Sylvia and I rode the bus home together, but I never
told her that
I was in love with her boyfriend. That would have accomplished
nothing. When she asked me if I had a boyfriend, I merely
shrugged my
shoulders and answered, “No.”
“I bet a lot of guys would like to go out with you,”
she told me. “You’re a little heartbreaker.”
“Not to guys in my grade. They treat me like
I’ve got the plague.”
“Ah, freshman boys don’t know anything.
They’re still messed up from puberty. Too many hormones!”
“Or not enough!”
“I hear guys talk about you all the time. They
always say, ‘Who’s that little fox?’ whenever you walk by.”
“I’m sure!”
“No, really!”
“I look like a little kid. Guys never say that
about me.”
“Sure they do.”
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.
She could have been
saying those things to boost my confidence. I decided to ask her
a few
questions of my own to test her honesty.
“Tell me about your boyfriend. What’s his
name?”
“Casey Winslow. You talked to him on the phone
yesterday.”
“How did you meet him?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. “I’ll tell you
once we’re at your
house.” The bus slowed down and stopped in front of my
house. We got
up and walked to the exit. Once we got off the bus I checked the
mailbox and walked with Sylvia to the house. She started to tell
me
the story of how she met Casey.
“It all began when I moved here two years ago.
Casey was the first
kid to introduce himself to me, and we got to be friends. I still
had
a boyfriend in my old town named Scott, and we wrote letters to keep in
touch. Casey always understood that we could only be friends and
never
pressured me to be anything else, which was really nice of him.
We
used to hang out together all the time.
“After a while, I started making more
friends—especially after I
joined the cheerleading squad. A lot of my new friends thought
Casey
was just a troublemaker and advised me to stay away from him, but a
friend’s a friend and I couldn’t do that to him. I still saw him
from
time to time, but we didn’t hang out as much as before. Besides,
I
still had Scott.
“The other cheerleaders weren’t satisfied.
They put a lot of
pressure on me to stop seeing Casey completely. As much as I
wanted
to, I couldn’t bring myself to stand up to them. Casey couldn’t
understand this.”
I thought about the cheerleaders. They were
without a doubt the
most exclusive clique in the whole school. Kathy Katzenjammer was
their undisputed leader, even when she was a freshman. She ruled
the
cheerleaders like a tyrant, deciding who they could associate with and
who they couldn’t. Nobody ever stood up to her.
We went inside the house and got a couple of sodas
out of the fridge. “So what did you do then?”
“I don’t know. I guess I started ignoring
him. He kept calling me
up to ask me to hang out with him, but I’d always find an excuse to say
no. Eventually, he got sick of trying and stopped calling
me.
Whenever I saw him in school, we’d act like we were still friends, but
pretty soon that got to be so fake that we stopped talking to each
other altogether.” Sylvia frowned and took a sip of her
soda. “I felt
terrible.”
“It was that snob Katzenjammer, wasn’t it?”
Sylvia grinned. “I didn’t want to say anything
because of You-Know-Who.”
“The heck with Superjock. He’s only my stupid
brother. I don’t worship him.”
“Well, it was Kathy Katzenjammer. She was
bossing people around even then.”
“I never liked her,” I said. “She’s a goatface, man.”
Sylvia and I went outside to hang out on the
deck. She continued to tell her story.
“Well, anyway, Casey started partying like crazy
after that and was
even involved in a car accident. He was partying with some older
kids
from the next town over and they crashed into a tractor trailer.
Everybody in the car was killed instantly, except Casey. He came
out
without a scratch. Ever since then, he’s dedicated his life to
’living
on the edge.’ He went totally out of control.”
“Because of you?”
“I thought so. I don’t know. Anyway,
this was about the time that
the letters from Scott stopped coming. I tried calling him to
find out
what was going on, but his family changed their number. It made
me so
upset that I decided to go back to my old town to see what was up.
“The only problem was getting there. My father
wouldn’t take me
and even told the clerk at the bus station not to sell me a
ticket.
None of my so-called friends offered to give me a ride, either, so I
said the hell with all of them and started walking.”
That took guts. All of the roads out of
Eastville go through the
mountains. A person could walk along those lonely roads for hours
and
never see a single car. “How far did you get?”
“A couple miles. Casey came along on his
motorcycle and offered me
a ride to the next bus station. When I told him what was going
on, he
offered to give me a ride all the way to Scott’s.”
“That was nice of him.”
“Considering the way I had been treating him, it was
saintly. I
apologized for being so mean to him and told him it was because of the
cheerleaders. He said he understood.
“When we got back to my old town, we went directly
to my old
neighborhood. I stopped at an old friend’s house and she told me
Scott
had another girlfriend. In fact, he had even been seeing this
girl
when I still lived there! I was so mad, I could have killed him!”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t have to. Casey did it for me.
He punched his lights out.”
“Wow!”
“The funny thing is, he said it was the first fight
he’d been in
since grade school. He said he just acted tough so nobody would
pick
on him. When he realized he could fight, he started in on your
brother
again. Then he started fighting with other people until he
mutated
into the gangster I know and love today.”
“So what happened after he beat up Scott?”
“Well, when we got home, he told me that if we
couldn’t be friends
in public, he’d settle for a secret, over-the-phone friendship
instead. That almost broke my heart right there. I asked
him, ’Why
would you want to be friends with someone who wouldn’t want anyone to
know about it?’ He just said, ’You can keep me chained up to a post
behind your house for all I care.’ I told him I’d drop all of my other
friends in a minute if that’s the way he felt about it.”
Sylvia laughed. “It was so silly. We
started crying like a couple
of little kids, just me and him, sitting on a motorcycle in the pouring
rain, hugging each other. Then he kissed me, and we weren’t just
friends any more.”
“How romantic!” Knowing how their relationship
started made it
much easier for me to accept. I didn’t feel jealous any more,
just a
little envious.
“I quit the cheerleading squad the next day.
Technically, I was
kicked out, but that’s because I broke the unwritten rule about beating
the crap out of Katzenjammer in front of the whole football team.”
“You beat her up in front of the whole football
team?”
“Piece of cake.”
“I wish I could have seen that,” I said. Just
then the phone rang. I ran back into the house to answer it.
“Collect call from Hollywood. A Mr. Spielberg
for Crystal Larson. Will you accept the charges?”
“Hi, Dad!”
“How did you know it was me?”
“It’s always you. You can’t fool me!”
“So, how are you behaving? You’re not giving
Sylvia a hard time, are you?”
“No, we’re getting along great, Dad! She’s really
cool.”
“Your mother’s going to call you later. She’s
shopping right now.
How are things at home? Did you see the satellite deployment at
school?”
“Yeah, it was great! That video monitor is really
nice. And guess
what? I won first prize in the freshman category at the science
fair
today!”
“No kidding! Gee, that’s great, Sprite. I
guess all of that expensive makeup stuff was worth it, huh?”
“Yeah!”
“How’s your brother? Is he home?”
“No, he has practice today.”
“Has he accepted the Air Force scholarship yet?”
“Not officially. They’re making a big deal
about it at school.”
I heard the front door open and slam shut.
“I’m home!” Curt yelled out. “Anybody here?”
“There’s Curt now,” I told my father. “Want to
talk to him?”
“Sure. Put him on.”
I handed the phone to Curt and went back outside to
join Sylvia.
She seemed deep in thought, staring at the trees behind my house.
“So do you like living here?” I asked her.
“I suppose. It’s a quiet town.”
“Where are Casey and his gang?”
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders. “Getting
smashed somewhere,
probably. They’re celebrating their victory.” She seemed
less than
overjoyed.
“Well, now that Curt’s home, I’m sure you could
leave if you want.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t even know where they
are.”
The look on her face told me this wasn’t the first
time he partied
behind her back. “It’s been two years since we met. Casey
hasn’t
changed his attitude a bit. In fact, he’s even worse. You
know, I
love him more than anything else in the world, but sometimes I feel
like it’s not enough.”
For whom?
For Casey? For her?
I was dying to ask for clarification, but I knew she’d tell me if she
wanted to. I just stood there and waited for her to continue.
“I don’t know. Love’s a funny thing.
It’s better not to analyze
it, because you might find out you were better off without it all
along.”
That didn’t clarify anything. Did this mean
she was having second
thoughts about Casey? Was she thinking about breaking up with
him? “I
don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to, Crystal. I have a hard
time understanding it myself.”
I gave up. I wasn’t getting anything out of this chick.
“Look,” she said, smiling again. “I’m getting
sick of talking about my problems. Want to talk about something
else?”
“I don’t care.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Anything, I guess.”
We spent the next hour talking about music, movies,
clothes, and
everything under the sun. Then we went inside to do our homework
at
the kitchen table. Curt watched us study while he ate his
dinner.
Every now and then, I’d catch the two of them making eye contact.
I
can’t say they were making passes at each other, because neither of
them seem to smile.
Sylvia mystified me. There was a lot more to
her than I originally
thought. I guess you could say I was beginning to sympathize with
her,
because I went to bed that night feeling only slightly suicidal and
dreamed about buying new shoes.
