The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (2 page)

Flannery tugged on Rocko’s leash, pulling him back toward the sidewalk. “All the sudden I’m starving,” she said. “You want to come to my house for breakfast?”

Kate wasn’t sure what she should count as the third surprise, that Flannery ate breakfast, or that she would actually invite Kate to come eat it with her. Both seemed equally unlikely. She leaned over to brush some grass off the bottom of her foot, wondering if she should make up an excuse not to go to Flannery’s. Eating breakfast with someone was sort of personal, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to get personal with Flannery. She suspected that might be a dangerous thing to do.

“My mom’s making pancakes,” Flannery trilled in a singsong voice. “You’ll love ’em!”

“I guess so, yeah, okay.” Kate shrugged. What else could she say? She was clearly dressed for breakfast, after all. Besides, Flannery was the only person besides Petey McIntosh who’d treated her like a human being in the last eighteen hours. You had to give her points for that.

Flannery hopped off the car. “Excellent. My stepdad hardly yells at all when we have company.”

Great, Kate thought, following Flannery and
Rocko down the sidewalk toward Flannery’s house. Just what she wanted, to be a buffer at Flannery’s dysfunctional breakfast table.

It didn’t occur to her until they were sitting down to eat that Flannery hadn’t asked her why she was outside in her pajamas at seven o’clock in the morning.

Of course, if you were as weird as Flannery, Kate reasoned, everything in the world might seem normal to you.

Flannery’s stepdad hadn’t even come down for breakfast, so it had just been Flannery, Kate, Flannery’s mom, and her two little brothers, Josh and Bennie. Flannery’s mom was a little too happy to see Kate, if you wanted Kate’s opinion. It was sort of like she thought Kate was there to rescue Flannery from a life of crime.

“I forgot how nice your mom was,” Kate told Flannery after they’d eaten and were hanging out in Flannery’s bedroom. It had been a long time since Kate had been here, and it looked a lot different from how she’d remembered. Last
year around this time, Flannery’s room had had lots of stuffed animals and pink stuff. Now the walls were still pink, but they were covered with posters of bands who looked very, very mean, like they hoped you would fall down and die that very second.

“She’s okay,” Flannery said. She was sitting on her bed, painting another layer of silver polish on her toenails. “I wish she’d get a job, though. She’s here every single second of the day. It drives me crazy.”

“My mom works part-time,” Kate said. “I actually like it when she’s home. She bakes a lot. I mean, baking is actually her other part-time job. She used to be a window dresser, but she decided that baking is what she really loves most of all. She does wedding cakes and cakes for parties. So it really smells good when my mom’s home.”

“You know, a lot of the time you talk like you’re about eight years old,” Flannery told her matter-of-factly, leaning forward so she could blow on her toes. “Maturity-wise, I mean.”

Okay, this show was definitely over. The
night before she’d been ignored, this morning she was being insulted. Kate stood up to leave. She turned toward the door, and as she did she noticed Flannery’s open closet door. There was no way in the world she could keep herself from looking inside it. The floor was a jumble of shoes. All the shirts were hanging halfway off their hangers. And in the middle of all the mess, leaning against the closet’s back wall, was a guitar.

An electric guitar.

“Do you play that?” Kate had to know. Was Flannery, in fact, a girl guitar player who knew the secret of how to get through life without caring about anything?

“A little,” Flannery told her, walking over from her bed to grab the guitar from the closet. “I mean, I know all the chords, but I’m still learning to do barre chords, which is what you have to know if you’re going to be in a band.”

“You’re going to be in a band?” Kate asked, thinking that would explain all the eye makeup.

Flannery sat on the floor and cradled the
guitar in her lap. “Maybe. Megan Woods and I have been talking about it. Her brother is a drummer, and he said he’d let us use his drums.” She looked up at Kate. “Why? Do you want to be in a band?”

“I was just thinking I might want to learn how to play guitar. It seems like it would be a fun thing to know how to do.”

“That’s what I mean,” Flannery said, shaking her head sadly. “That is such an eight-year-old thing to say. Playing guitar isn’t a fun thing to do. It’s a way of life.”

Kate looked at the floor. “I know that,” she said quietly. “That’s what I really meant.”

Flannery didn’t say anything for a minute, until finally she looked at Kate and nodded her head. “I believe you,” she said. “I believe that’s what you really meant.”

And then she handed Kate the guitar. “Take it,” she said. “Borrow it for a few days. Take the amp, too.”

Kate stared at the guitar for a moment. It felt so natural, the way her left hand fit around the neck, the curve of the body resting in her right
hand. “No, I couldn’t,” she said reluctantly. “I mean, I can’t borrow something this important.”

“It’s no big deal,” Flannery said. “My dad says he’s going to get me a new one.”

“Really?” Kate asked. “Are you serious? I can borrow this?”

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my entire life.”

Kate looked at Flannery.

She believed her.

When Marylin called that afternoon, Kate was busy playing the E-minor chord. In addition to the guitar and amplifier, Flannery had also lent her a book about how to teach yourself to play guitar, and Kate was going through it page by page, looking for the really easy stuff. In Kate’s opinion, E minor sounded great.

“Where did you go this morning?” Marylin asked. “When I woke up and didn’t see you there, I was worried sick.”

“So how come you’re only calling me now? It’s after lunch.” Kate strummed another E
minor, which sounded satisfyingly dramatic and sad at the same time.

“Well, it took forever to eat breakfast, because Mazie kept burning the pancakes, and one time the smoke alarm went off, and that made everything completely crazy. And to be honest, it wasn’t until about eleven o’clock that I realized you were missing.”

“That makes me feel great,” Kate said. “You have no idea how much you’ve just improved my self-esteem.”

Marylin didn’t say anything for a minute. Kate could practically hear her thinking. Then she gasped and cried out, “You’re right, Kate! You’re right. That’s awful that I didn’t notice earlier! It’s just with everyone running around all over the house, and the alarm going off, well, I guess I must have thought you were in the bathroom or something.”

For three hours?
Kate wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Because from her twelve years’ experience of being alive, she knew that very few people could admit they were wrong the way that Marylin just had. It was a trait you didn’t
want to squash out with a sarcastic remark.

“Anyway,” she told Marylin, flipping through the guitar book to find another easy chord, “I just decided to come home. You were the only person there who’s actually my friend.”

“That’s not true!” Marylin exclaimed. Then she was quiet again for a moment. “Okay, well, maybe it’s sort of true. But you’re friends with Ashley. You’ve been friends with Ashley since kindergarten.”

Kate rolled her eyes. The problem with being friends with Marylin was that she was such an unrealistic person. She thought cheerleaders and regular people could be friends. True, Kate and Ashley had been friends before Ashley had become a middle-school cheerleader. In fourth grade they had done a science project together, where they used Play-Doh to show the different layers of the earth, brown for the crust, yellow for the mantle, orange for the outer core, and red for the inner core. They’d spent an entire Saturday afternoon at Ashley’s house constructing the layers and making an interesting-to-look-at presentation.
Ashley’s mom brought in snacks and lemonade, and her little brother kept stealing bits of Play-Doh to make a
Star Wars Millennium Falcon.

That’s what killed Kate about middle school. You could share a history with a person, know their mom and their little brother and what kind of laundry detergent they used (in Ashley’s case, her family used Mountain Fresh Tide, which smelled a million times better than the baking-soda brand Kate’s mom bought), but the second that person became a middle-school cheerleader, forget it. It’s like all that stuff never existed.

It was different with Marylin, of course. But that’s because Marylin was the sensitive type. She was the sort of person who got mad if you picked up a daddy longlegs by one of his spindly legs. “You’re hurting him!” she’d yell, like the daddy longlegs was a person. True, she and Flannery had given Kate the silent treatment in sixth grade, a memory that still made Kate go cold all over, but in the end she and Marylin had become friends again. Now
their friendship had cracks in places, like a vase that had fallen off a shelf and had to be glued back together. But Kate had a theory: Maybe cracks could make a friendship stronger. Cracks said, We
don’t fit together a hundred percent, but that’s okay.

“What’s that noise?” Marylin asked. “Do you have the radio on?”

Kate realized she’d been strumming an A chord sort of loud. It was hard not to. The A chord, which was almost but not quite as easy as an E minor, sounded so nice and happy. It sounded like the beginning of a song you’d sing to a little kid, a song about the sun coming up in the morning and the birds flying through the trees.

“I’m learning how to play guitar,” she told Marylin. “It’s pretty fun.”

“When did you get a guitar?” asked Marylin. Kate could tell from her tone of voice that she wasn’t entirely sure playing the guitar was such a great thing to do.

“Flannery lent it to me,” Kate said. “I ran into her this morning.”

“Is her hair still pink?”

“It’s even pinker.”

Marylin laughed. “Can you even believe we used to be friends with her?”

“You used to be friends with her,” Kate pointed out. “Flannery and I were not friends. In fact, today was probably the second time in my life that Flannery was the least bit friendly to me.”

“All I’m saying is that she’s really strange.” Marylin paused. “In fact, you probably shouldn’t be borrowing stuff from her. You don’t want people to connect the two of you together. Besides, I don’t know about you playing guitar. It’s sort of... like something a guy would do, I guess.”

Marylin sounded like a school counselor or an advice columnist, someone who knew a lot about life and was there to guide you along the way.

“Girls play guitar,” Kate protested. “There are lots of famous girl guitar players.”

“But not in seventh grade,” Marylin pointed out. “Seventh grade is a time for, I don’t know,
hanging out with your group of friends and getting ready for high school. It’s about finding your own personal style. That’s what Mazie says. She says this year we are going to focus on finding our own personal style together.”

“How can finding your personal style be a group project?”

“Easy!” Marylin exclaimed, and then she began to tell Kate how each middle-school cheerleader was going to subscribe to a different fashion magazine, and every month they would gather together and look at magazines and give one another fashion tips.

Kate softly strummed an A minor, which she discovered was as easy to play as an E minor, and just as sad sounding. She liked playing guitar. She was pretty sure she was going to be good at it.

And, if she was being perfectly honest with herself—and why shouldn’t she be?—she liked the idea that Marylin didn’t like it. Because Marylin might have been one of Kate’s best friends, but that didn’t mean she knew everything in the world. In fact, in Kate’s opinion,
Marylin had made some pretty poor choices. Middle-school cheerleading. Mazie Calloway. And now fashion magazine subscriptions.

In fact, sometimes Kate thought maybe she should be the one giving advice to Marylin. Drop cheerleading. Make friends with people who have good values. Ignore fashion.

Play guitar.