Bee would have ordered a huge bowl of spaghetti. She wouldn’t care if she had noodles hanging out of her mouth like tentacles. Bee didn’t subscribe to the list of acceptable date foods.

 

Lena did. She would have ordered something neat. A salad, maybe. A neat salad. 

Tibby would have ordered something challenging, like octopus. She would challenge her date with octopus, but she wouldn’t order something that would end up between her teeth and cause true discomfort.

“Sautéed breast of chicken,” Carmen said to the darkly freckled waiter, failing to acknowledge that he was a sophomore in Tibby’s pottery class. Chicken was safe and boring. She had come within a breath of ordering a quesadilla, but had realized that could bring up annoying ethnicity issues. Momentarily she was struck with fear that Porter would order something Tex-Mex to make her feel at home.

“I’ll have a burger. Medium rare.” He handed in his menu. “Thanks.”

 

Very no-nonsense and masculine. It probably would have bothered her if he’d ordered something girlish and trendy, like a wrap. 

She bunched up her napkin in her hands and smiled at him. He was very nice-looking. He was tall. In fact, he seemed especially tall sitting across from her. Hmm. Did that mean he had short legs? Carmen had an irrational fear of short legs, since she suspected she herself had them. Her mind leaped about. What if she fell in love with him and they got married someday and they had children with very, very short legs?

“Do you want another Diet Coke?” he asked politely.

 

She shook her head. “No thanks.”

 

If she had another Diet Coke, she would have to go to the bathroom right away and give him an opportunity to notice her short legs.

 

“So . . . have you thought about where you’re going to school?” 

The question hung out there, and Carmen wished she could suck it right back in. This was the kind of question her mother would have asked him if she hadn’t been on the phone when he’d arrived. You didn’t ask that of a fellow sufferer. The trouble was, they’d covered all the “How many siblings do you have”–type bases before they’d even ordered.

Gabriella, Carmen’s worldly cousin, had told her that you could judge the success of a date by how quickly it went. Maybe running out of things to say before you ordered your food was a bad sign.

Carmen glanced down at her watch. Her eyes froze. Uh-oh. Was that rude? Quickly she glanced back up.

 

Porter didn’t look offended. “I’ll probably go to Maryland,” he answered.

 

Carmen nodded with great interest.

 

“What about you?”

 

This was good. This would buy at least three sentences of conversation. “Williams is my first choice. It’s pretty hard to get in, though.”

 

“Great school,” Porter said.

 

“Yep,” she agreed. Her grandmother hated it when she said “Yep” or “Yeah” or “Uh-huh” instead of straight-up “Yes.”

 

Porter nodded. 

“My dad went there,” she said, unable to keep a note of pride out of her voice. She recognized that she worked that tidbit of information into conversations a little too often. When you didn’t have an actual father around, you tended to rely more on the facts.

Just then Kate Barnett walked into the restaurant with Judd Orenstein, wearing the shortest skirt Carmen had ever seen. It was denim with a lime green hem. In this case, the hem kind of was the skirt. 

Carmen wanted to laugh about this. Badly. But glancing at Porter, she somehow doubted that he would want to laugh with her. Carmen squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn’t start laughing and took a mental snapshot to share with Tibby later.

A date was good. A date was fine. But if she said “Kate Barnett borrowed a skirt from her fouryear-old sister,” her date would think she was catty and possibly even mean. 

One problem with her date, she realized, was that he was a boy. She didn’t know much about those. The regular cast in her life consisted of her mother, Bee, Tibby, and Lena. Just beyond that circle were her aunt, her female cousin, and her grandmother. In the old days she’d hung out with Bee’s brother, Perry, but that was before they’d hit puberty, so it didn’t totally count. There was Paul. But Paul was different. Paul was as sturdy and responsible as any forty-yearold man. He was on a higher plane.

The truth was, Carmen loved the idea of boys. She liked how they looked, how they smelled, how they laughed. She’d read enough magazines to know the rules and intricacies of dating. But when you got right down to it, having dinner with one was kind of like having dinner with a penguin. What were you supposed to talk about?

Dear Kostos,

How are you? How is your bapi? How is the football team?

So guess what? I got a job. At a clothing store about a mile from our house. It pays $6.75 an hour plus commissions. Not bad, huh? 

Effie is a busgirl at the Olive Vine, did I tell you that? She charmed them by using all seven of the Greek words she knows (most of them having to do with making out). Last night I heard her in the shower practicing the Olive Vine birthday serenade.

Say hello to the old people from me. 

Since February, when she’d broken it off with Kostos, Lena had written these brief, chatty, palto-pal letters once a month or so. She didn’t know why she wrote him at all anymore, really. Maybe it was that girl thing of wanting to stay friends with old boyfriends so they wouldn’t go around spreading bad rumors about you. (Not that she really believed Kostos would do that.) Or maybe it was so they couldn’t get over you completely.

Her old letters had been different—frequent and agonizing. She wrote in pencil before pen. She held the paper up to her neck so that it might absorb a little of her. She put it in the envelope but didn’t seal it for a few hours. She sealed it but didn’t stamp it for a day. She always hesitated at the mailbox, hovering before opening the door, hovering before closing it, as if her future were in the balance.

Lena had thought that since she’d broken it off, she would stop thinking about him and missing him so much. She’d thought she’d be free. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Well, it might have worked out that way for Kostos, ironically enough. He’d apparently stopped thinking about and missing her. (Which was fine.) He hadn’t written her a letter in months.

 

Lena studied the bottom of her paper, wondering how to sign off. 

If she hadn’t actually feared that she loved Kostos, she would have written Love, Lena, no problem. She wrote Love at the end of notes and letters to people she didn’t love at all. She signed thank-you notes to Aunt Estelle (her uncle’s needling ex-wife)Love, Lena . When you stopped to think about it, there was terrible love inflation in letters generally. It was easy to write Love when the word was meaningless.

Did she still love Kostos?

 

As Tibby liked to say, give Lena a choice of A or B and she’ll always choose C.

 

Did she love him?

 

A: No.

 

B: Yes. 

C: Well, you might suspect that, considering she did think about him a lot. But maybe it had just been attraction last summer. How did you separate attraction from love? And how could you possibly think you loved someone you barely knew and hadn’t seen in almost nine months and quite possibly would never see again?

In those last hours in Santorini, Lena had certainly believed she loved him. But what lunatic would base her whole life on a few hours? And anyway, she knew better than to trust her desiredrenched memory. The Kostos she remembered probably had less and less in common with the actual Kostos as the months passed.

She pictured the two Kostoses as being like the filmstrip of mitosis she’d watched in ninth-grade biology. The film had started with the one cell that spread and expanded, stretching and pulling apart until—foop—two cells. And the more time those two cells spent apart (one going off and helping make a brain, maybe, and the other going off and helping make, say, a heart) the more different they became. . . .

Yes, her answer was a resounding C.

 

Lena signed the letter Yours, folded it carefully, and slid it into its envelope.

 

On her way down the hall with Porter, Carmen reviewed the major points of the evening so she could answer what were sure to be a million questions from her mother.

 

“Hello?” she said quietly as she opened the door. 

There she was, Carmen Lucille, sixteen, almost seventeen, in her darkened apartment with a date. She waited for her mother to pad around the corner, all worried about catching them kissing.

Carmen waited. What was going on? Had her mother fallen asleep in front of Friends reruns again?

 

“Mom?” Carmen checked her watch. It was after eleven.

 

“Sit down,” she invited Porter, pointing to the sofa. “I’ll be right back.” 

She checked her mother’s room. To her astonishment, she wasn’t there. Carmen was starting to feel slightly afraid when she flicked on the light in the kitchen. Her mother was not there, but a note was sitting in the middle of the table.

Carmen,

I went out to dinner with a friend from work. Hope you had a fabulous time.

Mama

 

A friend from work? Fabulous? Had her mother mistakenly switched bodies with a different person? Christina didn’t say fabulous. She didn’t have any friends from work.

 

Stunned, Carmen walked back to the living room. “Nobody here,” she said, not recognizing the possible implications of her words until she looked at Porter.

 

He didn’t look lecherous exactly, but he was probably wondering what she meant. She had invited him to come up, after all.

 

Her mother had left the apartment to Carmen on the night of her first actual, official date? What was she thinking?

 

Carmen could march Porter right into her bedroom and go the whole damn way if she felt like it. Yes, she sure could. 

She looked at Porter. His hair was sticking up a little at the back. The soles of his tennis shoes were oddly wide and flat. She looked through the open door of her bedroom. It made her vaguely uncomfortable to think that Porter could see her bed from where he sat on the sofa. Hmm. If a guy seeing your bed made you feel embarrassed, it was probably a sign that you were not ready to get in it with him.

“Listen,” she said. “I have to get up early to go to church tomorrow morning.” She yawned for effect. It started out fake but turned real in the middle.

 

Porter stood quickly. The combination of God and the yawn had done the trick. “Okay. Yeah. I better get going.” 

He looked slightly disappointed. No, maybe he looked relieved. Was it possible she couldn’t tell the difference between disappointed and relieved? Maybe he didn’t like her. Maybe he was glad to be getting out of there. Maybe he thought the storied Pants on her short legs looked like the weirdest thing he’d ever seen.

He had a very, very nice nose, she realized as it came toward her. He was standing close and hunching over a bit as they stood together in the doorway. “Thanks a lot, Carmen. I had a great time.” He kissed her on the lips. It was quick, but it wasn’t disappointed or relieved. It was nice.

Did he have a great time? she wondered, musing at the closed door, or was he just saying that? Was his idea of a great time different from her idea of a great time? Sometimes Carmen marveled at the sheer volume of thoughts cramming her head. Did other people think this much?

The success of any date was all about expectations, really, and Carmen possessed a singular genius for stacking hers straight up to the sky. 

She turned to face the empty apartment. Where the hell was Christina? What in the world was her mother thinking? How was Carmen supposed to transform raw experience into a good story without her mother here to tell it to? What was the deal?

She went into the kitchen and sat restlessly at the small Formica table. When her parents had still been together, they’d lived in a small house with a yard. Since then, she and her mother had lived in this apartment. Her mother seriously believed that you couldn’t have a lawn without a man to mow it. The kitchen window looked at three other kitchen windows. The area between them was what real estate agents called a courtyard but what ordinary people called an airshaft. Carmen had long ago gotten into the habit of not picking her nose or anything when she sat in the kitchen.

This wasn’t right. She couldn’t just go to bed. This night was crying out for narration. She couldn’t call Bee in Alabama. She tried Tibby’s dorm room, feeling as though she were calling a different universe, a future universe. It rang and rang. In this future universe, it appeared, you weren’t there to pick up your phone at eleven thirty. She was hesitant to call Lena at this hour in case she woke up Lena’s dad, and his temper along with him, but she went ahead and did it anyway.

She braced herself for two long rings.

 

“Hello?” It was Lena’s whisper.

 

“Hi.”

 

“Hi.” Lena sounded sleepy. “Hi. Hi. How was your date?”

 

“It was . . . good,” Carmen pronounced.

 

“Good,” Lena said. “So . . . so do you like him?” 

“Like him?” Carmen repeated this as though the question were not entirely relevant. She had thought about many things over the course of the evening, but she hadn’t really thought about that.

“Do you think he has short legs?” Carmen asked.

 

“What? No. What are you talking about?” “Do you think I have short legs?” This was clearly the more tender question.

 

“Carma, no .”

 

Carmen was thoughtful for a minute. “Len, did you ever run out of things to say to Kostos?”

 

Lena laughed. “No. I had more the problem of not being able to shut up. But we only got together at the very end of last summer, after a lot of crazy stuff had happened.” 

Usually Carmen spoke to Lena as freely as she spoke to herself, but for some reason she felt shy about admitting that her famously big mouth had shriveled in the presence of an actual boy. Instead, she launched into a long consideration of the whereabouts and motivations of her mother.

Lena was silent so long Carmen suspected she’d fallen asleep. “Len? Len? So what do you think?”

 

Lena yawned. “I think it’s nice that your mom is out having fun. You should go to bed.”

 

“Fine,” Carmen said sulkily. “It’s obvious who needs to go to bed.”

 

After that Carmen still couldn’t fall asleep, so she wrote an e-mail to Paul. Paul was so sparing with words that writing to him was somewhat like writing to nobody, but she did it often even so. 

Then she decided to e-mail Tibby. She began by describing how Porter had looked. She was going to say something about the color of his eyes, but when she stopped and tried to picture Porter’s eyes, she realized that she hadn’t really looked at them.