Hungry Hill: A Memoir

Chapter 47 - A Ten-Second Phone Call

224 H u n g ry H i l l paid. Why is it so hard for me to ask for anything? At the dress rehearsal, girls were whispering backstage how their parents were muttering about the costumes’ cost, but I had hung back, saying nothing. I hide from my friends that I pay for everything now so that they won’t connect money, or my lack of it, with my father’s death. Each of us was allotted two tickets for the minstrel: two tickets I’d give away. In November, when my dad was still alive, he and Mary went to a cocktail party on the night of my induction into the National Honor Society, so I’m used to going to school functions alone. After the final Saturday night show, the cast members, some still in costume and stage makeup, head for East Longmeadow Friendly’s, honking horns whenever another car full of minstrel performers passes us on the way. When I walk by Kevin in the Friendly’s parking lot, I wave to him, but he either doesn’t see me or is pretending he doesn’t. Since his prom is only a week away, I guess I’m still going with him, but there is a dull foreboding spreading in me like the lyrics of the new Neil Sedaka song, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” = 47. A Ten-Second Phone Call Sister Walter Mari a, a French teacher and the head of the school’s memory book, is fond of flirting with the boys. And maybe it is her romantic French accent, but Sister is good at it. On the Tuesday afternoon of Senior Week, Sister is speaking French with Klaus Shigley, her favorite, in the corridor before unveiling to us the school’s first memory book. Just as Father Leary runs the student council at Cathedral, Sister Walter Maria has controlled the memory book, but I have been the one to give it a name: Pantherpix. Since the thin, purple spiral-bound books are ready on time for the Senior Week deadline, the memory book committee members are distributing copies to senior homerooms. As I count and stack the books into piles of forty-two per homeroom, I weigh sneaking a look at Kevin’s picture. But I am afraid of running the risk of being caught in the act by the sports edi- A Memoir 225 tor breathing through his mouth on my left or the clubs editor standing on my right. With the whole committee in Sister’s homeroom, we empty the boxes, and within an hour the committee has handed out eight hundred books. So delighted with the first Pantherpix, Sister Walter Maria claps her hands and gives us her mercis and au revoirs. How I wish the French words would slide from my lips with the same ease they fall from my pen. The Senior Prom is the high point of Senior Week. Back in the blue dress I so love, I slink down in my seat when Kevin and his friends ridicule the memory book, and its name in particular. “Who named it? Pantherpix? What is that?” they demand of one another, and I whisper under my breath so that no one would hear, “I did.” I try to explain that “pix” is a journalism term, at least Sister Edward Agnes had said it was, referring to a group of pictures. But the seniors avert their eyes, a sign for me to hold off on my feeble explanations. I sit there, pulling off the brown-end petals of my wrist corsage, rubbing the soft petals between my fingers, crinkling them into tiny pieces. While the orchestra plays, Kevin is talkative and funny, but aims his wit to the group at the table and has little, if anything, to say to me. For Kevin and me, the Senior Prom feels like an ending. Kevin’s ten-second phone call, I think we should date other people, came two weeks after the prom. Hurt, but not surprised, since I had guessed his not calling me post-prom had meant the end, I mumbled, Fine. His breaking up with me stings, and of course everyone (maybe even Ray, the manager) at East Longmeadow Friendly’s knows I am the rejected, the tossed, the dumped. If only I could be in a place where no one knows me, I might feel lighter, less humiliated. This time, sensing my discomfort, Gerry writes no...