On Saturday, November 11, at 9:00 p.m., Kelly Johnson lay on her bed, fully clothed in jeans and T-shirt, listening to a CD and staring at the ceiling. The bedroom door was closed and secured with a hook that she’d purchased that afternoon at the hardware store and screwed into the door frame. Then she’d gotten a hammer from the tool chest in the garage and pounded the eyelet into the smooth polished wood of the door itself.
“Why are you doing that?” her thirteen-year-old sister, Chris, had asked in bewilderment.
“To keep you out,” Kelly had told her.
“You don’t have to do that,” Chris said with hurt in her voice. “I don’t want to come into your crappy old room.”
“You’re always in there. You were there in the other bed this morning when I woke up. You sneaked in during the night without even knocking, and Mom keeps coming in all the time to check on me and see what I’m doing. I can’t even do my homework in peace anymore without somebody barging in and interrupting.”
“It’s scary sometimes with Dad not here,” Chris said. “Last night there was a funny noise like somebody was on the roof.”
“You’d better get used to it,” Kelly told her bluntly. “You’re not going to come running in here every time the wind blows.”
The cold cruelty of her own voice had pleased her, as had the look on her mother’s face when she had seen the disfigured door surface. It pleased her now to lie on the bed and dig the heels of her dirty tennis shoes into the yellow quilted spread. It had pleased her a few days ago to turn down Ethan’s invitation to homecoming, the invitation she’d been dreaming of for weeks and had thought he might be too shy to issue.
“No, thank you,” she’d said when he’d finally gotten it stammered out in its entirety. No excuse—no apology—no explanation—just “No, thank you,” as though he were the last person on earth she would want to be seen with. And later, when Tammy had called about triple dating, she’d said, “No, thank you,” again with the same distant coolness.
“What was that about?” her mother had asked her as she ended the call.
“It was Tammy, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Johnson had prodded. “She was inviting you to do something.”
“I said it was nothing important.”
“It’s important for you to see your friends,” her mom had objected. “I know you’re upset with your dad and me, and I understand that, but you can’t withdraw from the world. You need your friends more than ever now. You need people to talk to—”
“I don’t need anything,” Kelly had said.
And now, in the haven of the locked room, she repeated the words softly to herself—“I don’t need anything. Or anybody.” Not her parents, not Chris, not poor Ethan with his hopeful, cocker spaniel eyes, not Tammy, not Ann—not anyone. It was crazy to depend on other people, to let them be important to you. All it did was make you stupid and vulnerable and blind to reality.
“This isn’t anything sudden, Kelly,” her dad told her. “Your mom and I have been growing apart for a long time.”
They had, had they? Well, it had certainly been carefully hidden from her. As far as Kelly knew, her parents had never had a fight in their lives. They were absolutely compatible; they liked the same foods, the same books, the same music. They went to church on Sundays and shared the same hymnal; they attended PTA meetings together and held hands at the movies. They even looked alike. Kelly had read somewhere that people who lived together for a long time grew to resemble each other in appearance, and her parents were living proof, with the first strands of gray appearing in their brown hair in exactly the same spots and the laugh lines crinkling at the corners of their eyes in identical fans.
What a nice, normal, congenial family they were, the Johnsons, snowmobiling together in the winter, camping together in the summer—except for this past summer, when they somehow hadn’t gotten around to it. Funny, she hadn’t thought much about it until now, the fact that this year there had been no camping trips. Kelly herself had been so busy, working through June as a camp counselor, going up to the lake for swimming and cookouts, playing tennis and goofing around with her friends. Fiddling around while Rome burned. Goofing away the days, while her parents’ marriage disintegrated before her unseeing eyes. When exactly did her dad meet the woman he now thought he was in love with? During the summer? Before that, even? Was he seeing her, perhaps, on those sweet spring evenings when he supposedly had been working late while Kelly knelt in the cool twilight and helped her mom put in the backyard petunia beds? Had her mom suspected nothing? Wouldn’t any normal, intelligent woman know when her husband was falling out of love with her? And if she’d known, why hadn’t she done something? How could she just have stayed put, making meat loaves and baking cookies and quilting her daughter a lemon-colored bedspread and pretending nothing terrible was happening?
Laura Snow’s parents were divorced. That was the main reason Kelly had voted for her when she’d been proposed as a member of Daughters of Eve. She’d felt so sorry for her—in tiny Modesta there weren’t a lot of broken marriages. “The poor girl,” she’d said when the name had been suggested. “Her parents are divorced, you know. No wonder she’s a loner, and she probably compensates by overeating.”
Laura’s dad lived in another state. She hardly ever saw him. He was remarried, Laura had said once, and there was a baby half brother whom she’d never even seen. Would her own dad remarry? Kelly wondered. It seemed likely that he would, since he was in love with somebody. Would there be a baby, another Johnson child living right here in Modesta? Would it look like Kelly and Chris, with a round, rosy-cheeked face and brown eyes and brows that almost met over its nose? Whose genes had produced that look? “Those Johnson girls look so much alike,” people were always saying. “They’re two peas in a pod.” Teachers who had had Kelly in middle school kept calling Chris by her name. “I keep forgetting,” they apologized. “It’s like having the same student twice.”
Would they now have the chance to have the “same student” three times? Or four? Or even five? Would her dad start all over again with a new life as though this first one had never existed?
What would happen to her? What did a forty-year-old housewife do when there was suddenly no man to keep house for? Get a job? If so, what? There’d been a discussion about this at one of the Daughters of Eve meetings. When the middle-aged housewife gets forced into the workplace, Irene had told them, the employer isn’t going to excuse her lack of experience.
Poor old housewife, Kelly had thought. Nice, kind, stupid Kelly Johnson, always concerned about the fate of the unfortunate, but never applying the facts to herself or to anyone close to her. Poor Mom. Why couldn’t she show some compassion for her mother? She loved her, didn’t she? Of course she loved her. This was Mom, not some strange “other person” housewife—Mom—so why didn’t she unlock this stupid door and go out into the hall and down the stairs to where her mother sat in the living room and put her arms around her and hold her and break through this terrible wall that held them both in check, so that they could cry together?
“You need your friends more than ever now,” her mom had told her. Concerned about her. Loving her. Worrying over Kelly, not over herself. Wonderful, self-sacrificing Mom, and what had it gotten her? A load of crap, that’s what. A load of shit, is what Madison would call it—outspoken Madison, who called a spade a spade. Kelly had never called anything by an ugly curse word like that. Words like “shit” weren’t used in the Johnson household. Maybe that was why Madison didn’t have any hang-ups and Kelly did.
That’s why I can’t go downstairs, Kelly told herself now. It’s because I have a hang-up. A hang-up about being stupid, which, in its way, was just as terrible as being cruel, because both things hurt equally in the long run. Her mom had trusted in love, and that was stupid. Her mom had built her whole life on the premise that she was half of a perfect couple, and now she wasn’t anything. She was a cartoon character, walking around the house, emptying ashtrays that didn’t need emptying, cooking big meals that no one could eat, changing sheets that didn’t need changing, and it was all so stupid because she should’ve known. She should’ve known!
“It’s the woman who gets it in the teeth,” Irene had said. “Always.” Calmly, she’d said it, the words cold and careful. And now Kelly understood something she hadn’t picked up on before. The woman Irene had been talking about had been herself. The teacher who’d been forced out of that Chicago school hadn’t been a “friend” at all—she’d been Irene. No wonder she knew—no wonder she’d been trying to warn them!
Her mother had said she needed to talk to her friends. All right, then, she would do just that. She would talk to the one friend who would really understand the situation.
Kelly got up from the bed. The music was still playing. She’d set her iPod to shuffle songs randomly—now it was an old song by John Denver that her parents had played at their wedding. It was called “Annie’s Song,” and he supposedly wrote it for his wife. “Let me lay down beside you […] let me give my life to you…” Bullshit!
Kelly crossed to the door and unlocked it. She opened it and went down the hall to the phone-charging station her dad had set up by the stairs. He hadn’t wanted them texting when they were supposed to be doing homework, so all phones were plugged in to charge each night. The sounds of the TV drifted up the stairwell. Her mother and Chris were watching something with a laugh track.
Kelly didn’t have Irene’s number, but she figured it must be listed. She called information.
“Do you have a listing for Irene Stark in Modesta?”
There was a pause. Then the operator confirmed and connected her number.
“Thank you,” Kelly said.
It wasn’t until the phone had begun to ring that she remembered that this was the night of the homecoming dance. Irene, as the sponsor of Daughters of Eve, would be acting as one of the chaperones.
Well, so much for that, Kelly thought as the phone continued to ring with no response. Then, just as she was ready to hang up, there was a sudden rasp and Irene’s voice, sounding hurried and breathless, said, “Hello?”
“Hi. This is Kelly.” She couldn’t believe her luck. “I thought you would’ve left for the dance.”
“I was just going out the door,” Irene explained. “I’m running a little late this evening. I’m sorry. Were you girls worried that I wasn’t going to get there?”
“No, it’s not that,” Kelly said. “I’m not calling from the school. I’m at home. I just—just—” She didn’t know exactly how to continue. What was it that she did want, anyway? Irene would think she was crazy.
“I just wanted to talk a little while,” she finished lamely. “I forgot what night it was. I don’t seem to have it together these days.”
“Small wonder,” Irene said sympathetically. “I don’t really need to be at the dance until time for the presentation ceremony. Would you like me to come pick you up?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Kelly said hastily. “It isn’t that important.”
“I think it is. Needing to talk is very important.” Irene spoke firmly. “You live on Third Street, don’t you?”
“At one twenty-seven,” Kelly said. “The big white house on the corner. Look, you don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t. Stop worrying, Kelly. There’s no big problem. We can come back here to talk and later stop by the dance for the drawing. Put on a dress, and I’ll come by for you in about ten minutes.”
“I wasn’t planning on going to the dance,” Kelly said.
“You might change your mind. If you decide not to, I can drop you back at your house on my way to the school.” She paused. When she spoke again, it was quietly. “It’s all right, Kelly. I know what you’re going through. I know all too well. I’ve been through it, too. When I was your age exactly, my father walked out on my mother and destroyed her completely. I’ve never forgiven him for his callousness, and I never will.”
“He—destroyed her?” Kelly said shakily.
“She had a mental breakdown. She never recovered. You see, I know—” Her voice hardened. “I do know, Kelly, what it’s like to have a father incapable of giving love. You’re terribly hurt, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Kelly said softly.
“And you’d like to punish him, wouldn’t you? To make him suffer the way he’s making you and your mom suffer? That’s natural, Kelly. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. For men, marriage is a game, something they can walk into and out of as the mood strikes. They think they can have it all without giving anything themselves. Women have to be tough to make it in this world, Kelly. Women have to band together, because when it comes right down to it, our female friends are all we have.”
At 10:30 p.m. the DJ took a break, and Mr. Shelby, the principal of Modesta High, announced the results of the elections for homecoming queen. Peter Grange proudly escorted a smiling Madison Ellis to the front of the gym to don her crown and conduct the drawing for the prizes that had been donated in support of the athletic fund.
Most of the winners weren’t present for the drawing. The exception was Tammy Carncross’s parents, who were chaperoning. They received a set of stainless steel steak knives.
“Now all we need are the steaks to go with them,” Mrs. Carncross said lightheartedly as her husband returned from his trip to the band platform to collect the prize.
“Look on the bright side. There’s no law that says we can’t use them on hamburgers.”
“The way I fry hamburgers, I’d say that’s a good idea.”
They laughed together. Lil Carncross’s hamburgers were a family joke.
“It’s just that hamburgers are such boring things to cook,” she would explain apologetically after each disaster. “They lie there in the pan doing nothing for so long that your mind starts to wander, and the next thing you know they’ve taken off on you and turned to charcoal.”
After twenty years of marriage, Dan Carncross accepted his wife’s wandering mind in the same way that he accepted the dreamy eyes that floated soft and unfocused behind the lenses of her glasses and the disarray of curly hair that wouldn’t lie in one direction. They supplied a certain winsomeness in sharp contrast with the image of the professional journalist whose witty commentaries on small-town life appeared on the pages of national magazines.
“Congratulations!” Ann Whitten called as she worked her way toward them through the crowd. “That’s what Dave and I were hoping to win, but Madison blew it. She pulled out your ticket instead!”
“You’re the ones who should be congratulated,” Mrs. Carncross said warmly to the bright-faced girl and the broad-shouldered young man beside her. “I haven’t seen you since the announcement in the paper. Will it be a June wedding?”
“It was going to be,” Ann said, “but plans have changed a little. Now we’re thinking more like a year from this coming Christmas.”
“Ann’s won herself a scholarship to art school,” Dave Brewer told them. “A real well-known one in Boston. It seemed like too good an opportunity for her to turn it down.”
“That’s wonderful, Ann,” Dan Carncross said. “I didn’t have any idea you were applying for something like that.”
“Well, actually I didn’t,” Ann said. “Ms. Stark is the one who did it. She mailed in some of my sketches. She studied under Mr. Griffith, the head of the institute, back when she was in college. She wrote and recommended me. I almost passed out when I found out about it. I still can’t believe it! It’s like a miracle.”
“Which reminds me, I’ve never seen the miracle woman,” Lil Carncross said. “All you girls talk about Ms. Stark so much, I’d like to meet her. Is she here tonight?”
“She was supposed to be chaperoning, but I haven’t seen her,” her husband said.
“Oh, she’s here now,” Ann told them. “She came in just a minute ago with Kelly. That’s another miracle. Tam and I tried and tried to get Kelly to come tonight, and she wouldn’t even listen. Then, somehow, Irene got her here.
“There she is, Mrs. Carncross. That’s Irene up there on the edge of the platform, talking to Madison. They must be getting ready for the presentation.”
“The woman in green?” Lil stood on her toes, steadying herself with a hand on her husband’s shoulder to get a better view. “Oh! She’s certainly not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Dan Carncross asked with interest.
“From Tammy’s description, I pictured her as one of those enthusiastic young teachers right out of college, the kind the kids relate to so easily. Pretty, and very hip. Like how Madison Ellis will be five or six years from now.”
“She’s definitely not that!” Ann said, laughing. “But I think she’s really pretty in her own way. And she understands us all so well, it’s like she’s one of us. If you’re confused about something, Irene can sort it out so it makes sense, and all of a sudden everything falls right into place.”
“What’s Erika doing up there?” Mr. Carncross asked.
“As club president, she’s going to be with Madison when she makes the presentation. Paula is too. She’s our token athlete. It was her idea to—oh, they’re going to start!”
Erika and Paula were mounting the steps at the side of the stage to join Madison at the microphone.
The queen reached up a graceful hand to adjust the weight of the crown and smiled at her audience. “Will Mr. Shelby and Coach Ferrara please come forward?”
There was a hum of friendly chatter as everyone on the dance floor parted to make a path so the two men could reach the front of the gym.
“Did you girls do well with your raffle this year?” Lil Carncross asked Ann in a low voice.
“Much better than last year.”
“Ferrara will be happy about that,” Mr. Carncross commented. “Those warm-up suits the basketball players have been wearing are shredded.”
“Oh, but he’s not—” Ann began.
“May I have your attention, please?” Madison spoke into the microphone and her light, sweet voice filled the room. “We’ve been having so much fun tonight, it’s hard to settle down to something serious, but I promise you it won’t take long. In just a minute we’ll get back to the dancing.
“Erika, will you take over?”
“Thank you,” Erika said a trifle stiffly. Less at home with the mic than Madison was, she leaned too close and jumped back with a start at the protesting screech from the amplifier. Drawing a deep breath, she leaned cautiously forward and began again.
“Thank you, Madison. As all of you know, Daughters of Eve is sponsoring tonight’s dance. Each year our school project has been to raise money for the athletic fund. This year, thanks to the wonderful merchants of Modesta who contributed such fine prizes and to the generous people who bought so many tickets, the raffle brought in one thousand and fifty dollars—the largest amount we’ve ever raised!” There was a burst of applause, and a group of boys on the left side of the gym, members of the football team, let out a roar of approval. Mr. Shelby grinned broadly. Coach Ferrara, looking very dashing in a gray-checked sport jacket, raised his fist in a victory salute.
“We’re pleased, too,” Erika said. “Paula Brummell will make the presentation.”
Paula stepped forward. Her eyes met Erika’s, and the girls exchanged a quick smile.
“Mr. Shelby and Coach Ferrara—” Paula spoke slowly and distinctly. The audience grew more attentive, aware suddenly that something different was in the offing, something apart from the ceremonies of previous years.
“On behalf of the Daughters of Eve, it gives me great pleasure to present you with this check,” Paula said. “Your endorsement signifies your agreement that this money will be used only for the organization and purchase of equipment for Modesta High’s first all-girl soccer team.”
At 10:47 p.m. Laura Snow sat alone in the living room, her hands folded in her lap, waiting for the sound of the doorbell. She’d been waiting now for two and a half hours.
“I can’t bear not being here to meet him,” her mother had said when, at 8:40, Peter hadn’t yet arrived. “It’s just that the girls in my card club get so upset when we don’t start playing on time.”
“I know, Mom,” Laura had told her. “You go on.”
“But this is your first date! Such a big, big event! To leave you here all by yourself—”
“I don’t mind, Mom.” She did mind, really, but for her mother, not for herself. She couldn’t remember seeing her quite so happy as she’d been during the past week. On two different occasions Laura had found her waiting in the parking lot after school to drive her to Adrian on shopping expeditions to find “the perfect dress” and “exactly the right shoes.”
The shoes hadn’t been difficult—Laura’s short, plump feet were easy to fit—but the dress had been another matter. They had found it at last in a small, exclusive shop that specialized in “clothes for the regal figure.”
A pale blue silk satin halter, the dress was cut in Empire style, fitted across the chest and falling straight to the floor, where it swirled suddenly into a light ruffle.
“Lovely,” the salesgirl had murmured when Laura tried it on.
“Adorable!” Mrs. Snow had exclaimed. “You look like a fairy princess!”
Even Laura had smiled when she saw herself reflected in the elongated mirror. The dress was becoming, that was indisputable; the lines were flattering and the color good with her light hair and fair skin. Better still, however, was Laura’s secret knowledge that the slimming effect wasn’t due entirely to the cut of the material. In the past two weeks, she’d lost almost six pounds.
It wasn’t the first time she’d gone on a diet, but it was the first time she’d done so with such grim determination. Always before, she’d let her mother in on the project. Together, they’d agonized over how much mayonnaise could be spread on a slice of bread before a sandwich became “really fattening” and whether cookies made from brown or white sugar contained fewer calories. These ventures had seldom lasted longer than several days, at which time Mrs. Snow would become concerned that her daughter was “getting run-down” and “losing energy.”
“You can carry these things too far,” she would say worriedly. “After all, a growing girl does need to stay healthy.”
This time Laura had decided to handle things herself in the simplest way possible: She’d stopped eating except for when she was in her mother’s presence. The lunch that was so lovingly packed for her in the morning was deposited, unopened, in the school cafeteria garbage can. The brownies, set out for her after-school snack, were carried to her room, and from there to the adjoining bathroom, where they were flushed down the toilet. If Mrs. Snow left the table during dinner to answer the phone, Laura scraped whatever was left on her plate down the disposal. She felt guilty about such subterfuge, but it seemed kinder than putting her mother through the worry that the knowledge of such curtailment of food intake would cause her.
And the diet was necessary. There were no two ways about it. Peter Grange’s girlfriend couldn’t embarrass him by looking like a blimp at their first public appearance together.
Except that he’d never arrived to take her.
Alone in the quiet living room, Laura examined possible reasons, turning them over and over in her mind the way she’d fingered pebbles at the lakeshore as a child. Maybe he was sick. That intestinal flu was going around. Maybe he’d gotten his dates mixed up and thought the dance was next weekend. Maybe he had car trouble on the way over and had been forced to tinker with the engine or change a tire. He couldn’t do that in good clothes, so he’d have had to return home to change and, once the car was fixed, to get cleaned up and redressed. That could take a very long time.
Or there might have been a family emergency. A beloved grandparent in a distant state might have died suddenly, throwing the whole family into chaos as they scrambled to pack and rush to the airport. Or one of his parents might have been involved in a car wreck. Or his little brother could’ve been thrown from his bicycle. Kristy had mentioned once how stupidly Eric rode that bike, zooming in and out of driveways and darting through stop signs as though he owned the whole road.
Or, Peter himself—no, she wouldn’t let herself think about that possibility. Peter was all right. One of the other things must have happened. But which?
The answer was as far away as the phone. All she had to do was dial his home number—he’d never given her the number for his cell phone—and in another minute she would know.
In her mind she could hear his voice, embarrassed and apologetic.
“Hey, I’m sorry. We had this family emergency. I didn’t think about the time until the phone rang, and right away I thought, ‘Crap, I was supposed to pick up Laura a couple of hours ago!’ Can you forgive me?”
She could, of course. She could understand how such a thing could happen. There would be other dances.
So why didn’t she just call him? Why did she continue to sit here, staring at the wall, waiting for the doorbell to ring, when by now it was obvious that it wasn’t going to? It was after eleven. The dance would be over in less than an hour. If Peter were coming at all, he would have been here before now.
The doorbell rang.
At first she thought she’d manufactured the sound within her head, willed it into existence with her wishing. Her hands clutched each other tighter. She didn’t move from her chair.
The sound came again. Bling—blong! The chimes that meant a visitor was at the door. Her mom maybe forgot her key? But, no—that wasn’t possible. Mrs. Snow carried her house key on the same key ring with the car keys. Since she’d driven herself to her card club, she had her house key as well.
Slowly, Laura got to her feet, smoothing the folds of the blue dress so that the creases wouldn’t show, shaking the ruffle into place. She was stiff from having sat in the same position for so long. One of her legs was asleep. She put her weight on it gingerly, wriggling her toes within the confines of the wedge-heeled pump to start the blood flowing. The unaccustomed height of the heels tipped her forward, and she found herself wobbling unsteadily as she crossed the room to open the door.
The boy on the front steps was wearing old cords and a gray sweatshirt with MODESTA HORNETS lettered on it in orange. He stood with his hands in his pockets, hunched slightly against the chill of the crisp night air. His dark hair tumbled over his forehead, and with his face half-lost in shadow, she thought for a moment that he was Peter.
Only for a moment. He raised his head and smiled at her, and the resemblance ended.
“What are you doing here, Niles?” Laura asked.