Miraculously, Janie and I managed to get away with our hooky-playing escapade. The next day Mr. Peeler rang the fire drill bell without warning the teachers at the exact time we were supposed to go watch a Weekly Reader film, and the whole school got sidetracked, so Mrs. Gravitts and Mrs. Byrd never got around to asking anybody for their absent notes. I had a story ready, but I’ll bet Janie was on pins and needles and probably praying. Maybe it was her praying that caused Mr. Peeler to decide to have a fire drill that morning.
We were excited all week because her mother had given her permission to come spend the night with me on Friday. Since my mind was so consumed with trying to be good because of Mr. Gravitts’ disease, when the rest of the class was studying long division and reading Longfellow, my brain felt the need to retreat into visions and dreams of a more restful nature. That week they included what activities Janie and I could entertain ourselves with that might change her mind about my taste in fun. By the time Friday rolled around, I had everything planned out.
After supper Julie went out on a date with old Travis Wayne. That was at seven, so we had a few hours for me to get Janie trained for the great caper that wouldn’t actually begin until a little before 10:00, which was Julie’s curfew. For the first hour, I taught Janie how to cook Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco Treat) because it dawned on me in the middle of supper that we didn’t usually have dessert, and most people, like Janie, did. Both my Mother and Daddy were better cooks with one hand tied behind their back than anybody else’s parents, and by the time we had eaten their shrimp gumbo, t-bone steaks, or Italian spaghetti, none of us ever wanted dessert. The way I figured it, Rice-a-Roni could count as dessert, since that was my best thing to cook, and at the same time I could announce to Janie, “Hey, how about a lesson in the culinary arts?” (“Culinary” was one of my new “c” words, and I was anxious to try it out.)
After dessert, we took turns pantomiming records using a banana as a microphone and then it was time for me to begin her training in climbing on top of the house. The plan was to spy on Julie and old Travis Wayne when they came home and parked in front of the house after their date. Being in the ninth grade, they had pretty much gotten to be creatures of habit, so I could predict exactly when they would drive up and exactly where they would park. There was a perfect limb to sit on and spy, but the only way to get up to it was from the roof of the house. Mother had the Coke truck make regular stops at our house every week to deliver seven cases of Cokes to us just like they did to the stores, so if Janie couldn’t climb, we could have just stacked up Coke cases as high as she needed us to. Turns out, Janie, being a country kid, was a pretty good climber, so we just sat up there in the cold and practiced our howling for that extra twenty minutes before they got home instead of knocking the Coke cases over several times until she could achieve her balance, as I had envisioned that morning during reading class.
Then there they were, pulling slyly up the curb and cutting off the headlights. We had a good perspective, but all we could see was them snuggling way over on his side. It looked like four or five more people could have fit in the front seat beside them; that’s how close they were. It’s funny that in all that time I never thought about them like I thought about me and Johnny Paul kissing on the front porch after the Black Cats ran out; all I could think about was how on earth Julie could let somebody like Travis Wayne even talk her into getting into the same car with him, much less kiss her. That was probably more of a mystery to me than I had ever been to Johnny Paul. After only about five minutes, the windshield got all fogged up, and fog is a pretty boring thing to watch, so in grave disappointment and embarrassment, I told Janie we might as well climb down and go inside.
Janie seemed like she had a good time, but for some reason I could never figure out, she told her mother everything we did. Then after she got going, she lost all her inhibitions and told her about playing hooky the week before.
And that is why Janie was forbidden to set foot on our property after that weekend.
“Janie,” her mother told her, “you have no business skipping school, you have no business smoking cigarettes, and you have no business being on the roof of a house. And furthermore, people deserve their privacy, and it is wrong to sneak around and spy on them. If you are going to be friends with Jen, it will have to be out here on the farm. You may not go to her house anymore.”
This was a grave disappointment to me because Janie was somebody I really wanted to be close friends with. She was smart and interesting and knew how to be funny without ever doing anything wild or wrong. I thought that was pretty clever of her. It seemed like that if I could spend lots of time with her, I would have less of a chance to be bored into the kind of adventures that could send me to jail.
And not only that, but wouldn’t you know it? No sooner had Mother bought me that expensive necklace to help me save face with Johnny Paul than he discovered another mystery girl, my good friend Ruth Ann Foster. And the thing was Ruth Ann could not have cared less about Johnny Paul or any other boy. She was cute and spunky and I can see why he might have wanted to be her boyfriend for those reasons, but really and truly, I don’t think he even noticed her cuteness and spunk. I think he liked her because she did not like him, and that is both strange and stupid, if you ask me.
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