Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,27

up?” she asked.

He squinted at her, perhaps trying to discern her mood. “Are we still going out?”

To his apparent surprise, Jenny started laughing.

“It’s not funny,” he said, but he was smiling.

“No, it’s really sort of creepy and confusing.” She sighed. “Sorry. It’s just nerves.”

“I suck at talking to girls,” said Billy.

I had lived with Mr. Brown as my host for years, which included innumerable college parties, but I couldn’t help wishing Billy spoke with James’s vocabulary.

“Except for you,” said Billy. “So I’d be okay with you giving me a chance,” he said.

“Is that because I’m not like a real girl to you?” she asked. “Am I too much like a sister?”

“Ummm.” He chose his words carefully. “I’ve never had a sister, so it’s not like I have a lot of experience with this, but when I’m around you, I don’t think you could call what I’m feeling brotherly.”

I started pacing between them. Something worried me about this conversation. I had the queerest wrestling of emotions about Billy Blake. Part of me was not sure he was worthy of her, but I was willing to give him a chance. I wanted to test him—send him on a quest like a knight courting a princess. If he really wanted her, he should fight for her. Come back with a dragon’s head.

“I think I remember something you did in junior high,” Jenny told him. She was looking into his eyes, but also through him into the past perhaps. “At the Cinco de Mayo fair, when I was in seventh grade, I was standing in line to enter this contest and my mom left me alone while she went to buy tickets for the booths. I’d made this model of a Spanish mission out of clay that I was really proud of. There were these three boys standing nearby and one of them said my mission looked like barfed-up gum and another one of them said no it doesn’t and to leave her alone and then all three started having a fight and knocked over a display.”

“Actually it was a bake sale table.”

“See?” She laughed. “I remembered you.”

I stopped pacing and looked at Billy. Well done, Mr. Blake, I told him.

“Barfed-up gum?” Billy shook his head. “What a dick.”

I bristled at this.

“I know!” said Jenny.

“I should have kicked his ass.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Well, it was two against one,” said Billy. “I was outnumbered.”

Good lad, I told him. Language aside, his actions were gallant.

“Why did you hang around with them?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “They let me. I was kind of a loner. I didn’t have real friends after sixth grade.”

“I never had close friends either.”

“What about that crowd of church girls?”

For a moment Jenny looked tired and thin, with shadowed eyes, but it was just the lighting in the room. A flame lantern would help. And lace curtains. Her room lacked warmth. If I were her mother I would put a quilt on her bed instead of that bloodless white blanket. I knew exactly which one—the blue and green honeycomb pattern. It had snatches of my daughter’s first dresses, the navy gingham and the green stripes, and squares made from my own girlhood clothes, blue roses and a brown plaid faded to bone.

And she needed books in this room, of course. Now that I was here I would surround her with them, stand them up proudly on every surface.

And I wasn’t using my dresses anymore. I would hold them up under her hair and choose the one that suited her eyes best. I would pick out the old dry thread and sew them afresh. I would rub lemon juice into the stains on the lace. I would take up the hems for her. Only an inch, for we were so alike, she and I.

I found I was sitting on the bed now, behind Jenny, holding up my hands between the seams of her sleeves with a measuring tape that did not exist. When I realized that I’d forgotten we were a world apart, I withered back from her, ashamed that I had become so muddled.

Billy’s voice rattled me out of my daze.

“Maybe we’re not that different,” he was saying. “That’d be freaky.”

“Were you lonely too?” Jenny asked him.

He looked uncomfortable. Maybe this wasn’t something young men admitted.

“Well, here we are, keeping each other company,” said Jenny.

“Yeah,” he said. “Some things you just can’t do alone.”

“Like have a conversation,” she said.

“Or tell knock-knock jokes.”

“Do you want to tell me a knock-knock joke?” asked Jenny.

“I’m good for now.”