Dinah Forever

by Claudia Mills

  “Maybe we could hang one in some really crazy place, like outside on the big sign in front of the school,” Nick suggested.

  “I did that last year,” Dinah informed him. “Roemer made me take it down.” Nick hadn’t been around for Dinah’s campaign in sixth grade, because his family hadn’t moved to Riverdale until the spring.

  “Or maybe I could do some kind of stunt or something. Like pile a big heap of food waste outside of Roemer’s office.”

  “I did that, too,” Dinah said, trying to keep the note of impatience out of her voice. “Not food waste, but trash. I filled a bunch of trash bags with all the paper in everybody’s wastebaskets and dragged them all through the school.”

  “Or—there must be something else I could do, something that would really get everyone’s attention.”

  “I wore a recycling bucket to school on my head.”

  “You did?” Nick finally sounded impressed.

  “But it didn’t work out. It kind of backfired. Everyone just started calling me Bucket Head.”

  “Yeah, but they remembered who you were. My dad says there’s no such thing as bad publicity. There must be something else we can do.”

  Dinah tuned out; she had no suggestions to offer. Other people’s campaigns, she was finding out, weren’t much more interesting than other people’s vacations in England. There was a definite limit to what Dinah was willing to do to speed Nick on the way to seventh-grade fame and glory.

  * * *

  Toward the end of the fourth week of class, Ms. Dunne gave Dinah back her copy of “A Few Thoughts on Immigration Policy.” On the bottom, the teacher had written: “Please come and see me. Are you free after eighth period today?”

  Why would Ms. Dunne want to see her? Dinah felt a pleasurable tingle of anticipation. It had to be something good, like a nationwide poetry contest for Dinah to enter, or the announcement of a new magazine that published poetry by extremely gifted seventh graders. Or maybe Ms. Dunne just wanted to discuss ways in which she could work with Dinah outside of class to develop her unusual poetic gifts.

  As soon as the bell rang at the end of eighth period, Dinah hurried to Ms. Dunne’s room. The teacher smiled as Dinah poked her head in the doorway, but her smile was less bright than her classroom smiles.

  “Sit down, Dinah,” Ms. Dunne said.

  Mystified now, Dinah took her usual seat, in the second row.

  “Dinah, you’ve been writing some very nice poems for me this fall, but I wonder—lately, they’re all on the same topic.”

  “Death,” Dinah said, trying not to sound too smug. She knew that the other seventh graders weren’t writing poems as dark and powerful as hers, on such a serious and important topic. They were still writing little singsong poems about their pets.

  Ms. Dunne leaned closer to Dinah, her face soft with concern. “Dinah, has anyone close to you died recently? Or is someone dying?”

  “No,” Dinah said, taken aback at the question.

  “No?” Ms. Dunne asked gently.

  Dinah began to feel embarrassed as the teacher waited patiently for her reply. What was she supposed to say? Was someone dying? Everyone was dying, including Dinah herself. But if Ms. Dunne hadn’t noticed that yet, it didn’t seem Dinah’s place to point it out, particularly since she had already pointed it out as clearly as possible in “A Few Thoughts on Immigration Policy.”

  “No,” Dinah repeated, swallowing back her disappointment. Apparently Ms. Dunne wasn’t going to suggest that Dinah enter “A Few Thoughts” in a poetry contest or rush it off for immediate publication.

  “Well, anyway, Dinah, I just wanted you to know that I’m here if you ever need to talk. And I wanted to remind you that we have a fine psychologist here at JFK Middle School, Ms. Isenberg.”

  “Okay,” Dinah said, relieved that the conversation seemed to be over. She stood up to go.

  Hundreds of poets before Dinah had written poems about death. The seventh-grade reader was full of famous poems about death, by Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson. Had anyone ever suggested to Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson that they might want to visit their school psychologist? A person wasn’t crazy for caring about death. It would have been crazier not to care.

  * * *

  At the first practice debate, held after school on Wednesday of the following week, Dinah and Nick debated Lin and Scott. Nick and Dinah argued against restricting immigration; Lin and Scott argued for it. Dinah was almost crying as she portrayed the squalor of Third World slums in which starving children begged for crusts of bread. Nick was calm and reasonable as he pointed out the numerous benefits that immigrant workers brought to the U.S. economy. It seemed to Dinah that they complemented each other perfectly.

  But Lin and Scott won the debate. Lin and Scott just had so many facts. Dinah didn’t see how their brains could have room left over for anything else once all those facts about immigration policy had been crammed in. It was obvious that Lin and Scott had worked enormously hard over the past two weeks, far harder than Nick and Dinah had worked.

  “You two did very well,” Mr. Dixon told Nick and Dinah after he announced their losing score. “But all the emotion in the world doesn’t have the impact of one well-chosen statistic.”

  Dinah took that as directed at her personally. She had been the one who had shown emotion during the debate, not Nick. Her cheeks burned as she remembered how her voice had cracked when she had talked about the starving babies. Mr. Dixon might as well have come right out and said that Nick had done better in the debate than Dinah had. But Nick hadn’t spouted statistics, either. His brain was no more stuffed with facts than hers was. And Dinah had so many really big facts to keep track of these days, from Mr. Mubashir’s class. She couldn’t keep track of everything.

  For a few moments, as they walked together in silence toward the bus, Dinah thought Nick was going to have the good sense not to say anything. But then he said, “Emotion, huh. I guess from now on, we’ll have to tone down the dramatics a bit.”

  He said we, but Dinah knew he meant you. Nick hadn’t had any “dramatics” in his speech.

  “It’s not as if you had any great facts, either,” Dinah blurted out.

  Nick looked surprised. “Well, I guess I haven’t spent as much time in the library as I meant to. I’ve been pretty busy these days, running my campaign.”

  The election was still a sore point with Dinah. Every time she saw a green poster in the hall, a tiny voice inside her shrieked “Copy Cat!” It seemed to her as if Nick had made the same posters she would have made and then crossed out her name and written in his. Dinah felt crossed out. Crossed out of Carousel, crossed out of the election, and now crossed out of debate, as well.

  Dinah knew that she shouldn’t say anything else, not when she was feeling so hurt and angry inside, but, sure enough, she heard herself say, “Oh, the election. Well. We wouldn’t want anything to interfere with your election.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Nick asked. “So we lost one debate. Big deal.”

  “Nothing,” Dinah said. “There’s nothing to be emotional about, is there. People may be so desperately poor that they will sell their own children so they won’t have to watch them starve to death, but we shouldn’t get dramatic about it, now, should we?”

  “Mr. Dixon was the one who said you were too emotional, not me.”

  Ah-ha. Now it was you. Dinah had known the we couldn’t last too long. Had she ever really thought she and Nick were too alike? They were too different. Dinah cared about things, like the plight of starving refugees and the burning out of the sun. Nick didn’t. He wasn’t emotional, and she was. That was all there was to it. A line from Gone With the Wind suddenly echoed in Dinah’s mind: Scarlett O’Hara’s father telling her, “Like must marry like, or there’ll be no happiness.” There was certainly no happiness for Dinah and Nick.

  “Fine!” Dinah said brightly. “Don’t worry. I won’t inflict my emotions on you anymore.”

  Nick
got on the bus and sat on an empty seat toward the front. Dinah made a point of walking past him as if he were invisible, less than invisible, an infinitesimal speck of cosmic dust.

  Nine

  That was that. It seemed only fitting and proper for Dinah to be once more done with Nick forever. She took a melancholy satisfaction in mentally crossing him off her seventh-grade list. Now she had no lead in the play, no class office, no debate victory, and no boyfriend. There was something grimly pleasing about such a clean sweep of all her hopes and dreams.

  Dinah wrote a poem about it at home that evening.

  The Null Set

  I have nothing.

  Nothing.

  No thing.

  My life is a set

  Without any members

  As empty as

  A solar system

  Without any sun.

  The poem was another masterpiece. Moreover, it showed that Dinah could integrate learning across the curriculum: They had studied null sets in Ms. Lewis’s math class. But Dinah knew better now than to show the poem to Ms. Dunne. It would only make her worry.

  Nick didn’t call. Dinah hadn’t thought he would.

  The next day was the seventh-grade election assembly, held third period in the middle-school gym. Each candidate for class office gave a two-minute speech. Dinah had to admit that Nick gave by far the best speech of the three presidential candidates, filled with enough environmental facts to impress even Mr. Dixon. But she refused to let her heart melt. It was easy to give a good speech when you had copied all the ideas in it from your former, overly emotional girlfriend.

  The election took place the following day, Friday. Students voted in their homerooms; the results would be announced over the PA system at the end of eighth period.

  Dinah quickly checked the boxes she wanted for secretary, treasurer, and vice president. Then she stared down at the three names for class president:

  Eliza Evans

  Nicholas Tribble

  Jason Winfield

  There was space to add a write-in candidate. Dinah thought of printing in her own name, or Blaine’s. Or she could just leave that whole section of the ballot blank. Or she could vote for Eliza Evans. At least Eliza was a girl. But Eliza’s campaign platform had been dumb—something about better teacher-student relations.

  Finally Dinah picked up her pen and put the smallest possible check mark next to Nick’s name. She hoped that whoever was counting the votes had a magnifying glass handy.

  “Ocean-River.” Nick touched her arm in the hall as she was walking to first period.

  Dinah almost relented. Nick’s fingers on her arm felt so gentle and warm. But if there was no future with Nick, if she and Nick were really too different for their relationship to work out over the long term, why prolong what would only turn out to be the agony of parting?

  Dinah jerked her arm away. “Don’t worry, I voted for you,” she said coldly.

  Nick quickly extinguished the questioning look in his eyes. “Good, good!” he said, as if that had been all he wanted to know. “Keep those votes coming in, folks! Vote early and often. Tribble’s in the White House, waiting to be elected. Winfield’s in the garbage can, waiting to be collected!”

  Jason, overhearing him, gave Nick a friendly punch in the arm, and the two rivals fell into step together. Dinah walked the rest of the way to math class alone. Mrs. Briscoe’s favorite song from Carousel had been “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Ha! True poets often walked alone, composing soul-stirring poetry in their heads.

  * * *

  At the start of eighth period, Mr. Mubashir rubbed his hands together with pleasure. His face beamed like the classroom model of the sun, lit from within by a small yellow light bulb.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “I have some news for you, good news!”

  Dinah looked up from her book. She had been busy inking over the little lacy hearts she had drawn on the brown-paper cover of her science book a week ago, with “D.S. + N.T.” printed neatly inside each one. Now she was scribbling over the hearts so hard that her ballpoint pen ripped through the brown paper. Good news? It had been a long time since Dinah had heard any news that could qualify as good.

  “Next week, on Friday, we will go on our first class trip, to the Air and Space Museum! You will have to miss your other classes, I am afraid.”

  Loud applause.

  “But I have assured your teachers that this will be an important learning experience for you.”

  As Mr. Mubashir passed out the permission slips, he told the class more about the trip. They would leave JFK Middle School right after homeroom and return at four-thirty. They would see a special astronomy exhibit. They would view a movie about the space program shown on a screen seven stories high. Weather permitting, they would have a picnic outside on the huge outdoor mall in Washington, D.C.

  “Are there any questions?” Mr. Mubashir asked.

  “Can we sit with whoever we want to on the bus?” someone asked.

  “Yes, yes!” Mr. Mubashir said.

  “What are you going to do if Artie throws up on the bus like he did when we went to Annapolis last year?”

  Mr. Mubashir’s smile began to fade, as if the light bulb inside his head had a dimmer switch. “Does anyone have any questions about the museum? No? Then let us turn in our books to the problems at the end of Chapter Two.”

  Dinah felt excited in spite of herself. A class trip was just what she needed to take her mind off her troubles. Anything could happen on a class trip. Some kind of adventure was practically guaranteed. And travel was good for a poet. It was bound to provide new subject matter for a poem.

  A few minutes before the end of eighth period, the PA system in Mr. Mubashir’s room clicked on, and Mr. Roemer cleared his throat.

  “Attention, students. The vote tally for this year’s class elections is now complete. Our new class officers are: For eighth-grade president, Rose Compton…”

  Dinah dug her fingernails into her palm, waiting for the seventh-grade results. Did she hope that Nick would win or that he would lose?

  “… For seventh-grade president, Nicholas Tribble…”

  The class waited quietly until the other seventh-grade officers had been announced, then erupted into cheers. Jason’s chin was set a bit too high, but he quickly extended his hand to Nick. The other boys pounded Nick on the back, and the girls crowded around him, too. The closing bell rang, but nobody paid any attention to it.

  At first Dinah held back, but it would be childish not to offer Nick her congratulations, at least. If Jason could shake Nick’s hand, so could she. Dinah forced her way into the throng surrounding Nick and stuck out her hand. Nick shook it as if it were a stranger’s hand, and then he shook another hand, and another, and another.

  It could have been Dinah’s hand that everyone was shaking. But it wasn’t. Dinah wasn’t president, for the second year in a row, and she wasn’t First Lady, either. In the long run—the really long run, the five-billion-year long run—it wouldn’t matter. But first Dinah had to get through the short run. Her chest pounded with a mixture of jealousy, yearning, and stiff, sore pride. Quietly she slipped out of the room and hurried to her locker, knowing that none of the others would even notice that she was gone.

  * * *

  The weekend loomed before Dinah, an endless stretch of hours, minutes, and seconds to be filled. The one thing she was not going to do was walk down Nick’s street and look at his house. She wasn’t even going to consider doing that.

  Friday night, Dinah read in her room. The book was Wuthering Heights, and it was wonderful. Dinah stayed up past midnight to finish it. The story of Heathcliff and Catherine’s doomed love suited Dinah perfectly. Catherine and Heathcliff were alike in their stormy, passionate natures, but they came to each other from worlds that were too different. At least Catherine hadn’t had to deal with Heathcliff’s being triumphantly elected class president two days after they had parted.

  If only Dinah live
d on a storm-tossed moor! The bright sunshine pouring through her window on Saturday morning seemed particularly inappropriate.

  After breakfast, Dinah watched her father study for a while; his second biology exam was only a week away. It was fascinating to see her father—her regular grown-up father—taking notes in his notebook as if he were a seventh grader.

  “You know, honey, studying is not the kind of thing I do better with an audience,” her father said after a few minutes.

  Dinah herself did everything better with an audience, but she turned to go. The last thing she wanted to do was distract her father from a project that meant so much to him.

  She found her mother upstairs, organizing a bureau drawer. Benjamin sat on the floor next to her, building tall towers of Duplos and knocking them down.

  “Everyone thinks an organization consultant has a perfectly organized house,” her mother said. “It’s a good thing they don’t come over and look in my drawers.”

  “The newspaper piles at Mrs. Briscoe’s house are getting pretty big again,” Dinah told her. Up went another Duplo tower; down it came again.

  “I figured they would. Most people can change only so much. I expect that if I dropped in on most of my clients a year later, I’d find that their lives were pretty much the way they were before I ever came.”

  “But…” Dinah tried to be tactful. “Then doesn’t organizing them seem—you know—kind of a big waste?”

  Her mother shrugged. “Most of what we do every day has to be done over again the next day. Eating, sleeping, cleaning, changing Benjamin’s diapers. That’s just how life is. Look at it this way. It’s good for my business. It keeps my customers coming back. What are your plans for today, sweetie?”

  “I don’t have any. I guess I’ll go over to Suzanne’s for a while. Or maybe I’ll go see Mrs. Briscoe.”

  Benjamin finished building another Duplo tower, his tallest yet. He laughed out loud when he sent the small plastic blocks sprawling. Some people apparently were not bothered by the utter uselessness of their activities.

  “You and Nick still haven’t made up this time?” Dinah’s mother asked.