J.D. plopped in front of the TV and stared at an old black-and-white movie. The remote didn’t work and since he was too lazy to get up and change the channel, he watched a young woman with a hairdo in the shape of an ocean wave embrace a young man under a street lamp. “I would do anything for it not to be true,” the man said, pulling away from her and holding his hat over his heart. “But what we had here is over, dollface. We’re through.” J.D. watched their eyes glisten, he saw their sadness. He had his own little storage bin of strange, sad feelings he tried to keep under lock and key. He felt something like heartache when he thought about the mysterious girls, walking the hallways of his school. There were so many new faces since the graduated eighth graders from both the town’s junior highs and at least half of the Catholic school spilled together to make up the freshman class. His drama class was filled with many of these exotic girls. There was Susan Steen with her magical hair. He had watched her pull on one of her tight curls, pulling it past her shoulder to almost her elbow and when she let it go it sprung back up to half its length. There was Katie Taylor, who he heard danced ballet. Her spine was straight and her neck long, and even though she was a little chubby, when she walked nothing jiggled. There was Luann Morley, who still had a child’s body and a loud, high laugh. She could do a cartwheel on the balance beam. One day after school he walked by the gym and saw her strong arms stretched taut on the beam as her little legs parted in the air, and then as if her legs had eyes they landed to safety, one chalky foot after the other. She wobbled only the tiniest bit. He wondered about all these girls and what they were like to talk to. What did they think about? Would he ever know? Thinking like this was sometimes delicious, sometimes terrible.
He hadn’t wanted drama class; he wanted shop, where they made tool racks and bar stools, but freshmen got leftovers and he was rerouted to the arts. “A thespian,” the old guidance counselor shouted in J.D.’s ear, handing him his schedule. It would have been intolerable if it weren’t for these girls who filled the seats in front of him. From his seat in the back of the room, he could stare, unseen, at the back of their fine heads and wonder about them.
Two weeks ago, the drama teacher had asked the class to form groups, choose a play from the shelves, and present a scene. J.D. sat quietly, waiting for one of these girls to turn to him, which they were bound to do considering he was one of only three boys in the class; there were boy parts, he knew. But this didn’t seem to matter. He watched as desks were turned and groups sprung up. He watched and waited and found himself alone.
Then Dawn Martinelli poked him in the arm. “I guess you’re stuck with me,” she said.
“I am?” Dawn Martinelli was a big, beefy girl with bad skin, like his, although her pimples were red and mean and gathered in small clusters, while he had a couple of large, sluggish bumps. He knew Dawn Martinelli’s type, from her chicken soup smell to her huffy attitude. He had her pegged.
“You’ll be Vladimir and I’ll be this Estragon,” she said, thrusting a copy of Waiting for Godot at him. “We’ll do this scene where they call each other names. ‘You abortion! You sewer rat!’”
“You lobotomy,” he whispered.
“You butthole,” she said. He inched his chair away from hers, looking at the gray sky. January was one of those months that went on forever.
“We’ll be bums. It’ll be wicked. You’ll see,” she said.
J.D.’s mom dropped him off at the Allards’ at seven o’clock. The house was small and bright with a yellow living room, a little yellow kitchen and a short yellow hallway, sprouting two bedrooms and a bathroom, which were probably yellow as well, J.D. thought. “John Dewey, how are you?” Mrs. Allard smiled. She was cheerful and dumpy, wearing pink lipstick.
The kitchen table had been moved into the living room and a rickety card table was pushed up next to it. Both tables were covered with a paper tablecloth. Six assorted chairs were gathered around the tables, and each place was set with a bowl, a spoon, and a napkin. Mr. Allard in his coat and boots carefully placed a dish of melting butter to the right of the bread basket, then the left. “Where do you think, Johnny?” Mr. Allard asked, when he saw J.D. watching him. J.D. shrugged.
“Girls, girls, John Dewey is here,” Mrs. Allard called.
Shy at first, Annabel and Sophia clung together and whispered into each other’s hair. They wore flannel nightgowns and plaid slippers. Annabel was eight and could be a chatterbox. J.D. remembered her once standing on his shoes and holding his hands, discussing nimbostratus clouds; she and J.D. had dazzled each other with the weather report. Sophia was younger and quieter and had dark, dark eyes. Both girls had chin-length hair and mild cases of static electricity. A couple strands rose, almost elegantly, toward the ceiling.
“We’re having a progressive dinner, J.D. We’ll come back here for stew.” The Allards grabbed their coats, kissed the girls and left. For the first half-hour, the girls colored quietly on the floor, looking up at him shyly, then looking away. “It’s been a long time since we saw you, John Dewey,” Annabel said after a while.
“J.D.,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Do you want a snack?” he asked.
“We had our snack,” Annabel said.
J.D. settled on the couch, opened Waiting for Godot and studied his lines. He’d finally agreed to it because he wanted the class to notice him, notice that he was breathing the same air as they were in the same overheated classroom; he hoped the scene would be funny, and he found he liked yelling insults at Dawn Martinelli. Earlier in the week, though, when they were supposed to be rehearsing their scene, Dawn Martinelli had stared out the window and wouldn’t cooperate.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“I decided to stop talking so much. I’m trying to cultivate a sense of mystery.”
“Well, you’ll still be weird and boring.”
“I’m not boring,” she said mildly.
“No,” he agreed. Boring wasn’t one of her flaws. “But this is required talking.”
Dawn pointed to one of the groups. “They’re doing The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know a thing about art, do you?” she said, leaning her fat head close to him and scowling.
“Get out of my face,” he said, inching his desk away.
“You are so blah,” she said, lightly, almost musically. “There’s not one thing about you that’s memorable. You could disintegrate right now and not one person in this room would notice.”
He felt himself get warm, could feel his face reddening. They seemed to instinctively know things about each other that he wished they didn’t know. “I take it back,” he said, as easily as he could. “You are boring.” But he could see they’d both gotten under one another’s skin, and for the rest of the week they spent third period drama class alternately rehearsing their lines and saying terrible things to each other.
Now just looking at the lines made his heart sink. He didn’t know what to make of high school, where he walked the halls like a phantom. He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked over at the Allard girls, who were watching him expectantly. They smiled, looked down into their coloring books, and then looked up again.