heavy and had not attempted to rejoin the cheer squad. And yet, even if sex wasn’t unheard of, I hadn’t expected Dena to
really
do it; I’d expected her to teeter on the edge, bragging and teasing, without slipping over.
“Don’t you want to save it for marriage?” I said. This was my plan, and it seemed perfectly reasonable given that we’d likely be married within a few years. In Riley, even girls who went to college often were brides before they graduated, and if you got to twenty-five without a wedding, you were staring down spinsterhood. Ruth Hofstetter, who worked at the fabric store where my mother and I bought material for our clothes, was twenty-eight and had no beau, and whenever we left the store, my mother and I would talk about how sad it was, especially because Ruth was kind and pretty.
“It’s a little late for that,” Dena said. “There’s hardly a difference between partway and all the way.”
“Do you think you’ll marry Robert?”
“I might.”
“Dena, if you marry someone else, he’ll figure it out when you don’t bleed on your wedding night.”
She scoffed. “Not everyone bleeds.” She picked up the mirror again and looked into it. “You don’t know anything.”
I HAD BEEN avoiding my grandmother, but one afternoon in early February, my mother was at the grocery store when I came home from school, and my grandmother was sitting in the living room, smoking and reading a novel by Wilkie Collins. I hung my book bag by the door and went into the kitchen to make a snack, and my grandmother followed me. As I pulled honey from the cupboard—I was planning to spread it on toast—she said, “You’ve been awfully moody since we returned from Chicago. Is there anything about the trip you’d like to discuss?”
“No,” I said.
“No more questions about Dr. Wycomb?”
I shook my head.
The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, “I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.”
In this moment, I detested my grandmother. She was such a hypocrite, I thought—pretending to be bold and frank as she distorted the truth and implicated me in her distortions. Standing with my back to the stove, I glared at her.
“People are complicated,” she continued, “and the ones who aren’t are boring.”
“Then maybe I’m boring.”
We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, “Maybe you are.”
ROBERT BEIKE AND Dena had officially been boyfriend and girlfriend for several months by the time the junior-senior prom rolled around that May, and Dena had decided in March that Larry Nagel ought to ask me. A few weeks before prom, this had come to pass; when I emerged from the chemistry classroom late one morning, he was standing in the hallway, his arms folded. We made eye contact, and I was pretty sure I knew why he was there. I’d been walking beside my friend Betty Bridges, and I murmured to her, “Go ahead and I’ll catch up.”
When she was gone, Larry said in a not particularly warm tone, “Are you going to prom?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Want to go together?”
“Sure.”
“Okay,” he said, and his tone remained flat. “See you around.” He then headed up the hall, which happened to be the same direction I was going, but since it didn’t seem to occur to him that we might travel together, or continue the conversation, I held back, letting him disappear. To be fair, I couldn’t expect him to be shocked or thrilled that I’d accepted when the entire scenario had been choreographed by Dena. Had I been shocked or thrilled that he’d asked? But I hoped I’d see more flashes of the sweetly impulsive boy who’d kissed me on the stoop, and in a way, his usual coolness made his capacity for sweetness even sweeter. Surely
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