Free The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham Page A

played with the band.
    TELLING
    Eventually you told Lily Joyce. “Huh,” she said. “Henderson?” She’d been waiting a long time for you to start liking a boy. In the time you’d known her she’d liked Stewart, Cook, Childs, McDonald, Chesborough, Hilts, and Sperber. They were all boarders at the school; they would get off-campus permissions to go to her house on Saturdays, mostly one at a time, but Chesboroughand Hilts she invited together, because she liked them both.
    “What do you do when they come over?” you had asked her once.
    Lily Joyce shrugged. “Swim. Listen to records. Sometimes we make out.” With Chesborough she had played something called Seven Minutes in Heaven. You didn’t know what it was, and you didn’t ask Lily Joyce to explain. But Chesborough was another one of those manlike, shaving ninth-graders; and Lily Joyce’s exact words were “I let him play Seven Minutes in Heaven,” so you sort of knew.
    “Why Henderson?” she asked you.
    You weren’t going to give Lily Joyce a list of reasons. He’s so clean. I like how his eyes are blue and his eyelashes are dark. I even like how his glasses are held together on one side with tape. He’s a very serious, not very good guitarist . You didn’t like him because of those things; it was more that you liked those things because you liked him. “He’s cute,” you told Lily Joyce.
    This was a term she recognized and honored: it was valid currency with her. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
    “Do?”
    “ I know. You need to get Mrs. Sturm to put you with him at the dance.”
    There are children who are too old to be children. It stops being a problem when they get older—they grow into themselves—but before that happens it’s perpetually awkward. For you it was a mix of judgment and wistfulness. You thought all this stuff was stupid, but you also had no idea how to get it, and you wanted it.
    “Oh, goody. Let’s,” you said to Lily Joyce. She laughed; she liked it when you were sarcastic. Egged on, you grabbed herhand and started skipping toward the Sturms’ house. The two of you skipped along the colonnade, laughing, just as the boys were trailing out of their dorms to go down to the gym for sports. You felt wildly happy, bounding forward with the wind blowing against your face and hair, with all those boys watching. (Later, though, you’d use the memory to humiliate yourself: it had felt like two pretty girls skipping along a colonnade, but it must have looked like big you galumphing along beside little Lily Joyce.)
    Mrs. Sturm made tea and put out the mysterious pale cookies on a flowered plate. You sat in her living room, where she always had a fire going on these winter afternoons. “Well, ladies,” she said.
    “Ask her,” said Lily Joyce to you.
    “No, that’s okay,” you said. You knew that Mrs. Sturm was in charge of organizing the upcoming dance, and that each boy from your school would be “put with” a girl bused in from some girls’ school. But asking her to put you with Henderson seemed crass to you, dishonorable. She liked you; didn’t you owe it to her not to take advantage of that fondness by asking for a special favor? Maybe you would end up with Henderson anyway, either accidentally or because Mrs. Sturm, with her almost magical delicacy, would somehow know without being told to put the two of you together.
    Besides, you were afraid to tell her you liked a boy. You didn’t want to bore her, or make yourself look silly.
    But Lily Joyce was pointing at you. “Mrs. Sturm, she wants to be put with Henderson for the dance, and I want to be with Sperber.”
    Mrs. Sturm went over to her writing desk—a small, many-compartmented thing that she had told you was an old campaign chest from the time of the Napoleonic wars—andcame back with a pad and a tiny pencil. “Lily Joyce, Jeff Sperber,” she said, writing. She smiled at Lily Joyce, and then at you. “And Mark Henderson?”
    You nodded,