The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (11 page)

“Petey made that crown?” her mother asked at breakfast. She turned to Petey. “I had no idea you could do something like that.”

“That’s sort of an insult, if you think about it,” Petey said through a mouthful of muffin. “But I won’t take it personally.”

“No, it’s just... so beautiful,” said Marylin’s mom, sounding like she might cry. She reached
over and touched Marylin’s skirt. “You guys really made this with Dad?”

Marylin nodded. “He’s really good at making costumes. You’d think I would have known that before, but I didn’t.”

“Well, your dad was always so busy, traveling all the time for work,” Marylin’s mom said. “He made you that frog costume when you were two. Do you remember that?”

“I remember seeing a picture of it,” said Marylin. “I don’t remember actually wearing it.”

“Everybody loved that costume,” Marylin’s mom said. “It’s too bad Dad didn’t have more time later to do that kind of thing. I know he would have loved to.”

Marylin thought it was strange to hear her mom talking about her dad and sounding sad instead of angry. Maybe this was the start of something. Maybe her mom would stop being angry, start being sad for a while, and then go all the way back to being in love with her dad again.

She leaned over and tapped her mom with her wand. “I can’t make your wishes come true,”
she said. “But I can help make your dreams come true.”

Marylin’s mom gave her a funny look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not sure in this situation,” Marylin said. “But I’m glad you like my costume.”

A lot of people, it turned out, liked Marylin’s costume. When she walked up onstage to give her speech, a row of football players sitting in the back of the auditorium stomped their feet and whistled. “I’ll vote for you!” one of them shouted out, and a chorus of “Me too!” echoed back. Teachers massed in the aisles and started shushing everyone like crazy.

Marylin found Kate in the middle row, where she’d promised to sit so Marylin could pretend she was just talking to a friend instead of doing something terrifying like giving a speech to two hundred seventh graders.

“I can’t grant your wishes,” Marylin began, and then headed into her speech. She talked about the cafeteria, she talked about helping out handicapped kids, she talked about pizza every day for lunch and movie afternoons once
a month. “I promise I will do a good job,” she ended up. “I will work hard for you and will represent your needs and concerns to the student government. I can’t do it with a wave of my magic wand, but I can do it with your vote. Thank you very much.”

The applause was loud and enthusiastic. Marylin saw Kate clapping with her hands extended up in the air. She saw Ruby Santiago clapping in a medium sort of way. She saw Mazie and Ashley whispering to each other. They weren’t clapping at all.

And then she saw Rhetta Mayes, who wasn’t clapping either. She was drawing. Marylin would have liked to know what Rhetta thought about her speech, and more importantly, what Rhetta thought about her costume. In fact, suddenly it seemed important for her to know. So when she left the stage, she didn’t go sit with the other middle-school cheerleaders, she went and sat by Rhetta.

Rhetta ripped a page out of her sketchbook. “This is for you,” she said, not actually looking at Marylin.

Marylin took the picture. It was her. It was Marylin McIntosh dressed as a fairy princess with a crown of roses on her head. In her hand, she held two campaign signs. One said,
TO VOTE
... and the other one said, ...
PERCHANCE TO DREAM.

“Could I use this?” Marylin asked. “I mean, for a campaign poster?”

Rhetta nodded. “Sure. If you want to.”

“I do,” said Marylin. She sat back in her seat. Another candidate, Calvin House, started his speech, but Marylin couldn’t make herself pay attention. She kept looking at Rhetta’s drawing. Maybe if Marylin were elected, she could make Rhetta the official Class Artist. There could be a Class Artist and a Class Poet, which would be Kate, and a Class ... Well, Marylin had run out of ideas for the moment, but there might be lots of official class offices people could hold.

The election was a week away. There would be a debate between the candidates on Friday. There would be more handshaking, e-mailing, and campaigning in the cafeteria during lunch-time.
There would be more promises. But for now there was the dreaming. Marylin leaned her head back against her seat and closed her eyes. She imagined an army of fairies fluttering through the school hallways, the air shimmering around them as they touched their wands to lockers and water fountains and classroom doors, making everything perfect with a wave of their tiny hands.

When Kate was in fifth grade, she had bought a book called
How to Improve Your Vocabulary in Ten Minutes a Day.
Well, it had actually been a booklet, and her mom had bought it when Kate spotted it in the grocery store checkout line. Kate hadn’t particularly cared about improving her vocabulary, she’d just wanted to buy something, and she knew her mom wasn’t going to buy the Twix bar she’d initially had her eye on.

But reading the booklet on the way home from the store, Kate had gotten interested. She believed automatically what the author, Eugene K. Watsonberg, said—that words
were important. “Words say something,” Eugene K. Watsonberg had written. “What do your words say about you?”

At home, Kate had gotten out a brand-new notebook she’d been saving to start a new project in. Kate loved starting new projects, which is why she always kept notebooks handy. For her last project, she’d drawn an intricate map of her neighborhood, complete with trees, mailboxes, and yard art, and had spied on her neighbors and recorded information about them. Unfortunately, her neighbors didn’t come out much, so that particular project had petered out after three days.

To be honest, most of Kate’s projects fizzled after three days, which had been true (sort of) of her Improving Her Vocabulary project as well. Except that even after Kate had stopped picking a new word from the dictionary every morning to memorize and use at least five times during the day, she still kept noticing interesting words and kept a list in her head of her favorite and least favorite words. Her favorite words included
cashmere, blue, rodeo,
and
sizzle.
Her least favorite words were
pimple, mucus,
and
fink.

Now that she was in seventh grade and turning into a songwriter and a poet, Kate thought she ought to write down her special words in a poetry notebook. She would carry the notebook in her backpack so she would always have her words with her. She got this idea on a Saturday morning, and she liked it so much, she immediately hopped out of bed and went looking for her mom, whom she found in the kitchen looking through a book of wedding cake recipes.

“Are you going to the store today?” Kate asked her, not even bothering to say “Good morning” first. “Because I need a new notebook. For school.”

Mrs. Faber looked at Kate and raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t I buy you ten new notebooks, each a bright neon hue, at the beginning of the school year, which was”—and here Mrs. Faber checked her watch—“a mere two and a half months ago?”

“It’s December second, Mom,” said Kate,
pointing to the calendar by the refrigerator, which she noticed was still on the November page. She walked over and flipped it to December. “So I’ve been in school three months. Time for a new notebook!”

Mrs. Faber squinted her eyes at Kate. “You’re starting a new project, aren’t you? I can tell by the look on your face. You can’t fool me.”

“At least I don’t want horseback-riding lessons,” Kate replied, smiling in what she hoped was a winning way. Kate’s big dream in fourth grade had been to learn to ride a horse, but when her mother had finally signed her up for lessons, Kate discovered she was scared to death of horses. Unfortunately, Mrs. Faber had paid for the lessons in advance and the money was nonrefundable. It was Kate’s most expensive project, and her mom had never let her forget it.

“True enough,” Mrs. Faber said, standing up and stretching. “In comparison, a notebook is a cheap and easily attainable thing. And I’m going to the grocery store after lunch, so I can pick one up for you then.”

Kate took a deep breath. She knew she was pushing it, but she had a vision for her notebook, and it didn’t involve the $1.99 kind you got at Food Lion. “I was sort of hoping you might take me to Hobson’s. I’ll buy the notebook with my own money and everything. I just need you to drive me.”

Hobson’s was a store for people who liked paper and pens and rubber stamps and India ink. It was sort of like an art store and sort of like the fanciest Hallmark store in the world. Kate loved it. There were stacks of thick, creamy paper, which sold for twenty-five cents a sheet: dove white, pearl gray, lemon yellow, pale blue. There were fountain pens with nibs that Kate knew she was far too messy to use, but she liked the idea of. You could buy charcoal pencils and sketchbooks there, and brushes and watercolor kits. There were journals and diaries and notebooks, of course, with lined or unlined paper and thick cardboard covers—some plain and brown, others with famous paintings on them.

Kate wanted a notebook with lined pages,
college ruled, with a cardboard cover she could decorate herself. She also wanted a new pen, felt-tipped, fine line, black ink. No, blue ink. Indigo blue, a color she was sure she could only get at Hobson’s. Just the other night on the phone, she and Matthew Holler had agreed that the right pen was very important when it came to writing poetry. Matthew, she’d learned, used any pen handy for doing homework, a pencil for math, and a Pilot Precise V5 when he was working on a poem.

Mrs. Faber poured herself a cup of coffee. “I’ll take you to Hobson’s on one condition,” she said after a minute of thinking about it. “You tell me what the notebook is really for.”

“Words,” said Kate. “It’s for writing down words.”

“Could you be more specific?” Mrs. Faber asked. “You’ve just summed up the use of almost every notebook on the planet.”

“What about notebooks for writing down numbers?” Kate asked.

Mrs. Faber sighed. “Okay, yes, you’ve got me there. Do you want to go to Hobson’s or not?”

“It’s for writing down good words,” Kate said quickly, not wanting to irritate her mom any more than she already had. “Beautiful words. Like words you would use in a poem.”

Now, Mrs. Faber liked poetry. She still had all her poetry books from her college English classes tucked away in the family-room bookshelf, including
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I
and
Geography III
by Elizabeth Bishop, a book that Kate had read bits and pieces of and pretty much liked except for when it got boring.

“That’s a good reason to get a new notebook,” Mrs. Faber agreed. “Well, let me take a shower and try to look respectable. If we’re going to Hobson’s, I should at least put on some mascara.”

“You don’t need makeup, Mom,” Kate said. “You are a natural beauty.”

Mrs. Faber laughed, like she thought Kate was joking around. Actually, Kate wasn’t, but you couldn’t say something like that and sound all serious about it. People might get the wrong idea about you if you said that sort
of thing in a serious tone of voice. They might figure out that you loved them.

It was like carrying a bird in her backpack—something light, with wings, and filled with bits and pieces of songs. All day on Monday, Kate was aware of her new notebook as she went from class to class. She practically expected it to fly out into the hallway and dart from locker to locker.

She wanted to show it to Matthew Holler, but she couldn’t. Which, she thought, wasn’t exactly fair, since in the time that she and Matthew Holler had been friends, he had shared all sorts of things with her.

The day Matthew had grabbed Kate’s hand and pulled her out of the cafeteria, he had taken her to the school’s audiovisual lab. Brenner P. Dunn Middle School was famous for its state-of-the-art technology. People moved twenty miles just so their children could go to Brenner P. Dunn Middle School and get their hands on its computers and digital recording equipment. Every time there was a school
assembly, the principal went on and on about the fascinating and educational projects students were doing in the audiovisual lab. “We are the middle school of people’s dreams,” she liked to say.