Helena Mary Cole

And so, Jay found himself locked into a deal where he had to be nice to Sandy. And it worked. Sort of.

It worked until Alex got a couple of pet mice, and Jay couldn’t resist dropping one on Sandy’s shoulder just to see what would happen. It scuttled up into her hair and made her scream and contort herself absurdly, torn between wanting to get the mouse out of her hair and a horror of actually touching the animal. Jay let this go on for a good few minutes before getting the mouse out, and Sandy was furious. Alex, on the other hand, laughed himself into the most stubborn case of hiccoughs he’d ever had in his life. He complained that his hiccoughs had persisted until he fell asleep, sometime around midnight, but Jay only accused him of secretly enjoying the show. As for Sandy, she didn’t speak to Jay for almost a week after the incident, except when politeness strictly dictated that she do so. She was determined to live up to her own promise to Alex.

After that, the deal between Alex and Jay worked until Sandy left her backpack unattended in the east living room and Jay broke into it and switched her notes into different binders, so that the binder she’d carefully labelled ‘math’ was full of history notes and vice versa. Jay thought at the time that this was one of his lesser prank ideas, and might even go unnoticed. But when Alex came into history class that day, he found Sandy sitting at her desk, beet red, surrounded by open binders, and near tears. “Alex, I think I’m losing my mind,” she told him, and explained to him in piteous tones that her notes were all mixed up. As Sandy always carried all her notebooks with her everywhere, she wasn’t in any kind of difficulty that would force her to rush back to her locker to get the right one. But she was in a predicament all the same.

Alex hadn’t seen Jay make the switch, but quickly guessing the truth. His laugh reflex audibly twitched. Knowing she didn’t consider the situation funny, he managed to pass off this involuntary laugh as a sneeze.

“Are you all right?” Sandy asked him, “On top of everything else, I don’t need you to get sick.”

“I’m not sick,” Alex said, and nothing more.

But after Sandy spent the morning walking around in a fearful state of mind, looking over her shoulder every chance she got, Alex decided to put her out of her misery. He pointed out that Jay had been left alone in the east living room for a while, in the presence of their backpacks, and would have had ample opportunity to switch up her notes. Sandy’s mouth fell open and she blushed lightly. After pause, all she did was murmur her agreement with Alex’s explanation, and nothing more was said about it.

Somehow, Jay didn’t even get in trouble for the joke from Alex. Alex confronted him about it the following evening, when they were all at Old Hall having a snack in the kitchen. The moment Sandy excused herself to the washroom, Alex immediately turned to his friend and said, “Jay, you switched Sandy’s notes, didn’t you?”

Jay popped a cube of cheese in his mouth and looked at him in mock innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You made her question her sanity.”

Jay laughed. “Really?”

“It was classic.”

“Is she mad at me?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said, “If she doesn’t bring it up, I wouldn’t if I were you.”

But Sandy never mentioned the prank to Jay. She told herself at the time that she didn’t want to encourage him by letting him see that he’d gotten to her, but later on, she began to think that maybe he hadn’t gotten to her at all. Maybe she thought that, inconvenient as the trick had been, it had at least been subtly done and showed a spot-on knowledge of her own quirks.

Sandy was, however, seriously considering pulling Jay aside and warning him that she wanted him on his best behaviour for her birthday party, which was coming up in a week and a half. Every time the party was talked about among the three friends, she started to frown at Jay, and made up her mind she was going to deliver the lecture, but then the tiny smile at the corner of Jay’s mouth made her stop.

Once, when she and Alex were alone, she came out and asked, “Alex, do you know what Jay’s planning on getting me for my birthday?” She was so worried about this, she’d actually lost a little sleep the night before.

Alex emerged from behind a giant book entitled Watercolour Painting and answered, “Don’t worry about that—I made him promise to go back to the mall and get you something else.”

“Why? What did he get me?” Sandy couldn’t help but ask.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
*
Jay walked into his family’s kitchen the Saturday before the party, holding a Whoopee cushion still in the package, saying, “Mom, I need a ride to the mall and I thought I heard Caroline say you were going today.”

Mom was stirring a big pot full of macaroni and Erin was grating up a mountain of cheddar cheese. Erin looked at him sharply, taking in the sight of the Whoopee cushion, but Mom smiled at him and said, “We’re leaving right after lunch. Of course, you can come if you want.”

“Caroline and I are going, too,” Erin informed him bluntly, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t welcome to join them. Jay asking to go to the mall was highly suspicious behaviour.

“So?” Jay said.

Erin scowled at him. “Mom, don’t you need him to stay home and look after Maggie and Rob?”

“I’m sure your father and Simon would appreciate that, but really, between the two of them, I think they can handle the toddlers,” Mom said.

Jay was stunned to think about Simon doing anything so sociable as looking after his kid brother and sister with his father, but Erin didn’t comment on that, and only tried another tactic with Jay, “What do you need at the mall anyway?”

Jay hesitated and said, “Oh, I just need to return something, and then I have to… shop…”

“Shop?” Erin said, as if she’d never heard of anything so strange, “What do you need to shop for?”

Jay turned red. “I have to get a birthday present.”

“For who?”

Mom answered for him, “Jay’s going to Sandy Summerville’s birthday party in Dovecote next weekend.” She frowned at her son, having just noticed the Whoopee cushion. “Please tell me that’s not what you’re going to give her.”

Jay didn’t answer, but his blush told the tale.

Erin began to laugh, “You are so hopeless.”

Jay’s blush deepened. “What? I said I’m returning it and getting something else.”

“Why don’t you leave the gift shopping to me, Jay-bird?” Mom said, “I don’t mind—I’m sure Erin and Caroline wouldn’t mind staying a little longer than we planned.”

Erin was still laughing too hard to approve or disapprove of this plan.

Mom held out her hand to take the Whoopie Cushion, “Which store does that have to go back to?”

Jay turned away from her. “I changed my mind; I’m keeping it for myself.” He slapped Erin upside the head with it on his way out of the room.
*
When Jay got home from the Old Hall that evening, he found Erin and Caroline giggling in the living room. As soon as they saw their brother, their giggling increased dramatically in volume. “What’s the matter with you two?” he asked as he flung himself onto the couch.

“Nothing,” Erin said, “Mom, Jay’s home,” she called up the stairs.

“Did you show him what we picked out for the Dovecote girl?” Mom called down.

Caroline picked up a lump of a shopping bag from the floor beside the loveseat where she and Erin were sitting and tossed it at him, “Something for your true love,” she laughed.

Jay made a face at her. When he opened the bag and saw a bright pink sweater with red hearts embroidered all over it, his jaw tightened with anger. “I’m telling Mom and Dad you wasted money on another gag gift,” he barked at them.

“Who do you think paid for it, and it isn’t a gag gift,” Erin said.

“I’m not giving this to Sandy,” Jay got to his feet and flung it back in Erin’s face.

“But you have to,” Caroline practically sang, “It’s either that or the Whoopee cushion.”

Mom walked into the room and Jay immediately rounded on her with, “Mom, we have to go back to the mall and find something else for Sandy.”

Mom looked startled. “But Jay, your sisters insisted this sweater was the latest fashion and that she’d love it.”

“Oh, really.” Jay glared at his sisters, but he faltered. He didn’t really have any idea what the latest fashion was.

In the pause, Mom took the sweater from Erin and held it up in front of her, “Does it look like it would fit her?”

“No,” Jay said, gaining back his confidence that the sweater was ugly. Erin and Caroline had such impish grins, he knew not to trust them.

“She’s only a half a year younger than Erin. I think it’s fine,” Mom folded it up and put it back in the bag.

“Either we’re getting something else or I’m giving her the Whoopee cushion,” Jay insisted, with his arms crossed.

Erin and Caroline’s eyes swung back to Mom, as if they were watching a tennis match.

Mom’s lips got thin. “Well, Jay, it comes to this: I’m not driving back to the mall on a Sunday and there’s no time to go back during the week, so you’re either going to have to give her this sweater or else show up empty-handed.”

“Fine, I pick empty-handed,” Jay said.

“You cannot show up empty-handed at a birthday party, especially this one. What’s wrong with it anyway?” Mom was out of patience.

“What’s wrong with it is it’s the stupidest sweater that was ever made and those two know that,” he pointed at his sisters, “It looks like a frickin strawberry.”

“It’s cute,” Mom said.

“It really is, Jay,” Erin was making faces at him behind her mother’s back. Caroline joined in.

Jay stalked out of the room in disgust.

On his way out, his mother said, “I’ll wrap it up real nice for you.”

“I’m not giving it to her,” he shouted back.

“You like her!” Erin shouted. “I knew you did.”

“None of that, Erin,” Mom said.

Already halfway up the stairs, Jay didn’t dignify Erin’s accusation with a response. She was wrong. Jay didn’t know exactly why he cared so much about not giving the sweater to Sandy, but he knew it wasn’t because he liked her.

It couldn’t be.
*

Jay Belden had never felt so out of place in his life, as he did at Sandy Summerville’s birthday party.

He’d been thrown off his game right off the bat when he rang the doorbell and neither Sandy nor either Summerville parent answered the door. He was well-schooled in schmoozing parents of friends, but he didn’t know how to handle a sharp-eyed woman wearing an apron and a hairnet, raising her eyebrows at him while he fumbled to produce the word “hi.” The feeling-out-of-place got worse when he entered the house, wiggled out of his sneakers and kicked them into a row of exclusively feminine footwear that looked like a shoe store window display during prom season. As soon as he ducked into the front room, where the party was happening, he made a beeline for Alex, who was sitting on the other side of a large cluster of folding party chairs, holding a fancy little cup full of something pink and sparkling, and looking as relieved to see Jay as Jay was to see him. Jay weaved through the little mobs of girls in shimmering dresses, parked himself in the chair nearest to Alex, and muttered, “Am I ever glad to see you, Sash. Who are all these girls and why are they so clean?”

Alex raised his eyebrows at the last part of the question and only explained, “A lot of them are from our class at school.”

“No wonder I feel like an alien,” Jay said.

“You’re not the only one,” Alex told him.

Jay looked around and spied Sandy in another room separated from the first by a vast archway. She was wearing a frosty pink dress, complete with gloves and a thin tiara, but was nevertheless standing behind a white table, filling up the little cups with punch and lining them in neat rows. She waved hello to Jay but her smile had an uncertain quality to it, as worried about something. But apparently, for the moment, she couldn’t get away from her duties.

Within moments, Mrs. Summerville came over with her greetings and invited him and Alex to eat, and then Jay really put his foot in it, twice that he knew of. The cucumber sandwiches were so tiny, Jay had to take twelve of them to get a decent amount to eat (he refused to have anything to do with the salmon wraps). At the sight of this mountain of food on his tiny plate, at least three of the shimmery girls actually sniffed in disbelief. One of those sniffs had developed into a high, cold laugh. But at least Sandy wasn’t around to see. And then, Jay was already trying to forget what had happened with the pyramid of cream puffs he’d helped himself to. There was a grouchy girl somewhere in the room right now, walking around with no stockings on anymore because that stupid runaway cream puff had exploded when she stepped on it with her shoeless heel. There was also an apron-hair-net lady, a taller and skinnier one than the one who let Jay into the house, with sparks coming out of her ears because apparently it was an unforgiveable inconvenience to have to go and get the carpet cleaner, and take the soiled stockings away for laundering. Jay didn’t know why the stocking girl couldn’t have wiped off the stickiness and gone on with her day. The rule book here was foreign and unpredictable to him.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the party games were like homework. Jay guessed these were not the sort of people who went for things like a bean bag toss. Instead, there was a word jumble to riddle out (Alex skimmed over his copy but Jay’s fell on the floor and didn’t get picked up) and a Who Knows Sandy Best quiz, full of impossible questions like what was her favourite song. Jay kept looking at Alex’s paper, but even though Alex was playing along a little better than Jay, Alex admitted he was just making things up most of the time anyway. Neither boy won any of the prizes, and Sandy gave them a long, disappointed look.

Jay was annoyed. He couldn’t speak for Sash, but if she’d wanted not to be disappointed in him, she should have had the bean bag toss. He tried to catch Alex’s eye, to see how he was taking all this, but he was picking at his finger nails with single-minded determination.

But now that everyone was sitting and watching Sandy open her gifts, Jay had at least settled into the situation a little bit. The girls’ attitude towards him had morphed from cool surprise into subtle curiosity. Jay didn’t know if he had changed or them, but suddenly, he noticed that their glances had become interested, not criticizing. Maybe they had been all along, he wasn’t sure. A frizzy-haired girl in a blue sequined dress, with slightly broader shoulders than the others, had ventured a flirtatious comment. The other girls seemed to be calling her Danica.

Jay was still contemplating Danica’s profile when he heard Sandy say, very pointedly, as if trying to get his attention, “Thank you, Jay.”

“What?” Jay blurted, snapping his attention back to her, making giggles spread throughout the room. But then he realized she was thanking him because she’d just removed the card from the gift bag he’d brought and discovered the gift was from him. Now that she had his attention, she reached in to retrieve the gift. She was so weird. She had been thanking people for her gifts before she even knew what they were this whole time. It was a script she had to follow or something. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled, remembering that she’d thanked him.

He kept his eyes from the floor but he could tell by the ripple of shock and muttering that shot through the room that she’s unearthed his present. Alex, who was still sitting beside him, murmured, “I thought you said you were going to get her something else.”

Jay glanced at Sandy, who was now holding up the Whoopie cushion with her mouth open, and replied to Alex, “It’s really hard to shop for girls.” No one in the Belden family ever found out that Jay had dumped the entire gift-wrapped package containing the ugly sweater into the clothing donation box at Victoria and Spruce in Edenbridge last Wednesday. He was seen doing it by a couple of neighbours on Spruce, but all that resulted from that was a new sign going up on the box the next day saying, “Donations only. No garbage.”

The tittering was a long time in dying down. Danica was looking at Jay with a big grin. But Mrs. Summerville, who was sitting next to Sandy, looked at Jay with a mystified and disapproving expression. Sandy was quite red and the hand that was holding the Whoopee cushion had clenched into a fist. But her mother said, “Sandy, make sure you thank the young man.”

Oh, was Sandy ever mad. Jay was thankful there were so many people in the room, to prevent her from really reaming him out. She obeyed her mother with a face twisted up like she was eating a lemon, “Thank you so much, Jay. It’s really…very nice.” She kept her tone even and was clearly wrestling her face back into a smile. She succeeded, too. Jay was quite impressed. Then she passed the Whoopie cushion to the closest girl as if anxious to get it out of her sight. All the gifts were being passed around so everyone could get a closer look.

Jay took a second to ponder the way Sandy did whatever her mother told her to do, no matter how painful it was. He was leaning back to try and avoid being seen by Mrs. Summerville, whose disapproval was somehow worse than Sandy’s.

“Hey, Sandy, can I borrow that sometime?” Danica called, then looked right back at Jay to see if he appreciated her joke.

Jay smirked and bestowed a glance on her. Still leaning back, he now put his hands behind his head.

Sandy ignored Danica and moved on to her next gift, which her mother was already holding out for her to take.

“Oh,” Sandy said, doing a one-eighty from anger to pleasure, “It’s from Alex. Thank you,” she said as her gaze fluttered from Alex’s face and down again as she began to apply herself to undoing the wrapping paper Mrs. Newcastle had picked out and wrapped Alex’s gift in herself.

But very few of the girls even bothered to give Alex a glance while Sandy unwrapped his gift, and Jay might have been the only one who noticed that Alex was sitting up straighter than usual in his chair, and that his ears were slightly pink. Jay shifted around on his folding party chair and suddenly became very aware that Sandy was going to love the sliver-plated charm bracelet that Sash had picked out for her at the mall.

She did love it. Her raptures could hardly be contained. Jay was embarrassed to listen to her, but not as much as Alex. Alex looked like he wanted to hide behind his friend. The other girls were starting to exchange looks with each other the longer she went on. It was the longest moment of the entire party, and that was really saying something.

Sandy passed the bracelet around in its box, and then it received some exclamations of delight from most of the girls. But some of them were still taking it in turns studying the Whoopee cushion, which was still being passed around, and then studying Jay’s face.

When Sandy moved on to opening Lacey McGovern’s gift, Jay took a deep breath of relief and muttered to Alex, “Well, I’m glad that’s over.”

“I know what you mean,” Alex said, also keeping his voice down, “By the way, are you going to tell me what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“I mean what happened with the Whoopee cushion and why you didn’t return it and get her something else.”

“Well,” Jay carefully didn’t look at him, “I guess I didn’t know what else to get. I figured, at least I got her something, and there’s a pretty good chance she’ll just give it back.”

“Give it back?” Alex frowned. “I don’t know much about party etiquette, Jay, but I’m pretty sure you don’t give back a gift.”

He was both right and wrong. Sandy’s anger at Jay reappeared a few times, but the Whoopie cushion did not, that day. Jay didn’t see it again until it came out of Sandy’s shoulder bag next time the three of them were hanging out at the Old Hall. “Do you want this thing, Jay?” she asked as she dropped it like a snotty tissue on the desk, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “I think you know perfectly well I don’t.”

Jay had been killing time online, on the desktop computer, but he now looked at her with a grin. “I’ll get you two presents for Christmas, okay?” He pulled the gag gift towards himself.

“That’s okay,” she waved the offer away with her hand. The charm bracelet Alex had given her bounced around on her wrist. “I don’t need a joy buzzer or a squirting boutonniere or a rubber chicken, but at least I know what’s on your wish list.”

Alex had looked up from his sketchbook to enjoy the show. He said to Sandy, “I was guessing you already threw that thing out.”

But Sandy turned on him and said, “I prefer to give away anything that isn’t broken, and I don’t know what you’re smiling for, Alex, that cushion is going to be sputtering away under your bum next thing you know.”

But Jay took the Whoopee cushion home and used it on Simon a few times before the toddlers grabbed hold of it and it began turning up forever in their piles of toys. So, no one ever knew that it had actually gone to Sandy’s in a gift bag that day. When Erin cheekily asked Jay if Sandy liked her sweater, Jay just growled, “Shut up, Erin.” She soon found couldn’t get much of a rise out of him, and got bored of the subject.

Jay was not the sort of guy who reflected on his actions all that much, which is why it was surprising that he felt uncomfortable every time he thought about the birthday party for months. He hoped Sandy would get sick of her charm bracelet really soon – it was a constant reminder of that day, and she wore it all the time. It became necessary for him to concentrate sometimes on the fact that Danica had found some way to slip a little note into his jacket pocket at some mysterious point before he left the Summerville house that day, giving him all her social media handles. The memory of this puffed up his mood even if he had no intention of following her online, and he soon forgot her name.

Occasionally, he wished he could have a do-over of the whole thing.