Lorraine Rosenthal - Other Words for Love  

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2011 by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenthal, Lorraine Zago.
Other words for love / by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1985 Brooklyn, New York, sixteen-year-old artist Ari learns about
first love.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89692-7

[1. Coming of ageFiction. 2. Family problemsFiction. 3. ArtistsFiction.
4. SchoolsFiction. 5. Family lifeNew York (State)BrooklynFiction.
6. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R7194458Lim 2011 [Fic]dc22
2009053656

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v3.1

acknowledgments

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to those closest to me for their unwavering support; my deepest gratitude to my agent, Elizabeth Evans, for her dedication and enthusiasm; and my sincere thanks to all the people at Delacorte Pressespecially my editor, Stephanie Lane Elliottwho contributed their talents to this novel.

Contents

one

In 1985, just about everyone I knew was afraid of two things: a nuclear attack by the Russians and a gruesome death from the AIDS virus, which allegedly thrived on the mouthpieces of New York City public telephones.

My best friend, Summer, however, didnt worry about catching AIDS from a phone or anything else. She started kissing boys when we were twelve and wrote every one of their names in her diary, which had a purple velvet cover.

I didnt have a diary. I didnt need one because I had only kissed a boy once, in the Catskills during a family vacation between eighth and ninth grades. The Catskills boy was from Connecticut, and he turned on me after I kissed him. He claimed that I opened my mouth too wide and that I was only a four on a scale of one to ten in the looks department .

Dont get any ideas , he said. You Brooklyn girls bore me. And Im going home in two days, so well never see each other again .

That was fine with me. I wanted to pretend that the kiss had never happened. It wasnt what Id practiced on the back of my hand while imagining handsome faces from General Hospital and Days of Our Lives . None of those guys would have said I was only a four, and they definitely wouldnt have told me to watch where I was going after we bumped into each other at the breakfast buffet.

What are you doing in there ? my mother asked later, while I was brushing my teeth in our motel bathroom and hoping there werent any AIDS germs in my mouth. And I didnt tell Mom what had happened. Shed already warned me that bad things could hide in the most unlikely places.

Summer and I went to different high schools. I attended our local public school in Brooklyn, while she was a student at Hollister Prep, a fancy private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that charged tuition my parents couldnt afford.

Summers parents could afford it, but that wasnt why she transferred there after only three months at my school. It was because some girls were spreading rumors about her, inventing filthy stories about how she supposedly serviced the entire wrestling team and went down on their coach in his office. Summer Simon swallows that was what the girls wrote in bright red nail polish on a bathroom wall. Then they Scotch-taped Trojan Ribbed for Her Pleasure packets all over Summers locker. That made her cry.

I peeled them off while she sobbed into her hands. Forget it , I whispered. Theyre just jealous because all the guys like you .

This was hard for me to say, because I was jealous myself. But Summer stopped crying and even smiled, and I was sure that Id done something good. And she did lots of good things, toolike not ditching me after she started at Hollister and became a member of its popular crowd.

Now our sophomore year was over and Summer and I sat on folding chairs in my sister Evelyns backyard in Queens. Toys were scattered across the grass, and Summer rolled a Nerf ball with her dainty foot.

Eight whole weeks of vacation ahead of us, she said.

I nodded and looked at my nondainty foot. There was a callus on my heel and a scab on my ankle and I needed a pedicure, but Summer didnt. The sun bounced off her painted toenails and the long blond hair that was strategically highlighted around her pretty face. Her eyes were dark, she always wore flashy clothes, and she smelled of LAir du Temps. She hadnt been without a boyfriend since junior high. Her latest conquest was a Columbia University sophomore shed met last September whod taken her virginity by Halloween. Hes nineteen, so its illegal , shed told me in a giggly whisper the next day. Nobody can ever know .

I knew. And I was jealous. Since shed started at Hollister, everything had been so easy for her. She rarely studied, yet her name was a permanent fixture on the honor roll. She was good at math, she was a fashion expert, and she could recite the stats of every player on the Yankees. She lived as the only child in a palatial house in Park Slope. Even her name was perfect: Summer Simon, like a movie actress on a glitzy marquee.

I wondered if her parents had planned it that way, and I wished my parents had planned better. They should have known that guys would be more attracted to girls named Summer Simon than to girls named Ariadne Mitchell. I also wished that my mother was as interested in movies as she was in literature. It wasnt a smart idea to name me after some dusty old book by Chekhov.

But Mom was a reader. She had a masters degree in English and taught sixth-grade language arts at a public school. She thought my best friend was highly overrated. According to Mom, Summer was short, she was a shameless flirt, and she was totally manufacturedall dyed hair and makeup and fake nails. Mom said I had a much better figure than Summer because I was thinner and three inches taller, and Jetblack hair with light blue eyes is very rare. You can thank your father for that .

Ari, Summer said. Patrick is looking quite gorgeous today.

My attention shifted to Evelyns husband, who was barbecuing hamburgers at the opposite end of the yard.

Patrick was thirty years old and six feet tall, and he had blond hair and brown eyes like Summer. He also had a killer body. It was lean and muscular from lifting barbells in his basement and battling fires with the FDNY. Id had a crush on him since we first met. He and Evelyn had a son named Kieran, whose fifth birthday we were celebrating, and now my sister was pregnant again.

Youre so boy-crazy, I answered, because what else could I say? Could I tell Summer that I knew Patrick was gorgeous and that whenever I slept at his house, I would press my ear against the guest bedroom wall to hear him and Evelyn having sex? I knew that made me a pervert.

Take it easy, little sister, Patrick said when Mom and Summer and I were leaving, but he pronounced the last word sistah because he was from Boston. He also referred to the sprinkles on Kierans birthday cake as jimmies and he complained that it was wicked hot today. He always called me little sistah, and I grabbed every chance to make fun of his accent.

Theres an r on the end of that word, Patrick Cagney, I told him.