The Last Chance by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online Page B

friends. He’d told her not to dress up, so she wore pants, but they were the wrong sort of pants; everyone else was in blue jeans. They were all young and skinny and long-haired, the boys and the girls dressed alike, and they were all lying on the floor on batik cushions smoking grass. Margot hated grass. Since she’d stopped smoking cigarettes, it made her just as sick as tobacco. The air stank. The kids—his friends—looked at her as if she were an intruder, some old person who didn’t belong there. Nobody bothered to talk to her. She felt self-conscious and ugly. The next day Kerry took her to some store on First Avenue and bought her a pair of blue jeans that were so tight she couldn’t sit down in them. He seemed to think her attire was the only barrier between her and his friends, while she knew better. It was her face and her mind and her life.
    Another time they went to Sherry’s to pick out wine. Kerry stood there quietly, not knowing one wine from another or caring either, while she knew all about them, and suddenly she wondered if the salesman thought the obvious and humiliating thing about them. Did they seem like a joke to other people?
    “You care too much what people think,” Kerry told her when she said she didn’t want to go to his friends’ next party.
    “That means they do think I have no business being there.”
    “I don’t know what they think, but I don’t care.”
    So she went, and she saw the absolute disinterest on their faces, far more cutting than an insult. She was too old to exist for them. In self-defense she took him to places where her friends were, to Ellen’s dinner party, for a winter Sunday at Nikki’s in a borrowed car. If Kerry was uncomfortable with her friends, he hid it well. He was quiet and pleasant. But what was he thinking? That some day he and his friends would be old like that? He might not like it, but it was a lot better than her knowing that she would never be young again like his friends.
    For about a year now Nikki Gellhorn had felt that her life had stopped. She was not a person who had ever been able to put up with a static existence, she always had to be stirring things up, even if it was just a couple of harmless flirtations. She had more energy than she could cope with, but using her energy on the dreary commuting to and from her job was meaningless effort. She wanted to do new and different things before it was too late.
    The feeling that she was trapped had started when the twins went away to college. She knew they would come back to visit, of course, but it would never be the same. They would never again come home to live. And although they had protested that that was not true, Nikki knew better. Last year, at the end of their freshman year, the girls were surer, stronger, looking for their own lives, talking about themselves and their futures as separate entities from the family. Nikki made herself accept it wholeheartedly so they would continue to be her friends as well as her daughters. Now, home for the midterm holiday in their sophomore year, Dorothy and Lynn were even more whole persons than they had been the year before, and Nikki knew she had lost them.
    Dorothy was going to major in psychology, she wanted to work with disturbed teen-agers. Last summer she had been a counselor in a nice middle-class camp, but this summer she was going to work in White Plains in a mental hospital. It was a branch of Payne Whitney, she said. Would she live in Wilton with her parents and commute? No, Dorothy said, the trip was too much, she would have a little room in the dorm on the hospital grounds, she was damn lucky to get it, she said, nurses got first choice. One gone, like ten little Indians, but Nikki had only two. Lynn had a boyfriend. She had been living with him almost all term. He was a senior at her college, and they were going to hitchhike through Europe together this summer. Lynn already had maps and lists of all the cheap youth hostels. She was