Dating Big Bird Read Online Free Page A

dressed in black jeans and T-shirts on their way into the church of Dean & DeLuca or emerging from the ever-hip News Bar, holding white paper bags filled with black currant scones or lemon coffee cake or corn-carrot muffins. I myself was walking up University Place with my Starbucks coffee when I noticed a woman—tall and thin with long perfect legs coming out of khaki shorts—pushing a baby stroller toward me. When the light at the corner of Twelfth Street changed and she wheeled the stroller into the crosswalk and revealed the shit-eating grin of a blissfully happy mother, I knew immediately that I had seen that smile before. I just couldn’t remember where.
    And then it came to me.
    High school.
    At seventeen, Amy Jacobs had been everything I was not. And now, given the child in the stroller, at thirty-five she was obviously still everything I was not.
    Back then, she got straight A’s and was one of the most attractive girls in the school.
    I got straight A’s (except for math) and had one eyebrow that grew together.
    She was on the varsity field hockey team. And swim team. And gymnastics team.
    I was editor in chief of the literary magazine but was short several hundred thousand gym credits by senior year, which almost prevented me from graduating.
    She was popular with preppy girls and jocks.
    I was popular with the tough girls who kept trying to drag me into the bathroom and dunk my head in the toilet while flushing to give me a “swirlie.”
    She was dating the cutest nicest smartest boy in the school—well-adjusted adolescent poster-child Jonathan Glebe, a Robby Benson look-alike—advanced placement math, chemistry, French, and English; captain of the soccer team; managing editor of the school newspaper—whom she had been dating since ninth grade. At the end of senior year, they were both headed off to Princeton. And then, of course, they would get married and live happily ever after.
    I was not.
    I did not.
    And so far I had not.
    As you can see, I’d really made a lot of progress since the insecurity of my teens.
    I froze at the intersection without crossing. I hated moments like this:
to say hello or not to say hello
. Finally something—perhaps the baby—perhaps the fact that I knew, given my state of mind that particular day, that I couldn’t take another person asking me if I had a hud-band—tipped the scale of indecision and made me edge a little farther away to make my escape.
    But that was not to be.
    “Ellen?”
    I froze again.
    “Ellen Franck?”
    I feigned surprise, as if I hadn’t been caught trying to hurlmyself into oncoming traffic in order to avoid her.
    “Amy …?” I started. “Amy …”
    “Jacobs.”
    “Amy Jacobs.” I nodded hazily. “Of course.”
    “Brookline High School.”
    “Of
course
.”
    “Seventeen years,” she said, parking the stroller out of the line of foot traffic on the sidewalk and pushing down the wheel brakes. “You look great. And you still have great hair.” She rolled her eyes to call my attention to her short straight brown hair. “I always envied your hair.”
    Amy Jacobs used to envy my hair?
    I was shocked.
    Still, out of habit, I couldn’t resist pulling it out from the sides of my head like Bozo.
    “But
you
were the one with the perfect hair.” I let the hair drop and then tried, unsuccessfully, to comb my fingers through it.”
You
were the one with
wings
!”
    I said
you
as if I were accusing her of something heinous. Which I was: a happy adolescence.
    She rolled her eyes again. “Yours is thick. Mine’s too thin. Not to mention the bald spot.”
    I stared at her as she pointed to the front of her head, just above and to the right of her forehead.
    “Bald,” she said, giggling. “Bald, bald,
bald
.”
    I almost liked her right then and there.
    Who would have believed!
    Amy Jacobs going bald and making fun of herself!
    But then I remembered.
    Jonathan Glebe. Who, I’d heard from someone as miserable during high school as I was,