“Cream and sugar?” she asked.
I nodded. My mouth tasted metallic, as if I’d bitten it and drawn blood.
Watching Mrs. Gogglio pour tea was relaxing. She took extra care. Two sugars, cream. Stir, stir. Clink, clink.
My treasure box was opened on the coffee table. We blew on our tea together, sipped, and stared at it. I put down my teacup first. She lingered over hers. I had not bothered to hide the double-coupon book. In its green felt sleeve, it perched on top of Amandine’s dragonfly pin. Other treasures, Mary’s friendship bracelet, a fountain pen that had belonged to a teacher at my old school, lay in a jumble.
“I’m listening,” she said. She placed her winking Popeye cup on his saucer.
“I’ve got these things,” I began slowly. I stirred my fingers over the box, then let them fall on my favorite treasure, a cigarette lighter I’d had for so long that I couldn’t even remember who it had belonged to before me. “And some of them aren’t mine.” I cleared my throat. “What I mean is, they all belong to people I like. People who have a lot—to offer, I guess. And I guess I feel like if I can take a chip off that person, just a tiny little chip, then part of what they have becomes mine. But it doesn’t, really. It’s just some dumb, stolen piece of nothing.” I pushed my hands through my hair. I was raw, my insides turned out.
“And you’re here because you think you’re ready to stop holding on to these things?” she asked. Her voice was soft, her rosy apple face serious, trying to make sense of the information.
“Yes. Well, I’m not sure,” I finished lamely. “It’s something I’ve done for a while now. But it doesn’t help me, or anything. It doesn’t make me feel good.”
Mrs. Gogglio thought on that a moment, then slowly she began to shake her head. “I’d never have missed that silly coupon book, Delilah. It was free in my mailbox, and the sleeve was free at my branch bank. So it’s not for value that you took it. It looks to me that there’s no real money value in any of what’s there in that box.”
“No.”
“Then why did you want to show me this?”
Fear rose in my throat. It was suffocating me. I swallowed and braved it. “Mrs. Gogglio, you tell me these stories about old people, and all the things they do because they aren’t in their right mind. Maybe I’ve got what they’ve got. Maybe I’m not in my right mind. All I want to be is normal, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m crazy.”
I could hear the last words in the silence of the next moment, and it scared me. Was it true? Was I crazy?
I waited. The wind chimes clanked dully in my head. It was hard work to keep my seat, when all I wanted to do was to grab my treasures and run out the door and down the road to nowhere.
It was the nowhere part that held me in place.
“Odie MacKnight is ninety-six years old,” said Mrs. Gogglio after a minute and another slow sip of tea. “His memory is failing him. He thinks he’s back in the Depression. Talks about working as a hired hand. ‘Gotta get to work,’ he says to me every morning. ‘Work or starve.’ Makes me feel sorry for him, on account that he can only recall back to this sad time in his life. After the second war, he’d gone on to be an engineer. Married, bought a house ten miles away from here—his son lives in it now. Odie’s got five children, eleven grandchildren, and a great-grandchild on the way. There’s a lot to be thankful for. A lot of achievement in that life.”
I stared at her uncomprehendingly.
Mrs. Gogglio smiled. “My way of saying it’s a shame the most memorable time in Odie’s history is the most painful. Just as I think it’s a shame that you’ll always have this time in your life to remember. Now I don’t know much about the Depression, but I remember fourteen years old like it was last year. First time I saw you, I thought to myself, Why, now—there’s fourteen! Oh, and it hit me like a train wreck, my memories of it. Good lord, I thought fourteen would never end.”
She bit into her toast. I chewed my lip. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here. Mrs. Gogglio didn’t really understand. I drew a shaky breath.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
Her face was a mask as she thought through my question, and I tried to find the fourteen-year-old girl in her features. It was hard. Mrs. Gogglio must have been more than sixty. “‘One step at a time will make the whole journey.’ Years ago, I read that across the back of a travelogue, and I never forgot it. I kind of adapted it into a life philosophy, if you know what I mean. Have you ever heard that expression?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Well, maybe you can borrow it as your own life philosophy for a little while. Maybe that’s how you could think of each of these knickknacks. One step.”
She reached into the box and held up Amandine’s dragonfly pin, which I had taken during my sleepover. It was brass-plated, and one of the dragonfly’s red glass eyes was missing. But I had liked the way it glittered in my hand. It had seemed to buzz when I held it, a secret buzz for me alone.
“Pick your steps,” Mrs. Gogglio said. She replaced the pin in the box; then she took her green felt coupon book and slipped it in her pocket, out of sight. “There. I just helped you take your first one. And see, not so bad.”
She leaned over and patted my knee with a flattened palm. “Of course you’re in your right mind, Delilah. You’re not crazy, not one bit. What I see is someone who’s trying to make the girl she is match up with the girl that other people want her to be. And sometimes she gets overwhelmed.”
Overwhelmed. Well, that was true enough.
“How about another cup of tea? You like this silly old tea set? It was three dollars at a tag sale in Vermont, you know, I think you’d like tag sales. Lots of people’s funny odds and ends, already with a bit of a history rubbed off on them. We ought to go to one, when, the weather warms up.”
One step at a time.
I had snitched Samantha Blitz’s bandanna, and only gave it back to her when I thought Amandine might have spied and recognized it in my box of treasures. At the time I hadn’t been sure if Amandine actually had discovered my cigar box and peeked inside.
Now I was positive.
It was hard to give up the cigar box, itself a treasure that I had smuggled out of Uncle Steve’s den and into my suitcase during a visit a few years back. If Amandine knew about the box, though, I could not run the risk of keeping it around. After I came home from Mrs. Gogglio’s, I dumped my treasures on my bed and stamped on the box to flatten it. Then crept to the kitchen, where I slipped it into a brown paper bag and buried it under the stack of newspapers that were twine-tied and ready for tomorrow morning’s recycling truck.
Next, I gathered my loose treasures into a plastic freezer bag. The weight of the bag was comfortable, heavy in my hand. It would be hard to let go of all of my treasures. A lot of me didn’t want to.
One step at a time. Every step was moving me farther away from Amandine. Closer to the side of the normal people. I could do that. I would do that.
I pushed the bag into my empty flower vase.
My second step would be Mary’s bracelet. I’d already wrapped it in some tissue and placed it in my book bag. I hesitated for a moment after I tucked it there, letting my finger rub the bracelet through the paper’s delicate skin. It didn’t have to be now, I reasoned. Maybe I could hold on to it for another week. I had taken to wearing the bracelet while I did my homework, and it made me unhappy to think I would no longer see it sliding up and down my arm.
I purged the feeling from my thoughts. Unhappy now, to be happy later. Later, in a place where Amandine held nothing over me.
PART THREE
SHE WAS WAITING FOR me at my locker the next morning. She was all I saw; it was as if everything else in the hall had sunk underwater. Shimmering walls and floors, the noises and faces of other kids were remote and blurred into the kind of incomprehensible motion that happens in dreams.
She shone like a bleak sun through my murky vision.
She was dressed in innocence, all wispy whites and pinks. I blinked, trying not to stare at her directly.
“Hi!” she said.
I nodded. I was moving underwater. I could hear my own breath in my ears, in and out, diver-deep. My knees went weak from the forcible effort of walking purposefully closer to her.
“Hi!” she said again.
Again, I nodded. Now she was on my side, now she was past me. I walked without pausing, without a word I passed her by.
Amandine’s eyes beamed on the back of my head. Disbelieving, flat, enraged.
I did not have to see to know.
Triumph rocketed through me and I allowed myself a smile. I did it. I’d done it.
Yes, I was stronger than I thought.
“I borrowed this,” I told Mary. I set the tissue-covered bracelet on her desk. “I was going to tell you I found it or something, but that’s not really true. The truth is I wanted to wear it for a while. But that was really, uh, … abnormal of me, I guess, and I’m sorry.”
Mary looked up. She unpeeled the tissue and shook the bracelet over her wrist.
“Thanks.”
“And I want to apologize for anything I did or might have done, and even for the things I didn’t do that you think I did. I apologize.”
“You should watch out, Delia, before you apologize away your whole existence,” she said. I could not tell if she was joking or warning me. I nodded as if I understood. Her gaze flicked past me, my signal to leave her, so I did.
In my pocket was my step three—Rudy Patrice’s sterling pound note coin that he’d brought back from his family’s recent vacation to Europe. I sat at Rudy’s homeroom desk for algebra, and it had been one of my most recent treasures that I had taken from James DeWolf, only a week ago. Rudy had never talked about missing it; perhaps he hadn’t noticed its absence yet.
In math class, I slipped the coin back, a solid clink of metal against metal as it hit the bottom of the desk.
“Godspell opens next weekend, over at the Walk the Plank Theater,” Dad said that evening when I came into the den to say good night. “Mom and I were thinking that if we picked up four tickets, you could invite your thespian pal, little Miss Amandine.”
“We’re not friends anymore,” I said.
“I see.” Dad sighed. “Well. There goes that.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, because I was, because now his spotlight had clicked off, leaving me standing alone in a dark place.
“Playing the loner is a lonely game, Delia,” said Mom with the assurance of someone who believes she has said something very wise and true, only when I thought it over later, it wasn’t either of those things.
With no more Amandine and no more Mary, I went from two friends down to none. My imagination had played worse tricks on me than what reality doled out. I guess that is usually the way. In my mind’s dread anticipation, loneliness was a bullet, hard and abrupt, the shock and pain of being discounted.
In reality, loneliness was more like a slow and constant drowning. I simply disappeared. The hall and classroom swallowed me up, and I became invisible, my quiet flailing unnoticed. Same as it had been at my old school, only there I’d had Lexi, my lifeboat.
I tried not to keep tabs on her, but I couldn’t afford not to be on guard against Amandine. Without Mary and me, she began to hang around aggressively with Jolynn. She even came to school wearing lipstick and nail polish in the identical pewter color that Jolynn preferred. But as far as I could tell, Jolynn was indifferent to Amandine’s tricks, and I could have bet that Amandine had nothing much to contribute to all that gossiping about guys and clothes and parties.
She was through with me. And I was sad. The truth was, school was boring without Amandine. The deep, outrageous thrill of being overwhelmed by a wave of laughter in assembly, or of opening a note filled with her whip-sharp jokes and drawings, or the wild excitement of a skit was all over now. The whole froth and churn of the day had gone flat.
Now Amandine hardly registered me. Sometimes she sent a vague nod in my direction when we passed in the hall, but I had hurt her once, deliberately, and once was enough. I asked Mrs. Gogglio to pick me up at a side door so that I could avoid waiting for my ride with Amandine.
Better to avoid her, I thought.
My one consolation prize was that for the very first time since I started James DeWolf, I was able to pay full attention in class. The focus paid off, and the next week I got my first A, in algebra.
“Wonderful,” my parents praised me. “You’re really adjusting well, Delia.”
It was amazing to me sometimes, how much they did not see.
At the end of that week, a slip of paper fluttered from my desk.
Meet me for lunch in the sports locker room?
—M.W.
Was Mary still angry about the bracelet? Did she want to see me so that she could have it out, a final slam before she went back to ignoring me, as she had been doing for these past days? It took my last nerve to collect my bag lunch and propel myself into the locker room after the first lunch bell rang. But I was so lonely that even Mary’s anger seemed better than nothing at all.
Mary was wrapped up on one end of the windowsill, her sandwich and celery sticks spread out on a napkin on her lap. She waved when she saw me. I approached carefully.
“Sometimes I eat here on the windowsill when the cafeteria gets, um, too rowdy,” she said. “It’s more peaceful, see. Nobody comes in here during lunch. And I thought you might …” She gestured to the space opposite.
“Sure,” I told her. “Thanks.” I climbed up on the windowsill next to her, and we ate together quietly, our backs warm against the midday sun. Over the past couple of weeks, I had been skipping lunch, sneaking bites of things in the halls between classes and using the actual lunch time period to study in the library, where food was forbidden. I welcomed the change.
“Actually, I wanted to talk, for real,” Mary told me, after we finished our sandwiches and had passed some time talking about easy things, like what we might be doing this summer. “I’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?”
“Amandine,” she said. “She won’t leave me alone. She calls me on the phone, sometimes twice a night. She passes me notes. I just wish she would go away. If you want to know the truth, I’m kind of scared of her.”
“Me, too,” I said, trying to dismiss a twinge of sadness, because Amandine certainly was not calling me. She hadn’t done any work at all to reclaim my friendship.
“And Jolynn and I aren’t friends anymore,” Mary continued. “So it’s this funny situation. I don’t know who else to talk to about her. But then I noticed you’ve been avoiding her, too, and I thought, okay then, maybe you and I had more in common than I’d figured? I’d wanted to be sure, since it seemed like the both of you were so close—it was hard for me to know if I could trust you.”
I nodded. I tried to think of what to say, and settled on a smile.
“Also, it’s been boring these past weeks, without anyone,” Mary mentioned.
“Better to be bored than …” I raised my arm, a meaningless motion, but she got what I meant. Better to be bored.
“You know, you could come over some weekend, Delia,” she offered in a rush. “We live way out, on a farm. We’ve even got a horse, Pegasus—Peggy. She’s too old to ride but you can pat her. It’s nice in the country.”
“My uncle Steve says barefoot in green y grass is as close to paradise as we mortals get,” I told her. Mary nodded solemnly.
“Sounds like my mom,” she said. “But you’ll like them. My parents, I mean. They’re not all Bible-ish, the way Amandine made them out to be—reciting dinner table prayers until the food’s gone cold. They’re totally normal, they let us watch rated Rs and go online just like regular parents.”
I laughed. The sound was pure relief, a trickle of cold water through a parched riverbed.
Later that night, right in the middle of prime time television, she phoned.
“Honey, it’s Amandine.” Mom called from the kitchen. Shock buzzed my body. I had assumed from the conversation that I had been eavesdropping in on—all about flowers and rain and patio covers that the caller must have been my grandmother.
Amandine’s voice, a snake slithering into my home, catching me off guard. For nearly five minutes she had been here, chatting up my mother in that fake perky voice of hers.
“Delia?” Mom called again.
I pried myself off the couch and walked into the kitchen. I took the phone from my mother as she left the kitchen for the den. I slid against the kitchen door, the glass a support against my back.
“What?”
For a long minute, all I could hear was heavy breathing. I almost laughed out loud. What kind of stupid threat was that?
“For future reference, Amandine, when you’re doing a crank call, it’s more effective when you don’t actually identify yourself to the person’s mother and then talk to her for, like, ten minutes about gardens.”
The breathing stopped. In the expanding silence, my courage failed. I could not let out my own breath, scared of what I would miss.
When she spoke at last, the voice she used was shiny and false. Her stage voice.
“You will pay, Delia.”
My pulse raced. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you and Mary against me. You’ll pay for it. I saw you guys together after last bell. Where were you at lunch? Did you have lunch together, too? Because if you think you can just be—be against me like that, you’re wrong. Mary was my friend before she was yours, you stole her, like you steal everything, you’re nothing but a plain old ordinary thief.”
Mom bustled back in, eavesdropping politely as she rinsed her and Dad’s tea mugs and placed them in the dishwasher. I had to be careful.
“It’s not like that, Amandine,” I said evenly. “It’s just I think Mary’s nice is all. She’s really … normal.” My pulse throbbed. It was sort of exciting, anyway, to have one over on Amandine, both of us knowing that Mary preferred my friendship to hers.
Amandine Page 7
