The Goodbye Time by Celeste Conway Page B

never mailed.”
    “Why didn’t you?” I asked him.
    “I guess I thought you’d think it was weird.” Still looking down, he lowered his voice. “And you’d also know I liked you.”
    What
had he said? Was I hearing right? He couldn’t have said what I thought he had. But then, very slowly, he raised his eyes, and that’s when I knew for sure.
    “You’re different,” he said. “I can’t explain. You’re not like all the rest of them. And pretty too. And I really like your hair.” I wanted to say that I liked him too, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth. The only thing I managed to say was “Wow, I wish you’d mailed it. The letter, I mean. It would’ve been nice.”
    “Can I write you from New Jersey?” he asked.
    “That’d be really great.”
    “Good,” he said, sounding glad. He smiled at me and walked over to stand beside me. We looked out the window for a while, out toward the river beyond the rows of buildings to the purple sky all studded with lights. Then I felt him look at me. I turned my face and he leaned in close and very softly kissed my cheek.
    “Is that okay?” he asked me. I told him it was.
    And while I was standing there still in shock, Tyesha, Nancy and another girl came sailing out of the dining room holding their piled-high plates. They looked at us. “You don’t have crepes?” As if we were missing an arm or a leg.
    “It was just kind of crowded,” Michael explained.
    “Well, it’s okay now,” Tyesha said. “The chocolate sauce is the best.” There were dribbles of it on her chin. Other kids began to drift in, heading for the drinks. Michael and I went back for some crepes.
    Normally I probably would have eaten about five of them, each filled with something different. But right now I could hardly eat. I’d just been
kissed
! I couldn’t wait to tell Katy! And then, of course, as soon as the thought came into my head, I remembered that I couldn’t tell Katy—Katy wasn’t speaking to me. That made me not want to eat at all. But in the end, I had two crepes, one with Nutella and one the French way, with powdered sugar and a lemon squirt. Kids kept coming back for more, and Kendra’s aunt—Simone was her name—kept filling up the tray.
    Finally, when no one could eat another bite, Kendra asked the girls if we wanted to see her dress from France. It would have been rude to tell her no, especially with her aunt right there, so we all said yes and followed her to her room. It was at the end of a long, narrow hallway with nothing in it, not even a scatter rug. Our shoes made a lot of noise on the floor. Like the other rooms, Kendra’s was very large and bare. Her bed looked tiny pressed to the wall and her desk seemed lost, like a little boat on a great big sea.
    The dress was hanging on the outside of the closet, as if she kept it there so she could stare at it all day. It was pretty, like Kendra had said, and I don’t know why, but it did look sort of special, like it came from somewhere else. Then Kendra’s mom said we had to see the shoes as well, and before Kendra could stop her, she’d opened the closet and pulled out a shoe box full of—Barbie dolls.
    “Mama!” yelped Kendra, grabbing the box away from her. The Barbies clattered to the floor, and everyone could clearly see they weren’t old but extremely new, the very latest Barbie dolls. The shoe box was pink and shiny, and I figured Kendra pretended it was her Barbies’ car.
    For the moment none of the kids said anything. I saw a few of them look at each other and cover their smiles, but no one dared to laugh out loud, not with Kendra’s mom and aunt right there. The grown-ups didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. Though I knew they’d hear from Kendra the minute we were gone.
    Soon we went back outside where the boys were, and we gave our gift to Michael. It was a big collage of photographs of our class from kindergarten up to now, and in the middle was a sign with the