One or Two Things I Learned About Love (19 page)

I feel like I’m a weathervane and the wind keeps changing every minute. North. South. East. West. Flip flop. Flip flop. You hear all this stuff about love and how wonderful it is, but I must’ve missed the part about how it makes you crazy. Not like crazy in love, just plain crazy. Am I crazy? I’m starting to worry that I am. I feel like I’m in a car, but I don’t know who’s driving. It doesn’t seem to be me. Or maybe it’s Connor who’s crazy. That seems like a real possibility when you think about some of the things he says (not to mention falling off the pier). So I tried to put myself in his head. To think like he does. I started wondering if when he’s at work he flirts with other girls. I pictured him pointing to his name tag and saying,
Hi, that’s my name. What’s yours?
I saw him smile and wink. I heard him say,
You want chocolate or cinnamon?
like he was asking for a date. Then I started wondering if when he says he’s with his friends he really is. How do I know that he is? He could be watching shooting stars with somebody else. He could be teaching her how to kiss. How do I know that when he says he’s messing around with Albie he isn’t messing around with someone named Cynthie Sue? I had to stop. It was really doing my head in. I mean once you start thinking like that where does it end? I’m too scared to even try to answer that question.

Asked Dad if he’s ever been driven mad by love. He said love has to get in line behind his three daughters, his wife, his cat, his bank and the internal combustion engine if it wants to make him nuts.

To give myself something to do besides brood, I took a few minutes out from wallowing in misery to check Facebook and my old emails. I couldn’t find any message from Asher Cockburn about the Fall fair anywhere. But there must be some kind of glitch in the system because some of the people who email me now and then (like my cousin Bill and Andy Fogg who moved to Canada last year) and a couple of my Facebook friends seem to have vanished into the ether too. I don’t have room in my brain to worry about this right now. I have enough problems already.

I
must’ve been thinking in my sleep because when I woke up I’d decided that this thing with Connor is ridiculous. Got my cell out from under my pillow and texted Connor and asked if he wanted to talk. He texted back:
NO
.

Why is he mad at me? I didn’t do anything. Or maybe he isn’t mad at me. Maybe I’m the one who’s overreacting and it has nothing to do with Richie Deckle. It could just be a coincidence that Connor stopped being able to speak after he saw me with Richie. Maybe he’s just in a bad mood and I’m projecting. Like when you walk into a room and people are laughing and you think it’s at you, but really they’re laughing because someone made a joke. There could be dozens of reasons why he’s so sulky. At least if he was a girl you could blame it on his period. But maybe boys have monthly mood swings, too. They do have hormones. Only Connor’s mood swings happen more like every few days than every month. Is that normal?

Nomi says the mere fact that I
asked
her if boys have monthly mood swings shows how immense my ignorance about the male section of our species really is. So I’m taking that as a NO.

Ely and I worked out a pretty good juggling routine today with carrots. It kept my mind (and Ely’s) off the fact that my phone might as well have been at the bottom of Lake Michigan for all the messages and calls I got today. The only time I dropped a carrot was when I saw a red car. It was like being stabbed in the stomach with an arctic icicle.

Went to Movie Club tonight. Louie wanted to know where Lover Boy was.
Don’t you turn into a dachshund or fall asleep for a hundred years if you go anywhere without him?
(You could be forgiven for not knowing he thought he was making a joke.) I said that Connor had practice. Jax wanted to know why he has to practise when he plays all the time. Nomi told him to shut up. The weird thing was that I was hanging out with my friends just like normal only I couldn’t enjoy myself. It was about as much fun as being pelted with rotten fruit. Only drier and not smelly. Whenever I thought of Connor I sank into a compost heap of despair. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I had my phone in my pocket on vibrate so I’d know if I had a message. But I didn’t feel anything. (Except miserable.) Then I started thinking maybe that didn’t mean I didn’t have a message. Maybe the message had come through while I was laughing or pushing Hitchcock away from the pretzels, and I missed it. He was waiting for me to answer. Waiting and imagining what I could be doing that was more important than answering my phone. Only I didn’t want to pull it out to check in front of everybody and then have them making comments and everything. So halfway through the movie I said I wasn’t feeling so hot and left. No messages.

Gus came home while I was fixing myself a snack. She gave one quick look around the kitchen like she was casing the joint and wanted to know where Connor was. I said I figured he was either with his friends or at home. Then she wanted to know if we’d had a fight. I said of course not. We haven’t been surgically joined at the hip you know. We do do things apart. She said pardon me for breathing in your air space. Then she helped herself to a pickle. So I made her a sandwich too and we sat out on the a-deck-so-far to eat them. I asked Gus if she thought she’d ever been in love. She said no. I asked how she thought she’d know if she did fall in love? Does she think it would be instantaneous? Or would it sneak up on you like a tracker sneaking up on a bear? Gus said she figures she’ll know she’s in love if he slurps his soup and it doesn’t annoy her the way it annoys her when other people do it. This conversation was so normal that I decided to go for double or nothing. I asked her about monthly male mood swings. If anybody knows, Gus should. She looked at me like I’d all of a sudden switched languages. She said now what are you talking about, Hildy? I said you know how mercurial guys can be. One minute a big, neon smiley face and the next they couldn’t be grumpier if they’d crashed their car, knocked out their front teeth and lost their dog. I was wondering if it was hormones. Gus tilted her head to one side. Was I thinking of anyone in particular? I said no, it’s just something I’ve noticed with my friends.
Your friends?
Her head was still tilted. And her brows were drawn together so it looked like she had one long eyebrow. She said, “Really?” I said, “Really.” She said, “You can’t mean Louie.” Louie? How did she get Louie into this? I said of course not. And anyway I didn’t mean anybody specific, I just meant in general. Gus said, “You can’t possibly be talking about Ely.” I said for Pete’s sake, I’m not talking about anybody special. It was just a general observation. She shrugged and said she’d never noticed.

I
didn’t want Ely getting on my case again so I decided that today I’d act as if my life couldn’t get any better if it tried. Big smile. Sparkling personality. Cheerful. Songs being whistled. So here’s what I learned for sure and certain: I can cross Great Actor from my list of possible future occupations if I decide not to be a potter. Pretending that I was happy as a million-dollar lottery winner didn’t work. The Countess wanted to know if I had something on my mind. I said I’m
homo sapiens
. I always have something on my mind. She said, “Don’t play games with me, Hildegard. You know what I mean. You have about you the air of an exiled queen living in a studio apartment in Atlanta who longs for her palace and the barking of the dogs going off on a hunt.” Besides that, I weighed out her onions and then put them back in the basket on the counter. I admitted I was a little preoccupied. She studied me for a few seconds as if I was a tiara she was thinking of buying. “Is it that boyfriend of yours? Have you had a fight?” Ely was busy unpacking the truck so I said kind of. Very softly. She wanted to know what the fight was about. I didn’t say, “I think he’s mad at me because I was talking to Richie Deckle.” I said I didn’t know. He just isn’t speaking to me. She said so in that case you didn’t have a fight. One person can’t have a fight by himself. That’s what she thinks.

By the end of the morning I’d moved from the compost heap of despair to the cesspool. Glugglugglug. In the afternoon Ely had to do some errands for Farmer John. He must’ve asked me six times if I was going to be all right by myself. As if I’ve never manned the stand alone. I said I might have trouble if a Barbarian army caught in a time warp suddenly came charging across the potato fields, screaming and waving their scimitars and trampling everything under the hooves of their sweating, wild-eyed horses, but I could probably handle anything involving bagging vegetables and giving change. Ely had been gone about an hour when Connor called! Part of me (the part that listens to Nomi Slevka) thought I shouldn’t answer it. Not right away. Let him suffer for at least four seconds. But the other part of me hit accept on the third ring. Connor said, “Hi.” Normal. I said, “Hi.” Cool. He said he thought he’d better get me before rush hour at the watering hole or he’d be too tired to push Call, hahaha. No laugh from me. I said we were pretty busy so I couldn’t really talk. He said he was sorry he hadn’t been in touch. But, you know… I didn’t know. He’d been arrested? He’d been on a space shuttle? He was defusing the bomb under a nuclear reactor? I didn’t say any of that (of course). I said, yeah. He said he really missed me. I pointed out that he was the one who stopped speaking to me. He didn’t say anything to that. So I said we needed to talk about this jealousy thing. He said it’s not jealousy. He isn’t jealous. It’s love. It has nothing to do with jealousy. It’s all about love. How can I not understand that? I said I guess I do. Then he said he couldn’t see me tonight because the Hashers have practice again because it’s the county championship coming up, but maybe we could do something tomorrow. I said, maybe. He said he’d call me after practice if I was going to be home. Everybody was playing beach volleyball tonight and I’d already said I’d go, but I told Connor I’d be home. My room was starting to reflect the disordered, confused and unhappy state of my heart (it looked like the garbage after the raccoons got at it), so I figured it was a good opportunity to stay in and clean it while I waited for Connor to call. I could’ve cleaned the White House. It’s midnight and I’m still waiting. Maybe he got hit in the head by a ball. I can’t believe I just wrote that! I thought love’s supposed to make you a nicer person, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that for me.

The only action my phone’s seen tonight was a text from Ely saying he’s worried about me again. I texted back that there’s nothing to worry about. I hope that I’m right.

This
morning it was my mom shouting my name that woke me up. “Get out here, Hildy. You have company!” I squinted at the clock. Who drops by before seven in the morning?
On a weekend
? My mom was back in bed by the time I got into the hall. I was keeping my eyes half closed in case I could go back to bed, too, but they snapped open when I saw who it was. It was Connor. In case I thought I was seeing things, he was in his work clothes and had his
Hi, My Name Is Connor
pin on his shirt. He was standing in the living room with a bag of doughnuts in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. I probably said something deep and meaningful like what are you doing here? He right away started apologizing. He knew it was really early and Saturday and he woke my mom up and everything but he had to see me before he went to work. He totally forgot about calling me last night because he got kind of involved in the game and hanging out with the guys. He said, “You know what it’s like.” And I had this really nasty thought. I thought, I used to know – when I did things spontaneously with my friends and didn’t feel guilty about everything. But I didn’t let it get out of my mouth. He held out the doughnuts and the flowers and begged me to say I wasn’t mad at him. It really is like I’m two people. The first me (the regular, everyday me) listened to him blahblahing about knowing it was practically dawn and was thinking sarcastic stuff like:
Wow, Connor can tell time
. The second me (the one I am around Connor) listened to him saying how sorry he was, and as soon as he stopped talking, said of course she wasn’t mad at him. Of course she understood. We kind of lunged for each other at the same time and got all immersed in make-up kissing. (Which may be even better than regular kissing.) We knocked over a lamp and I banged my knee on the coffee table and Connor went to pull us down on the couch and missed. And the next thing I knew Zelda was standing over us wearing her pink fairy wings and holding a bright green Brachyceratops. She wanted to know what we were doing. We jumped up so fast you’d think a volcano had started to erupt under us. Connor moaned and groaned and made a big deal of the time and how he was going to be late and had to hurry. He gave me a quick kiss, said bye to Zelda and bolted out of the front door. Where he stepped on Mrs Claws. Mrs Claws shrieked like something that wants to suck your soul out of you and throw it into the garbage. Connor screamed like someone who thinks something wants to suck their soul out of them and toss it away, jumped the stairs and sprinted to his car. Mom came out into the living room looking like she wasn’t too thrilled about being woken up twice in one morning. She wanted to know what Connor wanted. I held up the doughnuts. I said he brought us breakfast.