The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (16 page)

Marylin was puzzled. On the one hand, sure,
she had seen Rhetta’s notebooks filled with fairies and magical creatures and beautiful forest ferns and arbors laced with flowers. On the other hand, she’d also seen Rhetta’s wardrobe.

An idea suddenly hit Marylin with the force of a hurricane. If Rhetta could make her look beautiful, maybe she could make Rhetta look beautiful. Unlike Kate, Rhetta actually cared about beauty; she was just too stubborn to let her beautiful side out.

Marylin knew she’d have to be subtle, though. She’d have to make it seem like she and Rhetta were doing some sort of art project together.

A warning sounded in her brain: Becoming friends with Rhetta Mayes meant there were all sorts of people who wouldn’t want to be friends with Marylin. Mazie, to start with, followed by Ashley, Ruby, and all the other middle-school cheerleaders.

So what, Marylin thought, trying to feel brave about it, though really, what she felt was nervous, like she was about to take a walk along the edge of a very high cliff.

I should get a pair of boots like Kate’s, she thought, finally understanding why Kate wore those big, black clodhoppers. Shoes like that would hold you to the ground, keep you from falling. Then she giggled. You couldn’t pay her to wear those boots. She had way too much fashion sense.

“Would you like to come over to my house sometime?” she asked Rhetta, making herself take the first step out onto the cliff. “You could see my room and meet my mom and stuff.”

A blush spread across Rhetta’s cheeks and nose. “Yeah, that would be awesome,” she said, sounding pleased. “Maybe over Christmas break?”

“Sure,” said Marylin, the thought of Christmas making her feel a little bit giddy. Just that afternoon, taking out the trash, she’d sensed the first little molecules of Christmas in the air, a crisp pine-tree smell, the promise of cookies sprinkled with red and green sugar. Now she found herself excited thinking of a periwinkle blue sweater she had that would look perfect on Rhetta. “We’ll have fun.”

Marylin might let Rhetta keep one or two black items in her wardrobe, but otherwise it was going to be a complete transformation.

“You know, you’re really a lot different from how I thought you were when I first met you,” Rhetta said. “You’re much more of a real person.”

Marylin nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I am.”

After only an hour laughing and talking at the Student Organizations Holiday Extravaganza, Marylin realized she had a heart for Benjamin Huddle.

Only she really wished he’d stop staring at her.

“I can’t help it,” he said after she complained. “You’re so pretty, I have to stare.”

“But that’s not what’s important about me,” Marylin insisted, though she had to admit she’d be upset if Benjamin didn’t think she was pretty, especially tonight. Still, it was weird to have someone look at you all the time, like you were a painting or a television screen.

Benjamin covered his eyes with his hands. “Okay, I’ll stop looking. Let’s talk. What do you want to talk about?”

“We could talk about school, I guess,” said Marylin, feeling unsure about what the best topic of conversation would be. “Or maybe that’s boring. I don’t know. What’s your favorite class?”

“History,” Benjamin said, his hands still over his eyes. “Next question?”

Marylin giggled. “I think it’s your turn to ask me a question. And it’s not like you can’t ever look at me. Just don’t stare.”

Benjamin put his hands down and blinked, like the light was hurting his eyes. “Well, what do you think about this amazing party?” he asked. “Do you like parties? Or are you more of a homebody? Or is that a stupid question to ask a cheerleader?”

“I like parties,” Marylin said. “I like places where there are lots of people. But sometimes I like quiet, too. It just depends, I guess.”

She looked out across the room. As parties went, this one wasn’t the most exciting in the
world. It wasn’t as good as her Back-to-School party, with all the cheerleaders and football and soccer players. This party was for all the Student Government representatives, plus the Student Government officers and all the school club officers, all the kids who had been elected by other kids to run things. The boys here were quieter, skinnier, and they didn’t mix very much with the girls, who stood in bouncy, eager groups by the food tables, giggling and occasionally pointing over to one cluster of boys or another.

Marylin wasn’t sure that she fit in here. But she wasn’t sure she fit in with the cheerleaders and the football and soccer players anymore either. She wanted to fit in somewhere, but where? Her home was broken now, and how could you fit into a broken place? She wished she could fit in with Kate, and sometimes she still did, but Kate was changing shape, it seemed to Marylin, and it was hard to know exactly how to fit in with her anymore. She liked Rhetta, but she knew they weren’t a perfect fit, and she didn’t know Benjamin well
enough to know whether they fit together or not, though she hoped they did.

Marylin felt herself wobble a bit, like she’d gotten too close to the edge of the cliff and was about to tumble over. She reached out and grabbed Benjamin’s hand, to steady herself.

“You okay?” he asked, tightening his hand around hers.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she told him. “Just, well, I don’t know. Ask me another question.”

“Okay, let’s see.” Benjamin got a serious expression on his face. “If you could have anything in the world for Christmas, what would it be?”

Marylin thought about this for a long time. She considered the clothes she’d like to have, thought about the iPhone with the hot-pink case Caitlin Moore had gotten for her birthday and the makeup kit she’d seen at Nordstrom’s with forty-seven shades of eye shadow.

And then she thought about Benjamin and Kate, and her mom and dad and Petey. She thought about the middle-school cheerleaders and the soccer and football players. She
thought about Student Government, and about how maybe next year she’d run for president, and she thought about Rhetta, picturing her with long, flowing red hair. She thought about a story she’d been meaning to write, one about a girl who saves a dog from the pound, and after that, she thought some more about the iPhone.

“Everything,” Marylin answered finally. “I think I would like everything in the world.”

“Kinda greedy, aren’t you?” Benjamin laughed.

Marylin nodded. “You could say that. Is that terrible?”

“Terrible? No,” Benjamin said. “Impossible? Probably.”

Marylin sighed. That’s what she’d been afraid of.

Rhetta was waiting at the front door when Benjamin’s dad dropped Marylin off at the Mayeses’ house. “All right, spill it,” she said, ushering Marylin into the house. “How was Prince Charming? Did the glass slipper fit or what?”

They sat on Rhetta’s bed. Marylin looked in the mirror and saw that her makeup had worn off, and she looked like her real self again, pretty, but also normal, and a little bit tired.

“We talked a lot,” Marylin began. “Which was fun. He’s pretty easy to talk to.”

“Do you like him?” asked Rhetta. She raised an eyebrow. “I mean, really like him?”

Marylin nodded. “He’s kind of this mix of regular and special, you know?”

“Just like you,” Rhetta said. “That’s exactly the way you are.”

Marylin thought about this for a moment. “Maybe that’s exactly how everyone is.”

Rhetta shook her head. “Not me. I’m just special.”

Marylin laughed, and Rhetta joined in, and before long they were laughing in big, gulping fits of laughter, the sort of laughter you couldn’t stop once you got going, laughter that was about laughing and not whatever got you started laughing. Marylin’s stomach began to hurt, and when Rhetta actually rolled off the bed, Marylin thought there was a chance she
might break a rib, she was laughing so hard.

Finally the laughter slowed, and Marylin took in big breaths to steady herself. Rhetta lay on the floor, holding her stomach with one hand and wiping tears from her eyes with the other. It would have been nice if Kate was there, Marylin suddenly thought, and Petey. Kate and Petey could keep the laughter going, and they would probably laugh all night and keep saying funny things until somebody finally smothered them with pillows, which would make everyone laugh even harder.

Then I’d feel safe, Marylin thought, not sure what she meant by that, except that she imagined everybody’s hands holding on to her, so that she wouldn’t fall off the cliff, so that she could keep walking until she got to where she was going.

It is Christmas Eve, and Petey McIntosh is still working out the physics of Santa Claus. Yesterday, the last day of school before the holidays, Gretchen Humboldt argued that his equation was incorrect, and he finally had to agree with her. He had used the Earth’s circumference—24,901.55 miles—as the distance that Santa Claus had to fly in twenty-four hours, but as Gretchen noted, Santa doesn’t fly in a straight line around the globe. He goes north and south and all over the place. So now Petey is trying different ways of figuring out the actual distance Santa Claus flies on Christmas Eve.

He and Gretchen are secret Santa believers, and they have spent much of the last two weeks of school by the swings, whispering facts to each other about reindeer, the North Pole, and the true identity of Mrs. Claus. Other kids started to tease them about being boyfriend and girlfriend, and Petey and Gretchen didn’t argue with them. They knew it was better to be thought a romantic item than babies who still believed that a jolly old elf with a bag of toys slid down their chimneys every December 24.

Petey likes working on the Santa Claus problem. This way he doesn’t have to think about the Mom and Dad problem, or the Christmas Will Be Different This Year but You’ll Get Used to It problem. After dinner, Petey, his mom, and Marylin will meet Petey’s dad at the Church of New Hope to see a Christmas pageant, and then Petey and Marylin will go to their dad’s apartment and eat popcorn and watch
It’s a Wonderful Life,
before hanging their stockings from the built-in bookshelf in the living room and going to bed.

Petey has convinced himself it doesn’t matter that his dad’s apartment doesn’t have a fireplace. Santa Claus, Petey thinks, could land on the balcony and come through the sliding glass doors. As Gretchen Humboldt has pointed out, millions of kids all over the world live in houses without fireplaces. That Santa needs a fireplace to enter a house is a myth, in Gretchen’s opinion.

It means a lot to Petey that Gretchen believes in Santa Claus too. He knows that if she didn’t, he would have to give up Santa Claus once and for all. Belief in Santa Claus is not something you can hold on to all by yourself, especially not in fourth grade. Besides, Gretchen is right about everything, and if she said there wasn’t a Santa Claus, then Petey would finally have to give up and admit the likelihood of an old man driving a sleigh filled with presents around the world in a twenty-four-hour period was not great.

But thanks to Gretchen, he doesn’t have to. He can happily sit at the kitchen table, the
smell of banana nut bread baking in the oven floating over him, the blinking Christmas tree lights reflected in the living-room window, and punch numbers into his calculator, working out the exact science of Christmas.