The Secret Language of Girls Read online

  Kate leaned back in her chair. She was ready to let Courtney talk as long as she wanted. She was in the mood to be nice to everyone, even her annoying six-year-old neighbor and Buddy, the invisible friend.

  “That was a good poem,” Marylin had said to her that morning as they’d left the library for lunch. Five small words followed by a hint of a smile.

  Five small words. Kate could taste them.

  She was pretty sure there would be more.

  why look at the moon?

  The day Marylin fell in love with Mr. Kertzner, her nature studies teacher, she decided the only person she would tell was Aunt Tish, who was staying at Marylin’s house to recuperate after her divorce from Uncle Nick. Marylin thought the news of her budding romance with Mr. Kertzner might cheer Aunt Tish up and make her see that love was still alive in the world.

  Marylin found Aunt Tish eating a Snickers bar and reading Scientific American on the living room couch when she got home from school. Aunt Tish, who was an astronomer, had taken to resting in the afternoon and staying up half the night in the backyard looking at the stars through her telescope. In times of turmoil, she was fond of saying, infinity can be a very comforting concept.

  Marylin kept meaning to write that down in her diary.

  “He sounds like a dream,” Aunt Tish said when Marylin described Mr. Kertzner to her: how every Tuesday he wore his Mickey Mouse tie with the stain in the shape of Texas on it, and how his aftershave smelled just like the nutmeg kringles her father made at Christmas.

  “I’ve always had a fondness for older men myself,” Aunt Tish said, handing Marylin half of her Snickers bar. “My first big love was Galileo, who was about four hundred years older than I was at the time. But with a mind like that, you can overlook the little things.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” Marylin said, nodding, even though she couldn’t exactly remember who Galileo was. “Mr. Kertzner knows everything there is to know about the gypsy moth. I find it fascinating.”

  This was not entirely true. What Marylin found fascinating was the way Mr. Kertzner practically leaped on top of his desk when describing the gypsy moth’s destructive eating habits. It was like somebody had suddenly set his socks on fire.

  “Well, maybe we should invite this Mr. Kertzner over to dinner one night,” Aunt Tish said. “You could show him the telescope. Fascinating men are always fascinated by telescopes.”

  It had not occurred to Marylin that you could invite a teacher to your house. When she ran the idea past Flannery the next morning on the bus, Flannery’s mouth widened into a humongous O, as though a doctor had just asked to look at her tonsils.

  “You can’t ask a teacher over to dinner!” Flannery exclaimed. “It just makes the teacher think you’re trying to get a better grade from them. Nobody asks teachers to dinner!”

  “Why not?” Kate asked from the seat behind Marylin and Flannery. Flannery and Marylin were now speaking to Kate. But Flannery never scooted over to let Kate sit with them, so every morning Kate had to lean forward and rest her chin on the back of their seat if she wanted to join in the conversation. “I bet Mr. Kertzner would like to have dinner at your house.”

  “Do you really think so?” Marylin asked, craning her neck so she could look at Kate. She ignored Flannery’s glare. Flannery didn’t like it when Marylin got second opinions.

  “Sure,” Kate answered. “Just because he’s a teacher doesn’t mean he’s not a human being. Everyone likes being asked over for dinner.”

  By the time the bus pulled up in front of school, Marylin had made up her mind. She would do it. She would get Aunt Tish to make her famous vegetarian lasagna. She would show Mr. Kertzner Venus through the telescope. At night Venus is called the evening star, Marylin would tell Mr. Kertzner. Next to the sun and the moon, it is the brightest object in the sky.

  How could he help but fall in love with her?

  “Marylin, can you tell me the stages of the gypsy moth’s life span?”

  Mr. Kertzner’s voice startled Marylin from the daydream she was having about their wedding. In her dream Mr. Kertzner was wearing an emerald-green tuxedo that matched his eyes.

  “Um, well,” she stammered, trying to shift gears in her brain. “Let’s see, there’s the pupil stage . . .”

  “Yeah, when the gypsy moth starts kindergarten,” Matthew Sholls yelled out. Everyone laughed like they thought this was very funny, but Marylin didn’t find it funny at all.

  “I bet you mean the pupa, don’t you?” Mr. Kertzner asked kindly.

  Marylin nodded miserably. She wished she were in a pupa. She turned around to get a sympathetic look from Ashley Greer, but Ashley was busy rolling her eyes at Elyse Cassill. That’s all Marylin needed, to have someone like Ashley Greer turn against her. She’d probably get Flannery turned against her, too, and then Marylin’s only friends would be Kate and the wildly destructive gypsy moth.

  Mr. Kertzner stopped Marylin on her way out of the classroom for morning break. “Your mom called me last night about having dinner at your house next Tuesday,” he told her. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “Really?” Marylin asked. She had thought Mr. Kertzner probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her after the moth fiasco.

  “Sure!” Mr. Kertzner said, smiling. “Usually I just eat TV dinners and watch the news. A home-cooked meal is like a vacation in paradise for me.”

  Marylin walked out into the hallway feeling as light as a balloon. She decided to learn everything she could about the stars before Tuesday so she could show Mr. Kertzner through Aunt Tish’s telescope. Marylin nudged out of her brain the idea that Mr. Kertzner might be more impressed if she learned everything about the gypsy moth before Tuesday. The gypsy moth destroyed fruit crops and was a menace to society, which didn’t make it the subject for romance, in Marylin’s opinion. The stars, on the other hand, were as romantic as a valentine.

  Flannery and Ashley were hanging upside down on the jungle gym when Marylin reached the playground. Flannery was the only seventh grader who hung out during break at the playground. She claimed that so far she hadn’t met another kid her age with an IQ over 90. The fact that Flannery chose to spend break with her made Marylin feel like she was practically a teenager.

  “I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it,” Ashley was saying to Flannery, sounding distressed and patting Flannery’s upside-down shoulder with her upside-down hand.

  “What’s wrong?” Marylin asked as she grabbed on to a pole and lifted herself up onto the bar next to Flannery’s knees.

  “I was just telling Ashley that my doctor says I have really weak ankles,” Flannery said, “which means I can’t try out for cheerleading.”

  “Oh,” Marylin said, balancing herself on the bar so she wouldn’t flip backward or flop forward. She already knew about Flannery’s ankles. Flannery’s weak ankles were the reason she said she couldn’t do a cartwheel. But what was this business about cheerleading?

  “I was a cheerleader last year,” Flannery continued, swinging back and forth from her knees like a pendulum. “When I lived in Texas. All the best cheerleaders are from Texas. It’s a fact.”

  Ashley peered suspiciously at Marylin. “You’re not trying out for cheerleading, are you?”

  “Maybe,” Marylin said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  Flannery pushed herself off the bar with her hands and landed neatly on her feet. “I’ll coach you,” she told Marylin. “I know all the tricks.”

  “What about me?” Ashley asked.

  Flannery smiled her sweetest smile. “You don’t need any coaching. You’ll be a shoo-in.” She grabbed Marylin’s arm, saying, “Come on. I’ve got to go to the bathroom, and then I’ll start giving you advice.”

  As they walked toward the building, Flannery glanced back at Ashley, who was still hanging upside down on the jungle gym. “Don’t you think she sort of looks like a bat, hanging that way?”

  Marylin giggled. She was
going to be a cheerleader. That would show old Ashley the Bat.

  Kate was against the whole idea.

  “You’ll become the sort of person who only cares about her hair,” Kate warned, standing on one foot in the middle of the kitchen and balancing a stack of her sister’s Seventeen magazines on top of her head in an effort to improve her posture. “I’ve seen it happen a million times.”

  “You’re only eleven,” Marylin said. “You’re too young to have seen anything a million times.”

  “I’ll be twelve in two months,” Kate reminded Marylin. “Which means I’m older than you are, and therefore wiser. And I know what being a cheerleader does to people, believe me.”

  Marylin began crumbling a chocolate-chip cookie into little pieces on the kitchen table. It was true that Kate had some experience with cheerleaders. Kate’s sister, Tracie, had enjoyed a brief cheerleading career in seventh grade before she made a D in world history and her parents yanked her off the squad. Still, Tracie and Marylin were two completely different people. Marylin had never gotten a D in anything in her life.

  “Besides,” Kate added, collecting the magazines, which had spilled off her head onto the floor, “do you really think Mr. Kertzner is the type of person who would marry a cheerleader? He’s a man of science and reason, don’t forget.”

  Kate was the second and only other person besides Aunt Tish to whom Marylin had told about her feelings for Mr. Kertzner. For all of Kate’s drawbacks, like her refusal to pierce her ears, or the way she was always hanging around with little kids like Courtney, Marylin knew she could trust Kate with a secret.

  “You don’t know, though,” Marylin argued with Kate. “Maybe Mr. Kertzner’s favorite sister was a cheerleader. Maybe he’s crazy about people who are cheerleaders.”

  Kate shook her head. “All I’m saying is you’re taking a big risk. But,” she concluded, popping a cookie into her mouth, “it’s your life, so go ahead and ruin it if you want to.”

  All of a sudden Marylin felt like changing the subject. “Hey, let’s go sneak into Tracie’s room and check out her clothes,” she suggested. Tracie had very grown-up taste in clothes, Marylin thought. Most days she looked at least eighteen. Plus sometimes she dated football players. Although Marylin would never admit it to Kate, Tracie was one of her idols.

  Kate stared at her, her mouth falling open. “Are you nuts? For one thing, she’d kill us if she caught us. For another thing, the hairspray and cologne perfumes will automatically suffocate you the minute you walk through the door. And for even another thing, who wants to look at Tracie’s clothes? Could you have an even more boring idea?”

  “It was just a suggestion,” Marylin mumbled. She stood up. “I guess I should go home anyway.”

  “No offense,” Kate called after her. “About Tracie’s clothes and everything.”

  Marylin walked home from Kate’s the back way, cutting through Mrs. Larch’s backyard and following a leafy path through the woods to her house. Flannery’s house was smack in the middle between Kate’s and Marylin’s, and Marylin wasn’t in the mood to run into Flannery that afternoon. She’d probably want to practice cheerleading, and right now Marylin’s heart just wasn’t in it.

  It wasn’t that Marylin agreed with Kate that she had to choose between cheerleading and Mr. Kertzner. By the time Marylin was old enough to marry Mr. Kertzner, her cheerleading days would be a thing of the past. By then she’d probably be a world-famous expert on the gypsy moth and Mr. Kertzner would be too stunned by the shining constellation of Marylin’s brilliance to care whether or not she’d ever pushed a pom-pom.

  But Marylin knew that if she tried out for middle school cheerleading and made it, she might have to choose between Kate and Flannery. Sometimes Marylin felt like a rope being pulled in a tug of war. She didn’t know how to get out of the middle, or how to change things.

  Marylin didn’t even know if she wanted to change things. She was very particular about her life. She liked to know how things were going to be from one day to the next. That’s why it drove her crazy when her mother told her in the morning she would make meat loaf for dinner and then her dad decided at five thirty to make spaghetti. It changed the whole tone of Marylin’s day.

  Aunt Tish was standing at the kitchen sink and peeling potatoes for potato salad when Marylin got home. Marylin hopped up onto the counter next to her to watch.

  “You were a cheerleader once, right?” she asked Aunt Tish. Marylin had decided she needed to get the real scoop on cheerleading before she committed herself to something that might completely upset her lifestyle and cause her to care too much about her hair.

  Aunt Tish raised her arms into a V and jumped high in the air, yelling, “Rah! Go! Cougars!”

  Then she resumed her potato peeling.

  “Is that a yes?” Marylin asked.

  “T. R. Little High School, the junior varsity squad,” Aunt Tish confirmed, nodding. “I did a mean handstand.”

  Marylin leaned over and pulled a potato peel from Aunt Tish’s hair. “Did it change your life? Cheerleading, I mean?”

  Aunt Tish thought for a moment. “A little, I guess. It made me more popular and gave me the opportunity to hang out with some pretty snooty girls. But you know what really changed my life?” Aunt Tish’s voice grew light and airy, as though she were describing a dream. “The men on the moon.”

  “You mean the man in the moon, don’t you?” Marylin wondered if the potatoes were leaking fumes that were going to Aunt Tish’s head.

  Aunt Tish laughed. “No, I really mean the men on the moon. I was supposed to go to this horseback-riding camp right before I started tenth grade, but then the astronauts walked on the moon and I was hooked! I watched everything on TV, and instead of begging for a saddle, I begged for a telescope.

  “Did you want to become an astronaut too?” Marylin tried to imagine Aunt Tish in one of those big white astronaut suits, but it was hard to picture. Aunt Tish was more the tailored jacket and jeans type.

  “For a little while I did,” Aunt Tish said as she started cutting the potatoes into cubes. “But then I realized I didn’t really want to walk on the moon; I just wanted to look at it. It captivated me.”

  “What’s captivating about the moon?” Marylin asked, hopping off the counter. This conversation was not teaching her much about cheerleading, she had decided.

  Aunt Tish put down her paring knife. “The moon is captivating because it is always changing, but it’s always there.” She smiled. “Unlike your uncle Nick, who was just always changing.”

  “Here,” Kate said on the bus the next morning, dropping a book onto Marylin’s lap before she took her usual seat behind Marylin and Flannery. It was a copy of A Tale of Two Cities.

  “What are you giving me this for?” Marylin asked.

  “Because it’s more important to care about your brain than to care about your hair,” Kate said. “That’s my new motto.”

  Flannery rolled her eyes. “She is so weird,” she said to Marylin in a loud whisper. “I really think we should just ignore her.”

  Marylin reached down and stuck the book in her backpack next to her nature studies binder and her math homework. “Why should we ignore her?” she whispered back without looking at Flannery. “It’s no big deal.”

  “I can hear every word you’re saying,” Kate said from behind them.

  “That’s why we should ignore her,” Flannery said.

  Marylin really didn’t think ignoring Kate was necessary, but you had to be careful about rejecting Flannery’s ideas. “I’ll think about it, okay?” she said, smiling her most diplomatic smile.

  Flannery turned away so that she was facing the aisle. “You can do whatever you want,” she said. “I couldn’t care less.”

  It was going to be one of those days, Marylin could tell already.

  She was sure of it when Mr. Kertzner assigned Marylin and Jason Frey to be partners for their gypsy moth project. Jason Frey was a toothpick of a boy who barely spoke a
bove a raspy whisper when he was called on in class. Also he always had thin crescents of dirt beneath his fingernails. Marylin was very picky about fingernails. She thought they said a lot about a person.

  Marylin scooted her desk next to Jason’s. “I guess we should start brainstorming for project ideas,” she told him, taking charge. The one nice thing about doing projects with people like Jason Frey was that Marylin got to boss someone else around for a change.

  Jason nodded, red splotches blooming along his neck. He looked like he was coming down with an emergency case of the measles.

  Suddenly Marylin’s left ear was attacked by a wadded-up piece of notebook paper. She looked around as she unfolded it, but no one looked back at her.

  Dear Marylin, the note read. I think you and Jason make a very cute couple. How long have you two been an item? Signed, A Curious Person.

  The writing looked suspiciously like Ashley Greer’s when she wrote with her left hand instead of her right.

  “How about we brainstorm in silence for a few minutes,” Marylin said to Jason, taking a piece of paper out of her nature studies binder.

  Jason nodded again. He looked relieved, as though brainstorming out loud with Marylin might have caused him to internally combust right there in the middle of the classroom.

  Marylin picked up her pen and began to write. Dear Ashley, her note began, Good luck with cheerleading tryouts! I really mean it a lot!

  Marylin underlined “really” four times. It was clear she needed to do something to get on Ashley’s good side, or else Ashley would probably start spreading rumors that Marylin and Jason were planning to elope to Tijuana after social studies.

  “Meet me at my house after school,” Flannery said as she brushed past Marylin on her way to the playground at morning break. “And whatever you do, don’t bring Kate.”

  “Okay,” Marylin said, smiling her biggest, cheeriest smile, the one that showed all her teeth.

  “You look like a weasel, smiling that way,” Kate said, walking past Marylin on her way to the library.