Romeo Blue by Phoebe Stone Page B

knees. Come on, put ’em up, buddy. Winner takes all. How’d you get so lucky?”
    “Dunno,” said Derek, kicking a rock up into the brush ahead of us.
    Nothing was worse than having two show-off American boys fighting over a snooty, pretty American girl, even if she did wear braces. I was standing there, feeling like a foreign pip-squeak. A twerp. A twerp who knew too much. And my parents were in prison.
    When we got home, Derek and Stu went into the kitchen for a cup of Ovaltine, and I went up to the room I shared with Auntie. I sat on Auntie’s canopy bed. And then I flopped against her pillow. As I dropped back into the softness of it, I felt a crinkly paper at the back of my head. I turned round and picked up an envelope. It was aletter addressed to Miami Bathburn from a USO Camp Show office in New York City. My heart dropped then, like a terrible submarine going down even farther to the very bottom of the ocean. Oh, Auntie, don’t leave. Stay here forever. I couldn’t bear to wander about this house without your voice calling out, “Sweetest! Oh, sweetest, where are you?”
    I held the letter up to the light, hoping to see through it. I did have a little bit of luck. I could almost read the typed words Dear Miss Bathburn . Then I thought I could read, We are sneezed to inform you . No, the words were too jumbled. I couldn’t make them out and so I just sat there holding the envelope. I knew quite well in all my dreadful American snooping how to steam open a letter and then reseal it. Derek had taught me how. But for once the better part of me got hold and I resisted, though I knew already it was an acceptance. My aunt was going to be an actress traveling round to entertain the soldiers in America. It rather killed me and thrilled me at the same time.

I felt so sad and worried for my Winnie and Danny that it almost didn’t matter that the dreadful rose corsage was finally taken out of the icebox. It now sat on the table in the hallway, its petals glowing, waiting to be pinned on Cousin Brie’s shoulder. How could Derek do this? Did he not hug me in the darkness on the road last week? Did he not hold my hand in Portland? Had he not spent weeks practicing dancing with me? How could he now be going to the dance with Brie?
    It was evening and The Gram was in the garden taking the dry sheets off the clothesline. I could see her through the open window. There was the smell of burning autumn leaves in the air and the sun was going down, making The Gram and her sheets into dark shadows turning in the wind. How mysterious she seemed now to me after hearing her speak in the gymnasium with the two Bills. Somehow I was in the middle of something, as if in a dark funnel, everything circling round the Bathburn house.
    Derek came down the stairs and stopped in the parlor. He was dressed in a dark blue suit with a bow tie at his throat. He kept his one paralyzed hand in his jacket pocket. When Uncle Gideon saw him, he said,“Well, if it isn’t Humphrey Bogart from The Maltese Falcon !” Derek smiled. He had the corsage in his right hand.
    Auntie was lying on the sofa, reading a script for Romeo and Juliet . Yes, she had been accepted into the theater troop and there would be tryouts for Juliet later. She had her hair in bobby pins for curlers. She sat up and loosely tied a silk scarf round her head and said, “Oh, Derek, you are simply handsome tonight. Oh, you must always wear a bow tie!”
    I sat in the corner. I had a book propped up in front of my face and I am quite sorry to report that I was rather hiding behind that book and not reading one word of it. If anyone had looked closely, they would have known that I would never be reading a book called The History of Linguistic Development in Northern European Civilizations .
    The Gram came back in the front screen door with the laundry basket full of folded sheets. Just then a car pulled into the driveway. Its lights rode up and down the walls, momentarily flashing