New Girl

by Joan B. Flood

  Her straw made that gurgle-whoosh sound as she hit the end of her Coke.

  “Well, it is, but…all the time?”

  We said nothing for a while, just watched the other kids flirting and arguing.

  “Losing interest in Jack?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’m still totally into him, but I dunno. Seems like I’m just there, an arm ornament, when we go out with his friends. When we’re on our own, it’s different. It’s okay then.”

  She flung her hair over her shoulder. Her eyes were sad. I imagined them as they used to be, ringed with color, curious, and taking everything in. For a moment I even missed the push-up bras and tatty lace she used to wear.

  The café filled and emptied, then filled again. Chairs dragged across the floor and the coffee machine hissed and spat. The sounds mixed with voices as they echoed and bounced off the walls.

  “What’s going on with you and Jane?” Corinne examined the bottom of her glass.

  “Dunno.”

  “Jane’s okay, y’know. She likes you. Talk to her.”

  I had a sudden need for space and air. Corinne gave an exaggerated sigh, but she left with me when I said I needed to go.

  On Monday morning, I slipped into my usual seat in class. Inspired by Corrine’s change in image, I had on black jeans and a gauzy loose red blouse over a dark blue T-shirt. Thrift store deals.

  “Cool look.” Corinne eyed me up. “Nice. Suits you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and thought, at least my mother lets me out of the house like this. I had thought I’d take off the tee after school, but knew I wouldn’t really. I wasn’t ready to wear only gauzy shirts or little camisoles like most of the girls did after leaving school grounds, but a different look seemed in order. It was a good compromise, I thought.

  At break we sat on the grass and watched everyone milling around. I flipped through a copy of the school paper. On page three Corinne had written a short piece about fostering school spirit.

  “Hey, brilliant. Why didn’t you say?” I waved the paper under Corinne’s nose.

  Corinne shrugged. She kept her eyes on the fence.

  “Oh, go on, pretend it doesn’t matter. High five, girl.”

  She giggled, and then high-fived.

  “I’ll be editor there soon, you’ll see.”

  Then she told me all about her writing. She’d been doing it for ages: poems and stories and all sorts of stuff. Now she’d set her sights on being editor of the school paper. It was pretty cool.

  She looked past me at the fence again. I turned and saw Bart staring at us. He made a small sideways twist to his head that said “Come here.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.” Corinne handed me her bag and jacket. I watched them talk, the fence between them. Corinne’s hand was hooked onto the wire lattice. Bart did most of the talking. They didn’t speak long.

  Corinne came back and flopped beside me. She pulled a blade of grass and chewed on the end. I watched Bart walk away. His jeans didn’t fit him properly; the ass hung, not enough to be homeboy, just enough to look saggy.

  “What did he want?”

  Corinne shifted the blade of grass from one side of her mouth to the other, rolling it across her lip. She shrugged, a quick flick of her shoulder.

  “Oh, he’s looking for Jane.”

  I wanted in the worst way to know what was going on with Jane, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t know why I wanted her to like me. Sometimes I thought she wanted us to be just like her, and sometimes I didn’t know what she wanted.

  Back in class, I couldn’t concentrate on History. Did Jane know that Corinne wanted to be editor of the newspaper? What did she think of it? Corinne wanted to do it, and if people thought it nerdy, it wouldn’t stop her one bit. I thought about that all during class.

  In bed that night, the blanket pulled right up to my chin, I watched the clouds haunt my window as they covered and uncovered the moon. I loved my room. Right under the roof in the attic, the ceiling sloped down almost to the head of my bed, and right on the top were skylights that I could open with a long pole. There were no curtains, just the sky up there. I could watch as clouds scrolled by, strange kind of milky shadows against the dark sky, the stars winking in the clear spaces. Sometimes the moon was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep. Often I heard the rain beat on the glass like a million fingers tapping.

  I thought about Jane. She was sweet and angry, impossible and funny. Even when she was mad at the world she had something special. When I saw her, I was happy in a way I never felt about anyone else; not Tommy Mack, not Corinne. Better, even, than winning a race. It wasn’t just that I was happy to have a friend. When she was my friend, that was. Never before had I wanted so much to have someone like me. I was confused and churned up about it. Worse yet, I didn’t know how to make anyone like me. Then I thought about Corinne. Corinne just did things, tried new things, and changed if it didn’t work out. Like I did with running.

  The next morning I was out for my run just after dawn. The light was pale golden, and so many birds sang out that it was impossible to tell one from another. The tweets and whistles, caws, and trills rose around me gloriously announcing the new day. I recognized one or two calls, the chickadees, and the sweet song of the house finch. I laughed out loud as I ran, happy to be outside. On my way back I thought about Jane, Corinne, Bart, and Tommy Mack. Between all these people, I knew there was a mystery. Neither Jane nor Corinne would tell me what it was, and I didn’t know the others well enough to ask, so I would have to find out for myself. I needed to make up with Jane because she was in middle of it. And because I missed her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next few days I didn’t have time to worry about anyone. There were tests, and then a parent-teacher meeting that my mother would come to. My mother was ruthless, and if I didn’t get good grades she suspended all privileges. All of them.

  I sweated my way through the last test, Chemistry. Nothing worse than listening to all that paper rustle, thinking everyone else knew what they were doing and me drawing a blank. It didn’t help that Jane was sitting behind me and I could hear her breathing and smell that odd, warm scent she wore. Afterward all I saw of her was her back as she swept down the corridor.

  “How’d it go?” Corinne asked.

  She hugged her books to her pale blue sweater. She looked like she’d just put on whatever this morning. Her sweater was matched with a black skirt above her knees and purple fishnet stockings.

  We headed over to the track. I wanted to run off my nerves, and Corinne wanted to catch up with Jack.

  “Things okay with him now?”

  “Yeah. He’s okay most of the time. I’m volunteering with the school paper. Takes a lot of my time, so I don’t see him as much. Besides, I’m trying to spend time with Jane.”

  When she said that, I felt angry and sad at once. Kind of left out. I said nothing because I didn’t want to ask what they were doing, and the silence went on all the way to the track.

  The first thing I noticed was that Tommy Mack wasn’t there. And the next thing was that Jack was talking to a girl with long blond hair tied up in a ponytail. She wore a very short skirt and sneakers with neatly turned down socks. I mean he was talking to her, leaning in too close with intense eye contact and a smile that said, “I’m interested.” Corinne stopped walking, and I had to go back a few steps to stand beside her. She snorted and walked up to Jack. He gave Corinne a hug right away, and the other girl said “hi” to Corinne and moved off.

  On Friday, Jane was in her usual place at the back of the room. Her long legs in their worn sneakers stuck out into the isle. She leaned against the wall, her hands behind her head. I did a small wave to her as I went to my seat. She gave me the dead eye. It would take some work to get us talking again.

  Tommy Mack was in his seat too, solid and easy looking as always. So was Corinne. Her hair was black as coal again, the lovely reddish streak at the roots covered up. Miss Sapperton began to yak, so
I had no time to say anything at all to Corinne.

  At break I couldn’t find Jane in the yard. I spotted Corinne leaning against the wall and joined her.

  “Hey, you did your hair again.” Nothing like pointing out the obvious.

  “Yeah, couldn’t stand the stripe. I like it like this.”

  The yard was noisier than usual, as if everyone had eaten too much sugar or something. The younger kids had a basket shoot-off going and a crowd was screaming encouragement—or else yelling, trying to put someone off their shot. Corinne and I watched a while. Then I saw Jane coming across the yard, her head turning this way and that. When she spotted the two of us, she hunched into her hoodie and sauntered over.

  “Hiya.” She looked only at Corinne. “Listen, can we get together after school?”

  “Yeah. Sure. In the park?”

  “Yeah. That’ll be good. See you then.”

  “Bye, Jane,” I said as she walked away. She kept on walking.

  “Boy. I’m in her bad books.”

  I hoped Corinne might ask me to come to the park, but I wasn’t going invite myself.

  “What did you two fall out about?” She was watching Jane go across the yard and disappear indoors.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. And I didn’t know what Corinne thought about Tommy.

  “Tommy Mack.”

  “Tommy Mack? Oh.”

  “Why is Jane so down on Tommy Mack?”

  “Oh, you know Jane.”

  “Has he done something to her?”

  Corinne gave a little shrug. I could feel an opportunity slipping away here, but had no idea what to do about it. Just then I saw Tommy Mack over by the kids shooting hoops.

  “How about meeting us at the party next Saturday night?” Corinne asked, “A whole bunch of us will be there. You can kiss and make up then. If you want to?”

  “Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  No way would Mom let me go to that party. I thought of giving up on Jane and trying to get to know Tommy Mack, but when I looked for him in the yard, he was gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sunday night, and I had spent the whole day at home. Corinne had a date with Jack, and Jane still wasn’t talking to me. By the time I’d wandered around the house looking for something to do and finding nothing, I felt as boring as the TV re-runs.

  Mom and Dad were out, and Ryan was upstairs huddled in his room as usual. I rummaged in the fridge, though I wasn’t hungry. Although it was full, nothing grabbed my attention. I shut the door. Halfway across the kitchen, I thought of the five bottles of beer on the bottom shelf. “You a goody-good girl?” I asked myself. I went back, opened the door and took one bottle. I poured it into a mug and sat on the back steps. The first taste was bitter and thick. I didn’t let it put me off, and by the time I was halfway down the mug, it seemed almost pleasant. Clouds, dark and heavy, were driving in, and the evening light dimmed. The gas whiff of someone’s BBQ drifted through the neighborhood, and a car sped by, barely pausing at the stop sign at the end of the street.

  When the rain began, I went upstairs, lay on my bed and listened to its patta-patta on the skylight. Ryan was downstairs, crashing open cupboard doors. The rain, the noise from the house, and Ryan banging around jumbled into a weird symphony. He clomped to his room. My mind was awash with pictures of Corinne and Tommy Mack and the kids all necking in the yard. That got me thinking of Jane and then Tommy Mack again. Was Jane right, did I have a crush on Tommy Mack? I tried to imagine us together, me all cozied up to him the way Corinne did with Jack. Instead a picture of Jane popped into my head. Suddenly lonely, I went to talk to Ryan.

  He was hunched over his computer, his headphones on, and his head bobbing up and down. I had to say his name twice before he noticed me. He settled his headphones on his neck and motioned me in.

  “Ryan, do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Hey, what’s this?”

  “Just wondering. Do you?”

  A slow red crawled up his neck to the roots of his hair and then faded out. His hair was longer than usual, thick and curly over his forehead, and his shoulders stretched his cotton T-shirt to its limit. When had he turned into this good-looking guy? I almost turned to go, but then remembered he was my brother, and he was still a science nerd.

  “Not exactly. At least, not officially.”

  “Who is she? Do I know her?”

  He turned back to the computer, hit a few keys, and a photo came up. She was an ordinary girl with nice eyes and long curly hair, neither brown nor blond, but somewhere in between.

  “Why do you like her?”

  “Dunno. She’s easy to talk to. Smart. She’s just nice. Her name’s Claudia.” He said her name as if he had never before heard such beautiful sounds as Claw—dee—ah. “We have a date.”

  “How did you know you wanted to date her?”

  Ryan looked at me the way he used to when I was a kid and afraid of the dark, like he thought it was funny and didn’t want to laugh at me.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll know when you really have a crush on someone. If you don’t know, you don’t have one.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at me and smiled.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, not at all certain that it was.

  Back in my room I tried to remember what Claudia looked like as I listened to the rain rattle the skylight, but I couldn’t quite picture her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Just say sorry, I told myself. Just walk right up to Jane and say sorry. This was my plan the next day on the way to school. I left home early and detoured right out of my way through the park by Jane’s house, avoiding a mangy black dog trying to get into the garbage. If Jane walked to school, I might run into her and we could walk to school and talk. I didn’t see her. I didn’t actually know if she walked to school. It wasn’t far for her, and for all her talk against jocks, she was into walking and biking. I guessed they weren’t jock activities.

  Jane was in her seat already, at the back, one ankle up on her knee. I walked toward her, in a panic to think of what to say after sorry. She looked at me, eyes cold and hard. I lost my nerve and sat a couple of seats in front of her. My hands shook as I took out my book. I was such a coward. Worse than that, I wanted to put my head down on the desk and cry.

  The only place I had seen Tommy Mack was in class the last couple of weeks. I didn’t even look at him directly. Jane so ignored me that she wouldn’t have noticed if I’d done a dance around the schoolyard with him, but I’d avoided him anyway.

  All anyone talked about that week was Saturday night. Out past the south end of town accessible by a small dirt road was a field called Carter’s Acres, but everyone called it the Acres. It was just a field surrounded by blackberry bushes, with the railway track running along one edge of it and a field of cabbages along another. That was where everyone would be on Saturday. No way was Mom going to let me go to a dance in the middle of a field, so there was no point in asking. The only thing anywhere close to a dance I’d gone to was small parties in some girl’s house, with a couple of parents sitting on the porch drinking and yakking. I had been to a few school dances, which were much the same, except it was easier to avoid the chaperones. One thing I knew, I was going to that Saturday party no matter what.

  On Wednesday morning, Mom and Dad announced they were going to the opera in Maryville on Saturday and staying overnight. Ryan would be in charge while they were gone.

  “We trust you, son,” Dad said to him. “You’re old enough now to keep things running here. And you, Miss, you do what your brother says, okay?”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. I could get around Ryan, easy. I began to work on him on the walk to school, something we did only on Wednesday, when we started classes at the same time.

  “About Saturday night,” I said.

  “Yeah, about Saturday night.” Ryan cleared his throat. “There’s this party I was going to before Mom and Dad—”

  “The one at the Acres?”<
br />
  “Yeah, yeah, that one. I asked Claudia to go with me, so will you be okay in the house by yourself?”

  “I was thinking about going too.”

  I looked straight ahead, and let the words out real casual.

  “Hell, Carly, you can’t.”

  “Why not? You don’t want me there because of Claudia? Is that why?”

  “No, because you’re fourteen years old, and Mom and Dad would have a fit.”

  “I’m almost fifteen, and Mom and Dad would have ‘a fit’ if they knew you were going. So if you go, I go. Or I let slip to Mom and Dad that you’re going.”

  Ryan stopped dead. I kept on walking. He ran to catch up with me.

  “You, wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “Ordinarily no, but this time, Ryan, I will. I’m going to the party too. Look at it this way, Dad said watch out for me, and so at least we’ll be together. I won’t get in your way, promise.”

  And so it was settled. I was going to that party.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I checked out the cupboard where Mom and Dad kept the booze. A few almost empty bottles of gin and whiskey, six cans of lager, and a bottle of white wine. The small fridge in the basement wasn’t much better: four cans of lager and two half-opened bottles of wine, one red, and one white.

  The thing was, I wanted to try booze again. If I was going to go to the party and fit in, that was the thing. No way would I do anything else, but booze seemed okay. Everybody did that. I saw that getting it from my parents was a no go. Mom and Dad didn’t drink much and if I took a bottle of wine or more than a single beer, they’d notice. Besides, I couldn’t steal from my own parents. Then again, I took food from the fridge when I wanted it, didn’t I? I shut the fridge and left a note for Mom that I was going to town to meet a friend.

  I met no one I knew in town, which wasn’t a surprise on a school evening. I walked through the park near Jane’s house and saw only a fat man walking a tiny dog no bigger than a cat. Then I went by the liquor store. One good thing about being new in town, no one was likely to tell Mom or Dad that I checked out the shelves in the liquor store. The clerks at the till asked people for ID. Unless I could get a fake one, I couldn’t actually buy any, so I went home.