—
HERCULES DEMETRIOU didn’t show his face at the Female Trouble screening. That didn’t matter; there was popcorn and Pepper and so much divine and diabolical mayhem onscreen, plus Cookie Mueller telling it exactly like it is: Just ’cause we’re pretty everybody’s jealous!
“Were you expecting to see someone?” Pepper asked her, as they walked out of the cinema. “You kept looking round.”
She lied that she’d been watching the audience. It was a plausible lie because she was the kind of person who watched audiences.
—
HERCULES WAS WAITING on the staircase that led up to her room, his legs stretched all along the step, his feet jammed into two slots in the banister. He was reading one of the books Flor had left at Bettencourt headquarters: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. When he saw her he scrambled to his feet and hit his head on the stone ceiling. She felt his pain, so she patted his shoulder as he went by; he took her hand and followed her up the stairs until she came to a halt.
“What?”
“Is this yours?” he asked, holding up the book.
“No.”
“But you’ve read it?”
“Yup.”
“It’s great, isn’t it? It sort of rocks you . . . reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realize that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they’re sorry because they’ve decided to smash you to pieces . . .”
“But then you’re put back together again, in a wholly different order . . .”
“And it hurts so much you don’t know if the new order will work.”
“It’ll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don’t you think?”
He was smiling at her again. He hadn’t let go of her hand yet. It was nice until he invited her to the Bettencourt dinner. She hesitated for a surprising length of time (surprising to her, anyway) before she said: “Herc, I can’t.”
He wasn’t daunted; she’d shortened his name, that had to mean something! “You’re a Homely Wench. I’m not saying I understand all that that entails, but I don’t think the Bettencourters and the Wenches are that far apart in the way they see things anymore. Laughs, snacks, and cotching, yeah? And we have a journal too: a journal read only by us. Can’t we read each other’s? I know you want me to pretend you don’t look like anything much, but you’re a beauty. Sorry. You are. Just come to the dinner, come and meet the Bettencourters and actually talk to them, come and meet the people they think are beauties too. We’re not like last century’s Bettencourt Society. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.”
They both laughed at this closing speech of his. She didn’t want to blush but blushed anyway, and he saw that. He thought she was a beauty! What a wonderful delusion. And she liked the idea of the Societies reading each other’s journals. She could just about imagine putting on a slinky dress and going along to this little dinner, making the acquaintance of his brothers in charisma and the boys and girls they’d brought along. But she could also picture the looks that some of the diners would give other diners, the words that’d be murmured when the subject of evaluation left the room. Really . . . her? Or Nice, nice. Both possibilities made her feel weary. With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.
“I can see you believe you lot are new and improved, but to have this dinner where each of you brings one person to show off to the others . . .”
“Isn’t that what all socializing’s like when you’re in a relationship?” Hercules asked, resting his chin on her palm. This boy.
“Yes, well, I don’t know about that—”
“Never had a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
She took her hand back, stood on tiptoe, and whispered into his ear: “Ask someone else.”
“You’ll be jealous,” Hercules whispered back.
Day waved him away and climbed the last few steps to her door. “I won’t. Goodnight, Herc.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and walked backward down the stairs, calling out: “You like me. She likes me. She doesn’t know why and she can’t believe it, but Dayang Sharif likes me!”
—