Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along) (3 page)

It's not my fault that no one ever tries to get me back. Anyone can pull pranks, but no one else ever does it. And
now, I was sure that Ava and Bailey were probably whining about me.

It's not like I wanted to be buddy-buddy with the other random kids who were dragged along on their parents' work trips, but I also didn't have any other friends here. And August was a long month to spend on my own.

For the first time in a very long while, I felt the tiniest bit lonely.

B
efore I got even halfway
back up the path to our ramshackle Cardinal cabin, I turned and marched back down the hill.

People have no right to talk about me without me being a part of it. I don't like not knowing what's being said. If they were going to talk about me, I had a right to listen. I needed the ammo to retaliate.

I stepped off the main path, squeezing between a grove of newly planted trees and a huge, hollowed-out one that looked like it had fallen and been left to rot at least half a century ago. The log was teeming with insects and covered in moss. It was the sort of place raccoons might hide out during the day, before they came out to hunt twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-olds at night.

I shivered. The idea of rabid raccoons gave me the creeps, so I hustled through the brush. I carefully picked my way over stumps and around a pile of tiny little animal pellets—
ew!
—until I could hear voices and see the lake shining through the trees ahead. Let me just clarify now that the lake had a
dull
shine. This was not a body of water that deserved its own postcard or even an ugly amateur photograph in some hoity-toity local art gallery. I don't even think our school librarian would consider this a lake that would be worthy of her odd collection of photo coffee mugs. It was full of weeds and had a sort of green sheen to it that made it look like it was possibly full of disease. It probably was.

Coco squirmed in my arms, whining to get down. I kissed her fuzzy ears and whispered, “Promise you won't bark and give me away?” Coco looked at me, then licked my nose. It surprised me enough that I giggled. “That's good enough. I trust you.” I set her on the ground and continued to walk, slowly, toward the beach.

I could hear my dad's loud laugh echoing toward me from the dock, and my shoulders slumped. Dad never laughed like that with me anymore. He never had time to do anything fun anymore, and he hardly ever joked around the way he used to—at least, not with me. With his coworkers and his “team,”
he always pretended to be this easygoing Mr. Cool Guy. At home, though, Dad's stressed out all the time. It annoys me that strangers get to see the fun side of Dad that he used to save for me—even if it's all for show. In some ways, Mom's (not-so-secret) stranger anxiety is better than the way my dad acts. At least she's not being fakey with people.

As I picked my way through scratchy bushes and thick piles of dead leaves—
ow!
—I crouched down low so none of the kids gathered on the beach could see me. After a few more shaky steps, I sat down on a low rock that made a perfect snooping stool. I listened closely for Bailey's loud, gasping laugh or Ava's squeaky voice. I knew I had to be close.

Coco crawled onto my lap, and her eyes drifted closed. Her little body shuddered, then she sighed and fell fast asleep. “It's like you haven't been sleeping for the last five hours,” I whispered.

Suddenly, the sound of girls' laughter put me on high alert. I couldn't see them, but I knew Ava and Bailey and the others were less than ten feet away from me, just on the other side of a thick mess of wild blueberry bushes.

I held my breath, suddenly worried I'd be caught. It wouldn't look good if they found me hunched over here, crawling through brambles. I could say I lost a headband?
Needed wood for . . .? Oh! I'm hunting for blueberries! I knew I could come up with something if I needed to, and at the moment, all I could think about was how much I
needed
to know what Ava and Bailey were going to say about me. Knowledge is power, my dad always says, and in the case of gossip it's always the truth. I was sort of the master at figuring out how to use people's words against them, and I intended to do just that. If necessary, of course.

“Impossible,” someone said. The voice sounded like the cute guy, the one who'd made fun of me! Lobster Boy. “She didn't do that.”

“Not a lie,” Bailey said, laughing her donkey laugh again. If only she could figure out how to close her mouth before she took a breath, she wouldn't sound like a farm animal. “Pinkie swear.”

Pinkie swear? I rolled my eyes. What was she, six?

Bailey continued. “I was there. Really! It happened.”

They
were
talking about me! I was sure of it. I grinned, realizing that it was pretty cool that Lobster Boy sounded so impressed. Maybe he'd be worth my time after all.

“Prove it,” Lobster Boy said. I heard a shuffling sound, and suddenly his messy hair was bobbing above the brush line just a few feet away—he'd stood up! If he turned around,
I'd be caught snooping, for sure. I tried to slink down, burying myself deeper in the brush, but Coco stirred on my lap when I moved. So I stayed as still as I could and hoped no one would see me lurking in the bushes. What if they thought I was hiding back here, peeing in the woods or something? Oh, the humiliation.

Suddenly, Bailey stood up right beside Lobster Boy. I wondered what she was going to show him to prove what I'd done. . . . Was she going to try to demonstrate how I'd stolen their swimsuits? Or maybe she'd recite one of the poems? Oh! This was getting better and better. I loved hearing how other people told stories about me.

Before I could wonder any more, Ava leapt up and ran into the water. She jogged out until the water was about thigh-deep, then dove under. Everyone else stood up to watch her. Bailey reached down and grabbed a little Flip video camera, pointing it in the direction of whatever was going on in the lake. I had to crane my neck to try to see what was happening, which was tricky since there was this huge branch in the way. After almost half a minute had passed, Ava resurfaced right by a buoy that was way out in the lake.

“Told ya!” Bailey cried. She jumped up and down with her camera, cheering for Ava. “Woo-hoo!”

“That is seriously impossible,” Lobster Boy called loudly. “I'm impressed.”

Impressed by a girl who can hold her breath and swim for twenty whole seconds?
What?
If I'd done something that lame with my friends, they would have laughed so hard Heidi would be crying. Apparently, though, Lobster Boy was easily impressed. Maybe he wasn't quite as cute as I'd been giving him credit for.

That's when I realized that they maybe
hadn't
been talking about me at all. . . . Was it possible that they'd been talking about Ava's stupid water tricks the whole time? When were they going to talk about me? Surely, they were
going
to talk about me.

But I listened for a while longer, waiting to hear my name. Still nothing. All they talked about was their “amazing” swimming challenges, and about something dorky called Canoe Wars. Finally, I realized I was eavesdropping on the most boring conversation in the history of time. Okay, maybe that was sort of exaggerating—but this was definitely close to the most boring conversation ever. It was the most boring conversation
I'd
ever heard. So how lame did it make me that I was actually
listening
to it? That I'd climbed over animal poo (excrement!) to listen to it?

I stood up, holding Coco tightly so she wouldn't squirm as I escaped my hiding spot. I picked my way over branches and past the dead tree, walking faster and faster until I was back at my so-called cottage again. What a waste of time! Annoyed, I kicked at the bottom of the door and watched as it rattled. I felt foolish for wasting my time snooping on people who obviously had nothing interesting to talk about. What if I'd been caught? I shuddered at the thought that
these
people might judge me, then pushed open the door to the cabin and stormed inside.

I hadn't gotten a good look at the Cardinal cabin when we first arrived, because my dad had been so busy hustling me down to the lake to make first impressions. I should have just stayed back, since my first impression didn't go at all the way I would have liked. As Coco found her bed in the corner by the door, I scanned the dimly lit room. The living room was separated from the kitchen by a wall of low-hanging cabinets. Someone had scratched something totally inappropriate onto the back of one of the cabinets. Another someone had made the bad choice to paint over the scratching . . . which made it look like the crude word was an unframed work of art hanging on the living room side of the cabinet wall.

All the walls and furniture in the tiny cabin were wood,
which made it seem a little more cottage-like. But the whole place also just looked uncomfortable, like I was going to get splinters in my butt every time I sat down to look through a magazine. There was nowhere to flop—I would have happily traded Lobster Boy for my fluffy rug from home—and nowhere to curl up. I had a feeling I'd be spending a lot of time alone, planted in one of these splintery seats, unless some miracle happened and I suddenly wanted to hang out with two of the biggest nobodies from my school. And it wasn't like that was going to happen. Even if they came crawling back to beg me to hang out with them.

I peeked into the bathroom, which was small and rustic (meaning “old”). The sink was so tiny I could hardly fit both hands inside the basin, and the toilet had a crack in the seat that looked like it would pinch. There was no point in even looking at the shower, since the shower curtain was old and musty, so I could only imagine what the shower itself might look like. I was probably going to get foot fungus.

There were two bedrooms—thank goodness. As I'd suspected might happen, my bag had found its way from the car to my room, and my clothes had already been unpacked and neatly folded in the dresser drawers. This was my mother's specialty. Sara Hurst-Caravelli (a.k.a. my delightful mother)
had a certain way of doing everything, and I was much better off if I just stayed out of her way. If I'd unpacked for myself, I would have been forced to redo it. But if my mom just did things for me in the first place, she had less reason to be critical of how these things were done. That way, we were all winners.

I could hear my mom talking on her cell phone in my parents' room, which was just next door. The walls between the bedrooms were thin and the door was a wispy fabric curtain, so I could easily hear snippets of conversation. My mom's business wasn't all that interesting—she was probably just talking to one of my aunts, who seemed to be her only real friends these days—so I pulled my own phone out of my bag and checked for new texts.

Nothing.

How could there be nothing? Maybe there wasn't any service at the lake? Nope, three bars.

I quickly dashed off a short text to Heidi, then sent one to Sylvie. Neither one of them wrote back instantly, which was what I'd really wanted. I wanted my best friends to miss me, and I wanted someone to be thinking of me. But more than anything, I didn't want to be at a broken-down “cottage” with my griping parents and a bunch of nobodies and two freaks
from my middle school when I could have been somewhere—
anywhere
—else.

After quickly checking for rogue mice who might be hiding under the pillows, I flounced down on my bed. I stared up at the ceiling, which I noticed was also made of wood (was
everything
made of wood?), and wondered what I was supposed to do next. I flopped from my back to my front, trying to get comfortable on the sagging mattress. My mother had made my bed for me, and I felt a little more comfortable because at least the blanket was from home.

As I tried not to listen to the sound of my mom laughing on the phone in the next room, I picked at my fingernails. One began to bleed.

Coco pattered into the bedroom and launched herself onto the bed beside me. “What do we do now?” I asked quietly, stroking my dog's smushy body. Coco just stared back. It turns out, dogs are great for hugs but not as great for company.

“Isabella?” My mom broke through the silence from the room next door.

“What?”

She sighed loudly enough for me to hear it through both of our curtained doors. “Why aren't you down at the lake with the other kids?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“Don't be like that,” she ordered.

“Why aren't I there?” I said, trying to keep my voice pleasant. “Because I'm in here.”

The mattress in the other room groaned as she stood up and walked into my room. She squinted at me, as though the very sight of me gave her a headache. “But
why
are you here?”

“Why are
you
here? There's a dock full of adults down there, just waiting to be charmed.” We both knew that she didn't like strangers. Her best friends are her two sisters, and they can probably only stand her because they live hundreds of miles away. The thing about my mom is, she's usually sort of friendly to other adults at school events, or at holiday parties with their regular group of acquaintances—but a month with mostly strangers in a foreign land was probably going to make her go slowly insane. She hated making nice with people who didn't matter. (She also hated when I said stuff like that, but it was the truth and we both knew it.)

Luckily, Mom had picked up two consulting projects that were due at the end of the month. So that would give her a good excuse to hang out inside and work more than was necessary. I knew Dad had forced my mom to come to the lake—I'd heard them arguing about it plenty of times—probably
because it would look bad if he came alone. My dad was all about appearances, and if everyone else's family was joining them at the lake, then he would make sure
his
family would be at the lake too.