Chapter 11

Monday, February 12th, 2006 was another day I circled on my calendar in red. The first thing that Mr. Kennedy did in government class was hand back our tests. And not to brag or anything, but YESSS! "A-plus — Excellent work, Mr. Sterling." Maybe my answer had been correct; maybe the twenty-first step in a bill's journey to becoming law was having the President pro tempore of the Senate impress the bill for the register. Sure. My success was based on nothing more than my having remembered that there were exactly twenty-eight steps.

Another triumph in history class: another A-plus, on the paper that Mr. Anson returned. "A cogent analysis of the narcissism of the Jacksonian era." Whatever the hell that meant. I didn't care; I was on a goddamn roll.

In English class, Missy, of all people, still couldn't get around the topic of our assigned essay, "Why not call him Bob or Sam?"

"Did you read the chapters, Missy?" Mrs. Palmer asked.

"Well, yes, but — " she started.

"Mr. Sterling," Mrs. Palmer stopped her. "How does the book begin?"

"'Call me Ishmael'" I quoted.

"All right," she smiled. "Ishmael. How does the book begin?"

It was a good trap and I'd fallen right in. She got her laugh, and turned expectantly to Missy.

"But it doesn't say why it's his name," Missy protested. "How can you just expect us to get it from the book?"

"I don't," Mrs. Palmer said ruefully. "I expect you to get it from the Internet, where all of your knowledge appears to come. But what I also expect is a well-researched and well-written paper, no more than three pages long, that persuasively explains why Mr. Melville chose this name. Okay? Good."

We moved on to a lecture about the time period in which Moby Dick was set, a lecture that would likely get dragged out over a few more days.

As it happened, though, those days were going to have to be postponed. On Saturday, I'd gotten an e-mail from the library letting me know that the books I'd checked out three weeks ago were due. Jeanne was going to be spending the night at a classmate's to finish a project they'd been working on together, so on my way home, I stopped by the library to make sure I wouldn't get hit with any of those onerous nickel-a-day fines. There was a surprisingly good crowd there, for a library. Among the patrons was Mrs. Parsons, the woman who had been hustled out of the library the day after Christmas so that Lynn and I could have a little privacy. She appeared to remember me, and I gave her a small wave in response to a somewhat suspicious glare.

"Hi," I whispered to Lynn as I stepped up to her desk with the books.

"Hi," she said. "Shouldn't you be hurrying home?"

"Trying to get rid of me?" I asked in as offended a tone as I could manage.

"I joined a book club," she answered.

That stopped me. I looked around the library, desperately biting back the remark that she spent her whole day inside a frickin' book club.

"My girlfriend told me it's a good way to meet smart guys," she blushed.

I smiled back at her. This was really cool, even if it would cut my sex life in half. Still, one shouldn't be greedy, particularly when half of one's sex life was Tanya Szerchenko.

"So you are trying to get rid of me," I teased her.

"No," she blushed even more. "I meant because of the snow storm."

"Snow storm?"

"Don't you listen to the weather?"

"I'm a high school student. We only care about one day at a time. Pretty much always today."

She gave me a smirk.

"We're expecting 12 inches of snow," she said. "I'm surprised it hasn't already started."

"So that's why all the people?" I glanced around.

"Milk, bread, and toilet paper," she nodded. "Then books."

"In case the toilet paper runs out?"

"Thank you, Patrick Sterling," she snatched the books out of my hand, her eyes twinkling. "I don't think we'll be loaning you any more books."

"Guess I better get home then," I grinned. "See ya!"

"Bye," she smiled.

It had started snowing while I was in the library, in fact, and by the time I reached home, it was already covering the grass. As I walked into the house I noticed that it seemed unusually quiet.

"Where's Jeanne?" Jill asked as she suddenly came around the door from the living room.

"Her friend's house," I said. "Larissa, Clarissa, some rissa something. Where's Tiff?"

"She was having some kind of pain, so Daddy had to come home and take her to the hospital," she said. "She left a note."

"I'll bet Dad loved that," I grinned.

"Yeah, I'll bet," she grinned back. "Oh, and Dave called. He's got late shift tonight, and then he's going to stay with a friend of his who lives near the Seven-Eleven."

"Well, that makes sense," I said. "Probably safer. It's really coming down out there."

"I know," Jill said. "Andy slid into a car on the way here and busted its headlight."

"And you still beat me home?" I asked. "I'm only like fifteen minutes late."

"Why wouldn't we beat you home?"

"'Cause you would have had to stop for the crash," I said.

"He stopped, his truck was fine, so we left," she shrugged.

"But he broke the other guy's headlight!"

"So?" Jill asked. "I'm sure he has insurance."

"So does Andy."

"God, you have turned into such a dork," Jill said.

I had no answer for that.

"What's for dinner?" she finally said.

"I'll let you know," I smiled.

I'd wanted a chance to get to know Jill. Apparently that wish was about to come true. Perhaps not as quickly as I would have liked, though. After I'd scrounged up a fairly nice meal — nice being defined as a meal that a) didn't make either of us ill and b) included a vegetable — Jill announced that she had a few phone calls to make. Either there were more than a few, or Jill's phone calls lasted a lot longer than mine. I did have a long conversation (by my terms) with Tanya, with whom I'd finally managed to exchange cell phone numbers. Then Dad called my cell, because he said our regular phone had been busy for the past hour. He told me that he and Tiffany would find a motel, most likely for two nights if the storm was as bad as they were predicting. I told him where Dave and Jeanne were, and assured him that Jill and I would be fine. He reminded me that I needed to have the driveway cleared for him in case he did get home tomorrow.

I didn't really see Jill again until the middle of the following morning, when I was sitting in the living room, still trying to get plow through the next five chapters of Moby Dick. Chapters eleven through fifteen were due by Friday, and I'd fallen asleep last night during chapter eleven.

"I'm bored," Jill announced as she breezed into the room. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know," I smiled. "Play a game?"

The word "dork" was once again on the tip of her tongue, but after a few moments' consideration, she finally gave me a grudging "okay."

"What do you want to play?" I asked. I walked to the hall closet, the location we kept the games last time I'd played one. Fortunately, they were still all there. The same ones, too.

"Candy Land? Chutes and Ladders? Scrabble? Monopoly?"

The first three were met with varying expressions of disgust, but Monopoly got what I took to be a silent vote of approval. So I set it up on the living room coffee table, and selected the shoe. I was always the shoe. Jill, to the best of my knowledge, had always been the thimble, but this time she absentmindedly reached for the dog. We had been playing for about ten minutes, and I was about to ask her about Andy, which I figured was a safe enough topic of conversation, when she suddenly looked at me.

"What?" I asked, completely innocent of everything.

"Why do you keep staring at my fingernails?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know I was."

"Well, you were," she said. "It was freaking me out. Don't you like them?"

She stuck her hands in front of my face, and I blurted out that, in all honestly, no, I didn't.

She was shocked.

"But all those girls you dated!" she exclaimed. "They all..."

"Had fingernails like that?" I made her sentence into an astonished question.

She nodded slowly.

"Which ones?"

"Stephie, Anne, Becky, Liane, Barbara," she ticked off the list on her fingers.

"Tanya doesn't," I said, desperately trying to come up with a mnemonic for memorizing the other girls' names.

"Who's Tanya?" she asked. "That blonde you were sitting next to at the dance?"

I nodded. Solvent assets buoy leveraged buyout? Some ambitious bakers like bread?

"Is she your new girlfriend?"

"Are we playing Monopoly or Twenty Questions?" I countered.

"Truth or dare!" she said as her eyes lit up.

"No," I said.

"Why not?" she pouted.

"Because we're not a bunch of fifteen-year-olds at a slumber party. 'I dare you to kiss Melissa on the lips.' And no, she's not my girlfriend. Just a good friend."

A very, very good friend, I smiled to myself as I rolled the dice.

I looked up to find Jill still pouting.

"We can still play Monopoly, too," she said, trying to entice me into her game. I had no idea why she wanted to play Truth or Dare with her brother — it's not like I was going to kiss her — but I began to realize that there were advantages to the game, particularly if I could get some truths from her.

"All right," I said. "But Monopoly's the primary game. We'll play your game a little more slowly. You ask the first one now, and I ask the next one at noon, and then we go on from there."

She was apparently just as eager to question me as I was to question her. She tucked her legs underneath her on the couch and leaned toward me.

"Truth or dare?"

"Truth," I answered.

"How many girls have you kissed?"

How the hell did I know? Stephie, Anne, Liane — no, Becky, Liane, then some other B-girl, shit, I'd forgotten already, Tanya, Lynn Edwards, Liz Torianni, that Sheila woman I'd met at Christmas, Cammie, how many was that? Ten?

"Thirteen," I answered.

"Thirteen?" she said. "Is that all?"

"That's another question," I said. "And I'm buying the Water Works."

At exactly noon, Jill sang out "your turn."

"No it's not," I said. "I just landed on Illinois Avenue, and paid you a nice chunk of change. It's your turn."

"No," she said. "It's your turn for a question."

Oh, right.

"Truth or dare?" I asked.

"Truth," she smiled.

I figured I'd start slowly. If I just started asking questions about myself, she'd get suspicious.

"Name all the guys you've dated," I said.

"All of them?" she asked.

I nodded.

It took her a good while to remember all of them. I swear when she was done that there must have been fifteen names on the list.

"But you're only in tenth grade!" I protested.

"So? You must have dated like six different girls in tenth grade after you dumped Jeanne's friend."

"Cammie?"

"Yeah, the jock," Jill said. "I can't even remember all of them. Heather, Maria, and that ditzy one with the laugh. Tee-hee-hee! What was her name?"

"I have no idea," I said. Some ambitious bakers like baking honey muffins. Got it. "It's your roll."

Jill was quite the little entrepreneur. By the time the clock struck one, she had a number of red hotels and I had a dwindling pile of cash.

"Truth or dare," she said.

"Dare," I said.

Truthfully, I thought, what could she have me do? Run outside naked in the snow?

"I want to see it," she said, looking at my crotch.

"See what?" I asked in alarm.

"Your dick," she said.

"Why?"

"What do you care?" she laughed. "You picked dare, you have to do it."

I just stared at her.

"Oh, all right," she said with another giggle. "Last year, Marcia Burns said she watched you and her sister, Liane, do it for like half an hour, and she said you were really, you know, big."

"I'm not."

"I'll be the judge of that," she said.

"I'm not showing my cock to my little sister."

"Bawk, bawk-bawk-bawk-bawk-BAWK," she said, flapping her folded arms against her side.

"I'm not scared," I said, "it's just not, you know..."

"We're not gonna fuck, Trick," she shook her head. "I just want to see it."

Apparently that was the price of further conversation with Jill, so I sighed and pulled down my pants.

"You're right," she finally said.

"About?"

"It's not that big," she said.

"See?"

"Although it is big," she made a little moue with her mouth. "It's just not really big, like Marcia said."

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