12
VERONICA AND STRETCH began spending some time together, but they didn’t seem to be making much progress. Veronica seemed, now that she was getting a closer look, not to see anything attractive in Stretch. I was close to giving up, letting Veronica rob me of my childhood, of my innocence, resigning myself to spending my money on dates and never being able to set enough aside for a model airplane with a real gas engine, when I saw the poster for the roller-skating party. The whole plan came to me at once. I would invite Veronica to the skating party. She would be delighted, flattered, and thrilled. Not only was the roller-skating party likely to be appealing to Veronica for itself, but this was a high-school roller-skating party, sponsored by the junior class to help raise money for the traditional junior class barge for the annual Babbington Clam Fest. Veronica was sure to consider it, as I did, a sophisticated event. I would fall ill on the day of the party. I’d ask Stretch to escort her. At the party, Veronica would fall in love with Stretch and drop me like a hot potato. I would be able to buy the model airplane.
I saw Veronica next in the cafeteria, where she was buying her lunch. She slid her tray along the shelf formed by stainless steel tubes and took a plate of a macaroni dish called American chop suey, a bowl of boiled green beans, and a bowl filled with cubes of green Jell-O. “Do you want to go to the high school roller-skating party?” I called out to her. Veronica stopped and spun around. Her eyes were wide with pleasure. Her mouth was open. Her Jell-O was quivering. She put her tray down on the rack and ran to me and took both of my hands in hers.
“Do you mean it?” she asked.
“Sure I mean it,” I said, with the confidence that a well-wrought scheme could give a boy my age at that time.
“I’ve always wanted to go to one of those skating parties,” she said. She hugged me, right there in the cafeteria, with everyone watching.
“Oh, Peter,” she said. “I can’t wait. I bet I can skate just as well as any of those big girls.”
“You can?” I asked, bemused. The idea of actually skating, it suddenly occurred to me, had not been part of my vision of the evening. As I had seen it, Veronica would be happy enough just to be there, to sit somewhere with Stretch and eat popcorn, drink root beer and orange soda, and watch the high school boys and girls perform intricate and fluid routines that had required most of their high school years to perfect.
“Just wait till you see me skate,” she said.
I looked at my hands, and since they looked awkward just hanging there at the ends of my arms, I began wringing them. I was worried that perhaps Stretch couldn’t skate. If in fact he couldn’t skate, Veronica wouldn’t be likely to fall in love with him at the skating party.
“Oh, no,” said Veronica.
“What?” I asked. She looked concerned.
“You can’t skate, can you?”
I nearly told her that it didn’t matter whether I could skate or not, but I thought better of it in time. I doubt that pride would have allowed me to admit that I couldn’t skate anyway.
“Well,” I said, “It isn’t that I can’t roller-skate. It’s just that I’m—I’m a little rusty.”
I risked looking her in the face. There were signs that she might smile, that all might be well, if I could just say the right thing now.
“But it’s like riding a bicycle or doing multiplication,” I said. “It comes right back to you. I just need some practice. Of course, I won’t be as good as you are, but I’ll bet we’ll look pretty good together.”
Her face had lit up, and she gave me a quick hug. “We can practice together!” she said. She began to hop up and down. “I’ll get my mother to let you come along to one of my lessons. After my lesson is over, you and I can practice together for a while.”
“That would be great,” I said. To preserve the illusion that I would be taking her to the skating party, I was going to have to practice with her. I felt the sinking feeling that I have always felt when I know that I am getting myself in over my head, but I felt at the same time the other emotion that accompanies my diving into the dark waters of overreaching: an intoxicating self-confidence, all the more intoxicating because it is groundless. After all, since I had never roller-skated before, I had no reason to believe that I was not a roller-skating prodigy, awaiting only the sensations that would rush through me when the wheels of my skates first touched the floor to unlock the grace and power that lay within me.
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🎧 173: Veronica and Stretch . . .