Amandine

by Adele Griffin

  “You can consider this a formal threat, and your last warning. I’ll see you tomorrow in the regular place by your locker. This is it, Delia. Your big chance. If you don’t screw it up, I forgive you. Are we clear?” The line sounded rehearsed, as if she were stealing a piece of play or movie dialogue. I wondered if Amandine was as angry as she sounded, or if she was merely testing out the role.

  It was impossible to know.

  “Okay. See you tomorrow,” I said casually, for my mother’s benefit.

  There was a click in my ear, a click that I didn’t fully register until it was replaced by the sound of an automated voice telling me to please hang up and try my call again. I hung up the phone carefully.

  “She’s the most charming little thing, that Amandine,” my mother mentioned, turning to me from where she was at the sink, cleaning the trap. “Why don’t you have her over again some weekend? I’ve been seeing advertisements everywhere for the spring fair over in Dalestown. That might be fun.”

  “We’re not friends anymore,” I said. “I thought I’d told you. I know I did.”

  “You seemed friendly enough on the phone,” she said. Then she turned to face me. “Really, Delia. Just say you’re sorry, no matter whose fault it is. That’s how Dad and I do it. Then it’s all over and behind you.”

  I nodded vaguely. No point in getting into it.

  The next morning, I deliberately blew my big chance at Amandine’s forgiveness by sneaking around the school’s back entrance, cutting down the senior hall, then taking the back stairs and crossing through the library into homeroom.

  As I hurried, I imagined her standing beside my locker, her lipstick a spot of color on her pale face and a new skit ready to offer like an olive branch. And I imagined her eyes turning hard and blank when she realized that I had tricked her.

  Later, when I did catch sight of her in the hall, she ignored me as if nothing had happened. She was outfitted dramatically, in a cinched Spanish-style lace skirt and yellow blouse. Her red lipstick was bright as a fire engine.

  I didn’t know the movie, nor the role she was resurrecting, but I could tell that she was dressed for victory. For celebration. It made me feel guilty.

  “Señorita Amandita,” someone sang out as she ruffled past.

  “What a weirdo,” Mary pronounced later when we were eating lunch together in the windowsill. “That outfit! I’m surprised she didn’t put a rose between her teeth.”

  When I related the gist of Amandine’s call and threat last night, Mary had dismissed it.

  “She’s mental.”

  “The last thing I want to do is go back to being friends with her.” I spoke with strength, but I knew that part of me, a secret part, missed Amandine. Wanted her back, with all her terrible fun.

  “I’ve been going to school with her for three years, ever since she moved here from New York,” said Mary. “She’s never been able to find her right fit with this class. She’d be with someone for one month, someone else for another, and so on and so on. Nobody ever worked out.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Adjusting can be hard for some people, I guess.” My voice a touch smug, maybe.

  “Hey, I meant to tell you. My mom was making a recipe out of a cookbook the other night and I found out. Do you know what Amandine means?” Mary grinned as I shook my head no. “If you prepare anything almondine, all it means is that it’s made with almonds! Amandine’s name almost means almonds!”

  “Oh.” That didn’t seem like much information, but Mary loved it.

  “Made with almonds!” She snorted. “Topped with almonds! I always thought it was a made-up name!” Mary was doubled over in laughter now, she seemed to think that this was really funny, and I tried to join along. But all I could think was that it wasn’t the way I laughed with Amandine. No matter how hard I pretended it was.

  That weekend, I stayed over at Mary’s house. Her family was better than just regular, as she had described them. In my mind, they were perfect. The Whitecombs treated me as if I had been visiting their house for years.

  After Mary showed me around, we walked around their land and fed Pegasus an apple, then prepared dinner for everyone—English muffin pizzas, with homemade cantaloupe sorbet for dessert. The sorbet didn’t freeze right and was more the texture of cantaloupe soup, and Mary’s brother, Jasper, teased us about it. Mary was right—Jasper really did “get everything.” Not only was he handsome and athletic but he was also more at ease with himself, more confident than Mary.

  Reverend and Mrs. Whitecomb didn’t favor him, though, not that I saw. There was room for Jasper as well as Mary, whom they all called Daisy because, as Mary blushingly explained, she had been such a big, clumsy kid that everyone said “oops-a-daisy” whenever she fell over or knocked something.

  It seemed fantastic to me—a family who turned a flaw into a cute nickname.

  After dinner, we watched horror movies and gave each other home spa treatments-mud masks and French manicures. My manicure looked mature and made my fingers seem as if they should be occupied with glamorous tasks. The spa stuff was fun, a different kind of fun than skits.

  That night, tucked safe in one of the twin wicker-framed beds in her room, I finally confessed to Mary that I did not have a big brother. “It was one of those stupid things that started small and got bigger and bigger,” I said.

  “Another crazy Amandine idea,” she answered knowingly, and I didn’t deny it. While the lie of Ethan had been all mine, he did seem like Amandine’s fault. Her own lies had forced me into making him up.

  Another week passed, and Mary stayed over at my house.

  “She’s nice,” Mom pronounced, Dad nodding his head in agreement. They offered nothing more. I figured they were secretly disappointed that I hadn’t been able to keep my one exceptional friend. Clumsy Mary, nice as she was, had nothing on the kitten-faced girl who sang Carmen and danced Coppelia.

  For me, it was different. I could relax around Mary. I even told her about my one sleepover at Amandine’s, leaving out nothing, describing Jin and the Frightful Fun House and the pasta and water for breakfast. We laughed about it. Crazy Amandine. What were we thinking, being scared of her? She was a freak, her family was abnormal, we should have known better.

  I began to feel safe.

  The next weekend, Mary stayed over at my house again, and my parents dropped us off at the fair out in Dalestown. We rode the Ferris wheel and Mary won a stuffed polka-dot snake at the shooting gallery, and then we called Mark Ingersell from a pay phone by the parking lot. I was supposed to talk to him, but after identifying myself to his mother as Diane Veers, the best-looking girl in our class, I could keep my nerve only until I heard his voice on the line.

  “You hung up, shy-baby!” Mary giggled and pointed her finger at me. “Why?”

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “Anything! Anything!”

  I wasn’t quite ready for the risk of anything, but I was moving closer. One step at a time to normal, and lately the journey seemed safer. Maybe even fun.

  On Sunday, Jasper Whitecomb dropped me home, where I found my parents waiting for me on the front lawn. Side by side under a tree in their pair of lawn chairs, their iced teas resting on the matching glass-topped table between them. They waved as the Whitecombs’ car drove up, shouted a cheerful thanks to Jasper, and waved again when he backed out and left. But there was something odd in the way they were seated, like judges, that made me feel nervous.

  I knew they were waiting for me.

  “We got a call early this morning from Roxanne Elroy,” said Mom as I approached. “Your friend Amandine’s mother. She was very upset. Your dad and I have been talking together all morning, and we haven’t figured out any answers on our own, so we decided it might be best to talk to you.” Her voice was polite, as if she had met me only a few hours ago.

  “What did I do?” My heart was thrumming. There was no place to sit and so I was forced to continue to stand like a convict before
them.

  Dad shook his head. “Nothing, Delia. It has nothing to do with anything you’ve done. It’s not about you.” His voice sounded crisp and impatient.

  “Well, that’s not entirely true.” Mom crossed her legs neatly, folded her hands on her knee, and continued. “Delia, how would you describe Amandine?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she’s your friend and—”

  “But she’s not my friend!” I burst out. “You’ve known that. I’ve told you that. She’s weird. What did she do? What?”

  “Delia, what does weird mean? Be more precise. This is serious.”

  “Weird, like, she draws these things … and she tells stories, and she likes to be nasty to people, she’s nasty to me, I don’t know what else. Weird. What else do I say?”

  My father stood. He picked up his iced-tea glass and tossed its dregs and ice cubes into the flower bed before retreating up the lawn to the house. He was wearing a regular brown leather belt, I noticed. The silly tie was gone. Mom and I watched him until he went inside, banging the screen door that he had recently installed.

  “Is Dad okay?” I asked.

  “He’s tired.” Mom rubbed her face with her hands. “It’s been a long morning.” Her eyes fogged over as she glanced at the flower beds. “It might be a while before we see zinnias,” she said. Her voice was detached. “We’re late to seed …”

  I dropped into the empty chair. I was coldly perspiring.

  “Please, Mom, tell me why Mrs. Elroy called,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Mom glanced toward the house, and then began to speak very fast and methodically^ as if she were performing some distasteful job that she wanted to get finished in a hurry.

  “Apparently, your friend Amandine told her mother that your father had behaved inappropriately, that time he drove her home after she spent the night here. That he tried to … kiss her.” My mother’s laugh held no trace of humor. She tossed her head and flashed a pained hostess smile. One hand pressed against her chest. “Really, it’s too stupid, it’s not important, it’s obviously not true. We are dealing with a troubled girl who is upset by something and she’s lashing out and it’s as simple, as transparent as that.”

  For a moment, I could not speak. Disbelief dried up all the words inside me.

  “She’s worse than troubled,” I managed finally. “I could give you a hundred different examples of worse. A thousand. That’s why I’m not friends with her anymore. Believe me, please believe me. You’ve got to.”

  Mom hardly seemed to register what I was saying, speaking more to herself when she answered. “Roxanne Elroy has decided not to go to the school with it. She says there’s no point in any kind of legal involvement. It’s not a serious crime, she said, so much as a distasteful misdeed. Her words. Anyway, she requested that you keep away from Amandine.”

  “Keep away from her? I haven’t even talked to Amandine in almost two weeks. It’s ridiculous that she would tell such a huge, awful lie!”

  “Ridiculous, vicious, wrong. And, evidently, her revenge on you for your falling out, though that is hardly your fault, Delia.” She sighed. “You know, I do believe that if we had been a week earlier on the zinnias, we’d see blooms by the end of the month.”

  Mom now was reaching down to brush her finger back and forth, back and forth against a pale green shoot that was starting to push its way into the sun. It was a signal to me that she had finished her discussion about this; or rather, her discussion with me about this.

  I sat there for a moment, unsure. Then I stood and ran across the lawn, into the house, and upstairs to the safe exile of my room.

  In spite of my mother’s words to the contrary, I felt that I had done something wrong. That Amandine, my Amandine, was also my fault, and that I was partly to blame.

  Amandine’s lie was like the wrench thrown into a skit. The skit was our fight, and her lie allowed her character, the character of “Amandine,” to return to a familiar role.

  Amandine, the innocent victim.

  Amandine, who had suffered an injury at the hands of someone strong and cruel.

  When I saw her at school the next day, all I wanted to do was to run up to her and shout that I saw right through the whole pathetic performance. I wanted to slap her. I wanted to hurt her back.

  “Don’t,” my mother had warned me at last night’s mostly silent dinner. “No matter how strong the urge is to confront her. It’s not what we need and it wouldn’t do us any good. A silly story like this has both the potential to be worse and the potential to blow over. Dad and I, for one, would prefer the second effect.”

  Numbly, I agreed. Maybe it was better to keep my distance. My public explosion was most likely exactly what Amandine craved. Over the next few days, I began to believe that she put herself deliberately in my path at school, to test me. So I kept my distance and acted nonchalant. If nobody else knew, then it was as if it hadn’t happened.

  Things were happening, anyway. First, I caught an unmistakably dirty look from Jolynn Fisch in spring fitness. The same afternoon, a cluster of whispering girls stopped talking and stared at me with slit-eyed scrutiny when I passed by.

  Now everything fell under the shadow of my second-guessing. Why didn’t anyone sit across or behind me in study period, the only class where seats were not assigned? And was that a contemptuous beat of silence after I had answered a question out loud in English class?

  Mary didn’t say a word about it, and I was too mortified to bring it up. Had Amandine been telling everyone at school this creepy story? Or was I just imagining things? It became harder to convince myself.

  I was in art class when the truth washed out. We were drawing at easels from a still life set out in the front of the room. Tipped-over coffee and tennis cans. My ovals were sloping like deflated tires and my paper was ragged with erasing. Over the past few days, it had become difficult to concentrate on anything.

  “H-hey, Delia.”

  I looked up.

  After so many skits, the real-live, up-close Mark Ingersell was a shock. His eyes, that had only locked mine when Amandine pretended to be him in skits, were different from the way I had imagined them. Not hard and gray, but blue and soulful. And I realized that I did not know Mark Ingersell at all.

  “What?” My fingers clenched my pencil.

  “Your dad’s some kind of p-pervert, or what?”

  “My dad?” My voice, like my coffee can ovals, came out raggedy and deflated.

  “Y-yeah.” His stammer was just the way Amandine did it. She was a great mimic. “I heard if anyone in y-your family comes inside twenty yards of that girl, Amandine, he gets hauled off by the c-cops. Is that r-right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Thunderstorm blue. I hunched under his gaze. “That’s n-not what I’ve been hearing.” He paused, his face reflecting something between puzzlement and scorn, then turned and strolled back to his easel.

  I looked over at Miss Rose, our art teacher who was stooped in a corner of the room, sorting acrylic from oil paint tubes. She had no idea. I blinked down at my coffee cans. All the kids knew the story, I realized. All of them, every single one. The entire class had fallen into a hush when Mark approached me. Now, as I stared at my paper, I could sense their nudges and whispers.

  After a few torturing minutes, I excused myself from art and spent the rest of class time hiding in the bathroom, tearing a piece of paper towel into a thousand little scraps and dropping each scrap one by one into the toilet.

  The worst thing about school, any school, is there is no right place to go when everything goes wrong.

  Spring fitness was my next class. I kept a careful distance while we hit tennis balls against the gym wall and I caught up with Amandine afterward, while she was changing in the sports locker room.

  “Why are you telling everybody this lie?” I asked her. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “You�
�re not supposed to talk to me, remember, Delia?” Her voice projected loud, all the way to the back row of the theater, if we had been in one.

  “This isn’t a skit,” I said. I held my arms crossed at my waist, my elbows squeezing hard against the sides of my body. “This is real life.”

  “True,” she agreed. “This is real life. And if you keep on talking to me, my parents will get the real police involved.”

  A few girls standing near us had gone utterly silent.

  I backed off, terrified. Amandine arched a pewter-penciled eyebrow and tugged off her gym shorts. Standing in her underpants, her exposed legs looked uncooked and undernourished.

  She loved it. The audience was transfixed. We were all watching her.

  Only late at night, wide-awake in the darkness, did I allow myself to think about this.

  They are in the car and the music is on. Throughout the entire trip into town, they have been play-acting. His silly accents and her quick retorts make a happy banter between them. The sun glints behind her, standing her hair into a blond halo, and she is focused and sure in his spotlight. She is sophisticated and clever and pretending to be old for her age. She is nothing like me.

  And that’s why he kisses her. It seizes him in a fit, like in those old movies, when a kiss was something you had to have against all better judgment.

  I sat up in bed, dry-eyed. “You liar. You lie about everything. Every single thing!” My anger was lonely, though. It whispered through my room with no place to go, but I couldn’t get rid of it.

  Amandine’s teeth once had reminded me of a kitten’s, but I had chosen the teeth of the wrong animal. Because Amandine, the real Amandine, was slippery as an eel, and she attacked with an eel’s unexpected, vicious bite.

  It was done and there was no undoing it. The image of Amandine and my father might have been torn straight from her Ugliest Things notebook, was now pressed permanently into the pages of my mind.

  Mr. Serra’s office was clean and worn, like Mr. Serra himself. He sat tucked upright behind his desk. A fountain pen was balanced horizontally through his three middle fingers; he tipped it back and forth like a seesaw. He was a small, combed man like Batman’s Robin. A sidekick waiting for the real hero to arrive.