The Half of It, page 10
When they pulled into the Baskin-Robbins parking lot, Helen could feel her pulse rev a little. Relax, she told her pulse, it’s just Cal. But it kept cantering along anyway.
The place was small: an ice cream case, a counter, and a couple of café tables with narrow metal chairs. She would’ve seen him right away. But maybe he was in back.
“Is Cal Crosby working today?” she inquired in the most casual possible way of the guy with greasy hair behind the counter. She could feel Francie’s eyes on her.
“Oh, um, Cal?”
“Yeah, Cal. You know, red hair?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if he’s here?” Helen’s powers of casual were beginning to strain.
“No, he’s definitely not here. But also, I think he mighta quit.”
“Oh.”
“Is he a friend of yours?”
“Yes.” Sort of. At least he used to be.
“But you don’t know if he quit? Because that would be helpful to know. For me, I mean. So I don’t, like, ask him to cover a shift. My friend’s sister’s birthday is coming up and I—”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said Helen.
The guy deflated, presumably at the thought of missing his friend’s sister’s birthday, but Helen didn’t care about that. In fact, she was nearly at the point of wringing the guy’s neck. He let out a mournful little sigh. “I guess football takes up a lot of time.”
“Football?”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of practices. I mean, I guess. I’ve never been on a team.”
Helen was incredulous. “Cal Crosby joined the football team?”
Mournful Scooper Guy was suddenly suspicious. “You said he’s your friend.”
Francie hooked her arm through Helen’s and said, “Just make sure you wash those scoops carefully, okay? Because this place is due for a visit from the health department.” The guy looked at the scoops. Francie tugged Helen out the door.
“So that was a spy mission,” she said when they’d climbed into the sparkly green car.
“Football?” said Helen. “He’ll get crushed!”
“Hellie . . .”
“He’ll be snapped in half like a twig.”
“Seems like that’s not your business anymore.”
“No,” said Helen. “It stopped being my business when I wouldn’t go to Homecoming with him.”
“Regrets?”
Helen considered this for a moment as the Pinto rattled down Route 20. “It would’ve been a lie. But I wish I’d known he would cut me out entirely.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
“I would have stopped waiting for him to get over it.”
“I guess it’s time to stop waiting.”
Helen started dating Mark O’Malley in the fall. They were in eleventh grade now, and it seemed like a good time to start having a boyfriend.
Cal, she soon learned, had been personally asked by the football coach, Mr. Dombrowski, to try out for the team. The story that went around school was that the baseball coach had been complaining to Coach Dombrowski that Cal Crosby could run like a bat out of hell, and he could catch well. But the kid could not hit a ball with a bat to save his life. “Sounds like a wide receiver,” said Dombrowski.
The first time Helen saw Cal was mid-September. It was a couple of days before the first cross-country meet, and even though the sky had opened up, Coach Costarellis was sending them out for a long run. He let them stretch in the dry field house beforehand, though. Apparently, all the other coaches had a similar plan because the field house was jammed with the soccer, field hockey, and football teams, too.
At first she didn’t recognize him. It was the flaming red hair that caught her eye, attached to a guy in a football uniform, standing with a couple of the other guys who were all at least an inch or two shorter than him. She had a second of utter confusion: the hair was definitely his; the body belonged to someone else entirely.
Helen was studying this imposter who was half Cal, half . . . she didn’t know what. Sasquatch? And he turned away from the guy who was talking, his gaze wandering across the expanse of the field house until he caught her staring. Their eyes locked for a moment. Then his cheeks crinkled, and he was smiling his Cal smile at her.
She mimed throwing a football at him, and he shrugged a not-sure-how-this-happened shrug. He pumped his arms like he was running, and she shrugged a what-else-would-I-do shrug.
Coach Dombrowski bellowed, “Huddle up, ladies!”
Cal lobbed one last warm look across the field house to her, turned, and waded into the scrum of boys clacking their shoulder pads together as they herded toward the coach.
Most of the cross-country kids groaned and complained about running in the downpour. But not Helen. She needed to run and run hard. Her body was so full of emotion, she couldn’t have stayed still if she tried. Cal was okay. His sweet little heart had apparently mended and grown into a strapping football-size heart. He didn’t hate her.
It was all going to be okay.
Helen was realistic about the prospect of their friendship ever being what it once was. Cal was so different now. She spent more time in the cafeteria now that she was dating Mark (but only slightly more, since she didn’t want to give up her lunches in the ceramics room with Francie entirely), and she saw Cal eating with the football guys, cracking them up like he’d once cracked her up. Surreptitiously, she liked watching him laugh. But it was a new person she was seeing. She caught snatches of conversation; his voice was lower. Even his face had changed: a jawline had emerged out of nowhere; cheekbones were wider and more prominent; skin looked less delicate and pale, speckled as it was now with whiskers.
So that’s how you turned out, she’d think. And she was happy for him. But she still missed her little friend, a boy who was only a memory now.
Helen was no Felicity Manning, with her six feet and legs up to her neck. But Felicity had graduated and headed off to Indiana University on a full scholarship, so she was no longer there to dampen the hopes of shorter, slower, but just as hardworking girls. Helen was making her way up the varsity ladder, not hanging precariously off the bottom rung anymore. It also helped that Wendy Moriarty had joined the cheerleading squad. One less girl to beat.
Mark, too, had found a way to add a little rocket fuel to his stride; he and Helen encouraged each other and kept up on each other’s times. He even took a book out of the library on how to increase speed and endurance. Helen was impressed by his industriousness.
Mark was friendly—if not exactly friends—with Ricky Zugravescu, and both of them enjoyed watching the high school football games. Francie and Helen had never been interested in going. The stands were a mosh pit of yelling and flirting and spilling stuff on one another. “Not my cup of Earl Grey,” Francie would say when Ricky wanted her to come.
“I don’t see Ricky as a football fan,” Helen said to Francie one night while their boyfriends were at the game, and they were at the Bijoux waiting for The Black Stallion to start.
“He didn’t go last year.”
“Why is he so interested this year?”
“Honestly, I think it’s Cal. Ricky has an underdog thing. He always roots for the weird kids who can’t get a leg up.”
“Like Cal.”
“Yeah, except I think he’s a little . . . conflicted.”
“About what?”
“Well, Cal isn’t exactly a loser anymore, is he? He’s a football star. And he’s not a moron. ‘Smart Athlete’ is about as high up on the pecking order as you can get in high school.”
“He’s not really a star.”
“He kind of is.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, Ricky says he runs like the cops are chasing him, and he’s pretty tall, so he can reach up and grab the ball before the other guys get it. He’s made a lot of goals.”
“I think they’re called touch-ins.”
“Whatever.”
Helen pondered this for a moment. It might be interesting to see little Cal Crosby—now big Cal Crosby—make touch-ins. “Maybe we should go sometime.”
“You just want to watch Cal run.”
The lights dimmed and the previews started up.
“Of course I do,” Helen whispered. “I taught him, didn’t I?”
Helen went to only one game.
She did enjoy watching number thirty-two run—he was fast and agile as he zigged and zagged down the field to keep away from opponents, then leaping up to snatch the ball out of the air. At one point he jumped completely over a guy trying to tackle him. He would’ve been a good hurdler, she thought. And he made a lot of—
“What do you call goals, again?” she asked Mark.
“Helen, they’re touchdowns. Touch. Downs.” He looked past her to Ricky and shook his head but with a grin on his face that said, Isn’t she adorable?
“Jesus, Helen. Catch up, wouldya?” said Ricky, and not in a way that implied any adorableness whatsoever. He said it like she was an idiot.
He just didn’t like her. Maybe if I had a limp, she thought, or a lazy eye. She missed several plays amusing herself with all the ways she could be more of an underdog so Ricky would like her. That is, if she cared about Ricky liking her. Which she did not.
The guy who kept running down the field and catching the ball could have been anyone. He didn’t take his helmet off when he went to the sidelines, because Coach Dombrowski generally sent him back again pretty quickly. He had shoulder pads and the same uniform as everyone else. For all Helen knew, it was her dad out there.
The only tip-off was that when he got the ball, people in the stands would make a strange howling sound. “Hooooooon! Hooooooon!”
“Hoon?” Helen asked Mark.
“It’s a nickname,” Mark explained patiently. “Calhooooooun!”
She remembered Cal telling her once that Calhoun was his mother’s maiden name and that giving it to her firstborn only proved that she’d changed her mind about it and maybe didn’t want to be a Crosby. “Like, at all,” he’d said. Helen missed the first half of the fourth quarter ruminating on that.
In the last play of the game, number thirty-two (who was supposedly Cal) caught the ball and ran into the end thingy, and Corden County Regional High School won the game. That’s when he took his helmet off, red hair spilling to his shoulders, pink sweaty face grinning that Cal grin. The whole team rushed him, slamming into him and thumping him silly. Joyful screams of “Hoooooon!” filled the stadium.
When he headed toward the sidelines, a couple of the cheerleaders came up and kissed him on his sweaty cheeks. Helen felt her blood pause in her veins. Because until this particular moment in the fall of 1979 in her junior year of high school, she had never, not once, seen another girl give Cal Crosby the time of day. Much less kiss him.
“Can we go now?” she said to Mark.
“Oh,” he said. “Sure, if you want to. I mean, usually kids hang out for a while, and then there’ll be a party somewhere—”
“I’m ready to go home.” Helen stood and headed for the parking lot.
Mark O’Malley was a really good boyfriend. Adoring, loyal, supportive, amenable to . . . well, anything, really. Whatever Helen wanted was fine with him. As she had told Cal while they lay on their backs in a meadow at Paddow Mountain State Park, Mark was an adjacent kind of guy. And as long as he was adjacent to her, things went quite smoothly.
He also didn’t pressure her for anything sexually. They kissed a lot. At first it had been kind of messy and weird for Helen to be touching her tongue to someone else’s. When you thought about it, why was this something humans wanted to do? But they did, and Helen did, too, especially as she and Mark got used to each other, and got better at it.
They touched each other in various places. It was all a learning process, and Mark was good to learn with because he was patient, truly interested in knowing how to please her, and never pushed things too far. He was a good Catholic boy. He was honorable.
Francie was not having as much luck with Ricky, who sometimes “lost his head.”
“What does that mean?” demanded Helen.
“He just gets all hot and excited and kind of desperate.”
“For what?”
“Well, sex,” said Francie, “but a hand job will do in a pinch.”
“He doesn’t pressure you, does he?”
“Depends on what you mean by pressure.”
“Francie, you know what I mean by pressure!”
“He’s never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do, but . . .”
“But what?”
“We’ve had discussions.”
“Oh God.”
“You don’t even know about what.”
“Of course I do! You discuss”—Helen made little quote marks with her fingers—“whether he’s going to have his way with you.”
“Jesus, Helen, you’re like a 1950s housewife. It’s not ‘his way.’ I want to, too. But I just need him to slow down a little.”
“He is not a good boyfriend.”
“Just because I don’t have him completely wrapped around my finger like you do Mark—which, by the way, I wouldn’t want to—does not mean he’s not a good boyfriend. He’s a guy, Helen. He just needs his dick rubbed sometimes.”
Helen started to giggle. “Seriously, those things are so high maintenance.”
“I know! Can you imagine walking around with one? ‘Rub me, rub me, rub me!’ It’d be like having your mother yelling at you to clean your room every minute of the day.”
In the spring of junior year, Francie and Ricky had sex. Francie told Helen all about it.
“Did it hurt?” Helen asked.
“Not really. Just like a pinch. And by the time he’s in there, you’re worked up enough that you don’t really care.”
“Worked up?”
“It feels so awesome to be naked together, skin to skin, hugging and stroking and stuff. Then your brain gets a little melty and you can’t wait.”
Helen wasn’t sure her brain had ever gotten that melty. She was definitely interested in trying sex, but more as a fun science experiment than something she was passionately hungry for. Besides, Mark never brought it up, so why rush?
By January of their senior year, he still hadn’t brought it up.
“At least I don’t have to worry about birth control,” Helen said.
“Yeah, condoms are expensive.”
Helen looked at Francie.
“What? I’m agreeing with you.”
“You are and you aren’t.”
“Do you want to have sex with Mark?”
“Well, yeah, wouldn’t it be weird if I didn’t?”
“Ummmmmm . . .”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
Helen shrugged. “I could, I guess.”
“You don’t seem that into it.”
“No, I am. I definitely want to try it.”
“With Mark.”
Helen thought about this.
“Tick tock,” said Francie. “You took too long to respond.”
On Valentine’s Day, Helen was sitting on the toilet in the lav when a group of girls spilled in laughing and talking in high-toned voices.
“So romantic!”
“He brought her an ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins.”
The hair stood up on Helen’s arms.
“What did it say?”
“It said Prom with two question marks on either side. The first one was upside down like the Spanish do it because they have Spanish class together and that’s where he gave it to her!”
“That is so cute!”
“So totally cute!”
“God, he’s hot.”
There was a silence, and then a screech of laughter so loud and so perfectly in unison it sounded like a car crash.
“I’d eat that whole cake!”
“I’d eat it off his chest!”
“Cal fucking Crosby is so fucking hot!” one of them moaned, and they all screeched again and sailed back out.
“Mark,” said Helen that night as they sat in his car in the parking lot behind the Bijoux. They had gone to see Chariots of Fire, which was about running, of course, and Helen had thought it would “heighten emotions,” as she later told Francie.
“Mark, I think we should have sex.”
He looked as if she’d offered him a lollipop and then smacked him in the eye with it.
“What?” he said. “I mean . . . what?”
In that moment, she knew something was very wrong. This was not the response of your typical teenage boy with your typical teenage penis. But much like Cal when he asked her to Homecoming, Helen chose to forge ahead anyway.
“Mark.”
“Yeah?” A little sweat had broken out on his lip, and it did not look like passion-induced sweat. Also, it was fourteen degrees out.
“We’ve been dating for a year and a half.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel any pressure.”
“I don’t. I want to. I’m actually asking you.”
“Oh, um.” His face flushed. “That’s really sweet.”
“Mark, what is happening right now?”
He squeezed the back of his neck, then rubbed his whole face, then punched his thigh. “Helen, I think I want to be a priest.”
“A PRIEST!” Francie was choking with laughter. “You asked a guy to have sex with you and he said he’s saving himself for THE PRIESTHOOD?”
Helen had told Mark to take her home. She had called Francie before she even got her coat off. Francie had skittered her sparkly car into the driveway two and a half minutes later, and Helen had gotten in and slammed the door so hard it nearly came off its hinges.
“IT’S NOT FUNNY!” Helen yelled, but she was laughing, too. “I AM SUCH A LOSER!”
Helen was going to break up with Mark, but he beat her to it.
“I’ve been up all night,” he told her the next day.
You look it, she thought. His pallor was ashen, and the rims of his eyes were inflamed.
