Free He Loves Me Not by Caroline B. Cooney

if you like sports, which I do. Well, I not only sold my story to The Register, but I wrote it up differently—they call it slant in publishing jargon—and sold it to four major national magazines, including Sports Illustrated! Talk about a hit, Alison. There I was, sixteen, and I’d broken into four big, slick, tough, adult markets.”
    “Congratulations,” I said, and I didn’t say it lightly. I could well imagine how good the writing must have been to accomplish that. As Ted leaned forward, eager to tell the rest of his story, his notebook slipped and I saw that he had not been writing my words down in longhand, but in shorthand. He must have learned it because he felt he needed it for his career.
    It was partly his story and what it had in common with my own, and partly his calling me Alison as if we were friends, not reporter and interviewee. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I felt a deep kinship with Ted Mollison. I set down my fork and had a tremendous impulse to use that free hand to reach over and grab Ted’s and say, “Ted, I feel a deep kinship with you.”
    The mere thought of actually doing that made me choke up with horrified laughter. How disgusted with me he would be then! The girl not only tried to break his bones, she got all soppy and maudlin on him.
    “There wasn’t one adult reporter on the whole Register who’d sold more than one article to a major magazine and most of them hadn’t done that. Boy, was I cocky. I bragged until the staff was ready to slit my precocious little throat.”
    I could identify with that, as one who had done a lot of bragging in her time.
    “But I never did it again, you see,” said Ted, and there was a funny tired look in his face. “Since then I’ve never sold a single line to any publisher except The Register. I guess I’ve written fifty stories now that I thought were worth publishing, and all I have is a box full of rejection slips.”
    Ralph handled all our bookings. I suppose that our combo had had its share of rejections. But I hadn’t had to face the agony of being informed I wasn’t worth anything. Ralph yelled at me from time to time. I flubbed things now and then. But I was never thoroughly and completely rejected.
    “I know how it must hurt,” I said helplessly. I wanted to hug Ted. I wanted to say that I knew he wrote super stories even if the national magazines didn’t.
    Then I thought, I’ve gone crazy. I’ve never read one line by Ted Mollison. For all I know, he’s illiterate and the editor at The Register spends every morning correcting Ted’s stories. For all I know Ted’s mother actually wrote the article about the autographed baseballs.
    Ted cleared his throat, wrapping up that little moment of confidence. He looked flushed and disgusted with himself for saying anything. I wanted so much to talk with Ted about failure and success and trying again and again, but I couldn’t seem to find the words fast enough. Ted said, “Your combo ever plan to go on the road?”
    “No. Ralph went on the road for a few years and he makes it sound awful. Seventeen airports in twenty-two days, rundown motels in dreary industrial cities.”
    “Hey, neat,” said Ted, grinning, “when do we leave?”
    The grin almost unwrapped me. I restrained myself from saying that I would go anywhere with him, even seventeen airports in twenty-two days. Instead I gave him this dumb smile to fill up the space.
    “You like what you’re doing?” said Ted softly. “You have any regrets?”
    I want to share my thoughts with Ted the way I never had with anybody. The table was this terrible obstacle, keeping us apart, and I could use words and we would understand each other and it would be such a wonderful thing, to have a friend who understood.
    But Ted was not really interested in my regrets and griefs. He was writing an article to go in a newspaper that every family I knew read every afternoon. Did I really want people to know how lonely I was and how much I missed a