Paradise Read online

  Unexpectedly, Meredith felt the hot sting of tears behind her eyes. “It feels,” she said, “pretty nice.”

  “Do you think we could be roommates?”

  Meredith nodded, her face beginning to shine.

  Several yards away, a group of girls who were eating their lunches together looked up and stared: Lisa Pontini—the new girl in school—and Meredith Bancroft—the weirdest girl in school—had suddenly stood up, and they were crying and laughing and hugging each other, jumping up and down.

  6

  The room Meredith had shared with Lisa at Bensonhurst for four years was cluttered with packing boxes and half-filled suitcases. Hanging on the closet door were the blue caps and gowns they’d worn at the commencement ceremony the previous night along with the gold tassels that indicated they’d both graduated with highest honors. In the closet, Lisa was putting sweaters into a box; beyond the open door of their room, the hall was filled with the unfamiliar sound of male conversation as fathers, brothers, and boyfriends of departing students carried suitcases and boxes downstairs. Meredith’s father had spent the night at a local inn and was due in an hour, but Meredith had lost track of time. Overcome with nostalgia, she was flipping through a thick stack of photographs she’d taken from her desk, smiling at the memories each one evoked.

  The years Lisa and she had spent in Vermont had been wonderful ones for both of them. Contrary to Lisa’s original fear that she would be an outcast at Bensonhurst, she’d soon established herself as a trendsetter among the other girls, who regarded her as daring and unique. In their freshman year, it was Lisa who organized and led a successful raid on the boys at Litchfield Prep in retaliation for their attempted panty raid on Bensonhurst. In their sophomore year, Lisa designed a stage setting for Bensonhurst’s annual school play that was so spectacular, pictures of it made the newspapers in several cities. In their junior year, it was Lisa who Bill Fletcher asked to Litchfield’s spring dance. Besides being the captain of Litchfield’s soccer team, Bill Fletcher was also fantastically good-looking and very smart. On the day before the dance, he scored twice on the field and once again in a nearby motel, where Lisa gave him her virginity. After that momentous event, Lisa returned to the room she shared with Meredith and cheerfully revealed the news to the four girls who had gathered there. Flopping onto her bed, she had grinned and announced, “I am no longer a virgin. You may feel completely free to ask me for advice and information from now on!”

  The other girls obviously regarded that as yet another example of Lisa’s intrepid independence and sophistication, because they laughed and cheered, but Meredith had been worried and even a little appalled. That night, when their friends left, Meredith and Lisa had their first real quarrel since coming to Bensonhurst. “I can’t believe you did that!” Meredith had exploded. “What if you got pregnant? What if the other girls spread it around? What if your parents find out?”

  Lisa had reacted with matching force. “You’re not my keeper and you’re not responsible for me, so stop acting like my mother! If you want to wait around for Parker Reynolds or some other mythical white knight to sweep you off your feet and into bed, then do it, but don’t expect everyone else to be like you! I didn’t buy all that purity crap the nuns fed us at St. Stephen’s,” Lisa continued, flinging her blazer into the closet. “If you were stupid enough to swallow it, then be the eternal virgin, but don’t expect me to be one too! And I’m not careless enough to get pregnant—Bill used a condom. Furthermore, the other girls aren’t going to say a word about what I did, because they’ve already done it! The only shocked little virgin in our room tonight was you!”

  “That’s enough,” Meredith interrupted stonily, starting over to her desk. Despite the surface calm in her voice, she was squirming with guilt and embarrassment. She did feel responsible for Lisa because she was the one who’d brought her to Bensonhurst. Moreover, Meredith already knew she was morally archaic, and that she had no right to inflict restrictions on Lisa simply because they’d somehow been inflicted on herself. “I didn’t mean to judge you, Lisa, I was worried about you, that’s all.”

  After a moment of tense silence, Lisa turned to her and said, “Mer, I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” Meredith replied. “You were right.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” she said, looking at Meredith with pleading and desperation. “It’s just that I’m not like you, and I can’t be. Not that I haven’t tried now and then.”

  That admission wrung a grim laugh from Meredith. “Why would you want to be like me?”

  “Because,” Lisa said with a wry smile, then she mimicked Humphrey Bogart and said, “you’ve got class, baby. Class with a capital K.”

  Their first real confrontation ended with a truce that was declared that same night over a milk shake at Paulson’s Ice Cream Shoppe.

  Meredith thought about that night as she looked through the photographs, but her reminiscences came to an abrupt halt as Lynn McLaughlin poked her head into the room and said, “Nick Tierney called on the pay phone out in the hall early this morning. He said your phone in here is already disconnected, and that he’s going to stop by in a little while.”

  “Which one of us did he call to talk to?” Lisa said. Lynn replied that he’d called for Meredith, and when she left, Lisa plunked her hands on her hips and turned to Meredith with a mock glower. “I knew it! He couldn’t take his eyes off you last night even though I practically stood on my head to make him notice me. I should never have taught you how to wear makeup and pick out your clothes!”

  “There you go again,” Meredith shot back, grinning, “taking all the credit for my meager popularity with a few boys.” Nick Tierney was a junior at Yale who’d dutifully come here to watch his sister graduate yesterday, and had dazzled all the girls with his handsome face and great build. Within minutes of setting eyes on Meredith, he’d become the one who was dazzled, and he made no secret of it.

  “Meager popularity with a few boys?” Lisa repeated, looking fantastic even with her red hair pinned into a haphazard knot atop her head. “If you went out with half the guys who’ve asked you in the last two years, you’d break my own record for dedicated dating!”

  She was about to say more, when Nick Tierney’s sister tapped on the open door. “Meredith,” she said with a helpless smile, “Nick is downstairs with a couple of his friends who drove up from New Haven this morning. He says he’s determined to help you pack, proposition you, or propose to you—whichever you prefer.”

  “Send the poor, lovesick man and his friends up here,” Lisa said, laughing. When Trish Tierney left, Lisa and Meredith regarded each other in silent amusement, opposites in every way. Completely in accord.

  The past four years had wrought many changes in them, but it was in Meredith that those changes had been the most dramatic. Lisa had always been striking; she’d never been hampered with the need for eyeglasses or cursed with baby fat. The contact lenses Meredith bought with her allowance two years before had eliminated her need for glasses and allowed her eyes to come into prominence. Nature and time had taken care of all the rest by giving an emphasis to her delicately carved features, thickening her pale blond hair, and rounding and narrowing her figure in all the right places.

  Lisa, with her flaming curly hair and flamboyant attitude, was earthy and glamorous at eighteen. Meredith, in contrast, was quietly poised and serenely beautiful. Lisa’s vivaciousness beckoned to men; Meredith’s smiling reserve challenged them. Whenever the two girls went places together, males turned to stare. Lisa enjoyed the attention; she loved the thrill of dating and the excitement of a new romance. Meredith found her recent popularity with the opposite sex curiously flat. Although she enjoyed being with the boys who took her skiing and dancing and to their parties, once the newness of being sought after wore off, dating boys for whom she felt no more than friendship was pleasant, but not as wildly exciting as she’d expected it to be. She felt that way about being kissed too. Lisa attributed all that to the fact that