The Blue Girl (5 page)

I just hoped she couldn’t read minds.

“It’s very good to meet you, Mrs. Chancy,” I said when we were introduced.

“It’s Ms. Tattrie,” she corrected me. “Maxine might have decided to keep her father’s name, but I most certainly have not.”

Ho-kay.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Tattrie,” I said. “I had no idea  ...”

“Of course you didn’t. Would you like some tea before you girls begin your study session?”

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

Ms. Tattrie turned to Maxine. “Why don’t you see to it, dear? That will give me the chance to get to know your friend a little better.”

Here comes the third degree, I thought, but Ms. Tattrie surprised me.

“I’m so happy that Maxine has finally found a friend,” she said once Maxine was out of the room.

Unspoken, but tangled there in her words if you were looking for it, was the relief that the friend was as obviously prim and tidy as she thought her daughter was. But hey, that’s the image I was trying to project, so I couldn’t complain.

“She rarely goes out, unless it’s to the library or the bookstore,” Ms. Tattrie went on, “and I can’t remember the last time she had someone over. This past year’s been the worst. I think losing her father has been particularly hard on her.”

I guess Mr. Chancy had been the buffer between his wife and his daughter, making it a little harder for Ms. Tattrie to run completely roughshod over Maxine. But it sure was weird the way she made it sound like Mr. Chancy had died. My own mom said that happens when some couples break up, when it’s really messy and bitter. It wasn’t at all like that with Mom and Dad—they still had long talks on the phone every couple of days.

“Well, I just feel so lucky to have met her,” I said.

We sat in the living room while Maxine made the tea— no hanging around the kitchen table in this house, I guess. It was one of those sterile spaces that made you wonder why they’d call it a living room because, for all intents and purposes, no one actually lived in here. The furniture was all tasteful—sleek, polished wood tables; white couch and armchairs. The walls had generic landscapes, one per wall, no more, no less. On the mantel, flanked by silver candlesticks, was a formal portrait of Ms. Tattrie and Maxine. The coffee table had a fan of magazines—
Time, In Style, Life, National Geographic,
and the like—spread just so.

I didn’t have to work to remember my posture and keep my knees together. I wasn’t likely to relax in here—not in this room, or under Ms. Tattrie’s watchful eye.

“I don’t know how I’d ever catch up with my studies if it wasn’t for her help,” I went on. “I have to admit feeling a little guilty, taking up her time the way I have, because I certainly wouldn’t want her grades to suffer, but she’s assured me that helping me keeps the material fresh for her as well.” Her mother nodded. “There’s nothing like teaching to help you learn better yourself.”

“That’s
exactly
what she said. And she’s obviously so smart that she doesn’t need my help, but she seems to think I can be useful quizzing her on what we’re learning.”

“Well, I’m just glad that she’s finally found herself a friend with some
decent
values.”

I smiled at her, my hands folded primly on my lap. Oh, I really am good, I thought. But then it helps when the other person is seeing what they hope to see, rather than what they fear.

Maxine arrived with the tea, and we made small talk while we drank. I think I was the only one who was even remotely relaxed and I was tense—well, at least tense for me.

*    *    *

“I can’t believe you,” Maxine said later when we were in her room. “You should be an actress.”

It was such a girly room, all frills and lace—straight out of the Proper Girl Handbook, chapter four, “The Bedroom.” The lower part of the walls was a dark, dusty rose, the upper a lighter shade, the edging a border of vines and roses. The comforter had the same pattern, and so did the lace bedskirt and the pillows heaped at the headboard. The furniture was all white—bed, night table, dresser, bookcase, and a desk and chair set—while a rose throw rug picked up the color from the walls.

Lined up on the back of the dresser, with a few more on the windowsill, was a collection of what I could only call prissy dolls .You know the kind, all ringlets and lacy dresses and too-perfect porcelain faces. They were immaculate, as though they’d just come out of their packaging and had never been played with. Though I guess I was being unfair. Just because I like scruffy things, doesn’t mean everyone has to.

“I didn’t know you collected dolls,” I said.

Maxine pulled a face. “I don’t. This whole room’s my mom’s creation.”

She went to a corner of the room and pried up a loose floorboard. Reaching into the space that was revealed, she pulled out a battered plush toy cat, all lanky, droopy limbs. I could see it had been a calico once, but the plush was so worn away that only the memory of color remained.

“This was my only real toy,” she added.

“God, that’s so sad.”

She got a hurt look.

“Not the cat,” I said. “I mean what your mom’s done to your room.”

“It happened the first weekend I went to stay with my dad. I came back and it looked like this. She’d even boxed my books and put them in the basement storage, but I managed to convince her I needed them for my studies.”

I looked at the bookcase and could see how the mismatched spines of the books would drive her mom crazy.

“So I guess it wasn’t like this when your dad was here,” I said.

“Just not as much. She talks about him like he’s dead.”

“I noticed. Why don’t you live with him?”

“He’s always out of town for work, or I would. It’s not that I hate my mom, it’s just ... hard.”

“It’d sure drive me crazy.”

I picked up one of the dolls from the dresser, then put it back down.

“You don’t mind me snooping?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I just have this insatiable curiosity about other people’s stuff,” I said. I sat beside her on the floor. “So what else do you have stashed away?”

“Nothing much. Pictures of my dad. Some CDs that Mom’d hate. My journal.”

I made no move to take a closer look and got up when she returned the plush cat to its hiding place, sliding the floorboard back into place. I liked the idea of a hidden stash but would hate
having
to use it like she did.

“That’s one of the doors into hell,” she said when I wandered over to her closet.

I laughed. “What do you mean?”

“Just take a look.”

I opened the door to an array of clothes, all neatly arranged on their hangers, blouses on one end, dresses on the other, skirts in the middle. I fingered the nearest skirt. Of course, it was good quality material. I tried to think of something nice to say about them, but we’d already been through the whole business about her clothes.

“I hate that everything I own has been picked out for me,” she said.

“That bad, huh?”

She nodded. “Except for my books and what I’ve got stashed away. But the rest of my life is all focused on making me into the dork I already look like.”

“I don’t think you look like a dork.”

“How can you say that? If we’re going to be friends, you have to be honest with me.”

I shrugged. “I don’t judge my friends by the clothes they wear.”

“Oh, come on. You do the casual punk thing, but you have to be spending time planning it out.”

“I do. But clothes are only for fun. They don’t say who I am—not really, not inside. I don’t think I’ve ever had an original look. I just see somebody wearing something I like—in a magazine, on the street—and I think, that’d be fun.”

“Fun.”

“Mm-hmm. And my idea of fun changes from day to day. For instance,” I added, giving my pleated skirl a swirl, “today, this is fun.”

Maxine shook her head. “God, I wish I could be like you. You are
so
sure of yourself”

“It just seems like that,” I told her.

“How’d you ever get to be that way?”

“That’s kind of a long story.”

“I suppose,” she said with a glum look, “you’re going to tell me it’s the same way you got to be brave.”

“Not really.”

I came and sat on the bed with her. Opening one of the textbooks I’d brought, I laid it on the comforter between us, just in case her mom came to check up.

“There was this girl back at my old school,” I said. “Her name was Emmy Jean Haggerty, and she was this real hillbilly who got bussed in from the hills up around the old coal mines north of town. People’d rag on her mercilessly because of her raggedy hand-me-down clothes and her thick hill-country drawl, but she’d just ignore them all.

“I was getting my own fair share of hard times and bullying in those days—I mean, I was the little hippie chick who grew up on a commune, and everybody knew it. It didn’t matter how much I tried to dress like them and be like them. So one afternoon I went up to Emmy Jean in the library, where she was sitting by herself as usual, and asked her how she coped so well. You know what she told me?” Maxine shook her head.

“She said, ‘My granny told me to be happy inside myself. That while I can’t do the first damn thing about what other folks think on me, leastways I can be whatever I want to be, inside me. So I choose to be happy. I know the other kids call me “the Hag” and think I’m simple in the head, but I don’t care. I don’t even hear them anymore. Time was, they’d make me cry every day, but not no more.’ “ ‘How can you be that strong?’ I asked her, because I couldn’t imagine being able to do that.

“ ‘Well, you think on it,’ she said. ‘Do you really want to count folks like that as your friends? Do you
really
care ’bout what they think?’

“That’s when I realized that I did. I wanted to be just like them, but maybe I didn’t have to. But I also wanted to be just like Emmy Jean, and I told her so.”

“ ‘Oh, you don’t want that, neither,’ she said in that slow drawl of hers. ‘What you want is to be yourself, hard as that can seem.’ Then she smiled. ‘But let me tell you something else Granny told me ’round ’bout the same time. She said it didn’t matter how good I got at being myself, for myself, because sooner or later I was going to meet me some boy and I’d be throwing all my hard-earned considerations out the window, just for a smile from that boy’s handsome lips.’ “ ‘You think?’ I said.

“Emmy Jean laughed. ‘Well, I’m sure not letting it happen to me,’ she told me. ‘Not after spending all this time learning how to be happy with myself. You think on that, Imogene, when they come courting you.’ ”

I gave Maxine a grin. “Like they ever would, I thought. But the rest of the stuff she was telling me made sense. Maybe it was because she was just repeating what I heard all the time at home. Like I said, Jared and I grew up in the original laid-back household, where we were taught from the moment we could sit up in our high chair not to care what ‘the Man’ or anybody else thought about us.”

“So why was it different coming from her?” Maxine asked.

“I don’t know. I guess because she wasn’t some stoned old hippie, and I could see how it worked. She was by herself pretty much all the time, but she wasn’t unhappy And the mean things the other kids said just rolled right off her. So I taught myself to be like that, too. And you know what the funny thing is? Once they saw I didn’t care, I started having all these little cliques wanting me to be their friend.”

“And did you?”

I shook my head. “No, I ended up hanging with the dropouts and punks who didn’t bother going to school.”

“But you still did.”

I nodded. “Which is funny, because of all the kids going to Willingham, I probably had the only parents who would have supported my dropping out to ‘do my own thing.’ ” I made quotation marks with my fingers. “And I guess that’s why I stuck it out—because I didn’t have to. I skipped a lot of days, but I didn’t totally blow my tests and exams.”

“You make it all sound so simple,” Maxine said. “Especially the part about not caring what other people think.”

“It’s not,” I told her. “But it gets easier. And the thing is, people like Valerie and Brent really can’t hurt me anymore. Only someone like you could. Or Jared. Because I really care about what you guys think.”

That was more than I’d meant to say, so I shut up. I’d barely known her a week and I didn’t want to scare her off by being too intense. I really wanted a best friend, a sister. And I wanted it to be her. I couldn’t even tell you why, exactly. It just snuck up on me that first time we talked and now it felt like anything else wouldn’t be right.

But maybe I’d already scared her off, because Maxine went silent as well. The two of us sat there, staring down at the open textbook for a while, neither of us turning the page, but neither of us really seeing it either. Or at least I know I didn’t.

“So did the thing with the boy happen to you?” Maxine asked after a while. “Because I know I just want to crawl into a crack in the floor every time I see Jimmy Meron walking down the hall.”

“Who’s he?”

“I pointed him out to you on Friday. The guy on the track team.”

“Oh, right. He
is
cute. Have you talked to him?”

“God, no. He doesn’t even know I exist.” She paused a moment, then said, “You never answered me.”

“About the boy thing?”

She nodded.

“Not really,” I lied.

I wasn’t sure why, exactly. I guess I just wanted her to like me and I figured the best way for that to happen was for me to pretend that most of the stuff I’d done in Tyson had just never happened.

Before she could press me on it, I asked her, “So have you ever been kissed—like for real?”

She shook her head. “Have you?”

I nodded. This I could talk about.

“Sure,” I said. “The first time was by Johnny Tait. I was twelve, and we were at a bonfire near the sand pits outside of Tyson. It was nice, but I didn’t love him or anything.” But that didn’t matter to Maxine. She still had to know everything about it.