Uncovering Sadie's Secrets

by Libby Sternberg

  But wait! Maybe he had gone into the movie. I ran back to the mall door, and jogged down the road to the theater. I should have had Kurt drop me off there!

  Breathlessly, I shelled out the money for a ticket, giving myself a quick surreptitious spray of vanilla bean body mist, and went into the flick we had agreed to see. While flames and explosions lit up the screen, I methodically looked over each row. Couples, groups together, no individuals sitting alone, no head that looked like Doug’s.

  I turned around, skulking out of the theater and toward the pay phone in the lobby. First, I called Tony to see if anyone had called. But I got the voice mail, a sure sign he was tying up the line or mom was on the computer. If Doug had tried to call me, he would have gotten the same non-response. Then, I dialed Connie’s cell phone. She picked up on the second ring and I could hear the sound of traffic.

  “Hi,” I said sadly. “It’s me.”

  “He wasn’t there,” she said softly. She actually sounded sympathetic. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back. Where are you?”

  A CHEESEBURGER, chocolate milk shake, Boardwalk Fries, and chocolate mousse cake later, Connie and I were on our way home. She had treated me to a meal at the Food Court, even forgoing her health food diet to share the fries. And, she handed over her cell phone so I could try reaching Doug, but his line was busy both times I dialed.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time we got home, my stomach full of the unsatisfying substitute for losing out on the big date. I didn’t like to call people after nine-thirty whose family habits I wasn’t aware of, so I fought off the temptation to try Doug again before crawling into bed.

  Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night. As I tossed and turned, I thought of the different ways I could explain myself the next day to him, trying to make my story sound as pitiful as it really was.

  THE NEXT morning, we all went to church together. We don’t always manage to pull this off. Sometimes, Connie doesn’t go. Or Tony says he’s going to the later Mass (but I know he just hangs out for forty-five minutes at the Dunkin’ Donuts; I’ve smelled chocolate éclair on his breath), so it’s just Mom and me. I figure it’s the least I can do for Mom, and besides, you never know, right?

  We got home close to eleven and I immediately checked the phone. No messages. Connie started reading the newspapers and watching the Sunday talk shows. Tony grabbed some books from his room and headed out to the college library. Mom tried to interest me in going to the fabric store with her to buy material for a tablecloth, which was just a subterfuge for getting me interested in sewing a Christmas dress. Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the chance. Not today.

  As soon as she left, I went up to my room, cordless phone in hand, and dialed Doug’s number. My hands were clammy as I heard it ring. By the third ring, I was getting ready to leave a cheerful message apologizing and asking him to call me when he answered the phone with a listless “Hello?”

  “Doug!” I nearly shrieked into the receiver. “It’s Bianca. Look, I’m really, really sorry about last night. I am so sorry. You just can’t imagine how sorry I am. . .”

  “What happened?” he asked. “I waited for an hour and a half.”

  “Oh man, you must have just missed me. I mean I must have just missed you. It was car trouble. My sister Connie drove me. We were stuck for over an hour. I went to the mall afterwards and looked all over and tried to call you.”

  “Yeah, well.” He didn’t sound happy. Something was not going right here. I had apologized, given a perfectly credible explanation, and he sounded like I had sucker punched him right in the gut.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I improvised, coming up with a plan that was both practical and brilliant. “I’ll treat you. What about next weekend? Let’s try for that same movie again. . .”

  He didn’t say anything. Nothing. Silence. . . that was not golden. Anything but.

  “Or this afternoon,” I said, the cheer leaving my voice like air escaping a deflating balloon. “I’m free. I could get Connie to pick you up.”

  It was hopeless. He clearly wasn’t interested. Obviously, I had committed a mortal sin against Doug’s dating commandments.

  “I’m really sorry, Doug,” I said, sincerity taking over. I was practically in tears. “I didn’t mean to be late.”

  “Yeah, well. . .” he said again. Someone shouted in the background. “Look, I gotta go. My mom wants to use the phone.”

  After he hung up, I kept the phone pressed to my ear as tears streamed down my face. It was so unfair. I got tied up. I was late. Accidents happen. What if I had been in a real accident? What if I had been lying in the middle of the street bleeding? What if I had been calling him from my hospital bed? Would he have acted like such a. . . a. . . cold fish then? My vision blurred by crying, I grabbed for a tissue and punched in Kerrie’s number. When she answered, I told her the whole gruesome tale.

  Chapter Nine

  ONCE AGAIN I came to school on a Monday waiting with bated breath (what the heck is “bated breath” anyway?) for news from the grapevine. Kerrie had managed to comfort me on Sunday by swearing to find out what was going on with Doug. She assured me that Doug was a nice guy, incapable of being the kind of jerk who would cut a girl off simply because she hadn’t been able to make a date. Kerrie promised, with an intensity usually reserved for oaths before a law enforcement officer, that she would talk to Marsha, who would talk to Doug, and all would be crystal clear on Monday.

  While that had consoled me for a short time—long enough to catch up on much-needed sleep during an afternoon nap—the reality of the situation had hit me like cold water Sunday evening.

  What in the world would make Doug turn on me? If he acted that way simply because I stood him up, and for good reason too (I kept reminding myself), was he really the kind of guy I wanted to hitch my heart to? That started me in on a whole downward spiral of thoughts. After all, you want to think your first crush is your One True Love, right? And it’s bad enough to deal with the fact that maybe he isn’t, but usually this occurs after months and months of dating, not before you actually go out on your first evening together.

  I was just gifted and talented at dating, I guess, jumping over all those interim steps and zipping to the heart-breaking finale without even a hug or a kiss from the guy in question.

  Somehow, this newfound precociousness didn’t make me feel any better. I was downright miserable by bedtime Sunday night.

  But Monday was a new day, filled with expectations, opportunities, hope—the first day of the rest of my. . . whatever.

  Kerrie came breezing into the locker hall exactly fifty-nine seconds before the first bell was to ring, which almost made me scream at her in indignation, but I was too eager to hear the scoop, and she had to have it. She had to.

  She had a smile on her face. Good sign. Her eyes were wide. Another good sign.

  “Well?” I asked with no explanation. She knew what I wanted. She quickly threw the dial of her locker in a spin and began talking.

  “Well, Doug is mad at you.” She put her lunch inside and began rearranging books.

  What a revelation, I wanted to shout. Doug is mad at me. I never would have guessed. Silly me. I had been holding out hope that it really was his evil twin on the phone with me on Sunday.

  “Yeah, but why? I mean, I apologized.”

  “He saw you,” Kerrie said, smiling. “You sly fox.”

  Uh-oh. Kerrie was beginning to scare me. What in the world did she mean? The bell buzzed and I thought I would have to kidnap her right then and there to get the full story. I wasn’t going another second without knowing.

  “What do you mean? Come on, I’m confused, and I’ve got to get to class.”

  She slammed her locker shut and gave the lock a twirl. “He saw you with that hunk you’re obviously keeping secret from me,” she said sassily.

  That hunk? Kurt. Now it all became clear. Doug had told me he left the mall just around the time I was arriving. He must have seen
me get out of the front seat of Kurt’s Jeep with Connie hidden in the back. He thought I was two-timing him before we even had a chance to one-time it together.

  Part of me was—I have to admit it—pleased. Doug was jealous. And if he was jealous, that meant he—cared. But part of me was annoyed. Why hadn’t he just told me what he’d seen?

  “Why didn’t he just say something to me?” I asked as we hurried to our home rooms.

  “You know how guys are—from Mars,” Kerrie said and flew into her homeroom.

  DOUG MIGHT be from Mars, but I felt stuck in orbit between the twin moons “Confused” and “Frustrated.” I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him the truth without it sounding artificial. Oh, Doug, I forgot to mention, I heard myself saying in a sing-song voice, I got a ride to the mall with my sister’s tattooed friend Kurt.

  Who would use that as a conversation ice-breaker? Yet this was my day to set the situation right. We shared a lunch hour. If I waited until Wednesday, it would be too late. Instinctively, I knew that a three-day lapse would cause his original assessment of the night to set, as in concrete, unmovable except by a huge explosion.

  All this fretting about Doug almost made me forget to fret about Sadie. I saw her midmorning in Honors French. She looked tired but none the worse for wear. In fact, in some ways, she looked better. Her hair was darker—she must have put a rinse on it—so her roots didn’t show through so badly. And her skin was brightened by a little rouge. She looked like she was trying to be normal, a good sign. At lunch, she sought me out as we entered the cafeteria together. Catching up with me, she tapped my arm.

  “Thanks again,” she said shyly.

  “Is everything okay? My sister and I—we were worried about you.”

  “I know,” Sadie smiled. “Connie Moran, right?”

  Sadie knew! She knew it was us at her apartment the other night.

  “Pretty silly of us, huh?” I said.

  “No, I appreciated it. In fact, I was touched,” she said beaming at me. She had a nice smile that made her face look innocent and sweet. “Everything’s okay.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was lying, and I was about to ask her about the ATM adventure, when she caught sight of Doug, a/k/a “Martian Man.” He waved at her. I dropped to my knees sobbing.

  Not really. But I did get that sinking feeling—the same one I had when I heard she had been at his house. Oh heck, I was tired of being coy. Direct questions were the ticket, I decided.

  “You and Doug have something going on?” I asked as casually as I could muster, hoping my tremulous voice didn’t give me away.

  “What? No. I thought you and Doug were an item,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I heard you were at his house.”

  “Yeah. To do math homework. He needed some help. Mrs. Baumgarten paired us up. One of those team learning deals.”

  Relief flooded over me like rain after a drought. I had to do everything in my power to keep from breaking into the “Hallelujah Chorus” right then and there. I was ready to dance on tables, to scream it to the mountain tops—Doug, the Martian Man, is still mine!

  “So,” I continued, “do you go often?” I cleared my throat. “No. We’re done. Why? Do you want me to put in a good word for you?”

  A good word for me? From Sadie, who had helped Doug with his math homework? Now, that held promise.

  “Actually, you could. . .” I explained how Connie and I had had “car trouble” and Kurt had come to our rescue, and how Doug had seen me with Kurt and misunderstood.

  “No problem,” Sadie said assuredly. “I can spin that story any way you want.” She sauntered over to Doug’s table, more confident than I had ever seen her, a new Sadie, a Sadie very comfortable telling stories.

  MY LIFE was back on track. I spent the afternoon and the next few days successfully pretending to be normal. Sure, Doug and I hadn’t completely patched things up, but he didn’t look away from me when I passed him in the hallways, and once I could have sworn he even smiled at me when he caught sight of me in the chorus rehearsal.

  Or maybe it was a grimace. Or maybe he just had something in his eye.

  Every night I was on tenterhooks waiting for him to call me and ask me out again. But by now I was used to this state of nervous anticipation and it didn’t shake me, at least not too much.

  Kerrie insisted, in phone calls, IM’s, emails, and school chats, that Doug was a typical guy (from Mars) and would have trouble backing down and admitting he was wrong. I should give him time, she insisted, and if that didn’t work, I should just try asking him out, repeating my offer to make up the lost date.

  It sounded like a good plan—Kerrie was always good for plans—so I stuck to it, even though it nearly drove me crazy and took every ounce of my self-control.

  Luckily, or maybe unluckily, my family suddenly got a bad case of Donna Reed disease. That’s where we all start acting like characters in some old 1950s sitcom, filled with brotherly and sisterly love and activities that have all of us buzzing around our hive like bees on a deadline.

  My mother coerced me into going to the fabric store with her again and I actually let her buy five yards of hunter green velvet for a holiday dress for me. Connie told me privately that she was looking into who owned Sadie’s condo. She also talked about hiring me in her office during the summer. Suddenly, I had visions of working side-by-side with her on important life-and-death cases.

  And Tony—well, come to think of it, Tony was kind of immune from this strange affliction, so he stuck to his usual schedule of pretending he didn’t know us even when he was in the same house.

  So the week passed like a kind of timeless limbo. I was out of the house enough to keep my compulsion to call Doug under wraps. But I have to admit, I felt blue every time I came home and checked the messages, only to find no “Doug-a-gram” waiting to cheer me.

  Kerrie insisted that he wouldn’t be the type to leave a message if he was going to apologize, but I wasn’t so sure. A couple times, I did the old *69 routine to find out if he had called, but I never caught his number showing up. Just a few “sorry, that number is not available or private” messages squawked at me, and I assumed they belonged to Sadie. Why the heck wouldn’t she just leave her number?

  The weekend came around with no call from Doug. I was desperate, depressed, and nearly delusional. I imagined all sorts of scenarios—from Sadie lying to me about her relationship with Doug to. . . well, trust me, you don’t really want to know.

  We had a play practice at school that weekend, the first of many. I was beginning to regret letting Hilary con us all into auditioning. Gilbert and Sullivan wasn’t my cup of tea in the first place, and now it meant going to school on Saturdays.

  Plus, I was beginning to think in those darn patter-song couplets. If Dougie doesn’t call me soon/I’ll descend into an endless gloom/So please be kind, oh Mister Doug/And give this girl more than a shrug.

  Okay, okay. So I’m not good at the patter thing. But you get the idea. The only silver lining about the rehearsal was that Doug would be there.

  Or so I thought. When Kerrie and I walked into the auditorium on Saturday afternoon, he was nowhere to be seen. And he didn’t show up for the whole boring three-hour stretch of rhyming lines and tongue twisting choruses. I was in a pretty bleak mood after the rehearsal, so Kerrie decided to cheer me up.

  Of course, it involved a plan.

  “My Dad will pick me up when I call him,” she said as we left the school building. “Why don’t we go out to Charles Village? There’s a really neat vintage clothing store there. We could probably find all sorts of things for costumes.” Kerrie was really into the costume thing. My guess is she had thought about visiting this store all week. In fact, she might have been planning this trip since last Easter.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “I’ll lend you some if you see something you like. I’ve got my mother’s charge card.”

  Kerrie always had her mother’s charge
card. I think it was really Kerrie’s card but she was embarrassed about flaunting her family income.

  I agreed to go. After all, Doug hadn’t called me yet and he hadn’t shown up at rehearsal. That all conformed with Delusional Scenario #54, the one where he’s called in to work extra hours because some co-worker has run off to Tahiti with the boss’ daughter. Who could leave their employer in such a pinch, right? Doug was a great guy.

  Kerrie had mapped out this plan carefully enough to know that the bus we needed to catch was a street over, behind the school. We started walking that way, talking aimlessly about homework, clothes, the weather, the rehearsal—anything except Doug. As we got closer to the bus stop, Kerrie stopped and pulled back behind a scrawny city tree.

  “Hey, look,” she said staring down the block. I followed her gaze. There was Sadie, oblivious to our presence, getting into a car. Getting into the driver’s side of a car. Starting the engine, pulling out into the street.

  I yanked at Kerrie, pulling her down behind some parked cars so Sadie wouldn’t see us as she drove off. As the vehicle sped away, I got up and squinted at the back, memorizing the license plate number. It wasn’t a Maryland tag. It was a California plate.

  “That is weird,” Kerrie said in awe-struck tones under her breath. “She’s driving already.”

  For a few moments, we didn’t say anything to each other. Too many thoughts were cascading through our brains simultaneously. Was Sadie older than we thought? Or was the driving age lower in California? But then Kerrie articulated the one thought that both of us were zeroing in on.

  “Sadie is not who we think she is.”

  Chapter Ten

  THE TRIP to the vintage clothing store evaporated like mist on a fall morning. We stood on the sidewalk gawking, or maybe it was more like meditating—the goal of which was to pull from the cosmos the telltale clues to who the real Sadie Sinclair was. We didn’t like feeling duped. We had helped her, reached out to her. And she wasn’t telling us something. She was leaving out some vital piece of information. We had to find out what it was.