Meg Cabot - Missing You

“—should really come along,” Douglas was saying as Tasha trailed after him, holding a platter of corn on the cob. “It’s our community. We’ve got to take it back from the developers and yuppie corporate scum.”

“But I just don’t see the NEED for an elementary school in this neighborhood, Douglas,” Mrs. Thompkins said a little helplessly. “The people who can afford to live here have kids in college, like we do, not kindergarten.”

“That’s why we’re proposing a high school,” Tasha said, her dark eyes alight with excitement. “Not an elementary school.”

My mom had followed them out, holding her prizewinning scalloped potatoes in pot-warmered hands.

“Not this alternative high school thing again,” she said wearily. “Can’t we have one meal where we don’t have to talk about this alternative high school idea of yours, Douglas?”

Which was pretty ironic, considering that just a few years ago, my mom would have given her right arm to have Douglas even SIT with us at the dinner table, rather than hide in his room.

“Fine,” Douglas said, not taking offense. “But there’s a community board meeting at eight. I’m hoping at least some of you can come.”

“No politics at the table,” my dad declared, brandishing a dozen perfectly charbroiled steaks. “Or religion, either. Both topics spoil the appetite.”

Everyone ooohed and ahhhhed at the steaks, the way my dad had intended us to, then dug in. I ate with more gusto than usual, not having had much since my Egg ’n Sausage McMuffin that morning.

Sure enough, no sooner was dinner over than Douglas looked at his watch and announced it was time for the community board meeting, and that anyone who cared an iota for the neighborhood should stroll over to the Pine Heights auditorium with him and Tasha to hear what the board had to say about the future of the school.

None of the adults volunteered. Which was hardly surprising, considering the amount of beef and tequila they’d just consumed.

“Great,” Douglas said sarcastically, when he saw this. “I thought you Woodstock generationers actually cared about the world.”

“Hey,” my mom said in a dangerous voice. “I was way too young for Woodstock.”

“Jess?” Tasha had stood up to follow my brother out the door. “Want to come?”

I did not. What did I care what happened to my old elementary school?

“Jess doesn’t even live here anymore,” my mom said with a laugh. “She’s a jaded New Yorker now.”

Was that what I was? Was that why everything in my hometown looked so shabby and small to me now? Because I was a jaded New Yorker?

“Come on, Jess,” Douglas said from the doorway. “Every locally owned business in this town is selling out to the chains. Look what happened to the Chocolate Moose.”

“Not every locally owned business is selling out to the chains, Douglas,” my dad pointed out dryly, meaning the restaurants we still owned.

“Do you really want to see the place where you played the mouse inThe Lion and the Mouse in your third grade program turned into condos?” Douglas asked me, ignoring our father.

Well, it wasn’t as if I’d had any better offers. No one else had asked me to do anything with them that evening. And if I stayed home, Mom would just put me on dish patrol.

I was touched Douglas even remembered that I’d played the mouse in my third grade program.

“I’ll go,” I said, and stood up to follow Douglas and his girlfriend.

They spent the three-block walk over to the elementary school filling me in on their proposal to turn Pine Heights into a high school—“An alternative high school,” Douglas said. “Not like Ernie Pyle, which was so big and impersonal. That place…it was like an education factory,” he added with a shudder.

Which was interesting, because I hadn’t seen a whole lot of educating going on there.

“The alternative high school would put an emphasis on kids working at their own pace,” Tasha, who was an education major over at IU, said.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “And instead of the standardized state curriculum, we’re going to have an emphasis on the arts—music, drawing, sculpture, drama, dance. And no sports.”

“No sports,” Tasha said firmly, and I remembered that her brother had been a football player…and how much attention he’d gotten because of it, whereas she, a shy and studious girl, had been almost the family afterthought.

“Wow,” I said. “Great.”

I meant it, too. I mean, if I had gone to a school like the one they were describing, instead of the one I’d gone to, maybe I wouldn’t have turned out the way I had—broken. I definitely wouldn’t have been struck by lightning. That happened to me walking home from Ernie Pyle High. If I’d have been walking home from Pine Heights, which was so close to my house, I’d have made it home well before the rain started to fall.

It was weird being back inside my elementary school after all these years. Everything looked tiny. I mean, the drinking fountains, which I remembered as being so high off the ground, were practically knee-level.

It still smelled the same, though, of floor wax and that stuff they sprinkle over throw-up.

“Remember that time you banged Tom Boyes’s head into that water fountain, Jess?” Douglas asked cheerfully, as we walked by an otherwise unremarkable drinking fountain. “For calling me—what was it? Oh, yeah. A spastic freak.”

I didn’t remember this. But I can’t say I was surprised to hear it.

Tasha, on the other hand, seemed so.

“Why did he call you that?” she wanted to know. “Just because you were different?”

Different. That was one way to put it. Douglas always HAD been different. If you could call hearing voices inside of your head telling you to do weird stuff, like not eat the spaghetti in the school cafeteria because it was poisoned, different.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “But it was all right, because I had Jessica to protect me. Even though I was in fifth grade, and she was in first. God, Tom couldn’t hold his head up all year after that. The snot beat out of him by a tiny first grade girl.”

Tasha smiled at me admiringly, but I know there was nothing all that admirable about that situation. My high school counselor and I had worked long and hard to combat my seemingly uncontrollable temper, which was always getting me in hot water. I’d finally succeeded in getting control of it, but only after seeing for myself firsthand what could happen when someone with a bad temper got too much power—such as some of the men I’d helped catch in Afghanistan.

We walked into the school’s combination auditorium, complete with stage, gym (basketball hoops), and cafeteria (long tables that folded up into the walls to get them out of the way during PE or Assembly). The room seemed ridiculously small compared to the way I remembered it. About ten rows of folding chairs had been set up before a long table, on top of which sat a scale model of Pine Heights school, only with the windows and landscaping redone, so it looked more like an upscale condo complex than a school.

Standing behind this model, glad-handing what had to be a bunch of city planners and local politicians, was a pot-bellied businessman in an expensive new suit…which couldn’t have been all that comfortable in the summer heat, considering the school had no air-conditioning.

And standing next to the beer-bellied man was another guy in a suit, although this one was more appropriate for the weather, being silk. Also, the guy in it wore the jacket over a black T-shirt instead of a button-down and tie.

Except for the change of clothes, though, he was still perfectly recognizable as someone I had seen—albeit from a distance—just a few hours before.