Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,44

she asks brightly, and Lindsay says, I told you my friend Kel was coming over to do a history project.

Kel, I’m Jeanie Harper, says her mother, and she holds her hand out to me very officially and suddenly I remember Kurt Aspenwall telling me she was a lawyer. Welcome to our home.

Lindsay looks pained.

Do you want a smoothie, Kel? asks Mrs. Harper. I was just about to make smoothies.

Um, I say, and glance at Lindsay. If . . .

Have one! says Mrs. Harper.

OK, I say. The truth is that I do want a smoothie. I’m hungry. I like them. Thank you, I say.

You guys go ahead and start working, says Mrs. Harper, I’ll bring them to you.

I don’t want one, says Lindsay.

Linds, says her mother, but then she says OK, fine, and kind of throws her hands up in the air and rolls her eyes at me like What am I going to do with her!

Lindsay leads me to the basement which is finished and huge and cold and floored with a rough white carpet. A giant curved couch faces a low table and beyond it a flat-screen TV. The whole thing smells like strawberries or the sick sweet plastic of a doll.

All of a sudden I realize that we are alone and for the first time in a long while I get very nervous and can’t think of what to say. The other times we have hung out it has felt different, less frightening. She is wearing warm-up pants and a tight T-shirt. Her dark hair is down around her shoulders and she keeps brushing it back from her face with her pretty hands which I want to do also. I remember her head on my shoulder, last weekend at the movie.

We talk about nothing for a while and then Lindsay talks about the project while I listen. Then Mrs. Harper comes downstairs with smoothies and hands me one and then hands Lindsay one.

I made you one anyway, Linds, she said, and then she sits down on the leather couch next to us, crossing her legs, propping her chin up with her right fist. Lindsay takes the smoothie and puts it on the table in front of us, as far away from her as possible.

What’s your project, guys? Mrs. Harper asks brightly. I take a sip of the smoothie. It is the most delicious thing I’ve ever had in my life. I think it is made of raspberries. There are seeds in it that I burst between my teeth.

It’s on the Beat Generation, I say, because Lindsay isn’t saying anything.

Oooooh, says Mrs. Harper. Bongos and berets and stuff? She drums on her lap for a minute.

Thanks, Mom, says Lindsay. Thanks for the smoothies.

Mrs. Harper snaps her fingers repeatedly. That’s how they clapped, she says. After poetry.

Thanks, Mom, Lindsay says again, shortly.

After her mother leaves Lindsay looks at me, worried. Do you think I was rude? she says.

I do think so but I say no.

We work on the project for an hour, reading passages aloud to each other and writing stuff down that doesn’t even make sense. I had kind of figured that she would just do everything and I would watch because she is so much smarter than me and so much better than me at this kind of stuff. But she seems like she wants me to help.

Hang on, says Lindsay, and she springs gracefully from the couch and trots toward a door across from it. When she opens it I see it is a closet with many perfectly organized shelves. From one she removes a large stack of posterboard in many colors. From another she removes Magic Markers.

Wow, I say, why do you have all that stuff?

You know, says Lindsay. School projects and stuff.

It astounds me that someone can have a closet full of art supplies just for school projects.

She brings out a piece of light blue posterboard and says You’re good at art, right?

We have never talked about it, so apparently this is one of the things that people at school say about me, and for some reason this makes me really happy. I have taken art every year. I shrug.

She tells me what to write on the poster and at first I’m not thinking and I write The Beet Generation—beet, like a goddamn vegetable—but on my second try it looks very good. We talk more naturally. I find my words: we talk about other people in our grade, the most natural subject to talk about.