CHAPTER
ONE
NOW BEFORE you rush to judgment and say I should have handled it differently,
ask yourself what would you have done had you been in my shoes? I mean, here
I was trying to hook up with a guy who was my major crush, staying on top of
my schoolwork, being a good daughter, and having to deal with what looked to
be a major, possibly life-threatening problem involving a strange new friend.
They don’t cover this stuff in the “Healthy Living” classes I snooze through.
Trust me, I’ve read the syllabus.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is something my sophomore English teacher,
Mrs. Bernardino, says is a major problem for me. She’s always circling the beginning
of my reports with a fat red marker (one of these days, I’m going to buy her
a slim-point gel pen in a nice muted purple), and writing things like “Isn’t
this more appropriate at the end?” or “Why are you starting here?”
So, pardon me for my impatience with beginnings. I’m still learning.
The whole mess started one Saturday morning in October.
Kerrie called me at seven that morning yes, Saturday’s have a seven in the
morning, too to tell me Doug was going to meet us at the mall. (Doesn’t every
good story start with a trip to the mall?) With that news, I was bolt upright
in bed with no prompting from my annoying alarm clock. In fact, my heart started
pounding out its own alarm and my palms got sweaty.
Kerrie is my best friend. She knows me, and she knows that deep down I think
that Doug is my match, that we were destined to be together, that our paths
must have crossed in some other lifetime, but to come out and admit all that
will somehow make the whole thing burst like a fragile bubble.
So all I said to Kerrie was: “You woke me up to tell me this?”
After a little conversation in which Kerrie explained how Nicole had Instant
Messaged her late last night with the Doug news, I padded downstairs, thinking
of what I would wear now that my afternoon worldview had shifted. Passing our
hall mirror, I caught sight of myself and nearly had to be taken back up on
a stretcher. My shoulder-length brown hair was hanging in clumpy strings and
my face was Elmer’s-glue white, with enchanting circles under my eyes to boot,
making me look ghoulish and grumpy all at once. Heck, I was grumpy.
I decided to deal with the grumpy part first, by heading to the kitchen for
a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
“You should eat something healthier than that!” my sister Connie said, grabbing
a bottle of water from the fridge as I got out the milk. “You’re fifteen, for
goodness’ sake!” My sister is in her twenties, a slightly taller, curvier version
of me, and she’s a private investigator.
“For your information, that granola you snarf down by the truckload is nothing
but sugar-infused cardboard. Read the label,” I pointed out to her. But my gentle
observation wasn’t what she was in the mood to hear, so she grabbed her purse
and sunglasses and headed out with a shrug of her shoulders that I interpreted
as “sez who?”
In the Balducci household, we often communicate through body language. It saves
a lot of time.
As I looked at the picture of Tony the Tiger grinning at me from the big box
and took in the crunchy sweet cereal, my grumpy mood started to lift. Almost
time to get a new box, I thought as I tilted this one to pour more into my bowl.
After I was done, I added it to the shopping list stuck on our refrigerator
door. My mom usually does the shopping on Saturday mornings but today she was
at her boss’s office downtown doing some extra work on a big case. My mom is
a legal assistant in the district attorney’s office. She wishes she had gone
to school, and been a lawyer herself, but she’s done okay for herself.
Breakfast was over and I couldn’t put off the other problems that faced me.
First, the hair. Then, what to wear.
The best hairstyle I can manage is a casual, didn’t-do-a-thing-with-it look
accomplished by washing my hair before I go to bed, sleeping with the damp mess
mashed into my pillow, and brushing it out in the morning so it has a sort of
“wind-swept” appearance. This rarely fails me. It communicates a kind of cavalier
disregard for my personal appearance while at the same time making me look like
a younger version of Cindy Crawford who just hasn’t been discovered yet.
Okay, okay. Maybe not quite.
Today, I jumped in the shower and gave it the old lather-rinse-repeat. Ten minutes
later, I was sitting in my bedroom with a towel around my head swami-style while
I tackled my next problem what to wear. As I worked through these challenges,
I realized it was a good thing Kerrie had awakened me so early. Looking like
you don’t care about how you look takes a lot of prep time.
Jeans and a tee-shirt are my usual choices. But with Doug in the picture, I
considered other options. It was early fall but still warm in Baltimore, so
a tank top, though acceptable, was maybe too obvious. Besides, I didn’t like
my tank tops.
I moved from the closet to the floor where I started to paw through a pile of
clothes. Jeans and a peasant blouse? Hmmm…..that sounded good, especially since
the blouse had a hot design on it and I had worn it only once. What was it doing
in this pile anyway? I pulled it out and put it aside for further consideration.
A half hour later, I had it down to the jeans and blouse versus the black tee-shirt
and khaki pants, but I was leaning toward the latter because that outfit would
look neat but not like I was trying too hard. Besides, the black tee would look
good with my new gold stud earrings, which would get lost next to the embroidery
in the peasant blouse.
These hard decisions made, I went about the business of the rest of my morning,
which consisted of some cleaning chores, a few phone calls to friends, a little
web surfing, and a glance at my homework assignment book just to remind myself
that I was okay putting off that book report because it wasn’t due until early
next month.
My mother came home around noon and called up to me to make sure I was alive.
My 18-year-old brother Tony came in shortly after that from his morning shift
at the Burger Boy. Before his car keys even hit the half table by the wall in
the entrance hall, I yelled down to him.
“Don’t forget, you’re taking me and my friends to the mall!”
I heard what sounded like a swear coming from his mouth, which was confirmed
a second later when my mom barked from the kitchen, “Tony, watch that mouth!”
My poor mom has a lot of patience. She’s been alone for a lot of years my
Dad, who was a cop, died just after I was born. She’s got a lot of spunk too,
which is why she moved us back to the “old country” from a rented house in
the ‘burbs to an old townhouse in a section of the city where she was raised.
Which is one of the reasons Tony is taking my friends and me to the mall so
I can sort of ease into the city scene. Mom told him the night before that he
had chauffeur duty.
In a few minutes, I was downstairs. This time running past the mirror didn’t
make me panic. I was pretty much where I wanted to be not too neat, not too
curled, not too dressy, not too anything.
“Let’s go, Tone,” I called out to my brother. And we were on our way.
THE MALL is just north of town. It took us a good forty-five minutes to get
there because first we had to pick up Kerrie in Fells Point and Nicole in Towson.
At least my family’s move hadn’t split up my friendships. We went to St. John’s,
a parochial school in the city, and people came from all over the place to attend.
One of the things I liked about my school (and there were very few) was the
fact that you made friends with someone first, and found out where they were
from and what their circumstances were later.
That was because we had to wear dorky uniforms navy blue pants and white shirts
or a blue plaid jumper and white shirts. Wearing the same thing cut down on
a lot of clothes-envy even if it made us feel like prison inmates most of the
time.
Anyway, my friend Nicole was solid middle class. She lived in a split level
in an older neighborhood. Her father was a buyer for the county and her mother
worked part-time for an insurance company.
Kerrie, on the other hand, was the only child of two professionals (her father
was a lawyer and her mother was a doctor) who had moved into the city as part
of an urban pioneer thing. To me, her house always felt like a cross between
an antiques store and a page out of an architectural magazine.
I wasn’t quite sure where Doug lived except I knew it was somewhere north of
the city. The residence of his friend Adam who was also meeting us at the
mall was a mystery to me, too.
After Tony dropped us off with a fond “go get ‘em, mall-rats,” to which I thoughtfully
responded by narrowing my eyes, we headed for the food court first thing. We
managed to work in our quota of giggling during the escalator ride and stair
climb until we reached the food mecca, so I felt reasonably safe that we wouldn’t
make fools of ourselves when we came across the boys.
“Bianca!”
When I heard Doug’s voice calling mine, you could have pulled out the defibrillators
right then and there. He was standing by the Boardwalk Fries looking hot in
an American Eagle tee-shirt, olive cargo shorts, and backwards baseball cap.
Okay, so I wished he would lose the cap, but otherwise, he looked pretty cool
to me. He was six feet tall and lean and muscular with really short blondish
hair and brown eyes and a shy smile. And, from quite a distance, he had called
out my name to get our attention, my name from the three that he could have
chosen.
But my high spirits came crashing down when I noticed there was someone else
with him and Adam. And the someone else was a girl.
Her name was Sadie, a strange name for an equally strange person. She was skinny
as a rat and usually looked like she spent too much time hanging with the wrong
crowd. Seriously, I even checked her arms for needle marks. But they were always
clean. Today she wore a red tie-dye halter top and bell bottom jeans that looked
spray painted on her thighs and rear. Her blonde-in-a-bottle hair was crushed
under a blue bandana and she had a gold post in her nose and about five other
earrings arranged asymmetrically in each ear. Sadie had just started attending
St. John’s this year and hadn’t made many friends.
“Look who we ran into,” Adam said, smiling from ear to ear. Adam was a prankster
and it was quite possible he had asked Sadie to join us just to make us all
uncomfortable.
Sadie smiled a little and looked away, as if she were searching for someone.
We all murmured shy hello’s and then Kerrie, the social manager of our crowd,
chirped up with a “plan.” Kerrie always had plans. I think it comes from being
an only child.
“Let’s check out Hot Topic first. And then the Gap and then Strawberries and
then maybe we can come back and have an ice cream….” Kerrie said.
Doug smiled at me, and I swooned.
Well, not really. I smiled back.
“….you’re welcome to join us,” Kerrie was saying to Sadie.
It looked as if Sadie was about to say no when she caught sight of something,
or someone, and suddenly changed attitude and answer. She shook her head vigorously
and said “okay, let’s get going! I’m kind of in a hurry!” And then she linked
her arm in Doug’s and started to speed out of the food court so fast I thought
she was kidnapping him and I’d have to call the police.
This was not a good start to the afternoon.
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