The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “What way?” Kate asked. She could see splotches of red blooming across her cheeks in the mirror.

  “You know what way I mean!” Marcie said, punching Kate on the shoulder. “Like you’re in love with each other or something.”

  Kate splashed some water on her face, then dried it off with a paper towel. “You’re crazy, Marcie. Andrew and I are friends. We both like basketball.”

  “You both like each other! Wait until I tell everyone!”

  “I don’t care,” Kate said. “You can tell people whatever you want. Go ahead. No one will believe you.”

  By two thirty-five that afternoon everyone in the sixth grade had heard that Kate and Andrew O’Shea were a couple.

  “You should tell Andrew to get contacts,” Flannery said, sliding into the seat next to Kate on the bus. “He might be cute if he didn’t wear those stupid-looking glasses.”

  “Do you have to sit here?” Kate asked, looking straight ahead. “There are a thousand other places you could sit on this bus.”

  “It’s a free country,” Flannery replied in a singsong voice.

  Kate glanced at Flannery out of the corner of her eye. At the beginning of April, Flannery had cut her hair as short as a boy’s and dyed it red. It actually looked pretty good—not that Kate would ever tell Flannery that. She tried to say as little as possible to Flannery now that the only time she saw her was on the bus. After Marylin became a cheerleader, Flannery made friends with two eighth-grade girls who spent most of their time in the girls’ room experimenting with lip gloss and purple eye shadow.

  Flannery jabbed Kate with her elbow. “So have you kissed him yet?”

  Kate glared at her. “That’s none of your business!”

  “That means yes!” Flannery crowed. “Kate, I never knew you were so mature!”

  Kate ignored Flannery for the rest of the ride home. Of course she hadn’t kissed Andrew! She didn’t even know if she liked him. Okay, maybe she liked him a little. She liked talking to him, anyway. Saturday Kate and Andrew had watched basketball practice for two hours. They talked about school and how Mrs. Watson, their math and social studies teacher, should chew breath mints so that you didn’t practically faint every time she breathed on you. They talked about how they missed Paisley Clark now that she was at a school for accelerated children, and discussed what Jason Frey could do to stop being so shy. Kate talked about her dad’s heart attack last fall, and Andrew talked about his parents’ divorce when he was seven. By the time basketball practice was over, Kate and Andrew had talked so much, their voices had grown ragged and raspy.

  “Kissy-kissy,” Flannery said to Kate as she got off the bus. “Don’t let your lips get too chapped!”

  When Kate stomped into her house a few minutes later, the phone was ringing. Melinda, the baby-sitter, picked it up. Turning to Kate, she whispered, “It’s for you! It’s a boy!”

  “Give me that!” Kate said, grabbing the receiver from Melinda.

  “Was that your mom?” Andrew O’Shea asked. Kate could tell it was him, although his voice sounded kind of funny over the phone.

  “My baby-sitter,” Kate told him. “She’s nineteen going on eight.”

  Melinda made a pouty face at Kate from the kitchen table. Kate took the phone into the hall closet.

  “So I hear we’re an item,” Andrew said. “Marcie Grossman has been telling everyone.”

  Kate felt her face grow hot. “I didn’t say a word to Marcie. Marcie just likes to make stuff up.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you said something,” Andrew said, sounding disappointed. “I mean, it’s okay if you did.”

  “You wouldn’t care?”

  Andrew laughed. “Of course I wouldn’t care! I think it’s sort of neat. I mean, what do you think? About us, like, going together or something?”

  “Or something?”

  “About us going together,” Andrew said more firmly. “I mean, do you want to?”

  “Okay,” Kate said, surprising herself with how quickly she answered. “I guess so. Sure.”

  “Great!” Andrew said.

  “Great!” Kate replied.

  Then neither of them said anything for a few minutes. Kate’s legs started itching. Her stomach growled so loudly, she was sure Andrew could hear it. Finally she said, “Listen, the baby-sitter says I have to go clean my room. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  Then she walked out of the closet. Melinda beamed at her. “Is it true love?” she asked.

  Kate didn’t bother answering. Why everyone suddenly found her life so fascinating was beyond her.

  When Kate got off the bus Tuesday morning, she saw Andrew getting off his bus at the other end of the drop-off lane. Panic grabbed her around the middle. It occurred to her that since she and Andrew were now officially going together, he might want to hold hands with her in front of everyone.

  This idea terrified Kate so much that she ducked around the corner of the school before Andrew could see her and ran to the gym’s back entrance. Inside, the before-school program kids were playing Hacky Sack and shooting baskets. Kate scooped up a ball from under the bleachers and dribbled over to where a handful of boys played a listless game of horse.

  “You guys know how to play around the world?” Kate asked, twirling the ball expertly on her index finger.

  Five minutes later, after Kate had circled the globe once and was halfway around again, Andrew walked into the gym. He smiled at Kate when he saw her but stopped for a minute to kick around the Hacky Sack with some seventh graders before ambling over.

  “How about a game of one-on-one?” he asked casually.

  Having a boyfriend’s not so bad, Kate thought as she took the ball left, faking Andrew out, then shot neatly for an easy two points. For the next five minutes, until the bell rang, she and Andrew charged at each other, swiped the ball out of each other’s hands, and tried long, impossible shots from half-court.

  “Good game,” Andrew said, patting Kate on the back as they walked from the gym to their first-period math class. “You ought to come over to my house one afternoon, and we can take on my brothers.”

  Kate was just about to agree to this when she looked up to see that she and Andrew were surrounded. Mrs. Watson hadn’t unlocked her room yet, and all of Kate and Andrew’s classmates were waiting outside the door, leaning against lockers and batting wads of paper at one another across the hall.

  “Oooooh, look at the lovebirds,” someone crooned. Immediately a whole chorus of oooohs started up. Kate saw Andrew’s face grow red, but he smiled and shrugged his shoulders as though his classmates had caught him stealing from a cookie jar. She quickly walked over to where Marcie stood with Amber and Timma.

  “You’ve got a big mouth,” she said to Marcie.

  “I wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true,” Marcie insisted. “You guys just proved it. Anyway, what’s the big deal?”

  Kate honestly didn’t know. She looked to where Andrew was now standing with Jason Frey and Trevor Parlier. He really was halfway cute, she told herself, and he was a pretty good basketball player, even if he did have a bad habit of double dribbling when he got frustrated.

  “Sorry I’m late, folks.” Mrs. Watson walked through the crowd of kids, jangling her keys. Kate trailed Marcie and Amber into the classroom. She heard Mazie Calloway squeal, “Quit it, Robbie!” behind her.

  Mazie Calloway would never want Andrew for a boyfriend—Kate knew that much. Neither would Ashley Greer or Ruby Santiago or Caitlin Moore. Or Marylin. None of the middle school cheerleaders ever had boyfriends whose moms still dressed them or who brought Thermoses of milk to drink with their lunches instead of Cokes or sports drinks.

  Maybe that was why it was such a big surprise when Marylin stopped by Kate’s desk on her way down the aisle and said, “I think it’s sort of cool about you and Andrew.” She had a funny expression on her face. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Kate realized Marylin actually looked jealous, like she wished she had a boyfr
iend too. Marylin hadn’t been jealous of Kate since fourth grade, when Kate had gotten a skateboard for her birthday. Marylin’s mother was against skateboards for children.

  Unfortunately a little envy from Marylin didn’t change the fact that people would start expecting Kate to hold hands with Andrew in public. Maybe I should tell my mom about Andrew, she thought. Maybe she’ll say, “You’re much too young to have a boyfriend. Maybe when you’re fourteen.” I’m sorry, Kate would have to tell Andrew. We can still play basketball, but only as friends.

  “He sounds like a nice boy. When do we get to meet him?”

  Kate leaned back in her chair and let out a long sigh. This was not going as planned. Instead of giving her a firm lecture about being too young for boys, Kate’s mom was calmly chopping up onions for dinner.

  “What boy?” Tracie asked, walking into the kitchen and grabbing some grated cheddar cheese from the bowl by her mother’s elbow. “Don’t tell me Kate has a boyfriend. Who is it?”

  “You wouldn’t know him,” Kate said. “His name is Andrew O’Shea. Besides, he’s not really my boyfriend. He’s more like a boy who’s a friend.”

  “Is he related to Dave O’Shea?” Tracie asked.

  Kate nodded. Dave was one of Andrew’s older brothers.

  “Geeksville!” Tracie said, hopping onto the stool next to the counter. “That whole family is from Mars. Dave O’Shea, Brian O’Shea, they’re always winning these science contests, and all the teachers love them.”

  “Some people would say that that’s a good thing, Tracie,” Kate’s mom said, reaching for a dish towel.

  “They’re really good basketball players,” Kate said, defending Andrew’s brothers.

  Tracie laughed. “Who cares? They’re geeks.”

  Later that night Kate sat on her bed and doodled in her social studies notebook. She was supposed to be brainstorming a list of the Ten Most Important Natural Resources of the Future, but she couldn’t concentrate. The whole problem with love, Kate decided, was that it was the opposite of basketball. With basketball the object was simple: You put a round ball through a round hoop. You had to overcome some obstacles to score, sure, but if you practiced hard and played smart, you could win.

  With love there was no ball and there was no hoop. And as far as Kate could tell, there was no winning. There was just Andrew O’Shea, a very nice person whose hand she didn’t want to hold because she was afraid everyone would make fun of her. In the old days, when Kate had no interest in romance, she never cared what other people thought. Now, it appeared, love was turning her into a rotten human being.

  Andrew was getting a drink at the water fountain outside the cafeteria. There was something about the way his neck showed so that Kate could see the top bump of his spine that made him look innocent to her, like he was a little kid who still believed in Santa Claus.

  “Go ahead,” she said, bumping Marcie with her hip. “Go talk to him!”

  Kate quickly walked into the cafeteria and sat down with Amber and Timma. A few minutes later Marcie came over to the table.

  “He said okay, no problem,” she told Kate, throwing her lunch on the table.

  “What happened?” Amber asked.

  “Did you break up with Andrew?” Timma asked as she bit into her sandwich.

  Kate shrugged. “It wasn’t working out.”

  Kate was sure she had made the right decision until social studies, when Andrew read his list of the Top Ten Most Important Natural Resources of the Future. It was a really good list. For the tenth item he had put “Tiger Woods” and everyone had laughed, even Mrs. Watson, who usually didn’t appreciate her students joking around on homework assignments.

  Andrew looked straight ahead and didn’t even glance at Kate as he passed her desk on the way back to his seat.

  “I heard you dumped Andrew,” Flannery said from the seat behind Kate on the bus that afternoon.

  “Why do you care so much about my life?” Kate asked, not bothering to turn around. “Why is what I do so important to you?”

  “I don’t care, actually,” Flannery said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the back of Kate’s seat. “But I don’t not care either. Watching what happens to you is like a scientific experiment.”

  “What am I?” Kate asked. “A lab rat?”

  “Not exactly,” Flannery said. “But you are interesting. You have a lot more potential than I thought you did. Which is more than I can say for Marylin.”

  The two girls were silent for a minute. Then Flannery sat up in her seat. “Anyway, it’s too bad about Andrew. What happened anyway?”

  Kate turned around and looked at Flannery. “It’s too hard to explain. I can hardly explain it to myself.”

  Flannery nodded. “Love is a lot more complicated than people think.”

  Kate sat in the hallway closet and stared at the phone receiver. Then she looked up at the list of phone numbers she’d penciled on the closet wall in very tiny letters so that her mom wouldn’t notice. Marylin’s was on the very top, even though Kate had memorized Marylin’s phone number a hundred million years ago. Under Marylin’s name was a long list of names and numbers from the kids in her fifth-grade class. Kate had copied them from the school directory very carefully on the wall one night when her parents had gone out to dinner. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, although now it struck Kate as sort of dumb. She’d never called half those kids, and anyway she could have just looked them up in the phone book.

  Her eyes tripped down to the bottom of the list, where the sixth-grade names were, and found the number she’d been looking for. Kate smiled as she punched in the buttons.

  “I think Andrew’s great!” Paisley exclaimed after Kate had explained the situation to her. “But maybe you’re not ready for love.”

  “How can you tell?” Kate wanted to know. “It seems like half the girls I know have boyfriends.”

  “But that doesn’t mean they’re ready for love,” Paisley insisted. “Phoebe says that you should always start as friends first, anyway. Which you and Andrew did, but that still doesn’t mean you have to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “But maybe I want to be boyfriend and girlfriend.” Kate sighed. “I wish it could all be private. Why does everybody have to know about everything in my life?”

  Paisley laughed. “Why don’t you quit thinking about love and boyfriends and girlfriends? Why don’t you just think about Andrew O’Shea, the human being?”

  Kate stretched her legs so that they were poking out into the hallway and examined her shoes, which had extra-bouncy soles so she could jump extra high. Andrew had a pair just like them. Andrew the human being.

  “Maybe I’ll try that,” she told Paisley. “But sometimes it’s hard to think about other people as human beings. Too much stuff gets in the way.”

  Then she and Paisley decided to do their homework on the phone together, and Kate actually helped Paisley with a math problem, which made Kate feel like maybe she could be an accelerated child, and they talked about some things they might do that summer, like hang out at a creek that was near Kate’s house and famous for its frogs. For forty-five minutes, until Tracie started yelling at Kate to quit yakking and let someone else talk on the phone for a change, Kate forgot all about boys and love and caring what other people thought about her. She was too busy thinking about how nice it was to have friends like Paisley.

  And, it occurred to her all of a sudden, like Andrew O’Shea.

  As soon as she walked into the gym before school the next morning, Kate saw Andrew shooting baskets with a couple of guys from Mr. Tower’s homeroom. She almost turned around, but she stopped herself. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life trying to avoid Andrew O’Shea. She’d hardly ever get a chance to play basketball if she did that.

  It’s time to set things straight, Kate thought. The least she could do was talk to him in person, instead of sending her friends to do her dirty work.

  Kate ran across the court from An
drew, holding up her hands. “I’ve got an open shot!” she called to him. “Throw it here.”

  Looking confused, Andrew lobbed the ball at Kate. She grabbed it, then put it into the air. The ball teetered on the rim for a few seconds before falling through the net.

  “Two on two!” Tim Lopez, one of the guys from Mr. Tower’s homeroom, called out. “Me and Charlie versus Kate and Andrew. No competition!”

  Kate took the ball back to half-court, then passed it off to Andrew, who made an easy layup. For the next five minutes they played like they’d been on the same team all their lives. Finally Tim held up his hands as if he were surrendering.

  “I’ve got to go get my books before the bell.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Charlie said, scurrying after Tim out of the gym.

  “Amateurs,” Kate said to Andrew, throwing him the ball. “Tim should stick to soccer.”

  “Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “He’s a lot better with his feet than his hands.”

  Kate kicked the floor with the toe of her shoe. “So anyway,” she said, “when are we going to play against your brothers?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to do stuff with me anymore,” Andrew said, looking closely at the basketball as though he were inspecting it for very tiny holes.

  Kate took the ball from him and put it on top of her head. “It’s not that,” she said, moving her neck and shoulders around to keep the ball balanced. “It’s just that I don’t want to hold hands. I don’t think I’m any good at holding hands.”

  “Probably because you’re too busy using them to play defense,” Andrew said, grabbing the ball off Kate’s head and dribbling it toward the hoop. Kate ran after him, putting her hands up to block his shot. But instead of stealing the ball away from Andrew when she had a chance, she grabbed his wrist.

  “Maybe I could start with wrists and work my way down to hands,” she told him, suddenly inspired. “Maybe that would be okay.”

  Andrew smiled. Then he hooked the ball into the air with his free hand. Kate watched as it curved neatly into the basket, falling through the net without a sound.