Free He Loves Me Not by Caroline B. Cooney Page B

with a girl I didn’t know, and Dick Fraccola with Frannie. “What are you doing at a flower show?” I said, laughing. Immediately I was okay: I had an audience. I found my stride and failure disappeared.
    “We’re just wandering around,” said Frannie. “We didn’t even know about the flowers.” She waved a bored hand at the long rows of tables all around me displaying camellias. “We’re just killing half an hour till the movie opens.”
    Perhaps if I had been better company that time when Mike walked me down to gym, I’d be the one waiting with him now, I thought.
    “Would you play ‘Evergreen’?” said Mike.
    I was so sick of that song I wished it had never been written. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, just the way Ralph had taught me. “Sure, I’ll play it next.”
    Mike’s eyebrows arched wistfully, waiting for it. Somebody should write a song about those eyebrows, I thought.
    I wondered if Ted had good eyebrows. I could picture his face and his fingers and his hair, but not his eyes and eyebrows. Can’t judge a man by his eyebrows, I told myself.
    But if I did, Mike certainly came off well.
    For about ten minutes the Camellia Festival was like a dream: two marvelous, handsome boys ignoring their dates and staring at me with respect and pleasure as I played for them. (I just hoped they didn’t lean so hard on this portable organ that we all slid off the egg.)
    And then some overweight, middle-aged man with a mustache that needed trimming asked for a John Philip Sousa march. The organ salesman nodded at me; obviously he wanted this potential customer pleased. Who cared what a bunch of teenagers wanted? They didn’t buy organs.
    Unfortunately, I had never had occasion to play any Sousa marches. Or anybody else’s marches. I added a long tag to the rock number I was doing to give myself time to think. I hated to admit ignorance. On the other hand, if I tried to play a march and failed, the whole mall would know I’d been defeated.
    Most of all, Mike and Dick would know.
    Memories of football game marching bands at halftime came to me. I could feel a scrap of Sousa melody—that part where the piccolo shrills over the tubas. “Sure,” I said to the customer, taking my reputation into my fingers. I launched full volume into a piece I didn’t know, throwing on extra brass and percussion until the swell of the instrument filled the entire mall. The customer began marching in place beside me.
    I absolutely hate it when adults act like little kids. I get so embarrassed for them. But I was getting paid and I had to be part of it. I had no choice but to nod, grin, and make marching movements with my elbows so the man would feel good about his marching.
    People turned, smiling, because everybody loves a march.
    When I finished, I got a super round of applause. I was flushed with pleasure. Without Ralph and the rest to carry me through, I’d winged it—when one mistake would have boomed out in two hundred stores.
    I turned to see Mike’s expression, but he was no longer there.
    I searched the camellia crowd for him. After a minute I spotted the four of them sauntering down one of the star-shaped wings to the Cookie Monster Shoppe. Frannie was pointing at the fat sugar cookies decorated like Muppets, and obviously Dick planned to buy her one.
    They had left while I was still playing. They hadn’t been impressed at all. More likely they had been bored.
    My chest hurt and my eyes blurred over. “I have to take a break,” I said to the organ man.
    “Sure, honey. Listen, you’re super. You’re fantastic. How about you and me working out something permanent? Okay?”
    The way I felt then, the only thing I wanted permanently was out of music.
    The organ salesman was hopping with excitement. He was selling more organs in half an hour than he usually sold in a week. “Okay?” he said. “Want to? Okay?”
    It’s not okay, I thought. I don’t want some old organ salesman to call me honey. I