Best Frenemies (5 page)

The bell, signaling lunch, momentarily saved her from her wishy-washiness. But by the time Alice had gathered her things, smoothed down the skirt of her royal-blue dress, and gotten to the door, she could only just see the top of Cassidy's head as she and her friends sauntered down the hall to the cafeteria.

Alice made a decision:
I'm going to Cassidy's house. I'll get my homework done . . . eventually.
She picked her chin up and tried to do an impression of a confident
person, one who had time for both homework and friends.
At least I don't look like
her, Alice thought as she watched Nikki make a beeline for the door after class, her eyes staring at the ground.

I needed this,
Alice told herself, feeling the instant relaxation that came over her whenever she went over to Cassidy's house. She let herself sink in a little deeper into the soft, creamy white leather couch and took a moment to inhale—
aaah
.

Mrs. Turner was obsessed with good smells, and so each room in the house was a little treat for the nose. Depending on what Cassidy's mom was in the mood for, some days the kitchen smelled like apples (others vanilla), the powder room like fall potpourri (others baby powder), the living room like roses (others white musk), and Cassidy's room like lavender (other days patchouli), thanks to the candles, incense, and essential oils that Mrs. Turner tucked into the corners of the house. Alice wished her mom would embrace Mrs. Turner's philosophy of “Decorating with scent!” but the one time Mrs. Turner sent Alice home with a
cone of incense she had complimented (something that smelled ancient and spicy, like the inside of an old church), Mrs. Kinney had freaked.

“Is that
smoke
?” she had asked, seeing the tiny pillar of white emanating from Alice's desk.

“It's just incense, Mom,” Alice explained.

“Alice, you could burn the house down,” Mrs. Kinney said, and before Alice could protest, Mrs. Kinney grabbed Alice's glass of water and swept the innocent little cone into the water with Alice's ruler, creating a
hiss
sound and a dark cloud in the glass.

“Mom,”
Alice had said.

“I'll get you a new water,” Mrs. Kinney said. “And no candles or incense or whatever this is until you get your
own
house. And even then I think it's a bad idea.” Alice made do with some essential oil sticks she kept on her vanity stand, but it just wasn't the same without that quiet little plume of smoke keeping her company.

“Want to go upstairs?” Cassidy asked, walking out of the kitchen. “I've got refreshments,” she said, and waved around two yellow-and-blue plates laden with slices of Mrs. Turner's killer chocolate cheesecake.

“This is
so
much better than doing homework!” Alice said as they climbed the stairs to Cassidy's room. The wooden stairs were lined with a thick red carpet
that ran down the center, so Alice felt like a celebrity whenever they went upstairs.

“I can't believe how much homework you guys get,” Cassidy said as they entered her room. It was painted a deep midnight purple and decorated with huge black-and-white photos of Cassidy dancing, twirling and jumping and bowing confidently, like a queen accepting a crown. Alice wished her room looked as sophisticated as her best friend's. They arranged themselves on the black-and-white carpeted floor, propped up by huge teal throw pillows.

“What's up, Dingae?” called a voice from Cassidy's door. Alice looked up to see David, Cassidy's older brother, a tall and confident eighth grader with beautiful straight teeth newly revealed after a long and awkward bout with braces.

When they were little and would fight, David would call Cassidy a dingus, but when Alice was over and the two would play pranks on him during sleepovers (mostly dumb stuff like taping down the light switch in his bedroom or writing notes on the toilet paper in his bathroom), he'd refer to them as Dingus One (Cassidy) and Dingus Two (Alice), and he had decided that together they were Dingae. They hadn't played pranks on David in a long time, but he still used the nicknames,
which Alice secretly loved.

As an only child, Alice yearned to have someone in the house to talk to who wasn't her parents. Cassidy reassured her that having a big brother wasn't
all
that, but still, Alice suspected it was still pretty fun to have someone else around.

“We're just catching up on the day,” Cassidy said, holding her plate out of harm's way as David inched towards her with one finger out, pretending he was going to dig into her cake. “We have a rude-girl situation on our hands.”

“Rude-girl situation?” David asked. “You mean aside from the one I see right here?” He pointed at Cassidy.

“Oh, get out,” Cassidy said. “Don't you have some eighth-grade business to attend to?”

“Ah, yes,” David said. “Important matters. Top secret. I can't tell you about it. You may understand . . . some day. See ya, Number One and Number Two.”

“He's such a turd.” Cassidy sighed, settling into her pillows. She arranged her long legs, clad in leggings spotted with gold studs, in front of her and took a dainty bite of her cheesecake. Licking her fingers, she perused the notebook, which Alice had placed on the floor between them, raising her head and making comments about Alice's stories.

“Aaron really seems like a sweetie. We should see if he wants to go to the movies with you and me and Jesse sometime!” and “Did you see that necklace with the bow on it Christy was wearing the other day? I wanted it so bad!” Then she got to the most recent entry, with Alice's huge furious, angry writing about Nikki.

“Whoa,” Cassidy said. “Nobody makes my best friend mad like this! Let's talk.” She set down her plate in a let's-get-serious way, but before they could talk, the girls were interrupted by a tan-and-black blur that tore into the bedroom, yipping and snorting. It was Bagel, Cassidy's pet pug, who David must have let inside without giving any warning.

“
No
, Bagel,
no
!” Cassidy laughed as her dog tried frantically to eat the rest of her cheesecake. “Oh my goodness, he is such a little demon. But how could you not love a face like this?” she said, finally catching Bagel and holding his head still in her hand. Alice smiled politely. Just being around Bagel made her break out into hives, start sneezing, and get watery eyes. But on top of that, she secretly didn't think Bagel was so cute. His eyes were all bloodshot and bugged out of his head, and his face looked like a soda-pop can somebody had stepped on. His little butt had weird little patterns on it. Plus, he barked. All the time. Loudly.

“Oh well,” Cassidy said. “Out you go.”

To Alice's relief, Cassidy escorted Bagel outside and shut the door.

“This house is so ridiculous,” Cassidy said. “Too many distractions!” Bagel scratched and whined at the door, begging to be let in. “Bagel's like, ‘Are you
sure
you're allergic? Can you check again to see if we can have some fun?'”

“Sorry, Bagel!” Alice called at the door, and Bagel let out a little wet-sounding huffy growl. The girls laughed.

“Okay,” said Cassidy, once they could concentrate. “Finally. Tell me everything that happened today with Nikki.” So Alice went back over the day's events, from Nikki basically saying everyone was dumb during English, to her cold shoulder after class, to her shutting down Aaron Woolsey during biology.

One of the things Alice loved most about Cassidy was that she was such a great listener. The time Alice had informed Cassidy that her parents were taking her on a totally boring Civil War battle-site road tour during what was supposed to be a perfectly normal summer, she had widened her eyes so huge in disbelief that Alice could see the whites all around. She asked, “Are you being punished for something?” And Alice immediately cracked up. Cassidy always knew how to make Alice
laugh about something that seemed terrible at first.

The day that Alice complained to Cassidy that Mrs. Koshy was making her run laps in gym class for not showing enough “hustle,” Cassidy shook her head like she was a tired old woman and replied, “Mrs. Koshy wouldn't know hustle if it kicked her in the booty.”

When Alice and Cassidy did their post-Christmas rundown last year and Alice moaned about her aunt serving fruitcake and
nothing else
for dessert, Cassidy pursed her lips and grunted in disapproval (before sending Alice home with some leftover Christmas cookies from her family holiday).

She always made Alice feel like she was telling a really interesting story, instead of just griping about some girl in class. This particular time, with each story about Nikki's mean comments, cold shoulders, and dark looks, Cassidy widened her eyes twice, shook her head once, grunted twice, and finished with an “Oh no she didn't!”

“I can't believe she was so mean to you, not to mention that nice boy of yours,” Cassidy said. She was determined to get Alice and Aaron together, even though Alice had told her a million times it would never happen—this year, anyway.

“Well, he's not mine, remember,” Alice said. “But
yes. You should have seen his face, Cassidy—she was so mean!”

“You need to steer clear of that girl,” Cassidy said. “Don't talk to her—don't even look at her again. She's bad news.”

“I know,” said Alice, who was doing her best to carve her last bite of cheesecake into a thousand tiny bites in order to make it last.

“No, seriously, she's totally stuck-up,” Cassidy said. “In ballet on Monday we were working on this one routine, where you have to go like this—” Cassidy jumped up and demonstrated six or seven tiny precise moves.

“So it's pretty complicated, right?” said Cassidy. “On my second try, instead of going like
this
”—she crossed her ankles a particular way—“I went like
this
,” she said, doing what seemed to Alice like exactly the same move, but apparently wasn't.

“I mean, it was just practice, right?” said Cassidy. “But instead that girl Nikki says, ‘You're not supposed to do it like that! You're messing everything up! Blah blah blah!'” Cassidy stood with her heels together, rolling her eyes and using her hand as a puppet to imitate Nikki.

“That's awful,” Alice said. “Why couldn't she just say something to you quietly?”

“Or just let it go?” Cassidy said. “She's not Madame Bernard. She's not the teacher. She's not my mom. She's not the boss of me! I don't need her to tell me what I'm doing wrong. Especially not in front of everyone!”

“Maybe she wants to be a teacher someday,” Alice reasoned. “A mean one, like Ms. Garrity.”

“It was totally embarrassing,” Cassidy said. “Everyone was looking at me. And Madame Bernard was like, ‘Thank you, Nikki, for your gentle guidance,' and Nikki smiled, but I think Madame Bernard was sort of hinting to her not to be such a know-it-all.

“And,”
Cassidy said, “that's not even the end of it. She
still
is too good to hang out with us after class. I even made a point of asking her, ‘Nikki, do you want some pretzels and hummus?' but she just looked at me and said, ‘I have to go,' and left. No ‘thank you' or anything.”

“Would you even want to hang out with her after class?” Alice wondered. “Since she's so mean?”

Cassidy snorted. “Definitely not. But you'd think that maybe she could take five minutes to say, ‘Hey, Cassidy, sorry I was totally rude to you during class, I'm just having a bad day,' or something like that. It's like she totally hates being in class with all of us.”

“She seems so mad about everything,” Alice agreed.

“Maybe her brain is full of bugs,” Cassidy said. “Like, maybe a really angry spider crawled into her ear while she was sleeping one night and it laid eggs and now a hundred angry baby spiders are running around in there. And they're not just angry, they're pooping.”

“Oh my god!” Alice said, covering her eyes and laughing. “Cassidy, that's so gross.”

“The spider is gonna get ya!” Cassidy said, creeping towards Alice with a single finger stretched out. She poked Alice in the stomach, making her shriek. The girls laughed uproariously, making Bagel go nuts outside Cassidy's door, running around and yipping louder. Alice would never understand dogs.

“Oh, Nikki,” Cassidy said. “Why do you have to bring us all down?”

“Ah, let's not talk about her anymore,” Alice said. She felt so good right now. She had made the right choice to come over to Cassidy's.
I'll get my work done later,
she promised herself, and then instantly regretted even thinking about her homework, because it brought her happiness down just a few notches.

“Hey,” said Alice, nodding over at the flip camera resting on Cassidy's desk. “Let's make a movie.”

“Oh my god, we haven't done that in
so long
!” Cassidy said, jumping to her feet to grab the camera.
The girls spent nearly an hour narrating sketches they made up about the silly photos in fashion magazines.

“Hey, Susie, what on earth are you wearing?” Alice asked a photo of a model who was proudly strutting around in flowy floral pants under a white crocheted vest. It might have been fashionable somewhere else, like
Mars
, but it would never fly on the North Shore.

“I got it from my grandma!” Cassidy narrated on behalf of the model. “She's the coolest girl I know. She's eighty years old and her name is Agnes and sometimes when we're feeling feisty we eat mashed-up bananas together!” Alice put her hand over her mouth so she wouldn't laugh out loud during the take.

“What's going on with you, Petunia Poutyface?” Cassidy asked a model who looked out of the page sadly, wearing a cropped blue leather shirt and crunchy, side-swept hair, and sat on the floor with her feet twisted towards each other.

“I was so busy doing my hair today that I forgot how to walk!” said Cassidy in a baby voice.

“Um, also, where are your pants?” asked Alice.

“Silly girl, everyone knows that not wearing pants is the new pants!” said Cassidy.

“Looking ridiculous is the new looking awesome!” added Alice.

Mrs. Turner knocked softly on Cassidy's door and opened it. “Alice, honey? Your mom just called. She says it's time for dinner.”

“Ah, man!” said Cassidy. “Can't Alice stay for dinner?”

“She's always welcome, but not when her mom has cooked dinner for her already,” said Mrs. Turner. “And I heard it's lasagna night too,” she said, knowing Alice's favorite.