door. In the living room, there was the heavy glass paperweight with its piece of coral inside. When she was little, Bethie had loved the heft of it, the smooth curve of the glass against her palm. On her way out, she fell a few steps behind Jo and picked it up and slipped it in her pocket, next to the check. She walked out the front door and she and Jo hurried down the gentle slope of her uncle’s front yard, to where the car was waiting.
Jo
Jo and Lynnette looked at each other across the microphone in the school’s front office that would broadcast their voices over the PA system. Smiling, Jo mouthed the words “Three . . . two . . . one,” and Lynnette bonged out the introductory notes of “Mister Sandman” on the xylophone they’d borrowed from the music room. The two of them leaned forward and sang, in credible harmony, “Fellow classmates . . . bring us your dues. / We need your money, for our senior cruise. / A night of dancing, and plenty to eat / Will keep us out of all those car back sea-ats / Classmates, our savings are low / Can’t throw a party, without any dough / So please, don’t make us have the blues . . . / Fellow classmates, bring us your dues!”
Mrs. Douglass glared at them, the way she glared at everyone, before allowing herself the tiniest smile and saying, “Not bad, girls.” Jo and Lynnie made it through the door, with its wire-reinforced glass window, and were out in the hallway when they thrust their hands in the air in triumph and collapsed against each other, laughing.
“Oh my God, I was sure you were going to do it!” Lynnette said.
“Do what?” Jo asked, her face innocent. The previous week, Jo had proposed all kinds of lyrics, from funny to disgusting to obscene, with increasingly offensive rhymes of “dues” and “Jews,” until Lynnette begged her to stop, leaning against the bedroom wall with tears on her cheeks, saying, “I’m going to pee my pants!” As class secretary, Jo was responsible for collecting the class dues of five dollars apiece. The money would pay for a double-decker boat that would take the kids on a post-prom cruise along the Detroit River in May.
Giddy and breathless, Jo walked down the hall with Lynnette, who looked extra-adorable in her maroon and cream cheerleading uniform, with its short, pleated skirt. The summer had been bittersweet, wonderful and strange. Jo spent her days in the sun, at the lake or on the tennis court, the hours so full that there was little time to grieve. At night, she and Lynnette would slip down to the beach and slip out of their clothes and skinny-dip in the warm lake water, sometimes with the other female counselors, sometimes alone. “I love you,” Jo had whispered, and Lynnette had said it back. But as soon as they’d come home, Lynnette had started right up again with Bobby Carver, as if the summer had never happened. Bobby Carver, football-team captain; Bobby Carver, who, someday, would own his father’s dealership, Carver Chevrolet. “The Saturday Night Fights,” Lynnie had taken to calling their dates, shaking her head as she told Jo about how every night ended with a wrestling match in the back seat of Bobby’s car. She’d describe Bobby’s wet kisses, his octopus-like hands, the way he was always attempting to grind his erection against her, without seeming to particularly care which part he was grinding against. “Is it even dry-humping if he’s, like, pushing it into my arm?” Lynnette wondered, and Jo told her, solemnly, “I believe that Plato and Socrates had debates about the exact same thing,” without letting her face show how it sickened her to imagine Lynnette and Bobby that way. She was brave enough to tell Lynnette that she loved her, but not, it seemed, brave enough to demand that Lynnie end things with Bobby.
“Funny,” Lynnette said, elbowing Jo in the ribs and looking up at Jo fondly, in a way that made Jo’s heart do a flip-flop in her chest. “You’re so funny. You should have a TV show, like Lucille Ball.”
“Only if you’ll be my Ethel,” Jo said. Jo had no desire to be on TV. She dreamed of being a writer, or a lawyer, like Perry Mason. That wasn’t an ambition shared by many of her female classmates, and Sarah had scoffed the few times Jo had brought