Edenville Owls

Chapter 11

Joanie invited Nick to go to a party with her at the Boat Club. I was glad I didn’t have to go. I couldn’t dance.

We’d all gone to dancing class except Manny, and we all liked pressing against the girls. What we weren’t interested in was all the crap about who led who, and how you asked a young lady to dance and la di da. But if Joanie had asked me to the party and I’d had to dance, I would have been embarrassed.

Joanie had asked me what I thought about her inviting Nick. I had said he was a good guy. She said she thought he was really cute. I kind of didn’t like that. But she wasn’t my girlfriend. We were pals.

“You think he’ll go?” Joanie had asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

Nick was the first one of us to have a regular date, and the first one of us to ever be invited to the Boat Club. The rest of us sort of followed Nick and Joanie at a distance, and hung around outside. I don’t know quite why. Wanted to see what was up, I guess.

The thing was, I felt funny about it. I felt funny about her asking Nick and funny about feeling funny about it. I didn’t exactly wish she hadn’t asked him. And I didn’t exactly wish she had asked me. I guess I wished she hadn’t asked anyone and had, instead, come down and sat on the deserted bandstand with me.

“You think they might do something?” Russell said to the group of us.

“Joanie and Nick?” Billy said.

“Yeah. You think he might get a good-night kiss?”

“She seems pretty hot,” Billy said.

“Maybe more than a good-night kiss,” Russell said.

I didn’t like the conversation. But I couldn’t think of any way to complain about it. We talked all the time about what you could get a girl to do. As far as I knew, none of us had actually gotten a girl to do much of anything. But it didn’t slow the conversation any. If we couldn’t speak of what we had done, we could talk a lot about what we would do. Or would like to do.

That’s all Russell and Billy were doing. So why did it bother me? We hung around across the street from the Boat Club. We could hear music and see lights. But we couldn’t really keep track of what was going on. Beyond the Boat Club was a private beach where the waves washed softly up.

There was a roadhouse up on Route 6 where things we couldn’t imagine were supposed to go on, and now and then we would sneak up there and try to peek in the windows. But the windows were all tightly covered and we could never see anything. And we were always almost breathless with what we imagined could be going on beyond our ability to see.

I felt sort of like that now. And the more I couldn’t see, the more my stomach tightened up, and the more I felt feverish, and the harder it was to swallow.

“You’re the brains,” Russell said to me. “You think she’s hot?”

“Not for me,” I said.

“Who is?” Billy said. “Except maybe Miss Delaney.”

I walked away toward the beach.

“Miss Delaney’s hot for us all,” Russell said.

I kept walking.

“Hey,” Russell called. “Where you going?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Russell said.

“Let him be,” Manny said. “He wants to look at the water, let him look at the water.”

“Don’t you wanna see what’s going to happen?” Russell said.

“Maybe he’ll kiss her good night,” Billy said. “You don’t want to see that?”

I kept walking.

Behind me I heard Billy say, “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

“He’s pretty weird sometimes,” Russell said.

There was enough moon, so I could see okay. At the edge of the sand where the waves broke, there was a little white foam drifting. I watched it as it slid back out with the receding wave, and re-formed when the wave came gently up the sand again.