Eight

“Hi, Drew!” Wendy Varner, in a short pleated white skirt and a long red sweater, passed us in the hall, smiling, showing gorgeous teeth. “Hi, Pete,” she added in a friendly way, but with a lot less enthusiasm.

I wondered if I should ask Drew’s advice about the girl in the Nut Shoppe. Despite the—how to say it politely?—unfriendly note on which I had left the shop the week before, I was still thinking about the Peanut Princess. I kept playing over that scene in the shop and making it come out differently. In the new improved version, she was blushing, shy, sweet. I was manly, gruff, in control.

Hello! I’d like to get to know you and that’s why I’m here. Are you interested?

From what I’d seen of the Peanut Princess, she would

1. Annihilate me with a vicious stare.

2. Bark MYOB!

or

3. Call the fuzz and have me arrested for violating her privacy.

Choose one of the above. Then answer the following questions: Why had I fixed on her? Why did I continue to think about her? If I had to obsess, couldn’t I obsess over someone sweet and pleasant? How about Hitler’s sister?

In the chem lab, Sharon Karlin perched on the edge of my desk, the better to talk to Drew. “Did you see ‘Three’s Company’ last night? It was a scream. It was humor!”

Why couldn’t I obsess about Sharon? She certainly looked good enough with those spatters of freckles across her cheeks. Catching my eye, she smiled. She was wearing a white coverall with a polka-dotted handkerchief sticking out of the front pocket. I stared covertly at her breasts. Sharon and I were buddies. About once a week we did our math homework together in study hall. Once she’d called me at home to find out how to work a problem and then stayed on the phone for at least half an hour extra. I could have fallen in love with her in that half hour. The next day I’d wanted to rush up to her and say something terrific, at least give her the sort of bedroom-eyes look that Drew specializes in, the one that says everything without words. Instead, a desperate kind of shyness or fear had gripped me and I hadn’t even talked to her for the rest of the week.

Today, by the time lunch rolled around, I had made up my mind to give the Peanut Princess another chance. After school I spent just long enough at a meeting of the History Club to keep Totie Golden, our faculty sponsor and my favorite teacher, from sinking into despair. Mrs. Golden was skinny, dark-haired and incredibly intense about history.

When we had our first club meeting back in September, she told us she wanted to inspire the same love of history in us that had been inspired in her by her high school history teacher, Kenneth Glad. She said his name as though he’d been a saint. “A rare and beautiful man! He taught history with compassion. He taught it with intelligence. With attention to the people who lived along the fringes of the great tides. Our books are full of explorations, war, and revolutions, but as my mentor, Kenneth Glad, often reminded us, never forget, never, never never forget that history is people.”

That first meeting, when Mrs. Golden had asked us to call her Totie, there had been ten of us. Now there were only three left—me, Bambi Wiurka, and Robert Rizzo. We were a pretty tight little group, despite the fact that we all went our separate ways, not only outside History Club, but even inside it. We were all reading about different periods, different places. Every Monday we got together in Totie’s classroom, and right away the talking and the yelling and the questions started. When our meeting most sounded like a street brawl, Totie just leaned back in her chair and let us go.

For me, the weekly meetings had come to be glad spots—no pun intended, although Kenneth Glad’s name and presence were invoked so often by Totie that I thought I’d know the short, crew-cut history teacher in a roomful of strangers. Today, though, I really didn’t have history on my mind. After half an hour I slouched out with a wave to Totie. No explanations needed.

Outside, the sky was big and blue. I had spent the first eight years of my life in a rather large, nearly skyless city that I thought was the entire world; then the next eight years here in Winston, living with a fair amount of sky, lots of trees, and one foot out the door: one foot waiting to be joined by the other foot in a fast getaway the moment Laura and Hal gave the word.

I jogged the couple of miles downtown, easy going at first, all downhill. Past the worn granite Presbyterian church, a big bunch of little houses with neat neat lawns, past Leon’s Barber Shop, and a wave to Leon, the lizardy barber with his black patent-leather hairpiece.

A car full of girls went by, their faces pasted to the windows. I kicked my heels up a little higher and zipped past the four corners with four gas stations, held my nose as I went by the pharmaceutical factory that hung a toilet smell over the whole area, and clattered over the bridge, below which rushed not water but gleaming streams of cars on the Interstate.

I had to slow down for the traffic light at Jefferson Boulevard. As I crossed, dodging cars, I memorized three license plates, just for the practice.

Now came the part when I didn’t feel so lithe and athletic, running uphill. On the last stretch, I checked my time by the red digital clock on the Kappa Insurance Building, Winston’s eight-story skyscraper. I was doing a nine-minute mile. Oh, well.

I’d left History Club early because of the so adorable Peanut Princess, but instead of going straight there, I played the coward and checked in at Greenwood’s Optometry Center first. Delaying tactics.

“Your uncle’s with a patient,” Silky said. “Do you want to go to the post office for me?”

“Yes. No.”

“Which one?”

“No, not now. Maybe later. I’ve got something to do. Tell Gene I’ll be back in a little while.”

The shop where the girl worked was only a short sprint from my uncle’s office. I didn’t run though, I didn’t trot, I didn’t even walk fast. I did cross Water Street against the light. Maybe I’d get hit by a car—then I wouldn’t have to go through with this. Better still, she’d come out of the shop, see me lying bleeding on the street, and realize it was her heartless attitude that had ruined my life.

I stopped in Frank’s Smokery and bought the new issue of Time. Once, sitting in a hamburger shop with Drew while he talked about baseball, I had idly opened Newsweek (I think it was Newsweek), and there, in the Update section, were little circled head shots of Hal and Laura. FEMMER LAB BOMBERS: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

I must have gone into some kind of shock. My head heated up as if I’d been shoved into a pot of boiling water. I dropped the magazine onto the seat next to me. Drew was still talking, but I didn’t hear a word. I had gone deaf. His mouth moved, he jumped up, swung an imaginary bat. I bent furtively over the magazine, staring at the pictures of my parents, my eyes fixed and blurring. The pictures weren’t new to me; in fact, they were pictures I’d seen before in some newspaper article or other.

Yes, I knew these pictures, yet seeing them in a magazine I had just bought terrified me. What if Drew looked at those pictures and knew? Was it madness to think that way? Total paranoia? Why would Drew make a connection between Laura Glazer Connors and Hal Connors, the radical peace bombers, and his friend, Pete Greenwood?

Because you look like your mother. Because you’re a strange duck. Because you act furtive, as if you have something to hide. Because you lie. Every day of your life, you live a lie. Because one of these days, people are going to know. And when they know—when they know what your parents did and who they are, when they know all that—what do you think they’re going to think of you? They’re going to shun you. Yes, you—you not-normal-person, you not-all-American-boy, you not-Pete. You’re going to be a pariah. A leper. An untouchable. They’ll know who you are, what you are, you liar, you poseur, you pretender, you—

I fought it. I fought the thoughts. No. Drew won’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody has guessed. Why should Drew? Why should anybody? Yet I sat there and felt everything inside me go watery and bleak.

Now I stuck Time in my back pocket to read at home and did the my-mind-is-blank trick. I was good at that. A kind of concentration that forced everything out, as if my mind were a room I’d just emptied, blank and dark. I thought about walking, that was allowable, how the body knew to put one foot down and the other foot up, but if you thought about it, it would unsettle your whole rhythm. There were things you did you couldn’t think about—just let your body take care of it.

By the time I got to the Nut Shoppe, I was back in the present, striding right along and promising myself that this time I would go straight in. No standing around working up my nerve stuff. I did it, too, walked in on the heels of an older couple.

“Give me some of those walnuts in the shell,” the man said. “Last time they weren’t so good. I don’t think they were fresh. Are they fresh this time?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “They’re always fresh.”

The man tugged at his jacket. “Well, they weren’t fresh the last time.” The woman stood to one side, her eyes on the ceiling. “Give me two pounds,” the man said. “They’d better be fresh.”

I threw the man a look. Comes the revolution, you go first. Besides the bird earrings, Princess was wearing gold chains today. Very royal. I wandered down to the short leg of the L-shaped counter, where I’d first seen her sitting and reading. Books were piled up next to a notebook. I craned my neck. Cary Longstreet. Her name and phone number were printed across the top of the notebook!

The bell on the door dinged. The couple left and the store was empty except for me.

“You want something?” she said.

“Hi. Remember me?” Great opening. Sure, you’re the idiot who forgot his peanuts.

“No.”

Good. Off to a fresh start. Still—was I that forgettable? “I was in here the other day. Last week.”

“A lot of people come in here. Do you want to buy something?” Her broad, high, shining forehead looked disdainful and cool. Definitely the forehead of a princess of the royal line. Your Grace, granted, I’m not royalty of your breed. All the same, democracy is the watchword these days. Can you find it in your heart to give a mere commoner a few of your precious moments? I slouched, elbow on the counter to proclaim my poise, and noticed that she wore too much makeup. Her eyes were covered with goop. Still, with her hair drawn back with a red ribbon, she looked cute as hell.

I jingled my change fervently. “To tell the truth, I still haven’t eaten all the peanuts I bought the other day.” What a splendid nugget of useless information. Was there anything else silly or pointless I could say? “I don’t even like peanuts that much,” I blundered on.

She yawned, her hand with the bitten nails delicately patting her opened mouth.

I was boring her! Why not? I was boring myself. “Look,” I said, gripping the counter, “I—I—” Her brown eyes, steady and wary, disconcerted me. “I have a friend who thinks you’re beautiful. He wants to know you. He wants to be your friend. His name is Drew.” I heard these words coming out of my mouth with total disbelief. Drew? I had to bring Drew into this?

Suddenly her cheeks flushed, her eyes opened wide, her whole face changed—it was the strangest thing. One minute I was looking at Cool Princess Yawnski and the next I was looking at a little kid, just a real little kid with huge eyes that said, Don’t play with my feelings, don’t tell me things that aren’t true, don’t hurt me that way.

Again I had that same sense of urgency I’d had when I first saw her—that she was different, special, someone I had to know.

Then—it almost seemed by an effort of will—she became the Princess again. It was like a window closing. “What do you want?” she said.

I want to know you. I want to know who you really are and why I keep thinking that you’re different from other girls, different in a way I don’t understand. “I want—ah, my name is Pete,” I said. “Pete Greenwood. And you’re—”

She cut me off. “I thought your name was Drew.”

“That’s my friend.”

“Oh, yes! Your friend.”

“I really do have a friend Drew.”

“Do you?” She looked me in the eye.

“Yes.”

“And he wants to know me?”

“No,” I said. “That part wasn’t true. It’s me.”

There we were, looking straight at each other, and I was finally telling the truth and saying what I’d meant to say, and she was smiling. Yes! She smiled at me. Then the bell sounded and the man with the walnuts came storming back in. “These nuts are stale. Who’s the manager here? I want his name. I want to tell him a thing or two.” His wife stood off to one side looking up at the ceiling again. Then a bunch of kids came in, then a whole rush of people, and after a while I left.