Dinah Forever

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Copyright

  For all my friends

  in the Class of 1972,

  North Plainfield High School,

  North Plainfield, New Jersey

  One

  Dinah planned to save Nick Tribble’s postcards forever. She would keep them under her pillow every night and read them over every day, for the rest of her life. Then, if she ever died, she would have the postcards buried with her in her grave. They could be neatly thumbtacked to the inside of the coffin, message side out, or maybe placed on her chest, just over her heart.

  There were two postcards, only two, from the whole entire summer, but Nick had told her before he left that he wasn’t good at writing. Lying on Mrs. Briscoe’s lumpy couch, flat on her back, as if posing for her coffin, Dinah read both cards over again for the hundred-thousandth time.

  The first card had come from London, England. On the front was a picture of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. On the back, Nick had written:

  Dear Ocean-River,

  I tried to get one of these guys to crack up, but I couldn’t do it.

  Nick

  “Ocean-River” was supposed to be a joke, because Dinah’s last name was Seabrooke.

  The second card had come from Stonehenge, England. On the front was a picture of huge slabs of rock, standing in a circle, pointing upward toward the sky. On the back, Nick had written:

  Dear Frizz Head,

  Don’t let one of these fall on you.

  Love,

  Nick

  Another joke, because Dinah’s dark hair was curly. But “Love, Nick” didn’t sound like a joke to Dinah at all.

  They were Dinah’s first postcards ever from a boy—and her first postcards ever from a boy who was supposed to be her boyfriend. But Dinah had hated Nick until almost the end of sixth grade, and then Nick had left with his family to spend the summer in England. So he hadn’t really been her boyfriend for more than three weeks total. Now seventh grade was about to begin on Monday, only two days away, and Dinah would see Nick again, for the first time in almost three months.

  Dinah looked at Mrs. Briscoe, sitting across the cozy, cluttered room in her straight-backed chair next to the window. Mrs. Briscoe was thin and delicate-boned, with quick, bright eyes and a crest of snowy white hair; she reminded Dinah of a small, friendly bird. She had been one of Dinah’s closest friends for almost a year, ever since she had become a client of Dinah’s mother. Dinah’s mother was an organization consultant, whose job was to help disorganized people get organized. Although Mrs. Briscoe was eighty-three years old, she didn’t feel like an extra grandmother; she felt like a real friend, but even better in some ways, because she had lived so long and knew so much about life.

  Dinah propped the postcards against the back of the couch, finding space for them amid Mrs. Briscoe’s jumble of faded patchwork pillows. “Do you think—” Dinah stopped, and then tried again. “I haven’t seen Nick in such a long time. He may have forgotten all about me.”

  Dinah hoped Mrs. Briscoe would laugh and say, “Forget you? How could he forget Dynamite Dinah?”

  Mrs. Briscoe laughed. “Forget you, Dinah? You and I both know that’s impossible.”

  Dinah was pleased, but not yet completely reassured. “Just because he remembers me doesn’t mean he’ll still like me.”

  Dinah waited for Mrs. Briscoe to laugh again and say, “To love Dinah once is to love her forever!” Or something like that.

  But this time Mrs. Briscoe got up from her chair and came to perch on the edge of the sofa next to Dinah. “I have a feeling Nick still likes you,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “But as far as that goes, you may not like him anymore. Sometimes a spring romance fades over the summer.”

  Dinah felt mildly annoyed. What did the season of a romance have to do with anything?

  “What season was it when you started dating Mr. Briscoe?” she asked. Mr. Briscoe had been dead for over ten years, but Dinah loved to hear stories about their long-ago courtship and marriage.

  “Spring,” Mrs. Briscoe admitted with a smile. “To this day I can’t see a crab apple tree in bloom without thinking of Eddie, bringing me an enormous, messy bouquet of blossoms for my room.”

  “See?” Dinah asked. “And how long were you married?”

  “Fifty-one years,” Mrs. Briscoe said.

  “See?” Dinah said again. She felt somehow that she had proved something about herself and Nick. Not that Nick had ever brought her flowers. But he had kissed her.

  “Do you remember the first time Mr. Briscoe kissed you?” Dinah asked.

  “Oh, my, yes,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “But of course we were already engaged. Back then a fellow didn’t kiss a girl unless he planned on marrying her.”

  “Oh,” Dinah said. Well, things were different now. But even nowadays, she didn’t think a boy would kiss a girl—seven times—unless he planned to keep on liking her for a long, long time. At least she hoped so.

  * * *

  Back at home that afternoon, Dinah was reading Nick’s postcards over again when the telephone rang. Dinah snatched up the receiver on the second ring.

  “Ocean-River! I’m back! It’s me, Nick!”

  As if anyone else called Dinah Ocean-River.

  “Hi,” Dinah said, trying to keep her voice calm and casual.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then Nick said, “So.”

  “So,” Dinah echoed.

  “So when we drove in from the airport last night, we passed that carnival thing down by City Hall. Do you want to go?”

  “Sure.”

  “Like tonight? After supper? Like at seven o’clock?”

  “Okay.”

  “See you then, Frizz Head.”

  It felt good to be correcting Nick again. “My hair isn’t frizzy, it’s—”

  “Curly.” Nick finished the sentence for her. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” Dinah said.

  Ha! Nick wouldn’t have called her if he didn’t like her. Or asked her to go to the carnival with him, just the two of them, like a date. Or called her Ocean-River and Frizz Head. This hardly sounded like a spring romance that had faded over the summer.

  Dinah ran downstairs to tell her parents that Nick had called. Her mother sighed. Her father grinned. Her eighteen-month-old brother, Benjamin, looked at her solemnly, his thumb jammed in his chocolate-rimmed mouth.

  Dinah called her best friend, Suzanne Kelly, and she and Suzanne analyzed the phone conversation syllable by syllable.

  “He still likes you,” Suzanne agreed. “I’d say he still likes you a lot.”

  Then, after a quick salad supper, Dinah took a cool shower and debated with herself what she should wear, even though she and Suzanne had spent ten minutes on the same question not an hour earlier. Finally Dinah put on the cutoff shorts and Ocean City T-shirt that Suzanne had recommended.

  She studied herself in the mirror. She looked the
same. Would Nick look the same? What would she say to him? What would he say to her? She tried to recall the kinds of things they had said to each other last spring. They had teased each other, and debated capital punishment together, and Nick had kissed her those seven times. They must have had regular conversations, too, but about what?

  Dinah honestly couldn’t remember. But she had probably told Nick many of her amazing and entertaining stories. Dinah was the kind of person who always had a story to tell. It wasn’t bragging to say this, because it happened to be true. And Nick had probably laughed, the way Suzanne and Mrs. Briscoe and her parents always laughed. She could imagine him now, shaking his head with amused disbelief, saying, “You’re something else, Ocean-River!”

  Dinah thought back over her summer. She could tell Nick about the talent show she and Suzanne had put on at the nursing home. But that was a braggy story, because one of the old ladies there had called Dinah “the next Sarah Bernhardt,” and afterward Dinah had found out that Sarah Bernhardt had once been the world’s greatest actress. Maybe Dinah wouldn’t tell Nick that. She didn’t want him to think she was showing off.

  But she definitely could tell him the story about how loud she had screamed in the haunted house at Ocean City. Or about the time she had baby-sat Benjamin for an hour, and he had emptied an entire box of crumbled saltine crackers all over her parents’ bed. Or how she had walked across a river on a log during one of their family camping trips and had almost lost her balance and fallen in and drowned. It’s true that the stream had been very shallow, but you can drown in a bathtub if you aren’t careful.

  The doorbell rang.

  Dinah’s heart stopped beating.

  “Dinah!” her mother called. “Nick is here!”

  Dinah started downstairs. Sure enough, there he was, her supposed real live boyfriend, standing in front of the window.

  “Hi,” Dinah said.

  “Hi,” Nick said.

  Dinah stole a look at him. Same dark hair, same square glasses, same quick grin. He had grown taller over the summer. She met Nick’s eyes. He was observing her just as she was observing him.

  “Do you still want to walk over to the carnival?” Nick asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Dinah said, trying not to show how nervous she felt.

  She called good-bye to her parents and Benjamin, and she and Nick headed out the door.

  * * *

  The Riverdale summer carnival was held in the parking lot next to City Hall, a quarter of a mile or so from Dinah’s house. Dinah wondered if Nick would hold her hand as they walked there, but he didn’t, and she was just as glad. It was too hot for holding hands. The Maryland sun, even in the evening, was sweltering as she and Nick hiked up the steep hill to the heart of town.

  Dinah quickly reviewed her summer stories again. She would begin with “The Scream at the Haunted House.” It even had a great title. But before Dinah could deliver the opening line, Nick broke the silence himself.

  “I went punting on the river in Oxford,” he told Dinah. “You know, where the big, famous university is? A punt is a kind of boat, sort of like a rowboat but flat-bottomed, and instead of oars you use this big, long pole that you stick down in the bottom of the river to push the boat along. Well, I dropped the pole by mistake, and it floated away out of my reach, so finally I had to jump out of the boat and swim to get it. A bunch of tourists stood on the banks and cheered.”

  Dinah couldn’t help being impressed, but she felt jealous, too. She had never been to England. She had never been farther away from Maryland than Williamsburg, Virginia. And she had never been cheered by a crowd.

  “That’s really great. Well, Suzanne and I went to the haunted house at the boardwalk in Ocean City. The scariest part in it is when you walk through this long dark hallway at the end, and then all of a sudden this skeleton jumps out of a closet right in front of you. Well, the man who runs the haunted house said that in all his seventeen years in business, no one had ever screamed louder than I did when the skeleton jumped out. When Suzanne and I went back a week later, he said his ears were still ringing.”

  Dinah waited for Nick to ask for his own personal screaming demonstration.

  Instead, Nick only said, “Wow! Oh, another really wild thing that happened: I rode on a double-decker bus all by myself in London, and the bus broke down by Piccadilly Circus, and it took me four hours to find my way back to our bed-and-breakfast and by then my parents had called the police.”

  Dinah wasn’t even a little bit impressed this time. Anybody could get lost. Even Benjamin could get lost.

  She plunged ahead without comment. “We put on a talent show for Mrs. Briscoe’s friends at the nursing home—you know, the place she stayed last fall when she broke her leg. It was me, and Suzanne, and Greg, and Blaine, and a couple of other kids. I recited three really long poems.”

  Dinah hadn’t meant to add the next line—in fact, she had meant not to add it—but she heard herself saying, “One old lady called me ‘the next Sarah Bernhardt.’”

  “Who’s Sarah Bernhardt?” Nick asked.

  Dinah tried to sound modest, but it was difficult. “The most famous actress who ever lived. The greatest actress in the history of the world.”

  They reached the carnival. It wasn’t a very big one—just a small Ferris wheel and a couple of other rides, a row of booths where you could play games to win huge stuffed animals, and a row of booths that sold popcorn and ice cream and cotton candy and fresh-squeezed lemonade. Nick bought two ice-cold lemonades, and Dinah bought an enormous tub of hot buttered popcorn to share. They kept on walking and talking as they ate.

  Halfway through Nick’s fourth story about his adventures in England, Dinah had pretty much decided that this was one spring romance that couldn’t fade fast enough to suit her. Dinah had the feeling that Nick had barely listened to her stories. Of course, she had barely listened to his stories. But other people’s trips, frankly, weren’t very interesting. Dinah’s father still complained about the time her uncle had shown them three hours of slides from his cruise to Alaska.

  Dinah and Nick bought tickets to play some of the games. They both hurled balls at a moving target and missed. They both swung a huge mallet on the Strength-o-Meter. Neither of them rang the bell, but Dinah scored Pretty Pathetic, while Nick scored Muscle Man.

  Then they each got a slice of cream pie to throw in a clown’s face. If you hit the clown through the small hole framing his face, you could win a stuffed bear bigger than Benjamin.

  “You go first,” Nick said, “pathetic one.”

  Dinah knew Nick was teasing, but she didn’t find his remark even the slightest bit amusing.

  “You go first,” she said, “braggy one.”

  Nick stopped. “Wait a minute. I didn’t say I was a muscle man. The Strength-o-Meter said I was a muscle man.”

  “I’m not talking about that,” Dinah said. “I’m talking about everything else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like England, England, England, England, England. How you saved the Tower of London from burning. How you had a private audience with the queen.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Nick said. “The next Sarah Somebody, the greatest actress in world history, thinks that I’m bragging?”

  If Dinah hadn’t had a slice of coconut cream pie, thick with whipped cream, right in her hand, the quarrel might have ended differently. She wouldn’t have gone out of her way to hurl a slice of pie in Nick’s smirking face. But she did have a piece of pie in her hand, and Nick’s smirk was only five feet away.

  Dinah hesitated only a moment. Then she let the pie fly. She didn’t linger to see what Nick might decide to do with his piece of pie. She turned and ran. Nick didn’t run after her.

  Dinah didn’t know whether she felt angrier with Nick or with herself, for ever having liked him. She did know that when she got home, she was going to tear Nick’s two postcards into a million tiny pieces.

  Two

  Dinah’s par
ents were sitting together in the family room when she arrived home from the carnival. It was pleasantly peaceful in the house, with Benjamin in bed.

  “You’re back early,” her mother said. “You’re all flushed. You haven’t been running, have you? Not in this heat.”

  “Where is young Nicholas?” her father asked.

  Her parents looked at each other, bewildered. Then Dinah saw comprehension dawn in their faces.

  “Ah-ha,” Dinah’s father said. “A lovers’ quarrel.”

  Dinah glared at him. “Nick and I are not lovers, and we didn’t quarrel.” It wasn’t a quarrel, really, when you threw a piece of cream pie into someone’s face. It was more like the first strike in a nuclear war.

  “Don’t tease her, Jerry.” Dinah’s mother moved over on the couch to make room for Dinah next to her. “Do you want to tell us about it?”

  As a matter of fact, Dinah did. She had to admit that it was one of her better stories, right up there with all the wonderful summer stories that Nick hadn’t even wanted to hear. But for some reason, she felt near tears when she was finished.

  “Oh, Dinah,” her mother said. “That doesn’t sound like a very constructive way to resolve a disagreement.”

  “I didn’t really mean to throw it,” Dinah said. “It’s almost like it threw itself.”

  “Maybe if you apologized to Nick,” her father said. “Take him another piece of pie tomorrow. Kind of like a peace offering.” He seemed pleased with this suggestion.

  “I’m not apologizing to anyone,” Dinah said. “If I gave Nick a piece of pie, he’d throw it in my face. It’s just over, that’s all.”

  Her father grinned.

  “It is. Sometimes things are, you know.” Dinah swallowed hard. Her own words sounded so bleak and final.

  “Well, maybe it’s for the best,” her mother said. “You and Nick—in some ways you’re so much alike, maybe too much alike. There were bound to be some stormy times, sooner or later.”

  Dinah thought this over. Were she and Nick too much alike? They hadn’t seemed very much alike half an hour ago: Nick had only been interested in talking about Nick, while Dinah had been much more interested in talking about Dinah. Though maybe that was a way of being alike, after all.