The Year They Burned the Books

Saturday morning, in the middle of a breakfast-table argument about why neither set of parents would let Ronnie and his friend Fred sleep out in the woods without an adult, the phone rang. Jamie, glad to be out of the line of fire, ran to answer it.

“I just realized,” Tessa said without preamble as soon as Jamie had answered, “that you’ve never been to my house and I’ve never been to yours, and I think we ought to fix that up right away, since we’re going to be working together on those essays plus on both papers. You could come here this morning and I could go there this afternoon, or the other way around. Okay?”

Jamie felt a smile steal over her face even as she warned herself that there was probably no special significance to the invitation. “Okay. Sure.”

“Great! You want to come here first?”

“Sure.”

Tessa chuckled. “Will you say ‘sure’ again if I say come now?”

Jamie laughed. “Sure,” she said. “Be right there. Robert Road, right? Which house?”

Less than half an hour later, Jamie parked her bike outside a neat gray shingle house with green shutters, well back from the narrow street, in a fenced-in, carefully tended yard. A pile of leaves filled one corner, and Tessa, looking almost ordinary in jeans and a yellow-and-green-plaid shirt, was raking more leaves toward it; Jamie saw that her nails were free of polish, although the tiny star still glittered in her nose. A small pig-tailed girl played with a kitten nearby, scooping up leaves with her hand and tossing them gently at the kitten.

Tessa put down her rake. “Angela, come meet my new friend.”

The little girl picked up the kitten and slipped one hand in Tessa’s as Tessa walked toward Jamie. “Hi,” Tessa said, smiling.

“Hi to you, too,” Jamie said. “And hi, Angela. Hello, kitten.” She stroked the kitten’s tiny head with her forefinger; it purred instantly, loudly.

“You’re Jamie,” Angela said. “Tessa told us. This is Golly.” She indicated the kitten.

“Golly?” Jamie looked at Tessa over the top of Angela’s head.

“Yep.” Tessa wiggled Angela’s hand, still in her own. “Tell Jamie why.”

“Well, the first time Daddy heard Golly purr, he said, ‘Golly, what a purr,’ so we thought that would be the right name.”

“I see,” Jamie said gravely. “It’s a cute name. And she’s a cute kitty.”

“He,” said Angela. “Golly’s a boy.”

“Golly, I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Jamie said, and Angela giggled.

“His name really works.” With the kitten, she twirled away from Tessa, back to the leaves.

“Don’t you mess up my pile, Angie!” Tessa called after her. “Come see inside,” she said to Jamie. “Come see my room.”

Jamie followed her up the flagstone path and onto the front steps.

Tessa pushed the door open. “Mom,” she called. “Jamie’s here.”

A tall, pleasant-looking woman wearing a bright red smock came into the front hall from the back of the house, a plastic bag of white pebbles in her hand. She looked like an adult version of Tessa, except her eyes were set wider apart, her face was fuller, and she had none of Tessa’s flamboyance. “Hello, Jamie,” she said, wiping her other hand on her smock and then holding it out. “I’ve been planting bulbs, first outside, now inside, to force them. You know, crocuses and paper-whites.”

“Hi.” Jamie shook the offered hand. “My mom does that, too.”

Mrs. Gillespie’s smile broadened. “The funny thing is that the people who sold us the house couldn’t remember where they’d planted bulbs, so goodness knows what we’re going to find come spring. I’ve already run into a few, planting.”

“Yeah,” Jamie told her. “I think I remember lots of flowers around this house in the spring. I ride by here on my bike sometimes.”

“Well, I hope you ride by even more often now. Tessa’s told us lots about you, all good.”

“Most all good,” Tessa corrected. “Don’t want you to get stuck up.”

“There’s no chance of that, I’m sure,” Mrs. Gillespie said graciously. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to work, but there’s coffee in the pot in the kitchen, Tess, and the water’s still hot for tea. There’s about half that coffee cake left, too.”

Tessa grimaced, as if her mother always offered food to people. “Jamie’s probably just had breakfast, Mom.”

“Probably, but if she stays as long as I hope she does, she won’t have just had breakfast,” Mrs. Gillespie retorted. “And if it’s not quite time for lunch, she might want a little something. Do stay for lunch, Jamie, unless you girls decide to go out someplace. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jamie said. “Thank you.”

Mrs. Gillespie nodded and went back down the hall.

“I like your mother,” Jamie said, following Tessa up the carpeted stairs to the second floor.

“Yeah.” Tessa paused outside a closed door with a small grapevine wreath on it. “She’d feed the whole world if she could. It’s a good thing we’re all skinny in my family, because if any of us went on a diet, I think she’d die. Come on in.”

Tessa’s room was large, flooded with sun from two windows. A single bed, its bright multicolored spread matching the curtains, was under one of the windows, with a night table beside it. The second window was opposite a large table with a fluorescent tube running across it on a frame. Boxes of slides lined a shelf above the table, with a small projector in one corner; oversized photo books were piled on the bookcase nearby, and 4×6 file boxes filled another shelf. There were no piles of clothes draped over the chair that faced the table or on the one in the corner by the small white dresser on which a bottle or two of cologne shared space with a box of filters and a light meter. Tessa’s camera bag was dangling from a door that Jamie assumed led into a closet; two old-looking cameras sat on the night table along with a lamp and the senior English textbook. Neatly framed photos marched across the walls, most of them black-and-white, but a few in color.

“I’d never guess,” Jamie said, “that you were planning to be a ballet dancer.”

Tessa grinned. “That’s good. I’m so relieved! I wasn’t sure the disguise would work.”

Jamie noticed the red cape hanging on the closet door. “Is that a disguise, too?” she asked, and when Tessa looked startled, she added, “I noticed you took off the nail polish.”

Tessa tossed her head evasively. “Oh, that,” she said. “Yes. Kevin Allen called last night and asked if I was still wearing purple polish and my nose star, and I said no, just the star, so then I decided I’d better get rid of it, the polish, I mean. Along with him, you know?”

“Don’t you like him anymore?” Jamie asked uncomfortably.

Tessa shrugged. “Like I said before, he’s not here, and he never was very interesting. Plus, like I said, too, I don’t have time.” She regarded Jamie almost coquettishly. “Jack’s kind of cute, though, but he’s Cindy’s. I don’t believe in taking other people’s boyfriends. Anyway”—she picked up a small vase of dried flowers and raised it in front of Jamie—“to independent womanhood, remember?”

“Right,” Jamie said, glad Tessa had finally given her something she could react to openly. She seized a mug of pencils from Tessa’s desk. “To independent womanhood.” She gestured toward the tiny star in Tessa’s nose. “Is that part of independent womanhood?” she asked shyly.

“Sort of,” Tessa said. “Independence, anyway. I had this Indian friend, from India, you know? She had one and I really liked it, so she took me to have my nose done. I was only in seventh grade, and I really wanted to be different.” She paused. “Aren’t you going to ask if it hurts and how it feels when I have a cold? Most people do. But you’re not most people, are you?”

“No, I guess not,” Jamie said. Then she laughed. “But does it? Hurt?”

Tessa laughed, too. “Nope. I’m used to it, like it’s part of me. Even when I have a cold. I forget it’s there most of the time. But I take it out sometimes, like earrings, you know?”

They spent the rest of the morning in Tessa’s room and in her basement darkroom, where Tessa showed Jamie how to develop film, and they had an enormous salad and homemade bread with Mrs. Gillespie and Angela. Mr. Gillespie, his wife explained, was working.

“Your mother,” Jamie said, pushing her bike beside Tessa as they walked to Jamie’s house after lunch, “has got to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

“Well,” Tessa said, “she is my mother.”

Jamie punched her lightly. Tessa punched her lightly back, and Jamie realized that gay or not gay, it felt good to be making friends with a girl again.

Tessa seemed as intrigued with Jamie’s room as Jamie had been with Tessa’s. “Now see,” she said when she’d glanced quickly around at the news photos and headlines on the walls and the stacks of newspapers on the bookcase, “I’d never have guessed that you want to be an astronaut. That must be what made us become friends, our uncanny talent for disguises.”

“When you work for the CIA,” said Jamie, “you have to be good at disguises.”

“Darn!” Tessa snapped her fingers. “CIA? But it’s the FBI I work for!”

“Oh, no!” Jamie cried in mock horror, falling back onto a chair. “Not the FBI!”

“Well,” said Tessa, “I’m ready for a change anyway. Maybe I’ll quit, see if the CIA will take me. But,” she added, peering into Jamie’s mirror, “I’ll have to change how I look. Dye my skin, maybe, or shave off my hair.”

Without thinking, Jamie said, “No, don’t”—and felt her face grow hot when Tessa gave her a penetrating look.

For a moment, they both froze, and then Tessa, fluffing her hair with her hands and tossing her head so that her earrings danced, said, “I guess you’re right. Kevin Allen would freak—if he ever saw me again, which I doubt he will,” she added. “Let’s think up another fantastically brilliant photo essay.”

Monday morning, Jamie met Terry outside his house as he was carrying the box of Renegade Telegraphs to his car. He looked haggard, as if he hadn’t slept. “So,” she asked, “how are you? You look awful.”

“Thanks so much. I feel awful. Except …” He hesitated.

“Except what?”

Terry set the box down on the front walk. “I went out on the boat with Dad,” he said, almost shyly. “I knew I had to do something to keep from going crazy, like I knew Ernie wouldn’t call, at least not till the weekend was over, and I didn’t want to think about him being with Vicky. So there I am, hauling traps with Dad, and of course I’m thinking about Ernie anyway, and picturing him with Vicky, and suddenly I lose it; I start crying …” He stopped abruptly.

Jamie put her hand on his arm. “And your father?” she asked, dreading the answer.

But Terry shook his head. “No, Dad was wonderful. He’d figured it out already. I kept trying to stop blubbering, but I got all tangled up in the line I was handling and Dad came over and took it from me and then he said something like ‘All that stuff about men not crying is a lot of bilge,’ and then I just kind of blurted it out, you know, that I’m gay and that I love Ernie and that he’s trying to be straight and everything. And …” Terry’s voice dropped as if he was still amazed. “And Dad put his arms around me and said he wasn’t surprised, that he loves me, that he’s wondered for years and had sort of accepted it long ago, and that he’d been waiting for me to tell him. Then he dropped the line he was holding and we both almost fell overboard going after it and we ended up actually laughing.”

“Wow!” Jamie said softly, as surprised at her own sudden envy as at Terry’s father’s reaction and at the fact that Terry had actually told him.

“When we told Mom,” Terry went on, “she cried a little, but Dad says she just has to get used to the idea that it’s really true and that she’ll be all right. She really likes Ernie, so that helps, and she did seem better today.” He stooped over the box again. “That’s the good news. I tried to call you once, but your mom said you were with Tessa, so I decided not to bother you.”

“Thank you.” She watched him put the box of Renegades on the back seat. “What’s the bad news?” she asked when it was safely stowed.

“That I still haven’t heard from Ernie. I thought he might call before school. Dumb of me, I know, but I thought he might at least tell me how it went with Vicky.”

“Well, let’s get going, then. Maybe you can catch him before the bell.”

But Ernie wasn’t in school by the time classes started, and soon Jamie’s concentration shifted, for everyone was buzzing with talk about the Renegade Telegraph. Nomi said, a little stiffly, “It looks very nice,” and Terry, meeting Jamie in the hall after he’d had social studies and she’d had Latin, said, “We’re a hit!”—but he still looked haggard. That made Jamie remember Ernie.

“He’s not here, right?” she asked him.

“Right. Vicky is, but I didn’t trust myself to speak to her.”

“Do you want me to ask her if she knows where Ernie is?”

“No. Yes. Oh, I don’t know! Yes. Maybe later.”

Soon afterward, though, Ernie appeared, and he and Terry vanished as soon as both had a free period. Jamie made a mental note to call Terry that night if he didn’t show up at the newspaper office after school.

But Terry came back for math class and waited for Jamie in the hall afterward. “They went out twice this weekend,” he told her as he and Jamie walked to the newspaper office; his voice was flat, as if he was holding back his feelings. “And he overslept this morning. He says he likes her. He says he’s sorry and he doesn’t want to hurt me, but she makes him feel like he could be straight. I even heard some of the guys on the swim team kidding him. Real kidding, you know, jock kidding, like they were glad to find out he’s one of them after all. Makes him feel like he could be straight!” Terry’s voice broke then and he slammed his fist against the wall; Nomi passed them, eyebrows raised, and went into the office. “Cripes, Jamie! It’s not even that I’m jealous anymore. I mean, I am, but it’s all wrong for him. It’s like he’s lying to himself, to her, to me …”

Jamie tried to steady him with her hands as well as with her voice. “Maybe he has to lie first before he can find out the truth. Maybe he can’t accept the truth till he’s figured out the lie. You’ve got to give him space, Terry.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. But …”

Matt’s voice, uncharacteristically harsh, cut through Terry’s words. “In the office!” he shouted, striding toward them down the hall, without books or his usual after-school coffee mug. Cindy, pale and minus her perky smile, was just behind him; so was Jack. “Right now.”

In Matt’s hand was a copy of the Renegade Telegraph.