Marylin knew she shouldn’t care what other people thought, but she did. That was one of the main drawbacks of being a cheerleader. It was practically her job to care what other people thought.
Marylin’s mom came over to the mirror and began brushing Marylin’s hair. “Do you want me to French braid it?” she asked.
Marylin started to giggle. “French braid” made her think of “French kiss.” She wondered exactly what kind of kissing would go on at this party tonight. She’d never been kissed, not romantically anyway. When Marylin daydreamed about kissing, usually it was with Robbie Ballard, although he was a little more mature in her daydreams than he was in real life. Marylin had strong feelings that kissing should be serious. To make her daydreams come out right, she had to put out of her mind how often Robbie Ballard used the word booger on a daily basis.
Marylin liked to daydream about kissing in the part of a restaurant you waited in until the waiter came and took you to your table. She also felt kissing on a balcony of a hotel overlooking the beach would be nice. In her dreams she and the mature Robbie looked at each other a long time before they kissed, and then he gently swiped a strand of hair from her eyes before leaning toward her, lips puckered.
Marylin looked at her reflection in the mirror again. If she was going to get kissed in the serious, romantic fashion of her daydreams, she definitely needed to do something about her hair. “A French braid would be great,” she told her mother.
“I think you should dye your hair like Flannery did,” Petey offered from the doorway. “I think it would be cool to look like something from outer space.”
Marylin and her mom groaned in unison. You just couldn’t expect some people to understand about hair.
There was a rumor that Wes Porter’s parents were going to be out of town that night, which meant there would be no grown-ups at the party.
“His parents better be there!” Caitlin Moore’s mother exclaimed one block away from Wes Porter’s house. “No daughter of mine is going to an unchaperoned party before she reaches the age of twenty-one!”
Caitlin groaned. “Mom, don’t make such a big deal out of everything. No one else’s parents care.”
Marylin kept quiet. She knew her parents would care whether or not the party was chaperoned. They just hadn’t thought to ask.
“I highly doubt that no one else’s parents care,” Caitlin’s mom said as she pulled the car into the Porters’ driveway. She opened her door. “I’m going to find out exactly what’s going on here.”
Marylin and Caitlin stayed as far behind Caitlin’s mom as they could. What a terrible way to come to a party, Marylin thought. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t even related to Caitlin’s mom. Everyone would think they were connected.
Mrs. Porter answered the door. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a cat in a tuxedo painted on it. “Of course we’ll be here for the entire party,” she reassured Caitlin’s mom. “I bet I know how this misunderstanding got started. Wes’s brother, Tyler, is going to stay in the room while the party is going on, while Mike and I stay upstairs. That way there’ll be some supervision without actual grown-ups putting a damper on the kids’ fun.”
Marylin could tell Caitlin’s mom thought both Mr. and Mrs. Porter should be hovering over the party every second, but she couldn’t actually complain as long as there were parents somewhere in the house.
Robbie Ballard was standing in the kitchen throwing potato chips at Wes when Marylin and Caitlin finally made it inside. “Wow, is your mom overprotective or what?” Robbie said to Caitlin.
“Shut up, Robbie,” Caitlin said, but she giggled when she said it.
Wes put his arm around Marylin’s shoulder. “Now, Marylin—her mom wouldn’t care at all, would she? That’s why Marylin’s such a cool girl.”
Marylin slipped out of her coat and slipped out from under Wes’s arm at the same time. “So where’s the party?” she asked, handing her coat to Wes. “Are we the first ones here?”
“Basement,” Robbie said through a mouthful of potato chips. “We just came up to get some more stuff to eat.”
Marylin followed Robbie and Caitlin down the stairs. Wes was right behind her, tugging on her French braid. “Quit!” she told Wes, slapping at his hand. “You’re messing up my hair.”
“Ooh, touchy, aren’t we?” Wes said in a teasing voice. “We wouldn’t want to mess up Marylin’s hair, now, would we?”
“Leave her alone, Wes.” Wes’s brother was sitting in an easy chair in the corner of the basement near the staircase. He held a copy of Sports Illustrated opened to a picture of a bunch of football players tangled up in a pile. Marylin wondered if looking at people playing sports made him sad. Although for all she knew he could play whatever sport he wanted to. He could ride a bike, after all.
“Shut up, Ty,” Wes told him. He turned to Marylin and Caitlin. “Ignore him. My parents are paying him to stay down here.”
Ty smiled at Marylin. “I’ll be your baby-sitter for the evening. Your hair looks nice, by the way.”
Marylin smiled right back at him. She couldn’t help it.
“Marylin! Get over here!” Mazie yelled from the far side of the room, where she was standing with the other cheerleaders by the refreshments table. There were Ruby and Ashley and Mazie, and now Marylin and Caitlin. They all gave her little sideways hugs when she joined them, squealing, their squeals sounding like tiny little cheers. Marylin had never had the sort of friends who squealed before. Kate could yell with the best of them, but she was definitely not a squealer.
Kate! The bottom of Marylin’s stomach felt like it had dropped right out. She’d been supposed to go to Kate’s after school on Wednesday! It had even been Marylin’s idea, after their cheerleading coach, Ms. Lyttle, had talked to them about being active members of their community. Marylin had promised she would help Kate bake cookies for her church bake sale. That seemed like the sort of thing an active community member did. But then Mazie had asked her to come over Wednesday afternoon to work on cheers, and Marylin had forgotten all about cookie baking. Well, that explained why Kate had hardly said a word to her on the bus.
Marylin sighed. The hard part about having so many new friends was that the old ones got lost in the shuffle. Being a cheerleader was like having a whole flock of best friends, friends who just couldn’t seem to stop squealing. In fact Ashley and Caitlin were now squealing for no apparent reason at all. Marylin looked around. The cheerleaders were the only girls there. Counting Wes and Robbie, but not Ty, there were seven boys. All the lamps in the room were covered with scarves, so that only a dim light filled the room. Marylin shivered, even though it wasn’t the least bit cold.
“It’s so weird that Wes’s brother has to sit down here with us,” Ashley said, looking over at Ty.
“He only has one leg,” Mazie said, grabbing a cookie from the table. “Did you guys know that?”
Caitlin squealed. “Really? How weird! Why does he only have one leg?”
“Cancer,” Mazie told her.
Marylin wished Mazie would quit making such a big deal about Ty’s leg. Who cared? Anyone could tell that he was a very nice person, and wasn’t that what really mattered? I should stick up for him, Marylin thought. But she had no idea what she should say, so she didn’t say anything.
Marylin watched as Wes and Ned Garza, another boy from the soccer team, started pounding each other with pillows from the couch. Five seconds later all the boys except for Ty were bashing each other with pillows and couch cushions.
“Is this a party or a wrestling match?” Ruby called out. Ruby was the prettiest cheerleader, in Marylin’s opinion, and it fascinated her how boys automatically did whatever they could to make Ruby like them. One by one the boys dropped their pillows and cushions and stood up, their arms hanging awkwardly at their sides, as though they didn’t know what to do with themselves if it didn’t involve inflicting bodily harm.
Robbie socked Wes in the shoulder. “Let’s get
this show on the road, bro,” he said.
Wes nodded, then looked around as if he were waiting for suggestions. Ned Garza grabbed a bag of chips that had been perched on a rocking chair and began piling one chip after another into his mouth, little potato chip crumbs spilling down the front of his shirt.
“Very charming,” Ty said, turning the page of his magazine.
Marylin giggled, and Mazie gave her a funny look. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, and then she nudged Marylin with her shoulder.
“Yeah, Marylin,” Caitlin said, laughing and banging into her from the other side. “What are you laughing at?”
“Is it against the law to laugh in here?” Marylin asked, banging back into Caitlin. Suddenly all the girls were knocking into one another and laughing hysterically.
Robbie held up a soda bottle and cleared his throat. The girls went silent. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen! It’s time for the games to begin!”
Ruby and Ashley and Mazie giggled some more. They had been waiting all year to play spin the bottle, and finally they were going to get their chance. “Come on!” Ruby said in a loud whisper, bumping into Mazie to get her to walk to the middle of the room, where Robbie stood holding the bottle.
“For crying out loud, Ballard, were you born yesterday?” Ty asked from his chair. “You can’t play spin the bottle with an empty plastic bottle! It won’t spin on a carpet. Go get a glass Coke bottle from upstairs.”
“Does he really have to hang out down here?” Robbie asked Wes.
Wes shrugged his shoulders. “It beats having my mom down here.” Then he ran upstairs to get the Coke bottle.
“Round and round and round she goes!” Robbie called out after Wes had handed him the new bottle. He flicked the bottle’s neck to start it spinning. The first time it stopped, it pointed at Ned Garza. “I don’t think so,” Robbie said, spinning the bottle again. This time it pointed at Ashley. “Much better!”
Everyone laughed and cheered when Robbie leaned across the circle to kiss Ashley. It was just a tiny kiss, the sort of kiss Marylin gave her grandparents when they came for a visit. Is this what everyone gets so excited about? Marylin wondered. Suddenly she felt very disappointed, like the time her aunt Phyllis had given her three blouses and four pairs of underwear for Christmas instead of the Beauty Pageant Barbie she’d been expecting.
Next it was Ashley’s turn to spin. She got Walker Marley, whose kiss barely brushed her lips. Then Walker spun the bottle so hard that it careened around the circle, landing on Marylin’s foot.
“It’s a bottle, not a bottle rocket, Walker,” Ty commented, walking over to the refreshment table. “Try not to take anyone’s eye out with it, huh?”
It was Marylin’s first kiss. When Walker leaned toward her, a buzzing filled her ears. Marylin thought she might faint, but instead of swooning she found herself panicking that her nose would get in the way. What in the world was she supposed to do with her nose? She twisted her head at the very last second, so that Walker almost missed her lips completely. His upper lip smushed briefly against the corner of her mouth before he pulled his face away.
It wasn’t the most romantic kiss a girl could get, and Marylin didn’t feel at all different afterward. She’d expected romantic feelings to fill her like music after her first kiss. Instead she found herself wondering what Kate was doing at that very second. Probably something relaxing and fun, like watching TV and eating popcorn.
“All right, Marylin!” Mazie yelled. “Now show those boys how it’s done!”
Marylin looked around the circle, wondering whom she should aim for. She really wasn’t in the mood to kiss anyone at that very second, but Robbie Ballard might not be so bad. She wouldn’t mind it if it got around the sixth grade that she had kissed Robbie Ballard. She closed her eyes and gave the bottle a twirl. When she opened her eyes, the bottle was pointed at the gap between Wes and Caitlin, its mouth aimed directly at Ty, who was eating potato chips next to the table.
“Oh my God,” Caitlin said. “It’s pointing at Ty! You have to kiss Ty!” She said this as though it were the worst thing she could imagine having to do.
All the rest of the girls shrieked with laughter. Marylin could tell they all thought kissing Ty was a terrible idea. Maybe she was supposed to think that way too. Maybe she was supposed to think that kissing a boy with only one leg and who used to have cancer was not something a cheerleader did. But at that very minute Marylin didn’t care what she was supposed to think.
Ty smiled at her, the same smile he’d been smiling at her all day. “It’s not my party, but I can’t argue with the bottle,” he said, shrugging, as though he had no choice but to kiss Marylin. It didn’t look like he felt too bad about it, Marylin thought. She smiled back at him as he moved into the circle.
“No way!” Wes moved over to block his brother from getting any closer to Marylin. “You’re not supposed to be a part of this, Ty! You’re not supposed to be kissing my guests! The bottle’s pointing closer to me than anyone else, so I’ll kiss Marylin!”
Wes leaned over to Marylin, his lips puckered. Marylin felt her throat tighten, and she was afraid she might start to cry at any second. She decided she didn’t like this game very much. She wanted to choose whom she got to kiss. Other people shouldn’t be able to choose for her.
Wes’s lips pressed lightly against Marylin’s mouth, and then it was over. Her second kiss. It was better than the first, but it wasn’t the kiss she wanted.
“I can’t believe you almost had to kiss Ty,” Caitlin said after the party as she and Marylin walked to the car. “That would have been really horrible.”
“It wouldn’t have been so bad,” Marylin said.
Caitlin looked at her with a shocked expression. “He’s only got one leg, Marylin.”
Marylin nodded. She knew that. She also knew that legs didn’t have anything to do with kissing. In fact she was starting to think lips didn’t have much to do with kissing either. Kissing was about hearts. She touched the glove in her coat pocket. As far as Marylin was concerned, she was still waiting for her first kiss.
hoop dreams
“Put your hands up, Kate! Play some defense!”
Kate narrowed her eyes and raised her hands over her head. She knew she couldn’t outjump her dad, but maybe she could intimidate him into losing the ball.
“Yow-eeee!” Kate’s yell bounced off the walls of the gym as her dad dribbled the ball down the court. He feigned left, then pivoted right. Kate charged him, slapping the ball away in mid-bounce. She turned, dribbled twice, then arched the ball into the air.
“She shoots! She scores! She is the champion of the world!”
“All right, Katie!” Kate’s dad trotted over to her and they slapped high fives. All around them the gym echoed with the sound of basketballs hitting the wood floor and bouncing off backboards and rims. Most of the players were teenage boys and middle-aged men. Being around so many guys had made Kate feel shy when she’d first started coming to the gym with her dad to help him with his exercise-to-beat-stress program his doctor had put him on. But after a while she realized they were too busy playing ball to pay attention to her, so she stopped paying attention to them.
Kate’s dad checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven, which means Men’s League practice is about to start,” he said. “That’s too bad, actually, because I was just about to make my big comeback.”
“Says you,” Kate said, tossing the basketball at her dad.
“Think fast, Kate,” a voice called from behind her. She turned to see Andrew O’Shea lobbing a basketball in her direction. She caught it without even trying. Andrew was wearing baggy shorts like the ones the pros wore, and huge shoes that made the rest of his legs seem skinny as pencils. He looked completely different from the way he looked at school. At school Andrew usually wore tan pants and checkered shirts and deck shoes. Marcie Grossman said he dressed like his mom still picked out his clothes.
“Hey, Andrew,” Kate greeted him when he
walked over to where she and her dad were standing.
“Andrew?” Kate’s dad whispered. “Who’s this Andrew, huh?”
Kate shushed him. Then she turned to Andrew and said, “This is my dad. Don’t pay attention to anything he says.”
Kate’s dad stuck out his hand for Andrew to shake. “Mel Faber,” he said, introducing himself. “It’s nice to meet you, Andrew. You here shooting some hoops with your dad?”
“Nah,” Andrew said. “I’m here playing with my brothers.” He pointed to a group of teenagers on the other side of the gym, two of whom had the same blond hair as Andrew and the same gold-framed glasses. “Except now they’ve got practice, so I’m just watching.” He turned to Kate. “You could hang out and watch with me, if you want. We can give you a ride home later.”
Kate looked at her dad, who shrugged and said, “It’s up to you, sweetheart.”
Kate hated it when her dad said stuff like “It’s up to you, sweetheart.” Didn’t he know that parental guidance was necessary when it came to a girl her age watching basketball with a boy who was admittedly sort of cute but also goofy? A boy she had never thought about in a romantic way, but who might become a romantic prospect if she sat next to him in the gym? Did Kate even want a romantic prospect? She had no idea.
“Okay,” Kate said finally, not knowing what else to say. “I guess I’ll stay.”
Kate followed Andrew over to the bleachers near where his brothers’ team was practicing. Maybe they’ll notice me and ask me if I want to play, she thought. Maybe they’ll put me on their team. Yeah, we know she’s only eleven, she could hear Andrew’s brothers saying to the men’s league officials. But she’s almost twelve, and she’s got the best two-handed layup we’ve ever seen in our lives.
“So what’s this thing with you and Andrew O’Shea?” Marcie Grossman asked Kate in the bathroom after lunch on Monday. “Why do you guys keep looking at each other that way?”
The Secret Language of Girls Page 9
