“My James,” I said. “My, my!” But I liked that. All the time we were doing our shopping, that little phrase went round and round in my head. My James.
We did our shopping. Every time I threw something else into my shopping bag, I’d check my watch.
At five minutes before four, I said, “I’m going over now, Em. I’ll call you later and tell you all about it.”
“I think I’ll go with you,” Emily said.
“What do you mean? You can’t.”
“Why not? I want to be sure that everything’s okay. You can just say your friend came with you.”
“Emily, I don’t want to say that. Anyway, it’s a terrible idea. How am I supposed to introduce you? Emily? My name is Emily, remember?”
“You could just tell him Emily’s not your name, and—”
“No way, José! He’ll think I’m a complete space cadet. What do I say? Oh, sorry, James, the first time I met you, I had a little slip of the mind and I just happened to give you the wrong name. The real Emily is right here, while the other Emily, meaning me, is actually Bunny.”
“Well, you could say it. What’s so bad about that?”
“Emily, I’m not going to do it.”
“Bunny—”
“And please don’t call me that right now. What if he’s here already?” The minute I said it, I had to turn around and look. I sneaked another glance at my watch. “Why did you have to spring this on me?” I said. “We could have figured something out, but it’s too late now.”
Again I got that same bad feeling I had when I was fibbing to my father. The truth was, I didn’t want to figure anything out. I didn’t want Emily there when I met James. As soon as I thought that, I felt sort of panicky and almost sick. What was happening? Was our friendship falling apart? I’d always wanted Emily everywhere with me. I couldn’t think of another time in my life when I didn’t want her to be with me or do something with me. Not one single time.
“Bun—” Emily took my arm. “Okay, what if I don’t sit with you? I could just go in by myself and take a table, and—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said I don’t want you to.”
“Why not?”
“You’re starting to sound like Wilma.”
“Look, Bun—look, I won’t talk to you. I’ll just sit there and—”
“No. Why are you so worried about me? What do you think I’m going to do? Throw myself at his feet? Run away with him?” Didn’t anybody trust me? First my father. Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you doing it with? Now Emily and her nervous hovering.
“I don’t want you lurking, Emily. I don’t want you spying on me. I don’t want you protecting me.” I was mad. I let myself get mad, and I was glad to be mad, because then I didn’t have to think about the way I was acting.
“I’m not going to spy, Bunny! What a horrible thing to say. I just want to be there as—as insurance.”
“And I don’t want you there as an insurance policy, either. Just have some faith in me. I’m not a complete airhead.”
“No, but if you weren’t so busy thinking about yourself—”
“Oh, yes, I know! I know! I’m selfish and insensitive.”
We stopped in the middle of the mall. People hurried around us. Somebody’s shopping bag slapped into my back.
“Bunny, if you’d just listen for a moment. I—”
“I am listening, and I don’t like what I hear. And don’t call me Bunny.”
“—want to see him, too. Did that ever occur to you? First you talk about him and talk about him, and then you tell me I can’t even see him. When am I going to see him?”
“Okay, you can walk by and take a quick look.”
“I can walk by and take a quick look? Thank you so much! Thank you, thank you, your majesty. Or should I call you Generalissimo? You like power, don’t you?”
“Me?”
“Yes! You enjoy pushing people around.”
“Oh! How nasty!” At that point, I was so mad I didn’t care who heard us. James could have walked right up to us and I wouldn’t have been able to stop. “You talk about me, Emily. You have a queen bee complex. You’re so used to bossing poor little Wilma and Chris, lording it over them, that it’s a habit now. You’re just mad because you can’t boss me around, too.”
Emily’s face was pale. Her freckles practically jumped off her skin. “Talk about nasty. You are the expert. You know more about it than anybody.”
She walked away from me.
Chapter 13
I went around the corner to Stanchio’s. I went in and sat down at a table. The place was empty. There was music playing. A man was singing. “To tell you the truth, girl, I’m madly … badly … in love with youuuuuu.…”
“I’m waiting for a friend,” I told the man behind the counter. The same man with the bald, freckled head. He nodded.
My stomach was jumping around from the fight with Emily. I tapped my fingers on the table. When the song was done, it started playing over again. The man behind the counter said, “That’s one of my favorite songs. You know what I do?”
I shook my head.
“Every day I play just one song in the morning and one song in the afternoon. I listen to the song playing over and over, and that’s the way I learn the lyrics.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said politely.
“To tell you the truth, girl, I’m madly … badly … in love with youuuuuu.…” I was sitting with my back to the window. All of a sudden, I got this feeling that somebody was watching me. Eyes on my back. Emily, I thought. She’s right out there, spying on me, making sure I don’t do anything dumb.
I turned around. Somebody was watching me, all right. James. He waved and came in. “Hi. Did you just get here?” He sat down across from me.
“I’ve been shopping.”
“Buy anything good?”
“Toothpaste.”
The counterman brought water. “We have good tortelloni. I made them myself this morning fresh.”
“That sounds good,” James said. “How about you, Emily?”
“Raspberry—no, vanilla-rum gelato.”
“Coming up,” the man said.
James took a drink of water. “Well, I finally got that story written. And published.” He took a small, folded newspaper out of his hip pocket.
I leaned forward. “Can I see it?”
“I’m sorta nervous about showing you. I hope you think it’s good.”
“Of course I will.” I reached for the paper, but before I even looked at it, I thought of something. “Did you use my name?”
James shook his head. “No, you’ll see. I was going to, then I decided it would be better not to. I hope you’re not disappointed.”
“Oh, that’s okay.” I was relieved! I don’t know why, but the idea of my memory with Emily’s name on it seemed, well, dishonest. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. Because I didn’t think it was dishonest to use Emily’s name. Or maybe it does make sense. Because I didn’t like my name, but I liked my memories.
“It’s on the inside page,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, girl, I’m madly … badly … in love with youuuuuu.…”
I opened the paper and spread it out on the table. The headline said: LULU BELLE WOWS DEVOTED FANS. And underneath, it began: “A mob of screaming, singing, cheering fans greeted Lulu Belle and her band at the Civic Center last week. I was there in the spirit of curiosity—who were the people who grooved on this music?—and helpfulness. Your intrepid Teen Seen Reporter, Maureen Flint, roped me into this deal.
“’I can’t go,’ she said. ‘I need someone to fill in for me. You’re a friend. Prove it.’ Since Maureen is always saying this sort of thing to me with a suspicious glint in her eye, I thought, Okay, I’ll do it! This will be the supreme test. What better way to prove my friendship than to sit
through an entire evening of Lulu Belle Smith?”
I read down to the end of the article. It was really good. I thought maybe he’d pretend to have interviewed a lot of people, but he didn’t. He just wrote about me, some of the things I told him about how much I liked Lulu Belle’s music and why.
“So what do you think?” he said.
I folded the newspaper again. “It’s really good.”
“You like it? You really do? Maureen thought you’d have a fit, because I didn’t use your name. She says most people want to see their names in print.”
“No. I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You never have that yen? You don’t want to see your name in a newspaper?”
“Well, maybe, some day.” A headline flashed into my mind. COMEDY SENSATION STARTS NEW TV SEASON WITH OWN SHOW. RISES TO THE TOP FROM HUMBLE BEGINNING UNDER BIG TOP.
James leaned across the table toward me. “So, anyway, you made your contribution to my short career as a reporter.”
“Right, now you go full steam ahead for law.”
“Uh huh. What about you?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m going to be a clown.”
“I never knew a girl who did that.”
Under the table, James’s legs twined around mine. My face heated up. I started to burn. Even my eyelids got hot. “I’ll probably go to clown college.” My voice sounded like a robot’s.
“A clown in college. That’s cute.”
My legs were trapped inside his legs. I couldn’t stop blushing. “What do you mean, cute”?
“Cute. It’s cute. You’d make a cute clown. Emily, the cute clown.”
“It’s not cute,” I said. That annoyed me, and I was still blushing. “I’m serious. I think it’s my life’s calling.”
“Your life’s calling!”
“Do you think it’s cute that you want to be a lawyer?”
“Sure I do. Do you think I’m being sexist?” Everything I said amused him.
“James!”
“Em-ily!”
“Why do you laugh at me?”
“I told you. You’re cute and adorable.” He leaned even closer and kissed me. After the first moment of shock, I closed my eyes. I thought, I better remember this. My eyes were still closed when James pulled away. For a moment I didn’t want to open them. At all. Ever.
Then the counterman was standing over our table, putting the tortelloni with cream sauce in front of James and the gelato in front of me. “Enjoy,” he said.
And I heard the song again, the same words, the same chorus. “To tell you the truth, girl, I’m madly … badly … in love with youuuuuu.…”
I ran through the mall, looking for Emily. I don’t know how long I ran around, trying to find her. It never even occurred to me that she might not be there, that she might have gone home. I went in and out of stores and I finally saw her near Jeans An’ Things. “Emily! Emily!” I grabbed her by the shoulder. “Emily, wait till you hear—”
“Excuse me!” the woman said. She was small and dark-haired like Emily, and cute from the back in her jeans, but from the front she was definitely not Emily. She had a little peaky, pointed face with a bright red nose.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I thought you were—”
“I’m not,” she said, in a loud voice. She looked furious. “Rude, badly brought up kids!”
“Sorry,” I said again. “Really.”
I kept on looking for Emily and I found her, too, after I’d made a big circle, in the bookstore across from the gelato shop. “Hi, Em.”
She turned around. “I’m not lurking,” she said, right away. “I’m looking for a book for Wilma.”
I dragged her out of the store and told her everything.
“He put his legs around your legs?” she said.
“Yes!”
“He kissed you?”
“Yes!”
She squeezed her hands together. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. I closed my eyes.”
“You closed your eyes? And then what?”
“I thought, I’m going to remember this until the day I die.”
“Was it wonderful?”
“It was strange.”
“It was strange? Why?”
“Well … maybe because he just, um, did it. Here we were—talking … and all of a sudden, he leans across the table and smacks his lips on mine.”
“Smacks his lips?” Emily said. “Yuuck.”
“No, no, I said that wrong. I just meant that, you know, we were talking and all of a sudden, he did it, there were his lips, stuck on my lips.”
“Okay, so then what happened?”
“My gelato and his tortelloni came. No, I’m not kidding. It did.”
“And then?”
“And then we stopped kissing, and we ate, and we talked some more.”
“How did you feel?”
“Emily.” I linked my arm with hers and talked right into her ear. “That gelato tasted so good. It was cold. Oh, it was so good. My lips were burning, I mean it, they were just burning up—do they look burning now?”
She inspected me and shook her head. “No, they look fine. They look normal.”
“It’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to go home with fat, burning lips.”
“What’d you talk about? Did you talk about the kiss?”
“We never mentioned it. It was funny, because that was about ninety percent of what I was thinking about. Or maybe ninety-five percent. Anyway, I told him how old I was.”
“You told him how old you were?”
“Emily, you’re repeating everything I say.”
“I’m repeating everything you say?”
“There! You’re doing it again.”
“Did you tell him about your name, too?”
“Hey. One big truth a day is enough for me.”
We sat down under the skylight at one of the little Cinzano tables with umbrellas. “Bunny,” Emily said, “did you really tell him you were thirteen?”
I nodded. “It just came out. I didn’t know I was going to say it. First he kissed me. Then the gelato came. My gelato. And his tortelloni. He started eating. He said, ‘Aren’t you going to eat your gelato?’ So I did for a while, just cooling my lips. And then I looked at him and I said, ‘James. I’m thirteen years old.’”
The minute I repeated it to Emily, my face got hot and I remembered the way James had leaned across the table and kissed me.
“You said it just like that?”
I held up my right hand. “Girl Scout’s honor.”
“What did he do? What did he say?”
“He said he was astonished. I’m quoting. That’s exactly what he said. ‘I’m astonished.’”
“He didn’t know you were thirteen?”
“No. He’s eighteen, Emily. Remember I said he might be even eighteen? He is. He just had his birthday last month. He said he thought I was at least fifteen, maybe even sixteen.”
“Okay. And then what?”
“I don’t know. We just talked some more and then he paid for the gelato and stuff, and we got up and left.”
“Are you going to see him again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The article’s all done. I don’t think he’ll call me again. Do you?”
“How do I know? I never even met the guy! I never even saw him. In fact, I’m still mad at you,” she said, pulling away her arm.
“No, you’re not.” I took her arm and put it through mine again. “You can’t still be mad at me, because I’m not mad at you anymore.”
“Bunny—”
“Em-ily.” The moment I said that, I remembered how James had said the same thing to me, and I felt a pang or a pain, some kind of queer, hard, tightening feeling in my chest. And I thought, Bunny, why did you have to tell him your age? Why did you have to do that?
Chapter 14
Monday night, after supper, Shad and I were watching tv in his room when the phone rang.
“I�
��m going to take a shower,” Mom called from the hall. “Somebody else answer that.”
“Get it, Bunny,” Shad said. He was lying on his belly on the floor.
“Nobody’s going to call me.”
“How about Emily?”
The phone rang again. “It’s probably for Dad,” I said.
“Nobody ever calls him.”
“What about his clients?”
“Only the crazy ones call.”
“Shad, you better not let Dad hear you say that.”
The phone rang for the third time. I jumped up and ran across the hall to Mom and Dad’s room. I picked up the phone, just in time to hear Dad saying, “There’s no Emily here.”
“Dad, I’ll take it,” I said.
“Emily?” James said.
“Just a minute. Dad? Are you off the phone? This is personal.”
I heard the phone click downstairs.
“Hi,” I said. I sat down on the bed. I’d been thinking about James practically every single moment since Saturday. And I dreamed about him, too.
I dreamed that we were in an airplane together. I was flying the plane, and James was sitting there, with his legs crossed, wearing a pair of shorts.
“Was that your father?” he said.
“Yeah. He thought I wasn’t home,” I said quickly.
“Well, I’m glad you were. I wanted to talk to you. You know, I was talking about you to Maureen and—”
“You were talking about me to Maureen? Why?”
“Oh, interesting case.”
My face got red. “What?”
“No, don’t get mad. I was just telling her about you. Don’t worry. All good things. And, anyway—were you kidding when you said you were thirteen?”
I didn’t answer right away. What if I said, Yes. Sure, I was kidding. It was all a joke. One of my big jokes. I’d tell James he’d been right. I was really fifteen. No, sixteen.
And he’d say, Whew! Terrific! Because, to tell you the truth, girl, I’m madly in love with you.
“I’m thirteen,” I said. “Well, almost fourteen. My birthday is in August.”
“Three more months,” he said. “But that’s still sorta young.”
“For what?” I blurted.
B, My Name Is Bunny Page 8
