100 Days of Cake (11 page)

W
ant to go to the mall?” Elle asks.

“For serious?” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Are you suffering from heatstroke?” I'm only half joking. For the past few years, every time I've so much as used the word “mall” in a sentence, I've gotten a lecture about what awful corporate citizens the big stores are and about all the pollution generated by the industrial-strength chemicals they use to clean.

We're sitting in Elle's living room, divvying up the summer reading list for AP English (the one advanced class I didn't get kicked out of), and sweating. Elle could give you a whole presentation about how AC is destroying the world.

“I need a new bathing suit,” she says. “You probably do too.”

“For the ten millionth time, I'm not coming back to the team. I still can't even look at Coach Hartley.”

“I'm not talking about a practice suit but, you know, a fun suit.”

“What's a ‘fun suit'?”

She shrugs and tries to look nonchalant. “In case we want to go to the Y or something.”

“You want to go to the Y?”

This does not sound like Elle at all.

“Maybe,” she says. “It's been so hot out.”

I just arch an eyebrow.

“I'll drive.” Wasting fossil fuels for a trip that is completely within biking distance? This sounds even less like Elle.

“Who are you, and what have you done with my best friend?” I make an exaggeratedly confused face.

“Oh, come on.” She throws her copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
at me. “It will be fun.”

“Fine, the mall is air-conditioned.”

Ninety minutes later my butt is numb from sitting on a white plastic bench in the Fins and Grins Swimwear dressing area, watching Elle try on and dismiss nearly every two-piece bathing suit in the store. She keeps freaking out that all the tops make her look “flatter than a run-over rabbit.” She hasn't even mentioned that the swimsuit makers might
use animal by-products or employ sweatshop labor.

“And this one gives me less than no butt.” She tugs at the high-cut brief of a blue-and-red tankini.

“It looks good.” I try to sound convincing and supportive. Elle has adorable freckles and beautiful wide-set eyes, but the truth is that she doesn't really have enough in the boobs or the booty department to fill out the suits she keeps choosing. It's not the kind of thing that's ever bothered her before, and I wonder why she's obsessing about it now. “They have some really cute tops with a little ruffle on the front. Those might make you look a little boob-ier.”

Elle looks even more dejected.

When the buxom saleslady comes back and sees virtually every suit in stock on the floor of Elle's dressing room, she timidly suggests we try the juniors or girls department at Sears. Elle gives her the glare she usually reserves for people wearing fur or throwing cigarette butts into water sources. Violently Elle stabs her arms and legs back into her shorts and T-shirt. She looks like she might cry, and I remember that even though I'm the big blue bummer in therapy, it doesn't mean I've cornered the market on irrational teen angst.

“Umm, are you okay?” I ask.

“I'm fine. It's just, you know, not everyone in the world is a D-cup, and it would be nice if they could design a few suits for the rest of us that don't make us look like twelve-year-old boys!”

“Yeah. It's like, who makes these things, right?” I offer.

“Some sexist douche who completely objectifies women, that's who.”

“Definitely.” I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I change tactics. “Do you maybe want to get french fries or something? My treat?”

“Can the calories go straight to my tits?” she asks.

Laughing, I help put the suits back onto the hangers, and we head to the food court.

Elle is staring at the posted menus, debating which of the chain kiosks—Chick-fil-A, Sbarro, Arthur Treacher's—is the least environmentally damaging, when I catch a flash of familiar mahogany hair at the tables by the fountain.

My sister . . . in a little sundress that shows off all those curves Elle doesn't have.

She's with Chris Partridge and a couple of his friends from my grade—including Meredith “Hooters girl” Hoffman.

Of course. Chris's pool party two weeks ago is the reason why Elle and I are really at the mall looking at bikinis.

With her swimsuit-shopping PTSD, Elle definitely should not see this. Stealthily as I can manage, I try to shift her direction.

“You know, the crumb cake my mom is making tonight actually sounds pretty tight.” I steer Elle toward the door. “Maybe we should skip this and head home?”

“Don't worry. I'll still eat the cake for you,” Elle says absently. “That's the one good thing about having the metabolism of a rabbit on Adderall—”

That's when she notices Veronica. Elle's jaw drops pretty much to the floor like she's a Looney Tunes character.

“God, what is she wearing?” Elle says, equal parts disgust and envy. “I know that she's your sister, and women have the right to dress however they want, but she is seriously everything that's wrong with America.”

V's dress has a sweetheart neckline and spaghetti straps and looks like something Jennifer Lopez or Rachel McAdams might be wearing on the poster for a new romantic comedy. In her wedge sandals she's almost as tall as the boys. Gloss on her lips, a hint of mascara, and all that mink hair. She's radiant, throwing her head back, laughing at something Chris is saying. You can almost hear the peppy rom-com soundtrack playing behind her.

“I can't believe Chris would be interested in someone like Veronica,” Elle is saying, but I'm not really sure she's talking to me anymore.

The better question is, what guy
wouldn't
be interested in my sister? She's so amazingly luminous. And she's happy. Not force-yourself-to-get-back-out-there-every-now-and-then and fake-it-till-you-make-it happy, but really genuinely joyful.

Why isn't that me?

We have the same parents, the same DNA. We were
raised by the same gregarious go-get-'em mother. V and I are totally the nature
and the nurture
we learned about in freshman bio (back when I was an A student and paid attention to all of that crap). So why is V the way that she is and I'm the way that I am? How is that fair? How does that even happen?

All at once I want to talk to Dr. B. so bad that my hands are shaking. If he were here, he'd make a joke or say something to make me feel like I'm worth something, too. His cell phone number is tucked in my wallet. He did say anytime. . . .

But . . . Elle would give me crap about it crossing a line, and I'm so not having
that
fight with her again.

“I think I'm officially done with the mall forever,” Elle announces. Setting her hemp-weave satchel on a chair, she starts rummaging around for her keys.

While she's got her head buried—“How do I lose them every freaking time?”—a really bizarre thing happens.

Alex walks in. He's by himself and kind of glances around like he's supposed to meet someone. Not gonna lie, he looks really sexy in jeans and a vintage Nirvana T-shirt. Just seeing him calms me down a little, and I feel myself smile. How did he know Elle and I were going to be at the mall?

I'm about to jog over and invite him back to the model home for crumb cake, but then he gives a wave and a nod to someone else entirely.

Looking over, I see that it's Chris and V's group, which
I guess makes sense. He starts toward them and exchanges hellos with some of the guys and gives Meredith a quick hug that makes me a little crazy even if it doesn't look particularly romantic. But the strange thing is that he gives V a hug too, like they know each other in some capacity other than me just talking about him and FishTopia all the time. I mean, I guess they could have met at Chris's party after Elle and I left, but how weird is it that neither one of them said
anything
about it to me?

Then the whole group disappears into the Ruby Tuesday restaurant.

When they're gone, I almost can't believe it happened. I'm just staring off into the restaurant entrance, wondering if maybe I'm the one whose brain has finally melted from the heat.

I turn to ask Elle if she saw them too, but she's stopped searching for her keys and is by the garbage bins, yelling at some junior high boys in Air Jordans for not putting their plastic utensils in the right recycling bin.

Y
ou know how in those old Charlie Brown holiday specials, when the adults are talking, it just sounds like “Waa wa wa wa waa” to the kids? That's pretty much exactly what Mrs. Peck—this string-bean-thin college counselor who comes all the way from Orlando to get highlights done at Mom's salon—sounds like to me. We're at the dining room table (under the family portrait with Dad and his hands), and she's yammering on and on. I can tell that she's using words, some of which even seem vaguely familiar—“good,” “school,” “life,” and “plan”—but they don't go together in any way that makes sense to me. It's all just muffled trombone.

“Waa wa wa wa wa, SATs in September,” she's saying. “Waa wa wa wa, last chance.”

Next to me on the table in his plastic crabitat, Pickles is
lounging on the dollhouse couch. He pops out of his shell and gives Mrs. Peck a sideways glance (to be fair, his eyestalks kind of make all his glances seem sideways), and I'm convinced he's sizing up this big gap between her front teeth, wondering if he could slip right through.

“Waa wa wa probably state schools at this point, at least for now.”

Does Pickles have any aspirations toward higher education? What would his dream college be? He'd probably avoid any schools where the team is named after predatory birds, because getting eaten by the mascot would suck. Would he major in something practical like engineering—learn to design a better shell? Or perhaps he'd be frivolous and study theater or philosophy. I could see him digging into the whole “free will versus determinism” debate. (We had a unit on philosophy in European history last spring, and I thought it was pretty cool, even if I did get an F on the test because I spent the entire period drawing a king who looked like T.J. being hauled off to the guillotine.) Maybe Pickles would take some time off first, backpack around Europe for a few months, pick up bad accents from every country where he traveled, and grow some horrible facial hair somewhere between a goatee and beard, like Alex tried to do a few months ago.

Honestly, Pickles is probably too much of a homebody for any of it. “Why do I need to go anywhere?” he'd say.
“I've got everything I need right here in my shell.” Gotta love him.

“Since you seem to have quit all your extracurriculars”—Mrs. Peck is apparently still talking—“the SAT might just be your saving grace. It looks as though you were in the ninety-second percentile when you took the PSAT sophomore year.”