Our Little Secret Read online

  “Don’t let Christie Burbank work you over. She’s got nothin’. Just call her Spermbank, that’ll slow her down.” He stopped to tie the lace of his high-top. “And the other one’s Danielle Moyzen. I call her Moistbum.” His face craned up toward me as he knelt. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “I’m scared to tell you,” I said, and he laughed.

  When he stood up, he pulled the top of my English book down from where I held it clenched against me.

  “Angela Petitjean,” he said, properly, reading the label on the front. “English Ten. Okay, you’re in here.” He opened the classroom door for me. As I walked through it, he added, “See you around, Little John.”

  It was the only class of the day I went into smiling.

  He walked me home, too. It turned out he lived a block up from me in a house with a huge birch tree out front. I was ahead of him, trudging along in my gray Converses, when I heard footsteps catching up with me. I turned and there was HP, running with his thumbs hooked under the straps of his skull-embossed backpack.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  We walked in silence as I racked my brain for a conversation to have with him. He knew I was doing it, too, because after a minute he looked down at me.

  “Nothing?”

  “What does HP stand for?” I blurted. It came out really loud. We’d already reached my driveway so I stopped walking and mumbled, “This is me.”

  “Old Man Sneider’s place? You guys bought this house of horrors? Wow, when we were little, we used to hide behind this wall right here and watch for ghosts in the windows.”

  “Who did?”

  “Me. Kids around here. This house was the only one that never got decorated on Halloween. It never needed to.” HP sighed nostalgically. “And there used to be a shit-scary dog that lived here. I walked to school with a rock in my hand all of ninth grade.” He took his baseball cap off and ruffled the hair at the back of his neck. He had a line around his head from where he’d thrown his hat on after swimming. “You got a dog?”

  “We had one back in Boston, but it got regifted.”

  “By who?” He said it like he was about to get a posse together.

  “Mom gave him to a family across town. I think it was a hair thing.”

  HP nodded like he understood the logic. We stared at each other. He stretched. “I’ll walk by here tomorrow morning at eight. If you’re here, you’re here.”

  I pressed my back against the brick gatepost and looked up at him. “What’s HP stand for?”

  “My last name’s Parker, but that’s all you’re getting.” He put his baseball cap back on. “Some secrets you have to earn. I’ll see you around, Little John.”

  He stalked off, his fifteen-year-old legs gangly in his skinny jeans. I watched him kick a pebble down the sidewalk, catching up, then punting it on. He did it all the way home.

  From then on, the only days I didn’t walk to school with HP were those when one of us was home sick. And as it turned out, the greatest alliance anybody in the school could have was with HP. I never had any trouble from anyone ever again, including Burbank and Moyzen.

  As we got older—eleventh grade—girls waited for him at the gates and he’d peel off, flapping me a wave as he joined hands with the latest one. He had a constant stream of female fans; I’d often be in the bathroom while a huddle of eleventh graders consoled the latest HP casualty as she dabbed her eyes. Shhh, they’d whisper, their eyebrows panicked. That’s her, that’s Little John. Wait till she leaves.

  Girls threw themselves at HP’s feet, and he hadn’t figured out who the good ones were yet. I doubt he even cared. By seventeen he was captain of the swim team. He had bright blue eyes and arms like Poseidon. Even Mr. Cameron, the school principal, thought he was cool and high-fived him in the lunchroom. HP called Mr. Cameron “Jerry” or, on some days, “Jer.” When it came to the girls, though, I wished HP would be pickier, and maybe slow down a little on the hand-holding. Like my mom always told me, it’s graceless not to discriminate.

  I never understood why HP had chosen me as his friend, or how I’d gotten an all-access pass to him. It was like having a key to the White House. He told me everything he thought and felt and wanted, and I don’t think he told anyone else in the world—not even Ezra, his best buddy. Ezra was a goofball and a jock, and if you told him you even had a feeling about anything he’d probably give you a charley horse and call you a pansy. Sometimes HP painted pictures on thick, fibrous paper and wrote me letters over the top of them, letters about the good things in life—how your skin feels after a day in the ocean; the smell of asphalt before it rains; the way old people’s hands wrap around coffee cups in restaurants. Ezra would have punched HP in the face if he’d found out about those. I kept all of the letters—I still have them.

  In the summer after eleventh grade, HP and I sat with our backs against the trunk of the old birch tree in his front yard. We met there a lot, often after dinner when I’d walk the block barefoot and call for him at his open front door. His parents rarely shut the door and never locked it. “If anything’s coming for us,” HP’s dad used to say, “it’ll come just as good through a window.”

  It was a warm night—August, I think—and the cicadas were screeching. Mrs. Parker came out with pie, but I didn’t want any.

  “It’s peach.” HP took a plateful and a fork, hefting off a huge chunk.

  “Are you sure, Angela?” HP’s mom was small like a sparrow, with papery-soft skin. She spoke in short sentences and whenever she could she touched HP on the shoulder or head in passing.

  “I’m fine, thanks, Mrs. Parker. I just ate.”

  “Don’t get cold out here.” She drifted back to the house. “You two. I don’t know.”

  HP rolled his eyes. “She thinks we’re soul mates. She said so at dinner. Says she’s never seen two kids more comfortable.” A couple of huge bites and the pie was gone. “I told her to stop being emotional.”

  “I like that.” I picked up a leaf and ran its supple edge across my bare knee. “I believe in soul mates, but my mom says there’s no such thing. She says there are tons of people a person could be with, not just one. Believing in a soul mate is like believing in Santa. According to her it’s only ever about timing—who you meet and whether you’re ready. That’s all it is.”

  “Downer.”

  “Yeah.” I moved my foot so it lined his. “That’s what I said.”

  HP shuffled his back against the bark of the tree like a bear scratching. “Actually, you know what? I’m with your mom. There are tons of people a person can be with.” He raised his eyebrows and brushed pie crumbs from his shirt.

  “You’re certainly testing the theory.”

  “So far not so many soul mates, though. More wing nuts than soul mates, if I’m keeping a tally.”

  I flung my leaf at his foot. “That’s because you only date people on the outside.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t know who any of them are!”

  He banged my knee with his knuckles. “How am I supposed to know they’re wingers when I ask them out? It’s like friending someone on Facebook and then realizing they’re nuts when you look at their page. You’ve entered into a contract by then.”

  “Delete! Easy.”

  “Okay, well, we can be soul mates. I’ll date the wingers and you can be my soul mate.”

  “Another healthy plan.”

  With my weight against his side I could feel the teenage-boy leanness of him through the fabric of his sweatshirt. I could have straightened back up but didn’t.

  “One more year of school.” He sighed. I loved how his brain did that: the leaps were almost visible. “I can’t wait to be done.”

  “Are you going to travel?”

  We’d talked before about the adventures that were out there—the shark dives in South Africa, the climbing of the Matterhorn. But now our final year was before us, and with the freedom to pick a direction
, the world seemed less conquerable. Going places was scarier than talking about them.

  “I don’t know. My dad’s on me about getting a trade. He’s offered me an apprenticeship with him as a carpenter.” HP shrugged. “Sounds okay.”

  “God, what is it about parents who have only one child? My folks are on me constantly about which school this and what scholarship that. Jeez, it’s like they had a kid just so they could obsess and oversteer and maybe get a second shot at the glory. You know what I’m talking about.”

  I felt HP wince and pull at the neck of his hoodie. “My folks aren’t like that. They’re just looking out for me. And the truth is I’m not an only child.” He paused. “I had a brother.”

  The volume of the cicadas suddenly increased, or else it was the white noise in my head. I pushed myself up so I could look at him. “You what?”

  “He died when I was four.”

  I thought of his quiet mother and his dad’s apathy about locking the door. They already knew they couldn’t keep the world out.

  “Oh, HP, why didn’t you tell me before? That’s terrible.”

  “I don’t talk about it a lot.” He rubbed his eye. “And I don’t want you to, either.”

  “No, of course—”

  “I was only four. My brother choked at the dinner table right there.” He nodded toward the kitchen window, which was open and amber with light. “I was sitting next to him. He was a year younger than me.”

  I must have made a sound then because he faltered and put his arm around me. I could feel his ribs against mine. “I don’t remember a whole lot, just the fear of it. The panic. My dad wasn’t home, just my mom.”

  “Christ.”

  HP breathed in and out once, lifting me and settling me back against the birch. “You know, life’s not controllable. You do the best you can with the chances you get. And on you go.”

  “How didn’t it kill your parents?”

  “It did. It devastated them. But they went on. So did I, I guess.”

  He knew himself so well. He was miles ahead of me.

  “Why didn’t you guys move?”

  “Because pain isn’t in houses.” He swallowed hard. “And when something like that happens, it ties you to the house. It’s like a scar you grow into. I can’t explain it.” He picked up a twig and rolled the peeling bark with his thumb. “So I’ll probably take the apprenticeship with my dad, and the high school’s making noise about me coaching their swim team. That sounds all right, too. I like where we live—the lakes in summer, the coziness in fall, the smell of snow coming. I don’t know about the travel thing.”

  “Jesus,” I said, still reeling. “If I was you, I’d want a change of scene. Let’s go somewhere else. We can go together.”

  “For what? To ‘find ourselves’? Like I said, Little John, I’ll be me wherever I go.”

  We sat silently for a few minutes, watching the light from inside HP’s house. I could hear his mother clanking pots in the kitchen.

  “I don’t need to go anywhere, either,” I said at last. “Here’s fine for now.”

  He drew me into a hug and pulled his hood up, so I could see only strands of beachy hair poking out and the strong line of his chin.

  * * *

  In the spring of twelfth grade—so, eight years ago—my class planned a late-June camping trip out at Elbow Lake for graduation. Mom was weird about me going, which was dumb, given how she’d dragged me all over the country for Dad’s arts management jobs growing up. Apparently her new thing was for me to stay home more.

  “And will there be adult supervision? I’d like the thought of a caring custodian.” She twisted a pearl earring in the lobe of her ear. She’d been chopping carrots and had flecks of peel stuck to the sinews of her forearm. Behind us on the counter her food-preparation Les Misérables blared: she’d turned it up just before I came in, and we had to shout over it to be heard. “And have you finished your paper on Faust? You need to maintain your grade point average, darling. Beat everyone else and finish strong.”

  “What?” I said, my head in the fridge. There was never anything good to eat: it was all baba ghanoush and tapenade, foods she bought back with her from clenched trips to the city because she needed some sense of worldliness, darling. Flamboyance. Anything. I pulled out a strawberry yogurt drink that must have been HP’s, although it was rare he left many traces of himself—we spent more time at his folks’ place than at mine.

  “Honey, don’t say what, say pardon me. And drinking yogurt is manly. Get a spoon.” My mother’s hair draped forward over her shoulder as she worked, and she batted it away with a heavily bangled wrist.

  “It’s runny, Mom. The yogurt is runny!” I walked over and turned the CD volume down, then stood against the kitchen drawers, slurping from the container. My mother grimaced. “So can I go on the camping trip or what? Or pardon me?”

  “Don’t be clever, Angela. Nobody likes a show-off.”

  Dad wandered into the kitchen humming a Tchaikovsky bass line. It was rare to see him. When he wasn’t working at the library, he spent every hour in his study at home poring over ancient Greece. He knew everything about Orpheus and nothing about me. When he reached for a slice of carrot, Mom slapped his hand.

  “Who else is going?” She grasped the knife and chopped. This was the key answer to get right.

  “HP.” I waited.

  Even the mention of his name swept light onto her face. Did women of all ages adore him? I rolled my eyes but she didn’t catch me. Mom had decided long ago that I’d marry HP. I could ask her a question about anything else four times and she wouldn’t hear me. Say HP’s name, though, and her head snapped around like a barn owl’s.

  I’d been buddies with him for close to a year before I first introduced him to my mom. I wasn’t much of a talker back then, and if my parents ever asked how school was going, I gave them only monosyllables. But one day Mom intercepted HP and me on our walk home.

  “Oh, hi!” she said, not looking at me. “Who’s your friend?”

  HP readjusted the strap of his backpack and stood up straighter.

  “I’m Shelley Petitjean”—Mom wheeled past me—“what a pleasure it is. Angela failed to mention she had such a handsome chaperone for the school commute.”

  “This is HP, Mom. He lives a block up.”

  “I bet he does.”

  HP gave my mom a kind of hybrid handshake–high five across the gate. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Petitjean.”

  “Oh, call me Shelley, for goodness’ sake.” Her finger pointed at his chest, making him glance down as if he’d spilled food there. “You’re the quarterback on the football team.” She tapped her lip. “No, wait, you’re a junior hockey player. Beach volleyball?” She shook her head. “You’ve got me all turned around.”

  “He swims,” I mumbled. “See you tomorrow, HP.”

  “HP? What does that stand for?”

  He shifted his baseball cap.

  “It’s a secret,” I said.

  “Is it? Will you tell me later?” Mom whispered to me.

  “So.” HP cleared his throat. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Petitjean. I’ll see you around, LJ.”

  Mom looked at me quizzically, then looked back at HP. “Is there a prom soon? You should ask Angela to it.”

  “Mom!” I started to walk into the house. “It’s, like, in a whole year and besides, gross.”

  Mom followed me in, waving goodbye as HP took off. “Angela, you need to plan ahead for your milestone moments.” She hurried after me, stepping over my bag as I dropped it in the hall. “I’m telling you—Angela, stop moving and listen to me—prom’s a major life event and that boy is your prom date. Milestone moments!”

  Now at the kitchen counter, Mom paused in her carrot chopping. “Oh, darling, you didn’t tell me HP was going camping. That’s great. Now I know you’ll be safe. He’ll look after you.”

  “Well, hold on a minute, Shelley.” Dad adjusted the waistband of his track pants over his dress sh
irt. He took his reading glasses off and held them up to the light, huffing hot breath onto each lens. “Is it an overnight thing?”

  “Yes, Dad. It’s a camping trip, with tents and sleeping.”

  “And we’re sure that HP will keep a good eye on you, are we?”

  “Of course we are, David. He adores her. Doesn’t he, Angela?”

  I shrugged.

  “He adores her. You should see the way he looks at her.” Mom sighed and put her hand to her bony chest, the edge of the knife blade glinting near her chin. “Although frankly, honey, you could make more of an effort. Is that a boy’s sweater? And why do you insist on wearing your lovely dark bangs so they hang over your superior bone structure? If I were to take a photo of you right now and show it to you in ten years, you’d be horrified.”

  “You can only go if you’ve done all your homework,” Dad said.

  “I’ll have graduated by then!”

  “And if you have everything in place with college plans. Did I tell you I heard back from Reggie McIntosh? He’s head of Classics at Oxford.” He abandoned his search for crackers and rubbed his hands together while I yawned. “You might be in with a chance for this fall if you keep your head down. Reggie’s working it so you take your freshman year over there—he owes me a favor, so he’s all but sneaking you in the back door.”

  I drained the last of my yogurt.

  “Oxford University, England—get excited, it doesn’t get any more prestigious than that! You have such potential, my dear.…” He trailed off.

  If he was waiting for thanks he didn’t get it. I couldn’t care less about famous schools. The only reason I went along with his push for academia was because it got me out of their crosshairs.

  “We can talk about it properly another time … Angela? Look at me. Here’s what I have to say about this camping trip: If all your work is done…” He raised a pale index finger. “… and you keep your wits about you, it should be acceptable. But be careful: I know how teenage boys think. I was one of them, too, you know.”