The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (6 page)

“I wish I had time,” Marylin said in her best middle-school cheerleader voice, handing the book back to Rhetta. “But with cheerleading and homework and everything, it’s like I’ve got every minute of my day prescheduled.”

Rhetta took the book and put it back in her black satchel, her eyes boring into Marylin the whole time. “I don’t think ‘prescheduled’ is a word,” she said icily. “Or if it is, it shouldn’t be.”

She turned her desk to face the front again. Marylin leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. “We have to do a report, remember? I haven’t told you any interesting facts about me yet, and I need at least one more interesting fact about you.”

Rhetta didn’t say a word. She didn’t even bother turning around.

Marylin sighed. She opened her notebook and began to write.
Rhetta Mayes is new to our school. She wishes she had a twin who liked art as much as she did. She is a good artist and one day hopes to write books called graphic novels. She has interesting fingernail polish.

Then Marylin closed her notebook and put it back in her back pouch. She looked out the window at the woods that stood at the far edge of the soccer field. There, for just a second, she thought she saw a twinkling of light. Then it was gone.

Excitement tingled at the tips of Marylin’s fingers again. The words of a story were gathering in her imagination. All she had to do was write them down. If she closed her eyes, she could see that lost fairy flying, hovering at the edge of the woods, looking for signs that would help her find her way back home. All Marylin had to do was grab her notebook out of her back pouch. All she had to do was write.

Marylin shook her head as though she were trying to shoo the very idea of fairies out of it. She had cheerleading practice and homework and chores to do. She didn’t have time for writing stories.

“Come on, Marylin, I’ll walk you to your locker.”

Mazie stood beside her desk. The clock’s
second hand ticked forward and the bell rang. Marylin stood up, picked up her back pouch, and followed Mazie out the door and into the hallway, where the lights flickered and burned, but did not sparkle, not even for a second.

Kate’s first song was about rain falling softly against the windows on a summer night, but it was so dumb, she crumpled up the paper and threw it away. Her second song was about dogs. It was okay, but it didn’t really fit with the idea of what kind of girl guitar player she wanted to be. She didn’t want to be the kind of girl guitar player who wore gauzy skirts and had a dreamy expression on her face, and she didn’t want to be the kind of girl guitar player who sang about pick-up trucks and how she wished she lived in the country, where everything was simple like in the good old days.

The more she thought about it, she realized
she wanted to be the kind of girl guitar player who wrote songs about a boy named Dallas. She did not personally know a boy named Dallas, but she could imagine a boy named Dallas, a boy with sandy brown hair falling over his blue eyes, a boy who thought girls who played guitar were the only girls worth knowing.

Kate’s first song about Dallas was about how lonely Dallas got sometimes, even when he was hanging out with a bunch of his friends. She wrote about Dallas walking his dog down his street on an autumn day and seeing the last leaf fall from the oak tree on the corner. He looked at the leaf, then looked up at the window of a nearby house, where he saw a girl reading
The Giver,
which Kate just happened to be reading for language arts. At the end of the song, Dallas walked his dog back home, wondering if the girl in the window was as lonely as he was.

Kate started writing songs about Dallas on the first Saturday afternoon of October. By the following Saturday, she had written five Dallas
songs. There was “Just a Boy Named Dallas,” “Blue Skies Over Dallas’s House,” “The Girl in the Window,” “I Wonder How Dallas Is Today,” and a sad song called “Dallas Goes to the Moon,” about Dallas falling in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back. The girl’s name was Alice, which was the only girl’s name Kate could think of that rhymed with Dallas.

Flannery thought all the songs were too slow. “The words are good,” she admitted, “and the music isn’t bad, except that it sounds like you’re playing at somebody’s funeral.”

Maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea to go over to Flannery’s house to get songwriting advice, Kate thought. In Kate’s imagination, Flannery was like a slightly older sister, a little wiser, a little more experienced in the ways of the world. In real life, hanging out in her room, Flannery seemed more like an older sister who found you pretty irritating, but could put up with you for short periods of time when she was in the right mood.

Flannery leaned across the bed and took the
guitar from Kate. “Close the door, would you? My stepdad gets all hyper when I rock out.” After Kate shut the door, Flannery turned up the amp and slid her fingers up and down the neck of the guitar, turning “I Wonder How Dallas Is Today” from a ballad into a punk rock song.

When she was finished, Kate took the guitar back from Flannery and played the song the way she had written it. “I just think it sounds better slow,” she said when she was finished. “How you played it was good, but it doesn’t sound like the song I was trying to write.”

Flannery leaned back and propped her head against a giant teddy bear. “Who is this Dallas guy anyway?”

Kate shrugged. “Just somebody I made up. He’s like a character in a story.”

“Why don’t you write about yourself instead of your imaginary friends?” Flannery asked, only sounding halfway sarcastic.

“What would I write about?” Kate strummed an F chord, the hardest chord there was. She
spent thirty minutes a day practicing the F chord, and it still didn’t sound right. “I’m not very interesting.”

Flannery sat up. “Maybe. But you’re more interesting than you look. I’ve always said that about you. Have you ever thought about bleaching your hair?”

Kate tried another F. “No, because I’m not insane.” She glanced at Flannery’s hot pink hair. “No offense or anything.”

“None taken. But you know what your real problem is right now?”

“I didn’t know I had a real problem,” Kate said, even though it wasn’t true. She could name at least four real problems she had at that very minute, including a three-page paper she had to write about the causes of the Civil War and a pre-algebra test on Tuesday.

Flannery stood up. She walked over to her dresser and leaned in closer to her mirror, like she was trying to get a better look at herself. Then she turned around and faced Kate. “Your real problem is that you’re in love with this Dallas guy, and he’s not even alive. You need
somebody who’s actually alive to be in love with.”

She turned back to the mirror and combed her fingers through her hair. “Not that I believe that love exists or anything.”

“One, I am not in love with a make-believe character,” Kate insisted. She strummed the guitar hard, to underline her point. “And two, even though I believe love exists, I do not need to be in love with anyone. All I need to do is write songs and get at least a B-minus on my pre-algebra test. Preferably a B.”

“Well, if you ever need some advice about how to get a real boyfriend, as in a boyfriend who’s actually alive, let me know,” Flannery said, applying mascara to her eyelashes. “I have lots of good tricks.”

Kate did not want tricks for getting boyfriends. She just wanted to write songs about Dallas. She knew Dallas wasn’t real, but she believed a boy like Dallas was out there somewhere, and she wanted to be ready for him when he showed up.
Listen to this song I just wrote,
she’d say, and he’d grin a wide, happy
grin, because he’d finally found a girl who could play guitar and write songs. He’d finally found the girl he’d been looking for.

Sometimes at school Kate would look around for other seventh-grade girls who might be guitar players. She couldn’t be the only one, could she? She couldn’t be the only girl whose fingertips were so callused from holding down the strings that she could tap against them with her fingernail and hear a little click.

She was pretty sure she was the only girl wearing big, black lace-up boots, because so far most of the girls she’d seen wore tennis shoes, mostly white or grayish white, depending on how old the shoes were, with either pink or blue stripes. Really, she was a little surprised by how boring most people’s shoes were. In Kate’s opinion, what shoes you wore said a lot about your personality.

“Have you ever thought about ballet slippers?” Marylin asked her on the bus Monday morning. Even though they didn’t walk together to the bus stop anymore, Kate and Marylin
almost always sat with each other. It was nice, Kate thought, sort of like a family reunion with relatives you didn’t see any other time of year. “I mean, I really like your boots, they make a total fashion statement and everything, but think about how light ballet slippers would feel on your feet.”

Kate knew that Marylin was lying about liking her boots. She had seen Marylin looking at her boots with a definite “keep those things away from me” expression on her face. Still, she had to admire Marylin’s restraint. It showed a certain maturity. In sixth grade, Marylin would have told Kate straight out how horrible she thought her boots were. Now she was trying to manipulate her. It was a big improvement, in Kate’s opinion.

“I am not a ballet slippers kind of girl,” Kate told Marylin. “I’m pretty sure you know that about me.”

The weird thing was, sometimes Kate found herself wishing she
were
a ballet slippers kind of girl. She thought it might make life easier. Unfortunately, every time she tried to be that
kind of girl, she felt like an entirely different person from who she actually was. She’d put on a dress and automatically feel like she should talk in a supersweet voice and never think mean thoughts and take baths instead of showers.

“Okay, so maybe ballet slippers aren’t right for you,” Marylin finally admitted as the bus pulled into the school driveway. “But I bet we could find some really cute shoes for you. I mean, cute shoes that are just your style. They could even be black, if you wanted.”

“I have black shoes already,” Kate said, pointing at her boots. “And they’re the right shoes for me. Maybe you should think about getting some boots. They could change your life.”

Marylin laughed, but Kate was serious. She worried about Marylin. When she bothered to look over at the middle-school cheerleaders’ lunch table, Marylin seemed like a tiny mouse surrounded by hungry red-tailed hawks who were about to eat her alive in one tasty gulp. Sometimes Kate wanted to stomp over to the
table, the thunk of her boots ringing through the cafeteria, and say,
Marylin is better than all of you added together, even if she cares too much about her hair.
Then she would sock Mazie Calloway in the nose and say,
You’re not such a big deal. You’re not even pretty.

But as a rule, Kate was not the sort of person who socked people in the nose. So she sat at her usual table with Marcie Grossman, Amber Colbaugh, Timma Phipps, and Brittany Lamb, the same people she’d been eating lunch with since third grade, and didn’t say or do anything except eat her sandwich, look at people’s shoes, and make up song lyrics. Every once in a while she’d look toward the door, just in case a boy with sandy brown hair and blue eyes walked in and needed someone to sit with.