He Loves Me Not by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

substitutes for you?”
    “Oh, sure.” I told him about my father’s rules on wild parties.
    “How awful,” said Mike. “You go to all the dreary, boring, middle-aged stuff and you have to stay home for all the good ones.”
    “Right,” I said. I thought, wow, Daddy wouldn’t like Mike. Daddy doesn’t think the wild parties are the good ones. I looked up at Mike again and wondered if all the parties Mike went to were wild. I had a feeling they would be.
    Ted. Somehow I didn’t even picture Ted at parties. I pictured him doing things alone. Doing interesting things. Skydiving, maybe, or hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.
    “So if you ever really wanted not to work some night,” said Mike, “Ralph isn’t necessarily dependent on you.”
    “Right. The world is full of keyboard men.”
    “You are not,” said Mike McBride, looking down at me and taking my arm as we got to the top of the next flight of stairs, “definitely not, a keyboard man. ”
    I flushed. All I could think of was falling. He was going to spring compliments on me and, I was going to tumble down a flight of stairs like a complete klutz. I hung on to his hand on one side and the railing on the other, like a cripple. The distinctive odor of the locker rooms wafted up to meet us.
    “I hardly ever come down here,” said Mike. “Feels like alien territory.”
    “Feels alien to me, too,” I told him. “I hate gym. The only reason I’m even passing Physical Education is because I do attend. They can’t flunk you as long as your body is on the floor.”
    Mike frowned. “You don’t like gym?” he said. “But you like sports, don’t you?”
    Too late I remembered that sports were the center of Mike’s life the way music was the center of mine. “Sports,” I said feebly, trying to think of one.
    Mike just laughed. “Nice to talk to you, Alison,” he said. “See you around.” His thick sneakers pounded on the stairs going back up.
    Stupid. The adjective belonged to me. Mike had all but said that he liked me, and he wanted to know if Ralph ever gave me free evenings. I told myself Mike had rushed away to get to Trig, but I really knew he had lost interest in me. How could I blame him?
    I changed into my nasty gym clothes (I admit to being partially responsible for that ripe odor in the halls) and went out into the gymnasium. We were doing gymnastics. Or rather, other people were doing gymnastics. I was standing around wondering how they could bend their bodies like that.
    “Alison,” said Ms. Santora helplessly, “you’re so slim and trim and you must be well coordinated or you couldn’t play the piano. But you can’t even find the mat, let alone tumble on it.”
    “Actually,” I said, “falling is one of the things I do best.”
    I tried to do a somersault, fell heavily on my side, and struck the tumbler next to me with my left foot. For the millionth time, I thanked God that gym is not coed. If I have to make a fool of myself three times a week, at least I don’t have to do it in front of the boys.
    Boys, I thought.
    I narrowed that down quickly. Boy. Ted. Two very fine three-letter words.
    It was much easier to daydream about Ted, whom I didn’t and wouldn’t know, than about Mike, who was real and there and required effort I didn’t know how to make.

7
    “Y OU KNOW, HONEY,” SAID my father at supper, “I always thought you’d be a companion to me in my old age. But I’m hardly even middle-aged yet, and you’re off seven nights a week gallivanting.”
    “I’m not gallivanting, Daddy, I’m working.”
    We were having frozen pizza. We both hate cooking. Hate it. We eat a lot of frozen dinners, tons of junky fast food, and consider it the height of domesticity when we scramble eggs and make toast. The way we eat is boring, expensive, and probably not very nutritious, but it suits us.
    “Sometimes I worry about what your mother would say,” my father told me. He finished his pizza and began tugging at his hair,