Miss Taken by Sue Seabury Page B

track when a person eats that fast - Trey jumped
up from the table and mumbled through half-chewed brown goo, “I’m
going over to Matt’s.”
    There is such an annoying double standard in
this house. Mom cleared her throat and stared at him significantly
but did not take him to task the way she would have if I had been
the one trying to pull that with a guest in the house.
    Trey of course is impervious to hints. He
didn’t even wipe his mouth. He merely swallowed before saying,
“Thanks for the brownies, Diana. See ya at school.”
    Mom got up and followed Trey out to the
kitchen. I heard her say, “Turn around, young man,” but I didn’t
have time to eavesdrop on that conversation because I calculated
there were fewer than ten seconds between now and the moment when
Diana would explode into tears.
    Even though it was time to peel the scales
from her eyes about Trey, I didn’t want her to humiliate herself in
front of him. I had to get her away from Mom too. The last thing I
needed right now was to get caught in the middle of an anti-man
rant.
    Even with her own heart breaking in two,
Robin Jane never forgets the feelings of others. I said quickly,
“You want to listen to some music in my room?”
    She nodded, barely holding it together. I
pushed her up the stairs and kicked the door shut just as the first
sob escaped. Diana looked like her knees were giving out on her.
Shoving aside a stack of magazines on the bed, I made room so she
could sit down. I deftly sprinkled a few mismatched socks over them
so I didn’t have to hear an encore of her thoughts on the
exploitation of women in the media.
    Diana’s blubbing was getting louder. There
was a record on the player. It’s nice that my dad not only buys
modern music, but allows me to store his collection in my room. I
put the needle down and turned the volume up.
    It might have been wiser to scan the title
first. It was Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. Not the
best choice in this situation, especially the way it started with,
“Turn around...”
    Diana practically screamed. Then she stopped,
her attention arrested by something on the wall. Sniffing, she
nodded with her chin. “Did Ned make that?”
    I turned my head to see what she was talking
about. Ned’s oil painting.
    “Turn around...” came the voice over the
player.
    Diana went into full banshee wail. I cranked
the volume up to max and joined her.
    A funny thing happened somewhere in the
middle of the song. I stopped crying and started singing along. It
was more like yelling along, but it dried up Diana’s tears too. Our
eyes met and we were even able to smile a little. When we sang the
final “total eclipse of the heart,” we weren’t totally out of
harmony with each other.
    Sifting through the junk on my dresser, I
located two hairbrushes. The round one I generously presented to
Diana.
    I didn’t even get annoyed when she had the
nerve to recoil at the sight of a few hairs that were attached. For
gosh sakes, it’s a hairbrush. With a perfectly pleasant expression
on my face, I cleaned as much hair off it as I could and reoffered
it.
    Once she finally accepted the blasted thing,
I went to put the needle back at the beginning of the record and we
sang it again, belting it out into our hairbrushes. The third time
we listened to it, Diana let me have the round brush and I took the
lead part. The fourth time, she was Bonnie and I was the guy who
sounds like a woman who sings the “turn around” part. To be honest,
Diana has a better voice. So the fifth time we sang, Diana was
Bonnie again and we shared the round brush. She tilted it in my
direction for the “turn around” parts.
    After five rounds, I didn’t put it on again.
I think we both felt healed of our broken hearts, or at least
catharted of our Valentine’s Day misery. In an unspoken pact, Diana
and I decided not to discuss the sources of our unhappiness.
    Instead we listened to more sappy songs,
yelling them into our