“You told me all that. When exactly did you realize it wasn’t me, Matt?”
“Not until it was almost over. I had my eyes closed, and you two sound so much alike, and . . . you wear the same perfume—”
The bell rang.
“It’s hard for me to accept. Maybe we should stop talking about it,” I said. “See you later.” I didn’t mean to sound skeptical or indifferent, but I supposed that was how it sounded to him. After all, he wasn’t giving me anything new.
“Sure. Later,” he said bitterly, and walked off quickly.
I turned and saw that Haylee had been watching us and waiting for me.
“What did he say?” she asked as we entered the classroom.
“He blamed it on our perfume,” I replied.
She laughed, and we took our seats. Despite how strong we both appeared to our friends because of how easily we were tossing away boyfriends, I knew she was on shaky ground just as much as I was. Something deeply significant had happened this past weekend. I believed that now, during every day for at least these high school years, it would seem that our lives were constantly changing. We would continually be asking ourselves who we were, what we were becoming. Although that might be true for everyone our age moving from adolescence to young adulthood, it was especially so for Haylee and me. Perhaps what had happened this weekend was a real wake-up call. We had to work harder at being individuals, even if some of the things we did displeased Mother. Neither Haylee nor I felt like a little girl anymore, and so much of what Mother had designed and hoped for us was framed in a little girls’ world. I felt I had to do more about it than Haylee did, that I would have to help my sister find herself in a more sensible way. I could hope that she realized that some of what she had thought important was not. Time would soon tell.
Jimmy Jackson was not as indifferent to her dismissal of him as he had pretended in the hallway. He didn’t like being made a fool of in front of our classmates. Some had already spread the story about how casually Haylee had brushed him off. As we suspected he would, he began to tell stories about us and ridiculed Matt. Haylee was better at countering it and turning it back on him, telling girls that Jimmy was inadequate as a lover and was just trying to cover up for it by making up lies about us.
That afternoon, Matt and Jimmy did get into a fight. Mr. Allen, the physical education teacher, broke it up before it got too serious, and like two lions who knew they would only tear each other apart, they chose to avoid each other for the remainder of the day. Jimmy lost interest in it all and drifted back to his old friends and girlfriends.
Matt and I continued to circle each other all that day and the next, trying to find ways to mend the tear in our budding relationship. Haylee stayed away from him as she had promised, and if he began to approach me while we were together, she would quickly walk off. It didn’t really matter. Every time I looked at him, I saw the guilt in his face. Every word he spoke had a tentative sound to it, as if he thought I wouldn’t believe anything he said now. Some of that surely came from me, from the way I looked at him and responded to him.
He didn’t call Monday night or Tuesday night. Although we talked to each other a little in school during the remainder of the week, we sounded more like two people who knew very little about each other. He spent most of his free time with the few friends he had and slowly began to drift back into that private world he had once occupied. To keep from thinking about it, I dove deeper into our schoolwork. Haylee surprised me by following my lead. Her conversation now was peppered with references to herself, how much she had learned, especially about our maturity in comparison with our classmates and even the girls in classes ahead of us.
If I had been wiser, I would have noticed some warning signs and perhaps paid more attention to her, but I thought my sister was simply going through another phase. Right now, she was acting the role of the sophisticate. During lunch hour every day, she was holding court, repeating Mother’s diatribes against men, sometimes word for word, and ridiculing every other girl’s romance with a high school boy. Before the week ended, however, I began to see that the girls she thought were feeding off her as if she was the queen bee began to drift away. Some sat with other girls and boys, and those who remained were constantly changing the subject. Even Melanie Rosen and Toby Sue Daniels, who had been the closest thing to best friends for her, retreated. The girls who remained with us were girls who probably wouldn’t have a high school romance anyway. I had always thought that one of them, Denise James, was gay. She was shadowing Haylee more now and repeating some of her phrases as if they were biblical.
“I think Denise is falling in love with you because of what you’re saying these days about men, Haylee,” I told her. “You’re giving her hope.”
“Hope?”
“I don’t think she ever liked boys or will ever like men. Be careful.”
She started to laugh and then stopped, looked back at Denise in the hallway, and said, “Let her fall in love with me. I’ll break her heart as easily as I’d break Jimmy Jackson’s.”
My sister’s on a roll, I thought. There’s no stopping her now. It amused me for a while and kept me from thinking about Matt. Our contact with each other was falling back into only occasional glances and nods. The air between us felt as if a funeral procession had just passed through. I guessed the more I blamed Matt, the less I had to blame Haylee.
I looked for other things to capture my attention. We began to help Mother plan her dinner for Darren Paul. She had three recipe books out on the table on Wednesday and Thursday night and read from them as if they were bedtime stories, putting extra emphasis on certain ingredients or spices.
“There’s much to be said about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach,” she told us. “All of these women I know who have maids preparing their dinners every night have such thin relationships with their husbands. When they go into their dining rooms, it’s the same as going into a restaurant. Half of them don’t know how to scramble eggs. They become just another knickknack in the home. Whenever I see them out with their husbands, they look more like escorts than wives.”
“But you always cooked and baked for Daddy,” Haylee pointed out. “It didn’t work for you two.”
I wondered if Mother was going to be angry that Haylee had said that or if she was thinking about it deeply herself.
“That,” she said after another moment, “is how you can tell how self-centered he is. He wanted everything to be solely for him, or at least first for him and then the rest of us. Be sure,” she said, waving her finger at us, “that the man you fall in love with worships you, and I mean worships everything you believe and do and not just your pretty face and body. That’s the difference between a mature man and a boy. Just because a male reaches thirty or forty doesn’t mean he’s not still a boy,” she declared, and slammed her recipe book closed like a preacher shutting a Bible after a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
“Lemon roasted chicken with arugula salad and dilled orzo,” she declared. “For dessert, marble angel-food cake with strawberry topping. You girls are in charge of making the dessert. End of story,” she said, and stood up.
“Wow,” Haylee said when we went up to our rooms. “Mother is really going for the jugular with this guy. Maybe she hears wedding bells.”
“Does she really want that, or is she out to prove something to her girlfriends and Daddy?” I said.
Haylee shrugged. “What’s the difference in the end?” she said, and went to her room.
Depends on what you think of as the end, I thought.
That night, we found out that Toby Sue Daniels was having a party on Saturday, but we weren’t invited. Haylee thought the main reason was that Jimmy Jackson was invited, but Sarah Morgan, who was never invited to anything, told me she had overheard Toby Sue tell some other girls that Haylee was too negative about boys now, and she knew she couldn’t invite me without inviting her. Haylee’s reaction should have worried me more. Her indifference about it was so uncharacteristic.