Just Like That Read online

  Then the Blank came.

  The stupid driver.

  The stupid stupid stupid stupid driver.

  She tried not to let Jennifer hear her crying.

  * * *

  At St. Elene’s midday announcements on Tuesday, Mrs. Mott said that each of the new girls—which, in the eighth grade, was only Meryl Lee, since the girl with the regulation St. Elene’s uniform skirt that was too long had not been seen since the evacuation—was required to participate in one of St. Elene’s team sports, teamwork being a means by which individual girls might elevate themselves into something larger and more Accomplished.

  The fall semester team sport for all eighth-grade students of St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls was field hockey, commanded by Coach Rowlandson, who was a dragon.

  Or could have been if she tried.

  Coach Rowlandson was interested in Accomplishment too. She held her field hockey practice every Tuesday and every Thursday afternoon. Rain or sun, snow or light breezes, gray sleet or blue skies, monsoon or blizzard or tidal wave or tornado or thunder and lightning or general apocalypse consuming the planet, field hockey practice was still on, every Tuesday and every Thursday afternoon.

  The upper school field hockey team for St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls was called the Lasses. So was the upper school soccer team.

  What Holling would say about that!

  At practice, the girls wore regulation physical education uniforms—bright white tops and short green and gold striped skirts. And they carried lethal-looking sticks as they sprinted back and forth between the chalk lines of the circles, and the whole time they quaked for fear of Heidi Kidder, who was the goaltender for the Lasses.

  Wearing her pads and holding her own much larger stick, Heidi did not smile. She did not joke. She looked as grim as the guy who hauls the axe at a beheading. During the first practice, she hollered the whole time. She hollered in high decibels while waving her field hockey stick too close to people’s faces and while girls with smaller but still very hard sticks were thwacking at Meryl Lee’s legs while she was trying to dig out a ball buried in the grass and they were all yelling but not as loudly as Heidi Kidder, who said things like this:

  “Clear to the side! Kowalski, clear to the side!”

  “Out of the circle! Out of the circle, Kowalski!”

  “Sweeper! Sweeper! Where’s my sweeper! Kowalski!”

  “Kowalski! Only people with hemorrhoids run like that!”

  Everything she said on the field hockey field had an exclamation point. It did not even matter if you knew what she meant or not. You just knew you’d better Do Something Right Away.

  Meryl Lee was terrified of Heidi Kidder.

  During the second practice, Coach Rowlandson decided to try Meryl Lee as a midfielder. “Do you know what a midfielder does?” she asked Meryl Lee.

  “Is a midfielder closer or farther away from the goalie?” said Meryl Lee.

  “Farther away.”

  Good. This sounded promising.

  “What does she do?” said Meryl Lee.

  “A midfielder runs back and forth across the field hockey field until she dies,” said Coach Rowlandson.

  “Until she dies?”

  “Go on out and give it your best,” said Coach Rowlandson. Meryl Lee did.

  Here is Meryl Lee’s conversation with Coach Rowlandson after her second practice. She was a little bit out of breath.

  Coach Rowlandson: Kowalski, are you putting all you’ve got into this?

  Meryl Lee: (Nods. She cannot speak just yet.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Can you keep your stick on the ground?

  Meryl Lee: (Nods. She still cannot speak. She is not sure she will ever speak again.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Show me how you do that.

  Meryl Lee: (Shows her.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Kowalski, you think that’s going to stop a shot?

  Meryl Lee: (What was she supposed to say? She thought it would.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Sticks down! Try again. No, sticks down! Sticks down!

  Meryl Lee: (Thuds her stick into the ground.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Maybe we need to toughen you up with some wind sprints.

  During the third practice, Coach Rowlandson had the whole field hockey team run up and down and up and down and up and down the field as fast as they could.

  Heidi Kidder lapped Meryl Lee twice.

  Most of the other girls lapped her once.

  Here is Meryl Lee’s conversation with Coach Rowlandson after her third practice.

  Coach Rowlandson: Kidder is right. You run like you have hemorrhoids.

  Meryl Lee: Maybe . . . I need . . .

  Coach Rowlandson: I’ll tell you what I need, Kowalski: a midfielder who can stay in the game. And right now, that means you. So how about you start to show some Effort?

  Meryl Lee: Effort?

  Coach Rowlandson: (A stony stare at Meryl Lee.)

  Meryl Lee: Okay . . . Effort . . . But . . . I think . . . I’m . . . done for the . . . day.

  Coach Rowlandson: You haven’t worked with a coach before, have you, Kowalski?

  Meryl Lee: (Shakes her head.)

  Coach Rowlandson: The coach decides when you’re done for the day.

  Meryl Lee: Then . . . can . . . I have a . . . sip . . . of water . . . first?

  Coach Rowlandson: And throw up all over my grass? Get on over to the goal and we’ll do some more wind sprints. Effort, Kowalski. Effort.

  Coach Rowlandson was not a comforting presence.

  During the fourth practice, Meryl Lee decided she would show Effort. She stayed up with Heidi Kidder for the first two wind sprints, and even though Heidi later lapped her, no one else did. Meryl Lee tried to run like she didn’t have hemorrhoids.

  She wielded her field hockey stick so widely that most of the girls cleared away from her.

  And she blocked most of the long passes that came within reach.

  Except the six that went through her legs.

  Here is Meryl Lee’s conversation with Coach Rowlandson after her fourth practice.

  Coach Rowlandson: You weren’t as terrible as usual, Kowalski.

  Meryl Lee: (Nods her head.)

  Coach Rowlandson: I saw a whole lot more Effort out there.

  Meryl Lee: (Nods her head.)

  Coach Rowlandson: Maybe if you keep your eyes on the ball, you’ll make a half-decent midfielder.

  Meryl Lee: I . . . hope so.

  Coach Rowlandson: Who knows? Miracles can happen.

  Meryl Lee scored a goal during the first field hockey team scrimmage—but not for her side. She was defending, which is not easy because so much happens so fast, and because whenever the ball was anywhere near the circle, Heidi Kidder was screaming her head off. So when Heidi told Meryl Lee to block block block block, Meryl Lee stuck her field hockey stick down and Julia Chall’s clearing shot ricocheted off it and up into the goal. The way Heidi Kidder went on, you would have thought this was Meryl Lee’s fault and they’d just been eliminated from the Olympic trials, and even though Meryl Lee still wanted to be Accomplished, she didn’t really want to be Accomplished in field hockey.

  But everyone on her side was mad at Meryl Lee because they lost and had to run laps and Coach Rowlandson said she hoped Meryl Lee had gotten that out of her system because we wouldn’t want something like that to happen during a real game, and so Meryl Lee went back to her room because there wasn’t anything else to do and when she got there Jennifer was holding out Charlotte from Charlotte’s scarf and saying, “Oh, Charlotte, nobody wears an orange scarf with a peach blouse.”

  And Charlotte—who was indeed wearing an orange scarf with a peach blouse—was looking pretty pouty until Jennifer opened a drawer and pulled out a light green scarf. “This will be perfect with your eye coloring,” she said. Then Charlotte smiled and Ashley said Jennifer ought to know since she’s traveled so much in Europe and Jennifer smiled—“Don’t make me blush,” she said—and she w
rapped the scarf around Charlotte and they all giggled and hugged. And then Jennifer said she was dying, just dying, just absolutely dying, to tell Ashley and Charlotte about Alden and maybe, since she couldn’t reveal their secrets, she could tell them instead about what they were all going to do at Christmas. Would they like to know?

  The three of them held hands and giggled.

  Meryl Lee thought she might throw up.

  “Why don’t you have to go to field hockey practice?” she said.

  They looked at her as though she was such a dope.

  “Because we have been excused,” said Ashley.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Jennifer said, “girls should never have to sweat. Didn’t you know that?” Then she turned to Charlotte from Charlotte and said, “My sister called and she’s going to Vienna with her fiancé for Christmas and they want me to come along!”

  And Charlotte from Charlotte said, “Vienna! I’ve always wanted to go to Vienna!”

  And Ashley said, “Can you imagine? Floating in a gondola. With someone who adores you. With a gondolier singing about love in Italian from some opera.” She held her hands together over her heart.

  And Jennifer said, as if engineering a conspiracy, “Do you think I should ask Alden to come with us?”

  And Charlotte from Charlotte said, after a lot of giggles, “Do you think he would?”

  And Ashley said, “Maybe he would ride in the gondola with you!” More giggling and holding of hands over hearts, and then Meryl Lee, who had been looking for a clean towel all this time, decided to offer a point of cultural observation: “Gondolas are in Venice, not Vienna.”

  Silence in the room.

  Charlotte from Charlotte adjusting her light green scarf quietly on the green satin duvet.

  “I think I’ll ask Alden,” Jennifer said.

  And Ashley said, “Maybe the gondolier will take a picture!” Then Jennifer took out the two photographs of handsome, sweet-smelling Alden in his kilt, and Ashley and Charlotte both began to sigh. Jennifer let them each hold a photograph tenderly, and Ashley asked if it was true that underneath their kilts boys don’t wear . . . and Jennifer put her finger up to her lips and smiled.

  Talk about secrets, thought Meryl Lee.

  She found a towel and went into the bathroom and turned the hot water on and she remembered last summer’s walks with Holling, and how they talked, and how she could say anything, and how sometimes they didn’t need to say anything, and the yellow light yawning and going to sleep and the night air up in the maples cooling and the sounds of the peepers, the smell of the petunias, the quiet of their steps.

  She turned the water on harder. Hotter.

  When she came out, Jennifer was putting away her laundry. “Yours is outside,” she said.

  Meryl Lee opened the door and picked up the basket. Everything folded, cleaned, pressed. And a note from Bettye on top of her regulation uniform shirts: “I’ve shortened the sleeves a little bit,” the note said. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought you might be more comfortable.”

  * * *

  By the last week in September, Meryl Lee had decided that field hockey was really really really not what she was going to become Accomplished in.

  This was mostly because during Tuesday’s practice that week, she broke Marian Elders’s pinky.

  Marian considered herself more than a little put upon.

  Meryl Lee had not intended to break Marian’s pinky, but Heidi Kidder was hollering, “Clear! Clear! Clear!” and “Swing at it! Swing at it! Swing at it!” and when Meryl Lee swung at it! swung at it! swung at it! she did not know Marian was right behind her. When she hauled back, her stick snapped the little bone above Marian’s pinky’s knuckle and Marian screeched out a note two octaves higher than any note she had ever rendered before.

  So it wasn’t going to be field hockey.

  * * *

  That evening, Meryl Lee went back to Putnam Library, waved to Mrs. Hibbard at the reference desk—Mrs. Hibbard’s needles were still clicking like an industrial machine—and sat down. She still hadn’t handed in her author paragraph to Mrs. Connolly, and Mrs. Connolly was not being patient about this. Meryl Lee really did mean to write it. She really did. But she was on her second reading of The Grapes of Wrath—she hadn’t found the lewd parts on the first—and now Tom Joad was about to be in a whole lot of trouble, and Meryl Lee felt it coming closer, and then the trouble was right on him, when suddenly there was a sort of looming presence right across the table and Meryl Lee jumped and she didn’t have time to grab her domestic economy book to cover The Grapes of Wrath.

  She looked up.

  It was Heidi Kidder.

  Heidi took the book from Meryl Lee’s hands and looked at the title page. “Have you gotten to the lewd parts yet?”

  And Meryl Lee said, “I couldn’t find any.”

  Heidi said, “I couldn’t either. Let me know if you find them.”

  Meryl Lee said, “I’ll do that.”

  Then Heidi nodded the kind of nod you would give if you’d been lifting weights with your neck all your life, and she went over to another table, took out a book, and began to read.

  Meryl Lee had to know. She had to know. She waited a little bit, then went over.

  “What are you reading?” she said.

  Heidi Kidder showed her.

  “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?” said Meryl Lee.

  “I’ve always wanted to be Dorothy,” said Heidi.

  Meryl Lee sat down next to her.

  * * *

  That night, under her duvet-less covers, Meryl Lee lay in the bed and looked out at a half moon stroking its silvery light onto St. Elene’s. It’s hard to figure out how a friendship begins, she thought. Maybe sometimes it’s because someone you thought you knew—and that you didn’t really—turns out to be a whole lot more like a friend than you ever guessed.

  I guess it can happen just like that, she thought.

  Meryl Lee drew her blanket up to her chin and lay back, covered in white moonlight.

  Ten

  This is what Matt’s room on the second floor of Mrs. MacKnockater’s house—which Captain Hurd helped him up to that first day out of the hospital—looked like:

  A bed, with a pretty hard mattress and a pretty hard pillow, and a beige wool blanket that said U.S. NAVY on it tucked in with severe hospital corners, and a blue and white quilt folded at the foot.

  A round rag rug, mostly browns, ovalled beside the bed. Wide pine planks for the floor.

  White walls. Two framed pictures by a guy named Claude something. Matt couldn’t make out the last name, but since the pictures were dumb—and the guy obviously not any good because, I mean, just look at them—it didn’t matter.

  A smooth pine ladder nailed to the wall underneath a chute. Matt stood and, holding on to a rung, looked up. The ladder led past a cabinet door and all the way up to a skylight. From there, he guessed, it would lead out onto the roof. He’d explore that later.

  A short pine dresser with three drawers.

  A pine wardrobe with a mirror on the front. Inside were white and blue shirts and dark ties and two tweed jackets. And a navy pea jacket. It was a little big, but it would do. And he didn’t have anything else to wear in the cold.

  A pine chair pulled up to a pine desk. Treasure Island leaning against the lamp on the desk.

  He put his stuff away in the pine dresser. It took one drawer.

  He picked up Treasure Island and made his way through the first couple of pages. He stopped after about ten minutes when his left eye started to close a little bit.

  Then he looked out the window—at the September light slanting beyond the wooded ridge and stroking its soft hands upon the darkening sea. If he could keep his left eye open, he could probably see the tide coming in. Maybe, in the right light, he’d be able to see the currents left by the whales as they moved their way through the ocean, under God’s eyes.

  If Georgie could see him now. Safe and warm. A r
oom of his own. The ocean.

  If only Georgie could.

  In the mirror, Matt twisted to look at his back, still bandaged along the low ribs. Then he lay down on the bed. Below him, he could hear Bagheera clattering around in the kitchen. “Dinner will be ready in a moment,” she had said.

  He turned the pages of Treasure Island again until he felt himself falling asleep. He tried to stay awake, but finally his left eye closed, and then his right, and so Georgie appeared to him in his dreams, as usual. His guts blown out, as usual. All that blood.

  Matt gasped.

  Georgie.

  He clutched at the sheets.

  Georgie.

  Then the two men coming out of the Alley.

  And him walking down into it.

  That blood pooling toward him.

  And Georgie’s eyes still open, even if whatever made Georgie Georgie was already gone.

  All that blood.

  Then, “Matthew!”

  “Matthew!”

  He woke up, panting.

  “Matthew!”

  Mrs. MacKnockater. It was only Bagheera calling.

  * * *

  She was still in the kitchen when he came down, but he sat at the dining table, where Mrs. MacKnockater had laid out brown beans and brown bread with raisins. And a green salad that Matt knew he wouldn’t touch but she probably would. And chocolate milk. And he smelled something apple-y still baking in the kitchen. He leaned back in his chair.

  “Matthew,” Mrs. MacKnockater said, coming in with the ham steak, “we will be observing some decorum. And you’re perspiring. Are you all right?”

  He looked at her.

  “You need to wear a shirt when we come to the table.”

  “Why?” he said.

  Mrs. MacKnockater set the ham steak down on a trivet. “Matthew,” she said.

  He went back upstairs. He looked inside the wardrobe. He put on a white shirt—he let the left sleeve hang over the sling and cast—a broad maroon tie that he kind of wrapped around his neck, and one of the tweed jackets—he let the left sleeve hang on that, too. He went back down to the dining table and sat.