“OF COURSE HE’S A human,” said her sister Jamie. Jamie was absolutely disgusted with the end of the story. “Nick, you blew it. I cannot believe you turned around and ran!” Jamie was always convinced that she would handle any situation whatsoever a hundred times better than her older sister. Here was yet more proof.
Nicoletta hated defending herself to a child of eleven. But it happened constantly. There was no decision Nicoletta made, including, of course, being born, which met with her sister’s approval. “I was scared.”
Jamie flung up her hands in exasperation. “If you had enough guts to follow him into the dark and dank and dreary woods …”
“They weren’t dark or dank or dreary. The sun was shining. There was still snow on the ground in the forest. It was more silver than dark.”
“My point,” said Jamie, with the immense disgust of younger sisters who were going to get things right when they started dating, “is that he started talking to you! Flirting with you. You even invited him to meet you for lunch. Running away from him was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Their father said, “Jamie. Please. You are entitled to your opinion, but saying it once is enough.”
The worst thing about this minihouse was the way they had to function in each other’s laps. There was no privacy. All conversations and confrontations became family property. Nicoletta thought of their lovely house on Fairest Hill, and how she should have had an entire suite in which to be alone and consider her—well, Jamie was right—her stupidity.
“Besides,” said their mother, “of course the boy’s hands were cold. You’d been in the woods for hours and he didn’t have any gloves on and it’s January.” Mother sniffed. She did not like fantasy, and when the girls were quite small, and liked to make things up, their mother put a stop to it in a hurry. “Not human,” repeated Mrs. Storms irritably. “Really, Nicoletta.”
Nicoletta had told them about Jethro because it was easier than telling them about Madrigals. She could not bring herself to say that part out loud. I’m not in it anymore. You won’t go to concerts anymore. You won’t have to iron my beautiful medieval gown ever again. Somebody else—somebody named Anne-Louise—gets to dress up and sing like an angel and hear the applause from now on.
“Speaking as the only man in this family, …” said Nicoletta’s father. He looked long and carefully at his hands, as if reading the backs instead of the palms. “I want to say that if some girl followed me home, walked after me for miles through the woods, and told me she had a crush on me, and then I walked her all the way back to the main road, I would certainly have been hoping for a kiss. And if instead of throwing her arms around me, the girl fled … well, Nickie, I would feel I’d done something incredibly stupid or had turned out to be repulsive close up. I’d want to change schools in the morning. I’d never want to have to face that girl again.”
Wonderful, thought Nicoletta, wanting to weep. Now I’ll never see him again.
She struggled with tears. In the other house, she could have wept alone. In this one, she had witnesses. The small-minded part of her tried to hold her parents responsible, and hate them instead of herself, for being a complete dummy and running from Jethro.
She remembered the cold touch of his hands. I don’t care what Mother says, thought Nicoletta. Jethro’s hands were not normal. He scared me. There really was something strange about him. Something terribly wrong, something not quite of this world. I felt it through his skin. I can still feel it. Even though I have washed my hands, I can still feel it.
“So,” said her father, his voice changing texture, becoming rich and teasing, “what’ll we do tonight, Nickie? Want me to play my fiddle?”
Jamie got right into it. Nothing brought her more satisfaction than annoying her big sister. “Or we could slice up a turnip,” Jamie agreed. “That would be fun.”
Right up until high school, Nicoletta had loved the Little House books. How unfair that she had to live now where the family could go to McDonald’s if they got hungry, check out a video if they got bored, and turn the thermostat up if they got chilled. A younger Nicoletta had prayed every night to fall through a time warp and arrive on the banks of Plum Creek with Mary and Laura. She wanted a covered wagon and a sod house and, of course, she wanted to meet Almanzo and marry him. In middle school, Nicoletta had decided to learn everything Laura had to learn; quilting, pie making, knitting, stomping on hay. Nicoletta’s mother, who hated needlework and bought frozen pies, could not stand it. “You live in the twentieth century and that’s that. Ma Ingalls,” Nicoletta’s mother said, “would have been thrilled to live like you. Warm in winter, snow never coming through the cracks, fresh fruit out of season.”
When she was Jamie’s age, Nicoletta had made her fatal error. “Daddy never gets out his fiddle and sings songs for me when it’s snowing outside,” she’d said.
Her father laughed for years. He was always making fiddle jokes.
The second fatal error came shortly after, when Nicoletta tried eating raw sliced turnip because the Ingalls considered it a snack. Nicoletta’s mother had never in her life even bought a turnip because, she said, “Even the word gives me indigestion.”
Only last Christmas, Nicoletta’s stocking had included a raw turnip and a paring knife. “Instead of potato chips,” said the card. “Love from Santa on the Prairie.” It was Jamie’s handwriting.
Nicoletta’s Little House obsession ended with Madrigals: The singing, the companionship of a wonderful set of boys and girls from tenth to twelfth grade, the challenge of memorizing the difficult music filled Nicoletta the way her pioneer fantasies once had.
She thought of her life as divided by these two: the Little House daydream years and the Madrigal reality years.
And now Madrigals were over.
She was not a Madrigal singer. She was just another soprano, good enough only for the ordinary non-audition chorus.
Unwillingly, Nicoletta looked at the photograph of herself on the mantel. Every few years these photos were replaced, when the old one began to seem dated and ridiculous. Nicoletta’s portrait had been taken only last fall, and she stood slim and beautiful in her long satin skirt, crimson fabric cascading from her narrow waist, white lace like sea froth around her slender throat. Her yellow hair had just been permed, and twisted like ribbons down to her shoulders. In her hair glittered a thread of jewels. She seemed like a princess from another age, another continent, dressed as a Nicoletta should be dressed.
Now she hated the portrait. People would come to the house—Rachel, Cathy, Christo—and there it would sit, pretending nothing had changed.
I don’t want this life! thought Nicoletta, her throat filling with a detestable lump. Who needs high school? It hurts too much. I don’t measure up. I’m not musical and I’m a jerk who runs away from boys and makes them wish they attended school in another town. I don’t care what my mother says. Laura Ingalls had it good. Blizzards, starvation, three-hundred-mile hikes, scary badgers, and flooding creeks.
She thought of Jethro. His profile. His odd, silent darkness. His quiet listening while she poured out her pain.
“I got kicked out of Madrigals,” Nicoletta said abruptly. “Ms. Quincy tried everybody out again, and a new girl named Anne-Louise is better than I am, so I’m out and she’s in and I don’t want to talk about it.”