I met Eric’s mother at the grocery store. I think
it’s peculiar that she rang up my groceries and
had no idea that I was taking them to her home.
GRACE’S DIARY
TUESDAY, OCT. 16
The next morning I got ready as if I were going to school. Mom made us Cream of Wheat for breakfast and, as usual, Joel put so much raspberry jam in his bowl that his cereal was crimson.
“Like a little Cream of Wheat with your jam?” I asked.
He took a mouthful, reading the back of a cereal box. “I like it this way.”
“I’m going to work early,” my mom said. “We’re counting inventory. Want a ride to school, Eric?”
Not once since school started had my mother asked if I wanted a ride. It’s like she knew I was up to something. “Uh, no. Thanks. I’m meeting someone on the bus.”
She looked at me with pleasant surprise. “You have a new friend?”
My mother was always concerned over my lack of friends.
“Yeah.”
“What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“Your friend.”
“Oh. Gra…ck.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Grack?”
I nodded.
“That’s an odd name. Where’s he from?”
“Uh, here.”
“Hmm. Sounds Hungarian. What nationality is he?”
“American,” I said. “I think.”
“Well.” She looked at the clock. “You’d better get going. Maybe Grack would like to come over sometime.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll ask.”
She walked over and kissed me. “Have a good day,” she said and left the room.
“Who’s Grack?” Joel asked.
“Who do you think?”
He put another spoonful of jam in his cereal. “I have no idea.”
“That’s just gross,” I said.
I don’t know how many lies I had told in my life but I was sure that I’d soundly trounced my record in the few days since Grace had arrived. Now I was playing hooky. I wasn’t sure what power Grace had over me, but I hoped she wouldn’t make me do anything worse.
I grabbed my school bag and started walking for the bus stop. My mother drove past me halfway down the street, waving as she went by. As soon as she had turned the corner I looked back down the street to see if anyone was watching (as if my neighbors suddenly had nothing better to do than to make sure I was going to school). I didn’t see anyone so I turned back. I ducked into our next-door neighbor’s backyard, then crawled through the hole in the fence that separated our yards. (Joel and I hadn’t made the hole, but we’d enhanced it a bit.) I crossed into our backyard and knocked on the clubhouse door. “It’s me.”
I crawled inside. Grace watched me enter. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to come or not.”
I dropped my school bag on the floor. “Why?”
“You just seemed a little…nervous.”
I was glad she hadn’t said “afraid.” “Where are we going?” I asked.
“The mall.”
The mall? I thought. The place was probably teeming with truant officers. We might as well play hooky in front of the school.
The mall was a forty-five-minute walk from my house. We probably could have reached it sooner except I insisted we keep to the back roads, which Grace didn’t seem to mind. If there were truant officers at the mall, they didn’t see us. This made me wonder if they were just boogeymen that school administrators and parents made up to keep us in line.
We walked, unstopped, into store after store as Grace looked at clothes. For me we made a stop at a bookstore and a model shop. On the way back, we ate lunch at a diner. “Ain’t you a cute couple. You two playin’ hooky?” the waitress asked
“Science Fair,” Grace said.
“Oh,” the woman said.
I ordered a hot dog with relish and a side order of French fries. Grace ordered a bowl of tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich. Afterward we each ordered apple pie à la mode.
When no one was around Grace asked, “So, do you like playing hooky?”
“Sure.”
“You were afraid we were going to get caught, weren’t you?”
“A little.”
“Me too. But I was so sick of sitting inside all the time, I had to get out. Sometimes you just have to take chances.” She looked up at a clock on the wall. “We have about an hour of school left. Anything else you want to do?”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“I’ve got to pick up some things. Do you mind?”
“No.”
“Good. I’ll pay for lunch. You’ve fed me enough.” Grace brought out the red pouch and paid the check, then we started back home. On the way she said, “I need to go to Warshaw’s.”
I felt a wave of panic. “I can’t. My mother works there.”
“Oh. Will you wait for me outside?”
I thought about it. “Okay.”
I sat out on the curb at the side of the store, watching shoppers come and go and praying my mother didn’t come out. Grace was gone for nearly twenty minutes—long enough that I began to fear she’d been captured. I was relieved when she finally emerged. She was pushing a shopping cart with two large grocery bags. I walked over to meet her. “Is your mom really thin with brown hair that combs back like this?” She raked her hair back over her ears.
“Yeah.”
“I think she rang up my groceries. She’s pretty. You look just like her.”
I suppose that was a compliment but I was more concerned that Grace had been seen by my mom. “We better go home,” I said.
I pushed the cart to the edge of the parking lot, then we both took a bag and started walking. My bag was pretty heavy.
“What did you buy?”
“Food, mostly. I got some bread and shredded wheat and milk; it should last me for a while. I’ve felt bad that you’ve had to feed me.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“You’ve been really sweet. You’re always nice, aren’t you?”
Somehow this sounded like an insult. “Not always. I can be trouble.”
She grinned. “But you’re mostly nice. Do you know how I know? When you first saw me eating food out of the Dumpster, even though we weren’t friends then, you pretended that you didn’t notice.” She smiled. “Thank you for that.”
“I just didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”
“I wish there were more people like you.”
That was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. It took us about thirty minutes to get home. We carried the stuff around back. I packed her milk in the snow while she dragged the rest of the groceries inside. I climbed in after her.
“Want to play cards?” she asked.
“Sure.”
We played blackjack and Go Fish for about an hour. She won most of the time and even when she didn’t I had the feeling she was letting me win. Finally I said, “Do you know what time it is?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s almost four-thirty.”
“I’ve got to be at work in a half hour.”
“Today was fun,” she said.
“Yeah, it was.”
It had been fun. But I was sure there would be heck to pay.