Gabrielle's Bully (Young Adult Romance) Page 9

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “All right. I got the usual responsibility speech, and my mother let it go at that.” It turned the oven dials on the stove and opened the door.

  “She didn’t say you couldn’t see me anymore?” Heath asked anxiously.

  “No, but I don’t think naps in the den are advisable in the future.”

  “I’m really sorry about that. I didn’t realize how tired I was.”

  “We both fell asleep, Heath,” I answered. “You didn’t do it alone.”

  He smiled lazily. “It was nice, though, wasn’t it?”

  I met his eyes and felt warmth creeping up my neck. “It was nice.”

  He sat at the table and began tugging off his desert boots. “I’ve got to restore some circulation here or my toes will fall off from frostbite.” He dropped the shoes on the floor and massaged his toes. “They feel like frozen french fries.”

  I put the kettle on to boil. “I’ll make some tea. That should help.”

  He held out his arms. “I’ve got a better idea.”

  I went to him and bent down for his kiss. He stood, barefoot, and folded me in his arms, his coat hanging open and his scarf dangling to his waist. I snuggled against him, wrapping my arms around his middle.

  “You feel wonderful,” he murmured in my ear. “So warm and soft.” He kissed me again, harder, longer. I finally pulled away, breathless and a little dazed. He followed me, holding my hands.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t think we should, with my parents upstairs,” I said. As if to confirm my fears we heard a noise from the second floor, and both of us became statues. Heath reached for his shoes and was halfway out the door. I stayed him with a hand on his arm, listening.

  I heard the rush of water in the bathroom, and then the sound of footsteps returning to bed. We breathed a mutual sigh of relief.

  A horrible thought struck me. “What if someone looks out the window and sees your car?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. I left it on the next block and crossed through the backyards. There’s nothing to see.”

  The kettle began to whistle and we both jumped. I yanked it from the burner and set it at the back of the stove.

  Heath started to laugh. “I could never be a burglar,” he said. “This sneaking around stuff just isn’t for me. I almost had three heart attacks already tonight.”

  I giggled. I knew how he felt. I made the tea and we sat drinking it at the table, as if it were the middle of the afternoon instead of one o’clock in the morning.

  “Are you feeling better now?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Except for the paralysis in my facial muscles, of course.” He drew the corner of his mouth down crookedly, as if he had had a stroke.

  “Heath, that’s terrible.”

  He shrugged. “Bad joke.”

  “I forgive you.”

  He drained his cup, standing and buttoning his coat. “I’d like to stay longer, but we’re tempting fate already. I suspect that if I leave the car out long in this weather the battery will be dead when I get back.”

  “Where did you tell Roger you were going?” I asked curiously.

  “I didn’t. He was asleep when I left. Unless an earthquake rocks the house he’ll stay that way.”

  “Just the person to be left in charge of you,” I said sarcastically. “Rip Van Winkle.”

  “Makes it easy to pay midnight visits to my best girl.”

  I turned away, trying to hide my pleasure at his words.

  He finished dressing and put his arm around my shoulders. “Wish me luck in the game?” he whispered.

  “Good luck.”

  “Will you still go out with me if I disgrace myself in front of the entire student body, their parents, and the faculty?”

  “Heath, don’t be ridiculous. That’s not going to happen.”

  “Off to the wars,” he said, flinging his scarf around his neck like a 1920’s flyboy. “With my shield, or on it. I have but one life to give for my school. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I recognized the last line as Latin, which he had studied at the Academy. At such times he made me feel inadequate, undereducated, and outclassed.

  “Whatever,” I said uncomfortably.

  “Let’s hope I don’t get arrested on the way back,” he said cheerfully. “If one of your neighbors sees me trespassing and calls the cops, I mean.”

  I preferred not to consider that possibility.

  “I only have to climb one fence,” he went on. “The rest of the property is open. There is a rather large dog, though. I made his acquaintance on the way in. His name is Rommel. I saw it on his doghouse. I hope Rommel is deep in dreamland, chasing rabbits, when I cross through his yard.”

  “Can’t you walk around the long way?” I asked. This information was making me very nervous.

  “No can do. The street in the back doesn’t cut through. It’s Rommel’s yard or nothing.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and peered through the glass on the back door. “Just in case, how do you say ‘heel’ in German?”

  “Very funny. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  He turned to look at me and his expression changed. “Hey, I was only kidding. I’ll be fine.” He put his hands on either side of my face. “I’ll look for you in the stands.”

  I nodded. “Barb and I will be there. Her sister Margie’s giving us a ride.”

  He kissed me quickly on the lips. “I’ll see you then.” He opened the door and a gust of chill wind filled the kitchen. I shut it after him, watching his progress across the frozen landscape as long as I could. The snow was almost gone, the light dusting we’d had melted away during the warmer days, but what was left was glittering with frost. Wisps of clouds drifted across the full moon, which illuminated Heath as he walked away, casting shadows on the hard, packed ground.

  I left the window when I couldn’t see him anymore and shut off the oven. I rinsed the cups we’d used and put them away, looking for any other traces of his presence. There were none.

  I went up the stairs as quietly as possible. Nobody stirred as I let myself into my room on tiptoe, feeling like Nancy Drew, girl detective. I was getting pretty good at stealth.

  I undressed in the dark, not wanting to risk turning on a lamp, but the moon flooded the room with its own peculiar light, turning the furniture into grotesque shapes and casting a shaft of iridescence across my bed. I slipped into my pajamas and robe, and sat cross-legged in the pool of moonlight, remembering how I’d felt when Heath kissed me in the kitchen.

  I had pulled away, but only because I knew I should. I had wanted to cling to him, press myself into him, filled with a powerful yearning that I’d never experienced before. In the past, I hadn’t been able to understand how girls my age got into trouble; it had seemed so foolish and stupid, the sort of thing that could never happen to me. But I was getting the picture now, absorbing the knowledge that had eluded me for so long. They weren’t bad, or dumb, or any other thing that I wasn’t. They had simply been carried away on the tide of feeling that I had tasted tonight. And the taste was heady, dangerous; it drew with the most fundamental pull, the urge to be close, to express love. I ran my index finger over my mouth, feeling again the touch of Heath’s lips there. This was what my mother was worried about and I had to admit that I was worried, too. I knew I wanted more.

  I finally crawled under the covers, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning was clear, bright and cold. I slept in because I had been up so late, and was still wandering around in my bathrobe when Barbara called to say when she and Margie would pick me up. I got off the phone quickly, staggering into the kitchen for some coffee.

  “Do you plan on getting dressed some time today?” my mother asked mildly.

  I mumbled something in reply.

  “Don’t let me disturb your rest, dear,” she sai
d, leaving the kitchen. “When you wake up, there are some muffins in the bread box and I think Craig left one piece of fruit in the refrigerator.”

  I drank two cups of coffee and then went to the powder room on the first floor to survey the damage. I looked in the mirror and groaned. I just wasn’t one of those people who could do without sleep. My hair stood up around my head like a nimbus, and the bags under my eyes made me look like Vampira. I took some of my mother’s cover stick from the medicine chest and rubbed that under my eyes, which was no improvement. I now looked like an escapee from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. No more midnight rendezvous for you, my lady, I told myself. I would be lucky if Heath, and everyone else, didn’t run screaming out of my path in terror.

  I went upstairs and took a shower, letting the cold tap run on my face to reduce the puffiness, and drenching my hair with cream rinse to calm its wayward tendencies. When I was done I peered at myself in the mirror again, and was relieved to see that I more closely resembled a human being. I took two washcloths from the linen closet and went back to the kitchen, wrapping them around ice cubes and pressing them under my eyes.

  I was sitting there, holding the makeshift ice packs to my face, when my mother came in with a grocery bag. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me.

  “Good lord, Gaby, what on earth are you doing?”

  “I have bags under my eyes,” I informed her. “I read in a magazine that this is what you do to get rid of them.”

  My mother marched over to me and took the washcloths out of my hands, dumping their contents into the sink despite my wail of protest.

  “That is such nonsense,” she said. “Bags, indeed. If you want to see bags, look at me at seven o’clock in the morning. I never saw a girl more insecure about her appearance, with less reason. You’re very pretty, Gaby, which you’d realize if you stopped trying to transform yourself into Daphne Morris, that overblown tootsie whom you seem to think is the Queen of the May.”

  “She makes me look like a clothes hanger in a dress.”

  “Ridiculous,” my mother said with precision, enunciating the word crisply. “In twenty years she’ll be going to Weight Watchers and you’ll be wearing designer jeans.”

  “Oh, Mom, don’t start that stuff again. I don’t care about what I’ll look like when I’m forty.”

  “You should,” my mother said. “Take it from me, you’ll be forty soon enough.”

  Oh, oh. This was shaping up to be another ‘gather the rosebuds while you may’ lecture, the point of which was always to enjoy carefree youth while I could, I would be grown up and harried before I knew it. How anyone with as good a memory as my mother could think that youth was carefree was beyond me. Surely she remembered the problems and the pain, the way a hurtful put-down could linger in your mind for a month, the crushing desire to succeed and to belong. Why couldn’t she understand that regardless of the way we looked, Daphne fit in and I didn’t? That was the reason I wanted to be like her. It was as simple as that.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs and get dressed, Mom,” I said rapidly, to forestall a speech. “Barb and Margie will be here pretty soon.”

  She nodded, watching me leave, and then started unloading items from the bag. I escaped, taking the stairs two at a time.

  I dressed in jeans and a turtleneck with a vest, blow drying my hair and working on it with a curling iron until it subsided into its usual style. As if in obedience to my mother’s decree, the bags under my eyes had vanished, and I looked myself by the time Margie pulled up in the driveway in her little MG.

  Margie was a sophomore at the community college downtown, and was pretty good about carting us around on the weekends if we wanted to go someplace. She dropped us off at the high school with a few amusing remarks about how the old place had changed since she last trod its hallowed halls. She’d been out of high school all of two years.

  The gym was packed when we got inside, and the cheerleaders were already warming up the crowd. The players weren’t out yet. We took seats in the bleachers, watching Daphne and the others turning cartwheels and otherwise showing off for the multitude. Then they lined up to do “individuals,” which meant that each girl did a cheer by herself for a particular player. It came as a shock when Pamela Thorson leaped into the air and yelled, “Lindsay.” The rest chanted along with her as she went through her routine, yodeling, “Lindsay, Lindsay, he’s our man, if Heath can’t do it, nobody can.”

  “Thorson’s got Heath, huh?” Barbara observed. “Well, thank God, she’s still got braces on her teeth.”

  “She looks a little bowlegged, too, don’t you think?” I added.

  Barbara nodded sagely. “Bowlegged, for sure.” She squinted down at the floor. “Here comes Stanfield.”

  Vicki Stanfield cheered for Mike. She had once been his girl, too. But that relationship had gone down in flames on one memorable occasion when she had poured a can of soda over his head when he said something she didn’t like. I personally thought that love would be killed forever by the memory of such an incident, but Barbara was constantly monitoring the situation, watching for signs of returning life. Vicki did have the best legs in the class.

  “I think she’s gaining weight,” I said helpfully.

  Barbara squinted harder. She was very nearsighted but refused to wear glasses. “I hope so. Still, she’s supposed to be pinned to some freshman at State.”

  “I’m positive that’s a story,” I answered. “Have you ever seen the guy?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “There you go,” I said. “She’s making that up to save face because Mike dumped her for you.”

  “He didn’t dump her,” Barb responded, ever the realist. “They came to a mutual parting of the ways after Candy Marchetti’s party.”

  The soda pouring had occurred at Candy’s shindig. “Do you know what he said to make Vicki so mad?” I asked curiously.

  “He won’t tell me,” Barbara responded gloomily. “But I heard it had something to do with her mother.”

  That was easy to believe. Vicki had the most horrifying mother in the school, probably the county, a screaming harridan who made my mother look like Mrs. Cleaver on the reruns of Leave it to Beaver. Not even for Vicki’s legs would I take her mother.

  The crowd erupted in applause as the team trotted onto the floor. I searched for Heath, and found him, running in behind Mike Dalton. It was my first glimpse of Heath in the uniform, and he looked great, fit and handsome. He was Number 12.

  “There he is,” I yelped, punching Barbara.

  “Take it easy, take it easy, I see him,” she said. “Lookin’ good,” she said wisely, imitating the coach in a football movie we’d seen. “Lookin’ awful good.”

  The visiting team took the floor, and the captains met in the center for the jump. Jeff Lafferty faced the opposition’s man, exuding confidence.

  “Look at him,” Barbara said disgustedly. “Wouldn’t you just love to burst that bubble?”

  The referee threw the ball in the air, and as it came down Jeff tapped it to Mike. The game was underway.

  It soon became clear what Heath had meant about Jeff. Even when Heath was standing free, unguarded, with a clear shot at the basket, Jeff wouldn’t pass to him. He acted as if Heath were invisible. Mike and the other guys played along with Heath, but Jeff ignored him. I knew that Jeff would not get away with this for long; if I had noticed it the coach certainly would, and let him have it. But Jeff was just childish enough to indulge his petty grudge as long as he could.

  Even with Jeff’s lack of cooperation, Heath was doing well. Mike fed him the ball constantly and he had scored twelve points by the half. We were ahead, 26-18.

  Barbara and I went out into the hall, pushing through the milling crowd to the ladies’ room. We were only there a minute when the cheering section arrived, monopolizing the space in front of the mirror. I would have left, but I was waiting for Barb, so I stood against the wall and exhorted her silently to hurry up.

 
Vicki Stanfield fluffed her short curls with a pick and made a mouth in the mirror. “What do you think of old Heathland these days?” she asked Daphne. “Not bad now that his hair’s growing in, huh?”

  My heart sank. I stared at my shoes.

  “Not bad at all,” Daphne responded. “Thinking of giving him a try?”

  “Maybe,” Vicki said mysteriously.

  I knew they were doing this for my benefit. They were aware that I was seeing Heath, which nobody had seemed to mind until he turned out to be a basketball star. Now he had a lot more to recommend him. I was receiving notice that the heavy artillery was moving in; the message was: clear out and make way for your betters.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore and went out to the hall. Barbara found me there, staring into space.

  “Earth to Gaby, earth to Gaby,” she intoned, snapping her fingers in my face. “What’s the matter with you? I called you three times and you kept staring ahead like a zombie.”

  I looked at her unhappily. “I heard Vicki talking in there. It sounded like she was planning to aim both barrels at Heath in the very near future.”

  “Oh.” That gave her a moment’s pause. Then she waved her hand. “Oh, come on, lighten up. If he resisted Stacey Trumbull he can resist Vicki.”

  “Barb, you know that’s not the same thing,” I said. “Stacey is as dumb as dirt. Vicki is the secretary of the National Honor Society.”

  “You’re on the National Honor Society,” Barbara pointed out.

  “I’m not an officer.”

  “What’s your problem? You think he’s going to be impressed by officers because he went to military school?”

  “You’re not funny at all,” I said bitterly. “You were worried enough when you thought she might be going after Mike again.”

  She sighed. “This is true.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to forget it for now, because as of now nothing has happened. The game is going to be starting again in a minute, let’s get back in there.”

  We walked inside and climbed over several people to resume our seats as the second half began.