Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,88
going so I can get out of the house. I need to …”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.” She took a breath and seemed to push something from her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Is it Stan?” I asked. “Have you been arguing?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not him. Mind you, he has been getting on my nerves.”
“He has?” I tried not to sound too gleeful.
“Yeah. Frankly, sometimes he acts almost as full of himself as that bonehead Greg Loomis. And he’s dead stupid on his bike sometimes. Scared me to death the other day, he did. He was driving me home from school, and he overtook this car on a bend and there was this lorry coming right at us. He almost had to swerve off the road to miss it. God, Jesse, I tell you, I thought I was going to wet myself I was so frightened.”
“Maybe you should take the bus home,” I suggested.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Though sometimes, to tell you the truth, I have a good mind to give him the shove.”
“The shove?” I had the sudden image of Amanda standing on a roadside with Stan, pushing him into the path of a speeding lorry.
“You know, pack him in. Break up.”
“Really?” It was almost impossible to contain my delight now.
“Yeah,” she said, gazing up toward the jagged silhouette of an elm tree that had been stripped bare not by the changing seasons but by Dutch elm disease. It had stood there, overlooking the bus stop and the high street, a sad skeleton among its verdant companions all summer. Now, though, it blended perfectly into the winter landscape, stark against the yellow light of the ascending sun.
“So why don’t you? Why don’t you give him the shove?”
“It’s complicated and, well, I suppose it’s because I love him.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice suddenly thin. “Well, then, of course you can’t give him the shove.” I turned to look at the disease-ravaged tree, noticing the way its smaller branches reached like knotty fingers pointing to the vast blue sky.
“Of course, you’re probably still too young, Jesse, to understand love and all that.”
“No, I’m not,” I said quietly, still staring at the tree, because I didn’t dare to look at Amanda.
I felt her turn to study me, and for a moment I was afraid that she might tease me or, as Tracey or the Debbies would have done if I’d said such a thing to them, interrogate me about which boy at school I was infatuated with. Instead, Amanda reached out and placed her hand gently on my arm. “Yeah,” she said, “you’re right. You are old enough.”
As she touched me, I felt as if I could melt forever in that moment. And I wondered if, despite her declaration of love for Stan, there was a chance that Amanda might soon come to realize that he wasn’t the person she deserved. Realizing this, she would also see that I was the only one who truly loved her and, filled with this knowledge, she would have to love me in return. And though we’d have to keep our love secret, because no one else would understand it, the two of us would know that there was nothing terrible about the way we felt. While I had to hide my love from her, it was a terrible, shameful secret. But if Amanda returned my feelings I’d have no reason to be ashamed.
DURING THE LAST WEEK of term, there was a Christmas pantomime, a carol service, and Mr. Davies held a party for his class on the final afternoon. But the social event that elicited the most excited anticipation from Tracey and the Debbies was the disco that would be held on the Saturday before Christmas in the Reatton-on-Sea church hall. Hosted by Reverend Mullins, the vicar of Reatton—who was apparently rather more in touch with current youth culture than his counterpart in Midham—it was an annual event that attracted teenagers from miles around.
I’d been to a couple of school-run discos when I was at Knox Vale—a Halloween party and the Christmas dance—and found them excruciating. While the teachers seemed to think they were giving us an enormous treat, I would far rather have spent all afternoon drawing cross sections of the Humber estuary for Mr. Cuthbertson, memorizing vocabulary for Mr. Knighton, or even playing hockey on the frozen playing field than being herded with two hundred and fifty other students into the dimly lit assembly hall where Gary Glitter, singing “I’m the Leader of the Gang,” blared