“I hate this sweater,” I said. “I’m taking it off.” Jared would have to let go of my hand. I could put up with being a little chilly.
“What’s wrong with the sweater?” he asked.
“It’s too green.”
“Give it to me.”
I handed it over, and he tied it around his shoulders. It looked like he was wearing a cape. It looked dumb.
“It looks as bad on you as it did on me.” I wished he’d take it off. It was embarrassing. “Give it back.”
“No. It matches my toenail polish.”
Automatically I looked at his feet. Which were in sneakers.
“Gotcha.” He was grinning again.
I grinned too. I couldn’t help it. He was funny, even if he was crazy.
“Let’s watch the penguins eat,” he said, “unless you want to study Hamlet.”
“Penguins. I had time to study last night.”
The penguins were behind glass. When they ate, they lifted their heads and opened their mouths wide like baby birds.
I said, “I guess if they don’t catch their own food, they never have a chance to grow up.”
“Ancient hunters might feel the same way about us,” Jared said. “We don’t hunt for our food, so to them we’d be like children.”
He said the most amazing things.
“What do you want to be someday?” I asked as we left the building. I wondered because of the ideas he came up with.
He blushed. “A writer. What do you want to be?”
Why was he blushing? It wasn’t like he wanted to be a terrorist.
“A vet,” I said.
“Are you going to Elliot next year?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
“Yup. We’ll be together again.”
Well, that’s okay, I thought, surprising myself. He was nicer than I expected.
Now we were by the polar bears. My favorite place. Everybody’s favorite place.
Their pool is built into a hill with a glass wall on one side. At ground level, you see the bears plunging through the water, and when you walk up a flight of stairs, you see them coming up for air or lumbering around on the rocks.
“They’re so adorable,” I said.
“They have big heads,” Jared said. “I once read that the animals we think are the cutest have the biggest heads. They remind us of human babies.”
How did he know this stuff? “Like pandas?”
“They’re the ultimate,” Jared said. He took my hand again.
This time, I let him keep it. It wasn’t a lifetime commitment.
“It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t usually like popular girls. But I guess it makes sense in your case, because I liked you before you became so popular.”
“You did?”
“You know I did. Right after Christmas, your friend Suzanne Russo—”
“She’s not my friend.”
“I see you together some—”
“We live in the same building.”
“Oh. Anyway, she wanted to copy from me on a French test. I said yes, if she’d tell you I liked you.”
“She never said anything.”
“She’s a creep. In college she’s going to major in Creepology.”
I laughed. “She’ll get straight As.”
We watched two bears play with a red rubber ball. Had Jared really liked me before the wish? He might lie, the way Suzanne had, thinking I’d like him better for it.
I looked at him, wearing my stupid sweater. Here was someone who wouldn’t lie. Here was someone who liked me, the real me, the before-the-spell me. And when the spell ended, maybe he’d go right on liking me.
He continued, “So after nothing happened from Suzanne, I was scared to do anything else. But then, last week, when everybody was writing you notes and trying to sit next to you, I thought, if they can do it, so can I. So I wrote the note about the zoo.” He paused. “And a couple more notes.”
“That you didn’t sign. Which ones?”
“I’m not telling. This was the important one. So far.”
Did he write one of the anonymous invitations to Grad Night? I hoped not. Even more, I hoped he wouldn’t ask me in person. I didn’t want to go with him. He was growing on me, and maybe we could be friends. But this was my only chance to go with somebody cute, somebody popular. And I didn’t want to make him feel bad by saying “no” to his face.
The bears had stopped playing and were snoozing on the rocks.
“Jared?” He was the one to ask about popularity. He could probably quote some article that would explain everything. “Why do you think some girls are popular and some aren’t?”
He was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know, but the popular girls are usually locked together in bunches and you can’t separate them. Want to go to the bird and monkey house?”
“Sure.”
As we walked over, he added, “I once read that the most most popular kid—somebody like Ardis—hardly ever grows up to be anything special. Like she wouldn’t invent time travel or paint an important picture.” He blushed again. “I don’t mean you. You just became popular. You haven’t been that way all along.”
Yeah. It wouldn’t apply to someone who was only popular for a month, either.
Jared pushed open the door to the Tropics building. Birds don’t interest me much, but the monkey room was fun. We watched two monkeys groom a third.
“That one”—Jared pointed at the one who was being groomed—“looks like he’s at the dentist.”
He was right. The monkey looked patient, unhappy, numb. “Yeah, and that one”—I pointed at the one doing the heavy grooming—“is the dentist, and the other one is his helper. They should be wearing white gowns and rubber gloves.”
We watched the whole operation. I had never had such a good time at the zoo before. I fought back a giggle. If I told Jared, he’d say he once read that boys with one eyebrow were the best companions at zoos.
When we were sure the patient was resting comfortably, we left the zoo and walked into the park. The path through Central Park leaving the zoo is lined with benches, and the benches were filled with portrait artists and caricaturists. We watched them work for a while. I wandered around, but Jared stayed near a caricaturist—Antoinette, according to the flamboyant signature on her samples.
“I’ve always wanted to see what one of them would do to me,” he said.
Antoinette was drawing a man with a long face. Only in the caricature his face was so long and narrow that his eyes and mouth could barely fit inside it.
Jared laughed. “That’s so funny. Maybe I should do it.”
How could he? “Why pay somebody to make you look bad?”
“Not bad—funny. Would you mind waiting?”
I didn’t want him to do it, but I also wanted to see what Antoinette would come up with. I’d never seen a caricaturist draw someone I knew.
“All right. Go for it.”
Antoinette handed the drawing to her customer, saying, “You’re done. I outdid myself.”
“Can you do me now?” Jared asked.
“Pay me first, and remember, you asked for it.” She waited for Jared to hand over his money.
He paid her and sat on the bench, grinning.
She stared at him for a minute, then extended her arm with her charcoal pencil held vertically. She looked at Jared down the length of her arm and turned the pencil horizontally. Then she drew an egg shape, with the wide end on top.
After that, she marked off where his eyes, nose, and mouth would go. The caricature part began when she put in his forehead. She made it look like an overhanging story on a house—it jutted way out in front of the rest of his face. His eyes were lost underneath, just dark holes. Then she worked on his mouth, which she made narrower than it actually was. After his mouth, she added detail to his nose. She got the shape right, but she drew it too small too. Next, his eyebrow.
Jared has thick, curly brown hair, and his eyebrow hair is curly too. She made it bristly, like barbed wire, as if he had coarse, kinky bristles crawling up his forehead.
I was furious with her. If it weren’t for his eyebrow, Jared would be cute. His eyes aren’t huge, but they’re totally alert. His nose is straight, not too small, not too big. His lips are thin, and I like that. All he needed was tweezers.
She drew in his ears. They were okay. But then she made the hair on his head like his eyebrow, only longer. Now he looked like he was being electrocuted.
The crowning touch came when she started shading. She left his forehead pure white and put the rest of his face in shadow. This made his forehead, bordered by writhing antennae, seem to stick so far out that it cast a shadow over the rest of him, possibly down to his shoes, which were off the page.
“You’re done.” Antoinette sprayed the drawing with a can labeled “Fixative.” “I outdid myself.”
Jared came around to see. “It’s terrific! Look, Wilma. My eyebrows are a riot.”
Antoinette took the caricature away from him and slid it into a big envelope. “How about your girlfriend?” she said. “You want to give her a gift she’ll never forget?”
A caricature of me? No way.
His girlfriend? Jared One Eyebrow’s girlfriend? Double no way.