Fry had spent the time, while we were visiting Baylor, doing what he loved. He’d listened to music, and now he was ready to listen to more. “Let’s go back to H’s,” he proposed, pulling out his earbuds and wrapping his arm around me. “I feel a retrospective coming on.”
Which could only mean Millennial Carolina Funk: little-known bands that he and H had discovered when they were both in junior high. It wasn’t music that I knew or, truth be told, cared about. And it was sure to lead to more reminiscences about times and fun that were all Before Sarah. But of course, when I settled into the nest his arms made and Fry whispered that he couldn’t wait to share the next song with me (passing me half his headset so that the cord was stretched like a heart between us), I knew I’d ride along. Go along. Tag along.
That song, it turned out, was one Fry and H had first heard live at a club two towns over. A club that had never carded and, not surprisingly, no longer existed. So even before we got to H’s place, the two of them were in full nostalgia mode. And I was left out. Again. I had no one to talk to about my adventures Before Fry, such as they were. My BF days had gone up in flames, right along with Rufus Baylor’s memories. There was no way my old friends would want to talk to me now. And the truth was, even before I became convinced they were ashamed of me, I had acted as if I were ashamed of them. Who knows? Fry might have learned to like them, even if he wouldn’t get all their jokes. Even if he didn’t share their love of art films, or ’60s TV, or fantasy games. But I never took a chance. One awkward moment between Wanda and H, and I’d given up.
While Fry and H were going down memory lane, then, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. And missing the friends I’d never even told good-bye: Alicia, who loved Middle-earth and all things orange, especially her apricot-colored granny shawl. Brett, who along with Marcia, Thea, Eli, and me made up our homework theater, where we acted out assignments. (Eli had worn a beard and glasses when he was Pythagoras for geometry, even though we explained that glasses weren’t invented before right triangles.) And Wanda and George, who both had red hair and who liked poetry almost as much as Miss Kinney did, who still waved when they saw me in the hall. I sometimes waved back, unless I was with Fry, who usually had his arm around me, so I didn’t want to move. Stay.
It wasn’t just my friends I missed. I was in theater withdrawal, too. Since my understudy’s role last fall, I hadn’t tried out for a single production. But I still remembered that jumped-up, scrambled feeling in my stomach just before the curtain went up. And the way the shabby, one-sided sets and thrift-store furniture suddenly became real, while relatives and friends in the audience faded into a hazy, underexposed photo behind the lights.
“Coast is clear, cuates.” H pulled his car into the empty driveway. Both his parents were still at work. “Let’s finish that beer.”
We lugged the cooler inside, and sat in the immaculate living room to unpack the drinks and salsa on a light wood coffee table that was practically begging for a stain. (I hoped Mrs. Losada didn’t feel the way my mother did about chips and sweaty cans.) Fry and I took the sofa, and H corralled the recliner, tilting himself and his beer as far back as he could go. “Here’s to the last three days of school,” he announced, taking a long sip, then sighing and belching at once as he settled into the chair.
“Whoa! I just saw a ghost.” Fry shook his head at H, not a slow, that’s-amazing shake, but fast and hard, as if he were trying to knock something loose. “My dad used to fall into his chair exactly like that.” Fry’s father had died when he was twelve, and he hardly ever talked about him. Now I felt his body tense up beside me. It made the whole room tighter, more uncomfortable, as if the walls had just moved in on us.
“Whenever he was well enough, he’d come downstairs.” It wasn’t even Fry’s voice we were hearing. It was smaller, quieter, and not at all cool. “Then he’d call me over to sit on the arm of his chair. ‘Small Fry,’ he’d say, ‘how was your day?’ ”
He was staring straight ahead. I thought of Shepherd not looking at me not looking at him. Fry was seeing someone, all right. But it wasn’t H or me. “Of course, I never got to tell him. The phone was always ringing. Sometimes he’d talk straight through dinner.”
“Hey, man,” H jumped right in, fearless. “Your dad? He did what he had to, you know?”
For once, I was glad it was H’s full-time job to put Fry first, to keep him happy. Fry downed half his can now, and I felt the tension melt away. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Making book is the perfect job for someone who can’t get out of bed.”
It was my strict policy not to ask my prince about his dad, because whenever anyone else did, it put him on edge. But I was father-hungry enough to have pieced together the story, the story of a miner who’d retired to the shore on disability, then wasted away from lung disease. Someone who took sports bets out of his home until the day he collapsed and died. “It was a good day,” Fry told me once. “Everyone went heavy for the Vikings, but the Redskins won.”
Now he scooped the last of the salsa up with a chip. “So let’s talk about something else,” he said. “Something with a little more flavor.”
He grinned at H. “It’s your house, your call. Pepperoni, or meatballs with anchovies?”
I hoped H would opt out of anchovies (I always picked them off, anyway), and I also hoped that, someday, I wouldn’t have to learn about Fry secondhand. I’d never known, for instance, that his nickname came from his dad calling him Small Fry. Any more than I’d guessed what missing there must have been behind that smart remark about the Vikings. Knowing that Fry dreamed of daddies, too, made me want to put my arms around him.
I knew some guys weren’t good at showing their feelings, and my own life certainly wasn’t loaded with people of either gender who did. But wasn’t that part of being in love? Weren’t you supposed to confide things to your girlfriend? Things you wouldn’t tell anyone else, not even your second-in-command, who never left your side and who might as well have been your brother since you spent so much time together, more even than you devoted to said girlfriend? What if Fry had been able to let me in?
Soul baring and pizza aren’t really a good fit, though. Once the pie arrived, the safest topic of conversation was, once again, ancient history. H remembered the time he and Fry were in seventh and eighth grades, and too young to know that the “haunted house” three seniors dared them to visit was actually a funeral home. And Fry recalled the night he, H, and two blind dates found a giant dead shark on the beach.
Me? I let them talk, while I remembered, too. Once, after I’d landed a small part in our junior high spring play, Alicia and Marcia knew how nervous I was. They came to my house every day after school to feed me my two lines. By the time the play started, they knew them as well as I did. Long after the show, we used them as codes: “Alas! I have been poorly used in this affair” meant we didn’t get the test grade we thought we should have. And “I foreswear your proposal, Sir Edgar” meant we didn’t want to do what someone asked us to.
I didn’t mention these memories, of course. Play rehearsals weren’t likely to compete with funeral homes for Fry’s attention. But I couldn’t help thinking what fun it had been for the three of us girls to have our own secret language. It was just as thrilling, and lots more useful, than finding a dead shark. Even now, I was sure that if I’d walked up to either Alicia or Marcia that very minute and told her, “I foreswear your proposal, Sir Edgar,” she would have known exactly what I meant. And I was afraid, in a way I had no words for, that this made me closer to both those old friends than I could ever get to Fry.
* * * *
There was only one more day until poetry school. I could have waited. But I found myself walking to Rufus Baylor’s home away from home the very next afternoon. I took his first book of poems with me because I wanted to ask him about the one that was already my favorite. I told myself the reason I didn’t let Fry or H know where I was going, was that I didn’t want H pestering our resident celebrity about returning his pathetic poem.
The truth, though, was that I needed the chance to tell our poet what I’d been trying to all along: I wanted to make sure he knew how sorry I was about what we’d done to his long-ago cottage by the bay. I hadn’t managed to apologize on that last visit with H, and I wanted another chance. It was an apology that wasn’t really meant for witnesses, anyway. It was just between Rufus Baylor and me.
I probably should have called first, the Hendricks’ number was sure to be in the Whale Point directory. But something told me Baylor was home. And something told me he wouldn’t mind company.
“Sarah!” I loved the way he said my name. As if he’d just opened his door on the best possible surprise. As if there were no one else he’d rather invite in. And offer tea. (I said, “No, thank you.”) And ask about school. (I stalled.)
“It’s all right, I guess.” I kept my eyes on Carmen while I answered. She was just as puffed-up and scary as I remembered, but she didn’t hiss at me this time. Instead, she kept her distance, sitting by Baylor’s chair, not like a normal cat, all cuddly and drowsy, but bolt upright, as if she figured she might have to fight off an attack any second.
I didn’t have the heart to tell our poet that the last week of school was almost always a wash. Both teachers and students knew we’d get nothing done, but, for very different reasons, we agreed to put in the time, anyway. I told him, instead, about Miss Kinney and how she adored every word he’d ever written. “She wrote a note to you,” I said, “and we’re bringing it to class tomorrow. I think it’s sort of a love letter.” I remembered the time (okay, the endless minutes that passed like hours while our beach day got shorter and shorter) our teacher had taken over her letter. “Only checked four thousand times for grammar and spelling.”
Baylor laughed. “I hope she doesn’t think poets use red pencils. I’m afraid I’d disappoint her in that regard, Sarah. I’m inclined to dangle participles, you know.”
He sounded as if he’d just confessed to teasing babies or stealing flowers, so I laughed, too.
It wasn’t long, though, before he figured out that school was far from my favorite topic. That was when he nodded at the book I was clutching like some sort of talisman, something that would help me say and do the right thing. “Would you like me to sign that for you?” he asked.
“You can’t, sir,” I said. “It’s a library book.”
He smiled. He did that a lot. And then he waited.
“It’s just, well, I had a question, Mr. Baylor.”
“Call me Rufus.” Still smiling. Still waiting.
I wanted to, really I did. But like I told you, I’d been raised to believe first names between adults and kids meant no holds barred, the end of civilization as we know it. “It’s about one of your poems, Ruf—Mr. Baylor.” I opened the book, leafed through until I found the page. “I was wondering how you made it say one thing and mean even more.” I held the book so he could read the poem. “I mean, it talks about poetry, right? But it could also be about everything else, too.” Was I wrong? Was I making a fool of myself? “Everything in the entire world.”
There wasn’t a nanosecond between my question and Rufus Baylor’s answer. So I had next to no time to feel foolish before I felt wonderful. “You bet, it is!” our poet said. “Put a poem or a sunset in front of some folks, and all they’ll do is try to figure out how they can own it, cut it down to size.
“Same goes for a good bottle of wine, a garden, or a friend.” He stood up, then stepped carefully around Mega Cat. “Now how about you and I have that tea you turned down a minute ago? It comes with cookies?”
I remembered how Span had said his friends would be impressed to know he’d shaken hands with Rufus Baylor. I figured even fewer people could say they had drunk tea with the Great One.
But I did. Or I almost did. My host was in the kitchen with Carmen, putting the water on, when the doorbell rang. That first time it was a pair of reporters. They didn’t look official, since they were wearing jeans, just like us. But they showed their press badges and acted way too full of themselves, so I figured they were genuine. They wanted to interview our poet about the first class he’d taught. And when they found out one of his students was visiting, they wanted to interview me, too.
“I’d be obliged if y’all would come back tomorrow,” Baylor told them when he joined us. The pair looked around the room, then stared hard at me, particularly the woman reporter. It was a greedy look she gave me, but with a lot of sneer thrown in for good measure. It made me feel like I’d won a contest I’d never even entered.
Finally, though, the news snoops asked what time would be good tomorrow, and Baylor told them around five. After they’d gone, I shook my head. “Isn’t five o’clock when we’ll be in class?” I asked.
Baylor grinned. “I think you’re right, Sarah,” he told me. But his smile wasn’t that much broader than usual, and his tone was so close to innocent, I couldn’t be sure whether he’d just made a mistake or given the media the slip.
Tea with Rufus Baylor, Part II, didn’t last much longer than Part I had. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. I have to admit, it was pretty annoying. Not just because our poet was so popular, but also because the sound the bell made was like an orchestra, not a normal doorbell. Baylor said he wished a whole symphony didn’t start up each time someone came to visit.
This time it was a woman from the bookstore. A young woman who had a lot in common with Miss Kinney, particularly her charter membership in the Rufus Baylor Adulation Society. She had a long dark braid, an armload of books, and lots of big plans for “the most amazing author visit Whale Point Books has ever seen.” (Which wasn’t actually surprising, since I couldn’t remember a single author ever appearing there, except a prof at the community college who’d published his own book about barnacles. No joke. Barnacles.)
Rufus signed and nodded, nodded and signed. By the time I had to leave, he’d agreed to a reading, a signing, and probably a dance routine. That last part is a joke, but from the earnest look on Book Lady’s face and the way our poet kept nodding, there’s no telling what he agreed to.
I should have been sorry that I didn’t have the chance to say what I’d come to say. That I still hadn’t apologized for my part (okay, my starring role) in the Destruction of Rufus Baylor’s Historically Preserved Summer Home. I should have been upset, too, that I didn’t get more time alone with our new teacher. But the truth is, I was too excited to care. After all, I’d just almost had tea with the most famous poet on Earth. And even though I was much too nervous to do it, said famous poet had asked me to call him Rufus!
I Gave a Poem to Two Women
The first took the poem and hung
it in her closet. “How nice,” she said,
leaving the door open, letting
the colors run out behind her.
“When I wear it, people will say,
‘Doesntthatpoemlookgoodonher?’
Thank you.”
The second woman took my poem
and sat with it, her face suspicious,
grave. At last, she poked it with one
finger, then gave it a sucker punch,
trying to catch it off guard. She
sniffed it, daring it, staring it down
nose to nose.
Suddenly, she shot out her tongue
and licked one side of the poem from
bottom to top. She took it in her arms
and squeezed it as hard as she could.
Next, she and the poem moved
around the room together, locked
like dancing bears.
After that first meeting, the poem
moved in with the woman. She set
a place for it at meals and dabbed it,
like perfume, behind her ears. She
dragged it everywhere, so it picked
up things like a sticky wrapper that
said CAREFREE SUGARLESS.
She didn’t protect the poem at all.
She scratched it and dropped it
and dribbled it and chewed it. She
put it under a magnifying glass
and under her feet. She slept with it
every night. And she never said
thank you.