Among Friends (15 page)

Paul Classified is just the only one who admits it.

All of us keep our thoughts classified.

I have a cat at home. Isabelle. Once I had Ferdinand
and Columbus to go with Isabelle, but Ferdinand ran away and Columbus preferred living at Hillary’s house. Hillary calls Columbus “Cat,” and Cat comes whenever Hill yells for him. Isabelle doesn’t have a hard time being a cat. You never see Isabelle lying awake all night biting her nails fretting about being a cat. But people—we spend half our lives figuring out how to be what we were born being.

We are the only species that has a hard time being a species.

Perhaps that’s why we are willing to write these diaries.

We’re trying to declassify ourselves.

I do not have a friend in the world now.

It’s this math tutoring.

I don’t know how to get out of it.

I told my parents and I told Dr. Sykes it wouldn’t work out.

But they think I’m just succumbing to peer pressure. That’s actually what they said to me. I tell them the entire school is mad at me over this Star Student thing and I want to pull out and they say, “Jennie, dear, don’t succumb to peer pressure.”

Peer pressure!

What a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid phrase.

They are my friends, my world, my life, and they hate me.

That’s not peer pressure.

That’s suicide.

Oh, I don’t know what to do, I hurt so much,
I hurt so much
!

It was war there for a while and I thought of joining Jennie’s team, but she didn’t look my way. She stared her enemies straight in the eye and she refused to surrender. I couldn’t just walk over to her; she didn’t want me. Ansley and I talked about it. Jennie’s made her first really major mistake, I think. You can outshine everybody only so long, and then you have to blend in with the crowd. Now they’re going to turn on her.

It makes me sick, but I don’t know how to help her.

Amanda Hodges doesn’t lay off.

When we were going back to class after lunch, and I was trying to catch up to Jennie to tell her I was on her team, Amanda said something I couldn’t catch to Jennie. It must have been some blackmail, because Jennie said, “All right, I’ll go tell Dr. Sykes I’m going to withdraw.” She looked confused and unpoised for the first time I can ever remember.

But Dr. Sykes was coming down the hall, and Sykes had no idea that anything other than his school’s record was at stake. He was terribly upset. “This is my high school’s chance to set yet another record!” he cried. “Think of the trophies you’ll bring home! Why, Jennie, the front lobby will have the Star Student award for two years running! We’ll all be so proud of it.”

“Of it?” said Jennie. “Of it?” She was actually shaking, and then she laughed hysterically. “They bagged me in Africa, you know,” she said crazily.

It was not like Jennie to be weird. Everybody just looked at her.

Jennie turned to Amanda. “Or you could polish me,” she said, going on down the hall. “I might be silver. I might be gold.”

Candy used to sing a song about silver and gold in Brownie Scouts. Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

But Ansley thought she was referring to the trophies in the front foyer. You can polish trophies.

Jennie, bagged in Africa? Silver and gold?

For an entire half day, Jennie was the mystery, and not me.

I wanted something to hurt me.

It was so weird.

I had an evening rehearsal at school, and when it ended, I didn’t catch a ride with anybody and I didn’t call my mother. I just started walking.

I didn’t button my coat, wanting the wind to freeze me. I didn’t zip my pocketbook, wanting the money and the credit cards to fall out. I didn’t walk in the sunlight, but late at night, downtown, in dark shadows past littered gutters. I chose neighborhoods where crime is heavy and violent.

But nothing happened.

And in the end I came out at the corner of High Street and Ridge Road, and who pulled up next to me? Paul Classified. “Get in, Jennie,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home. What are you doing walking around at this hour?”

I walk in places where I could get mugged and raped, and what happens? I end up just where I’ve wanted to be all along: Paul Classified’s car.

The night was extraordinarily dark—cloudy, with no moon. Leaves flickered across the pavement like scurrying animals; I kept thinking we were going to run over a squirrel. We were trapped in the car together for the eleven miles to my house.

Paul said, “Had a pretty tough day in school, didn’t you?” He drove very well: hard, as if the sharp curves of narrow Connecticut roads were a test of life.

“Every day is a tough day now.”

He was staring straight ahead. His features were so clean in profile, like something that should be on a gold coin—something you could outline with a pen and frame. Paul said, “Do you need to talk?”

Oh, but there were so many problems. I didn’t even know how to start. How could I have turned a whole school against me just because I’m good? I had to fight sobs. Oh, how I wanted Paul to care about me. I wanted him to touch me, or hug me. I felt like a little kid with a skinned knee: somebody please put a Band-Aid on my cut!

“I’m listening,” said Paul a mile later.

“Emily and Hill are jealous.” Better for once to start small than my usual technique of starting impressive.

“I know.”

“They’re my best friends.”

Paul nodded. “It hurts them that you succeed left and
right hardly trying, and they muddle along behind you.”

He was on their side, too. He didn’t care that it hurt me—only that it hurt them!

“Stay out of those neighborhoods,” he said suddenly. “You’re playing with fire.”

“Do you care?”

Paul Classified stared at me, his face blank. “I have gone out of the business of caring. Don’t expect caring from me, Jennie.”

“Why?”

“I have no emotion to spare. I’m using it for something else. I go to school for an education, and that’s that. Not for friends or fun.”

“Oh, Paul! That’s terrible. Education is the least of the things you go to school for! Friends and fun are higher up!”

Paul actually laughed out loud. “You don’t really think that, Jennie. You who have to succeed or die trying. You read that in a magazine somewhere. It has nothing to do with your life.”

“Success doesn’t matter that much to me.”

“Oh no? I think, Jennie, that you would give up almost anything in order to succeed. Including Emily and Hill.”

“They’re giving me up!”

“So fail a little,” said Paul. “They’d come back then.”

To fail, I would have to fail on purpose. Say to myself: Now I will write a stupid paper; now I will figure out the wrong answers on the quiz; now I will forget the melody to my own song. “
Fail?
”

“Scary word, huh?”

I guess it must be, because I leaped away from failure and I said to him, “So what is this huge problem that uses up all your emotion, Paul?”

He said nothing.

We turned up Talcott Hill.

“Answer me. It’s the courteous thing.”

“I’m giving you a ride home, lady. Taking myself miles out of my way for you. The courteous thing is not to interrogate me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

Unexpectedly he took his eyes off the road to smile at me. A smile to be cherished, because it was infrequent: like getting a compliment from a teacher who rarely gives A’s. “Jennie,” he said, “your timing isn’t so good. Just trust me. We all have problems. Some of us can only deal with them in silence.”

Oh, how I wanted to know more! “I’ll help!” I said. “Is it money or family or alcohol or drugs or prison or illegal aliens? Tell me! Let me be part of it!”

“No,” said Paul Classified.

The wind caught on the whip of an antenna and screamed as the car turned up Talcott Hill.

“Here’s your house, Jennie.” He sat very still behind the wheel, neither looking at me nor reaching toward me. I knew that if I flung myself on him he would still just sit there, staying out of it. He won’t let me in his life, and he won’t come into mine. He leaned over me, but did not touch me, and opened my door. Cold wind brushed over us both, but it was the only thing we shared.

I went in the house. He waited to be sure I got in safely. How crazy life is. On Lost Pond Road, where everything ends happily ever after, cushioned by money and style, he waits to be sure I’m safe.

I drive at night. I can’t sit in the darkness alone at home. Funny how I still call it home when it’s just a place where my clothes are in drawers. Found Jennie Quint of all people wandering around a slum.

I worry about her. I will explode from the inside: secrets will burst my skin. But Jennie will explode from the outside: pressure will detonate her control.

And what will she do when she explodes? I’m different: I have a mother to visit. But Jennie has to get away from her parents! Or maybe away from herself.

Where will she go? Can she wait for college: one and a half years? A girl walking alone in the freezing dark is not in a waiting mood.

Success.

Jennie’s success is going to tear her to pieces.

Me, if I could succeed in just one thing, I’d be so happy. All I want to do is be sure Mom knows she’s my mother. Candy’s gone. It’s as if Mom had never tucked her in at night, or read her stories, or been her Brownie Scout leader, or fixed her banana milkshakes. It’s all on me. I have to be a great son from now on, because Mom is counting on me to be the child she succeeds with.

I guess the real definition of love is that there are no conditions. They love you no matter what. I love Mom no matter what.

But nobody loves Jennie no matter what. People love
her because she’s brilliant and exciting. Even her mother and father …

I didn’t know a diary would be like this.

I didn’t know that all day long part of my mind would sift through my thoughts choosing the ones I would write down.

Miss MacBeth, are you safe? I watch you now, in class, weighing you. I am pretty sure now I will never pass this in. I’ll get an F. But I don’t have a mother anymore who either knows or cares. Jennie’s parents would kill her for getting an F. They’d probably kill her for getting an A minus.

Or am I wrong? After all, her parents aren’t doing all this composing and writing and test taking—Jennie is.

Maybe Jennie would kill
herself
for getting an A minus.