frame.
“That's not a very good reason, Ellie.”
I don't look at her although I can tell she's looking at me, her head cocked just so, like an elderly teenager, her hair recently dyed with yellow stripes, “streaked” she calls it, and up on the top of her head in little combs.
“Sometimes I don't tell you the truth because I'm afraid you won't like to hear it,” I say, which is absolutely true.
The truth is interesting. I have told a lot of harmless lies. It's a habit of mine to tell certain lies like the one about Tommy walking up to the shops, but seldom, maybe never, do I lie about the way I feel in my heart.
“So you want to know the truth?” I ask. “Tommy makes me feel important and I've never felt important, really important, except with you and Dad and sometimes Milo.”
My mother says nothing. She is sorting through her pictures, putting them between the pages of an old photograph album, and I'm looking out the window of our kitchen at the potting shed and garage and garden as if it's the first time I've actually seen them.
And finally, she says in a way that is sweet and worrying at the same time, “Oh, El, I hope I can let you be friends.”
I'm lying on the cot on the sunporch, talking to Rosie O'Leary on the portable phone, when my parents leave to take Milo to a birthday party at Billy's house and then they're going to a seven o'clock movie, so that means they won't be home until about nine-thirty. Plenty of time for me to meet Tommy if he manages to get out of his bedroom. Lately my parents allow me to stay home alone if they're not going to be late, but I'm surprised they're willing to let me stay alone tonight since certainly my mom guesses I'll be with Tommy Bowers the minute I have a chance.
Unless she knows something I don't, which isn't likely.
I hear the front door shut and Milo's whiney voice. The car pulls out of the driveway and I'm still lying on the cot on the sunporch listening to Rosie babble on about Rebecca Foater and what a baby she is and how Brianna had her hair dyed because her mother thought it was mousy and how Tina Freed has a boyfriend from the junior high. Typical Rosie. She has opinions about everything and we're not even friends.
“So, El, I hear you've got a new boyfriend,” she says in that I-know-everything-about-you voice that I hate.
“Wrong!” I say in my ice-water voice, which I've learned from my mother.
“Tina told me today when I saw her at swimming,”
Rosie says. “A new boy just moved in next door to you.”
“A new boy did just move in next door but I only met him the day before yesterday. Not exactly enough time to be his girlfriend.”
“I hear he's supposed to be really hot and smoke cigarettes and act kind of old for his age.”
“He looks like a regular boy to me.” I'm enjoying this conversation and I imagine Rosie's very sorry she didn't invite me to her birthday party. Too bad for that. I don't plan to tell her one true thing about myself for the rest of my life.
“Tina said she heard from Maida about him. His name is Tommy, right?”
“That's the name of the boy who lives next door,” I say.
“Well, I was just thinking I've got nothing to do tonight and my mom could drive me over to your house and we could hang out or you could come over here if you want. There's night swimming at the pool till nine o'clock.”
“I can't,” I say. “I'm going to the movies.”
“With who?” Rosie asks, not missing a beat. She is impossible.
“With my parents,” I say.
“I could come with you and then you could sleep over at my house.”
We have call-waiting on the phone and it's beeping now, so I tell Rosie goodbye, that I have to take this call because I'm expecting my grandmother, and she hangs up.
I'm very glad to hear P.J.'s voice on the other end of the phone because she's the only one who knows about Tommy Bowers, and if she's told Tina Freed or anyone else, I'm not going to write her at camp this summer.
“I told no one,” she says to me when I ask. “You're my best friend. I'd never talk about you behind your back.”
“Tina Freed heard it somewhere.”
“Tina called me and said Maida was driving down your street with her mom and saw you standing wi
th Tommy in front of his house. Maida called Tina who told Rosie and me and probably the whole class. I'm really sorry.”
“S'okay,” I say. “It's not your fault. At least it's summer and we won't be seeing everyone in the class, and by the time school starts, they'll have forgotten and Tommy will be history.”
“And you'll be at camp, anyway.”
“Not likely,” I say. “Camp is canceled.”
“Canceled?”
“By me. My mom and I had a little argument and I won.”
But just at that moment, I hear Tommy calling my name, so I tell P.J. goodbye and run to the Bowerses' side of the sunporch.
I don't notice Tommy at first although I'm looking directly at his bedroom. But it's dusk with dusty light and shadows appear to be objects and objects appear to be shadows. So when I see his head at the top of my vision, I think it's the branch of a tree. I cup my hands in the shape of binoculars so I can see in the shadows and there he is already shinnying down a line of sheets tied together at the ends.
9. Under the Watson's Porch
I run downstairs, check the time—7:30, which means another two hours before Mom and Dad get home from the movies—grab a flashlight, and head up the street in the dark toward the Watsons' house. Even before I get there I see the flickering lights under the porch, and ducking under the eaves, I see Tommy in blue jeans and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and bare feet. He is lighting votive candles he's scattered around the dirt floor.
“Hi,” he says, looking up at me. “I made it out of jail.”
I flop down on the beach chair.
“Did you just leave the sheets hanging out your window?”
“What else? They're tied to my bedpost and besides they only go halfway down, so I had to jump almost a story to the ground.”
“Scary. I saw you from the sunporch.”
“Wine?” he asks.
“Please.”
The pitcher of pink lemonade is still on the table from yesterday and he pours a plastic glass for each of us. He takes a Snickers bar out of his pocket, takes off the wrapper, splits it, and gives me one half. He eats the other half standing beside my chair, his foot on the edge, sort of leaning on his knee while he talks to me.
