Ingrid’s Valentine
Penumbra Online/Fall 2021
“It’s not what it looks like,” Ingrid said to Jeremy as the two eighth graders stood outside Ingrid’s small brick house after their usual walk from school. They made their customary trade of her completed social studies homework for his completed math. All the while, Jeremy kept looking back at her house and yard.
Slightly taller than the teens, an army of blow up hearts formed a defensive across the front edge of the lawn, waving in the breeze. Inside the fortress, dead center of the lawn, eye-level inflatable Mickey and Minnie Mouses linked their puffy hands. To the right of the mice, another blow up, an electrified light up snow globe bursting with pink hearts. To the left, Betty Boop held an oversized heart-shaped box of chocolates. The house itself was strewn with cut out heart bunting, every window covered with different Valentine images - Cupids and bouquets of roses and silhouettes of couples kissing and Snoopys hugging hearts.
Speechless, Jeremy wandered away without as much as a goodbye.
#
Ingrid waited next to Jeremy’s locker. As he approached, her eye caught his and she smiled, to which he forced a similar expression. He knew people liked it when you smiled at them, or so his mother said. Jeremy noted that Ingrid wore a red turtleneck and her nubby fingernails gripping her English binder were painted a rather garish pink.
“Oh!” Ingrid said, noticing Jeremy noticing the nails, “I borrowed the nail polish.” Her face turned about as red as her nails..
“It’s really pink,” he said, all he could think of.
“Yes,” Ingrid looked down at her dirty white sneakers and then thrust her hand into her homework folder, pulling out a small red envelope which she pushed on top of Jeremy’s book pile. “Here,” she said, turning and walking away.
#
“Seems Ingrid Patterson gave you a Valentine,” his mother said, placing the rumpled envelope beside Jeremy’s cereal bowl. He removed the card which read Please Bee Mine! Ingrid. A bee flew around a heart shaped flower.
Jeremy smiled a small smile, then, feeling his mother’s eyes on him, an unexpected heat rose to his cheeks.
“Are you good friends with Ingrid?” his mother asked. Jeremy never told his mother about any friends, because he didn’t have any, and she never asked.
Was Ingrid his friend?
“I help her with her homework,” he said.
“Ah, I see. That’s nice,” his mother said, moving away from the table, calling back, “Those Pattersons are pretty strange.” With that sentence, Jeremy snapped into focus, conjuring Ingrid’s tangled hair, dirty sneakers, and the heaps of Valentine decorations on her house and in her yard.
“Strange how?” Jeremy asked his mother.
“Strange like not someone to be friends with strange,” his mother said, smiling her stiff, controlling smile, an expression Jeremy knew well.
#
His mother gave him her looser, ecstatic, my-son-might-go-to-MIT smile the next morning when Jeremy lied, telling her he joined the robotics club that met before school.
“Well, that’s wonderful, honey,” she said, “ I’ll get your breakfast.”
As he walked to the market, Jeremy thought about the place Ingrid held in his life. Without her, there would be no one at his locker when he left homeroom. Without her, he would eat alone. Without her, he’d have to spend countless hours filling in questions for social studies. Without her, he’d leave school alone. And now, without her, he would not have received one, single Valentine.
#
They usually didn’t see each other until after homeroom. She would not be expecting him. Jeremy grasped the knocker, pulling it up and down to bang bang bang on the door. Finally, he heard footsteps and someone yell Shut up! He jumped when the door opened and a haggard looking woman with pink lipstick and a stained robe opened up.
“Who’re you?” she burped.
Jeremy noted the wall of stacked newspapers and boxes piled up behind the woman, taking up all the space in what would normally be a front hall. “I’m, uh, is Ingrid-”
“Huh? Ah!” the woman held a cigarette up to her lips and took a long drag. Before the smoke was entirely exhaled, Ingrid appeared, pushing past with all her might, not acknowledging the woman Jeremy assumed was her mother.
“There’s my Miss Priss,” the woman said, laughing.
Ingrid’s face turned red. The door slammed behind her.
Jeremy, a little out of breath, held the plant with both hands, feeling the weight of his back pack. Ingrid’s eyes were watery, her eyebrows furrowed.
“That’s what I meant,” she said.
“By what?”
“The decorations, all the hearts and flowers. Love. La La.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s,” she nodded at her house, “not what it looks like.”
“Oh,” Jeremy said, “This is for you.” He handed her the plant, a violet.
“Wow. I love it. I absolutely love it,” Ingrid said, sniffling.
Jeremy turned toward school, prompting her to follow.
#
Later, after he went home to his neat as a pin house, after he let himself in through the side door, after finding his usual tomato sandwich on whole wheat his mother left in a Tupperware box in the fridge, after he watched his allotted episode of The Mandalorian, and after he went upstairs to his room to do his homework and read his PCs For Dummiesbook, he thought about the cold exterior, the emptiness of his own house, and how it really was how it looked.
Jeremy sighed. He thought of Ingrid’s messy house, how she sprouted from that mess, a beautiful flower. He hoped she could find a nice place to keep the violet he gave her, some small place where the sun shone through.
