Thirteen (8 page)

After we got home, I tried to distract myself by watching
Hannah Montana
with Ty. Ty had a crush on the main girl, who went by the name “Miley” in her normal life, but was secretly a pop star named Hannah Montana. “Miley” was a cute name, I thought. So much cuter than “Winifred.” “Winnie” was acceptable…but
Winifred
?

If I were a pop star, I could change my name to “Wiley.” Except that was the name of the coyote on Bugs Bunny—so maybe not. Plus, it wasn't cute. Why was “Miley” cute, but not “Wiley”?

If I were a pop star, I would never worry about being boring or blobby. If I were a pop star, I wouldn't worry about Lars coming back to me or not. I'd know he would.

On the screen, Miley's annoying brother, Jackson, made his belly button talk, which made Ty laugh. It was Ty's start-off-real-and-then-turn-fake laugh, which he did when he wanted to keep the hilarity going. I loved that about Ty, that laughing was so fun for him that he made more and more burble out.

“I want to do that with my belly button,” he said.

“Okay, you're allowed,” I said.

“And I want to learn how to make stink noises with my armpit, like Joseph. Joseph can make really good stink noises.”

Joseph
. Wasn't he the kid Mom and Mrs. Taylor had been talking about during our graduation luncheon? Something bad, something that broke Mom's heart. I'd meant to ask her about it, but had forgotten.

“Don't you, Winnie?”

“Huh?”

“Wish you could make stink noises.”

I did, actually. There were several things like that I wished I could do: raise one eyebrow; pop my elbow out like Cinnamon, who was double-jointed; make my scalp wiggle; whistle through two fingers. I wouldn't mind being able to do a split, either. A split would be impressive, even if I was never a cheerleader.

What
could
I do in terms of weird body stuff? I could curl my tongue (easy), and I could bend each of my fingers from the top knuckle without letting the middle knuckle move. I taught myself that one with lots of practice, mainly during fifth grade social studies. With all ten fingers bent like that, I'd hold my hands out like claws and make zombie sounds, letting my face muscles go slack. Amanda used to giggle and shriek as I lurched toward her.

I could also sit in the lotus position with each foot on top of the opposite thigh. That one, like the tongue-curling, was easy for me.

“Can you do this?” I asked Ty, leaning back against the sofa and pretzeling my legs into lotus position
without even using my hands
. Talk about impressive.

Ty was intrigued. He tried, but his legs went into normal criss-cross-applesauce mode.

“Nope,” I said. I unfurled my legs and stood up. “Keep working. You'll get it.”

“Will you give me a dollar if I do?”

“No. Will you give me a dollar since I already can?”

“I'll give you a dollar if you give me a dollar.”

“Sure, Ty, whatever.”

I went and found Mom in the kitchen. She was making cookies, and the smell of vanilla was heavenly. Such a funny thing, vanilla: it smelled fabulous, but tasted good only once it was mixed up with other things like sugar and eggs and all that. Same with coffee, except its mixer-uppers were sugar and milk.

“Hey. Mom. What's up with that kid Joseph, from Ty's class?” I asked.

“Oh,” Mom said. Her eyes softened around the edges. “Well, Joseph's got leukemia. His parents just recently found out.”

Leukemia? There was a girl who went to camp with me last year who'd had leukemia. Her name was Jessica. But by the time I knew her, she was fine.

“That's so sad,” I said. “But kids get better from leukemia, right?”

“Usually,” she said. “There's a lot that can be done, like chemo, which Joseph's going to start this summer.”

Chemo for a six-year-old. Wow. “Will he lose his hair?”

She nodded. “Yeah, poor kid.”

Her expression was sad, and I knew that in addition to feeling worried for Joseph, she was thinking about Ty. I was, too. I was thinking how awful it would be if Ty had a scary disease. If he had to go through chemo and lose all his hair before probably—but not definitely—being healed.

And here I was feeling sorry for myself because my boyfriend was traveling the world.

I was a turd.

“But he'll be okay,” I insisted. “Joseph will be okay.”

Mom used her wrist to push back her hair. She left a streak of flour across her forehead. “Sweetie, there just aren't any guarantees. But I sure hope so.”

 

Morning came, and I awoke with the knowledge that Lars and his parents were traveling to the airport at that very moment to catch their early international flight. At ten o'clock, I thought,
Well, Lars is on the plane now
. He'd fly to Paris, which took nine hours, and then he'd catch a connecting flight to Prague. The Atlanta-to-Paris leg involved flying over the ocean.
Please don't let the plane crash
, I prayed.

I tried to be a better person and not be needy and pathetic. I tried to remember that my boy troubles (which weren't even
troubles
so much as a minor three-month-long inconvenience) weren't the most important thing in the world.

It kind of worked. I made plans to go to the pool with Cinnamon later in the week. Dinah called and reminded me that at least my boyfriend wasn't a vampire, which was indeed something to be thankful for.

As I lay in bed that night, I thought about Lars, far off in the universe and doing who-knew-what. Was he in Prague yet? Was he eating? Unpacking? Sleeping? I realized I didn't even know what the time difference was between us.

I also thought about Joseph. I could place him in my mind now: a skinny little guy who always wore cordoroys. Brown hair. Sweet smile. Ty had gone to his birthday party two months ago, and I'd accompanied Mom when she dropped him off. Joseph had come barreling out the front door wearing a gold eye patch, with a black patch for Ty in his hand. It was a pirate party. Later, Ty had come home with gold-coin treasure.

I wished I could make Joseph's leukemia go away. Same for anyone else who had cancer or a brain tumor or that crazy disease where you can't go out in the sunlight. I wished I could make all the pain and sadness in the whole world go away. But I couldn't.

Something came into my head that I
could
do, though. Locks of Love. Sandra had a friend who'd done that. She'd grown her hair super long and then clipped it off for Locks of Love, so it could be made into a wig for a kid with cancer.

I imagined going to school with suddenly short hair and all the attention I'd get. I knew that wasn't the point…. though if people
did
ask why I'd done it, I didn't think it would be overly braggy to explain. I'd be modest about it, of course. But more importantly, I'd be helping someone in need.

I thought about all that for a long time. It was a satisfying place for my mind to hang out, nice and hopeful and warm with potential. And then I had the one-step-further thought that I could truly do it. Not just think about it, but
do
it. Chop off that hair—
whomp
!

Aye-yai-yai. Would I look good with short hair? Would I be able to survive without the option of a ponytail? Would I still be pretty?

Still…how cool it would be to be someone who wasn't afraid of such things. Who saw the need for something and did it, just like that.

I slid out of bed and padded to my computer, which Mom and Dad had gotten me when my homework assignments started getting harder and I was required to do more Internet research. They set up all sorts of parental controls, and they made me promise not to have “inappropriate e-mail or IM conversations.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I hit the space bar to wake up the screen, clicked on Firefox, and typed in “Locks of Love.” I learned that the wigs were actually called “hair prosthetics,” which would have made me giggle, if not for the pictures on the site. I
had
hair, unlike the kids in the photo gallery who were stark, raving, no-doubt-about-it bald. Grinning, for the most part, but bald. Next to each bald picture was an “after” picture of the same kid wearing a hair prosthetic. Humans did look better with hair. I wouldn't argue with anyone on that one.

I scrolled further through the site and learned that in order to donate your hair, the cut-off part had to be ten inches long from tip to tip. I dug a ruler out of my desk, tilted my head sideways, and measured from my part to the ends. Fifteen inches! I could donate tomorrow!

Except, wait. If I cut ten inches off, that would leave me with only five inches. I felt selfish for caring with those bald kids smiling out at me, but five inches wasn't a lot of hair.

I used the ruler again to see what my hair measured from my part to my chin. Eight inches. So if I wanted to be left with chin-length hair, I'd need to grow my hair out to a total length of eighteen inches. Eighteen minus fifteen meant I had three inches left to go. In hair time, that equaled approximately half a year.

Well.

I put the ruler back.

It was disappointing not to get to do something right this very second to make the world a better place (and me a better Winnie). And unlike the graduation-day mothers with their cries of “Oh me, oh my, time goes by so fast,” I knew that time was far more likely to creep along like a very sluggish snail, especially if you were waiting for something particular to happen.

But that was okay. I could handle it. Someone with leukemia might not have all the time in the world, but, as far as I knew, I did.

A
H, SUMMER.
Even without Lars, I couldn't help but love the hot, lazy, glorious days. Sleep in, eat a little brekkie (my fun new way of saying “breakfast”), watch a rerun of
Dawson's Creek
on the Lifetime channel, or sometimes an episode of
Flight 29 Down
with Ty.
Flight 29 Down
was about a group of kids who survived a plane crash, but were now stuck alone on an island, trying to survive. It was dorky, with lots of life lessons about teamwork! And cooperation! And never giving up despite the odds! Even so, I found myself getting sucked in.

Plus, ever since accepting Cinnamon's invitation to go on a weekend camping trip (just me, 'cause Dinah was off to her grandparents), I'd been boning up on my outdoor wilderness skills. Which weren't many. But I figured watching the Flight 29 kids had to count for something.

On a normal day, after a relaxing morning of TV, I'd go for a bike ride or meet Cinnamon and Dinah at the pool. Something to get me off my butt and out into the world. At some point I'd fit in a lunch of PB&J, Doritos, and a Coke, or occasionally a pizza Hot Pocket from the pool's snack bar—although they were gross, and every time I ordered one, I swore to myself I'd never order one again. Maybe they'd be decent if they were cooked in a toaster, but the snack bar workers nuked them in the microwave, which made the crust all nasty.

But today was not a normal day. Today Mom dropped me off at Cinnamon's house with my duffel bag and my Snoopy sleeping bag, which Cinnamon laughed at. She'd also laughed at my sneakers, which apparently marked me as a greenhorn. She
also
laughed when I brought up
Flight 29 Down
.

“That's not real camping,” Cinnamon said, even though she'd never seen the show. She shoved a pair of wool socks into her backpack. “We will not be foraging for food, and we will not be building a shelter out of palm leaves, I promise. Which I highly doubt six kids could do, anyway. And how come only the kids survived the plane crash and no grown-ups?”

“Don't ask me. Ask the script writers,” I said.

“Exactly.
Script
writers, because it's not real.” She yanked shut her backpack's zipper. “Real camping is campfires and tents and s'mores. Have you ever had a real s'more? A
real
s'more?”

I thought about Ty and his microwaved marshmallows, spinning round and round until the timer dinged. Unlike Hot Pockets, marshmallows did quite well in the microwave. Smack them between two graham crackers with half of a Hershey bar stuck in between, and wa-la. Instant deliciousness.

“They can't be that different,” I said.

“You are sadly mistaken,” Cinnamon said. “Just wait and see.”

A car horn beeped.

“That's her!” Cinnamon cried.

Excitement fluttered in my stomach, and I followed Cinnamon downstairs. This would be my first time to go camping
and
my first time to meet Cinnamon's mom. I'd heard a lot about her—she smoked, she made silver jewelry, she used to hate Cinnamon's stepmom, but had mellowed slightly since getting a boyfriend of her own—but we'd never met face-to-face. Mrs. Meyers lived in North Carolina, which was where we'd be going camping. From Atlanta it would take three hours to get there.

“Hi, Mom!” Cinnamon said as she burst out the back door. Cinnamon tended to talk about her mom dismissively, but she sure seemed happy to see her. “This is Winnie. Winnie, Mom. Mom, Winnie.”

“Hi, Winnie,” Mrs. Meyers said. She'd gotten out of her Subaru and was in the process of opening the trunk. She was way skinnier than Cinnamon, with grayish-blond hair pulled into two pigtails. Her jeans were patched with purple and red squares. She wore chunky silver rings on seven of her ten fingers.

“Hi, Mrs. Meyers,” I said.

“Call me Mary Beth,” she urged.

“Told you,” Cinnamon said.

Cinnamon's dad came out with my bag, which he loaded into the car along with Cinnamon's backpack.

“Mary Beth,” he said.

“Warren,” she said.

They were civil to each other, but nothing close to friendly. Mr. Meyers walked over and hugged Cinnamon good-bye. He released her, but kept his hands on her shoulders. “Listen up, you. You better take care of yourself, and you want to know why?”

“Da-a-ad,” she complained.

He refused to be deterred. “Because you're my one and only brown-haired, green-eyed daughter. I want you back safe and sound.” He turned to me. “That goes for you, too.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Even though your eyes are brown.”

“And I'm not your daughter.”

“Right,” he said, grinning.

Cinnamon and I climbed into the car, and we were off.

 

The first two-thirds of the journey was smooth and easy, but the last hour took us higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains, and while it was gorgeous, it was also extremely curvy. The two-lane road took us through an abandoned work zone called Bad Creek Project, which looked industrial and spooky, then snaked up endless hairpin turns that made me green-in-the-gills carsick. To our right, bare rock stretched toward the sky. To our left, the road dropped off sharply into forest.

“You should come up in the winter,” Cinnamon said from the front seat. She twisted to face me. “Icicles hang from the rocks, like three feet long. Sometimes we stop and break them off.”

“Mother Nature's popsicles,” Mary Beth said.

“Remember the time Logan stuck one in his diaper?” Cinnamon asked.

Mary Beth chuckled.

I was probably supposed to ask who Logan was, but I wasn't in a good position to be talking. If I opened my mouth, I was afraid I might throw up.

“Logan's one of the kids who's coming camping with us,” Cinnamon supplied. “He's eight now. His brother, Adam, is our age.”

I gave a tiny nod.

“The Gibsons are
very
nice,” Mary Beth said. “We've been going camping with them since before Cinnamon's father turned into a jerk.”

“Mom!” Cinnamon said.

“You're right, you're right,” she said. “He was a jerk all along. I was just too dumb to realize it.”

“
Mom
.”

If this was the “slightly mellow” version of post-divorce Mary Beth, then I felt bad for Cinnamon. Except I was too queasy to care.

Cinnamon crossed her eyes at me. Then she frowned. “Winnie? You okay?”

I wasn't, but I didn't want her drawing attention to it.

“Mom, Winnie's carsick,” she announced.

“Oh, poor thing,” Mary Beth said. We took a sharp turn, and I gripped the armrest. “Do you need me to stop?”

“That's okay,” I managed.

“Good, because we're almost there,” Cinnamon said. “Aren't we, Mom? Aren't we almost to the ‘Are You Lost' rock? And from there it's, like, twenty minutes to the campsite.”

“There it is,” Mary Beth said, pointing. I wanted her to put her hand back on the steering wheel, so I obediently lifted my head. A gray rock the size of a grizzly bear protruded from the mountain side, painted with crude white letters which read,
R U LOST
,
OR R U SAVED
?

Cinnamon leaned forward to peer out the windshield, then flopped back into her seat. The car bounced.

“I love that rock,” she said. Even through my nausea, I could hear how happy she was. Happy to be with her mom, happy to be going camping, happy to have me along.

She turned to face me yet again, and I didn't get how she could squirm about so much and
not
feel sick. Her grin dimmed as she took in my condition. Then it flashed back, both sympathetic and superior.

“City girl,” she said condescendingly.

I couldn't defend myself. I was too weak to reply.

 

At the campsite, Mary Beth had us unload the trunk and put the plastic milk jugs in the creek to keep them cold. Cinnamon showed me how to loop a piece of twine through each jug's handle and leash them to a tree so they couldn't float away. They looked goofy, like bobbing-milk dogs. I thought it was a cool idea, though—way more funky than a red-and-white insulated cooler.

The Gibsons arrived as we were putting up our tents—one tent for Mary Beth, one tent for me and Cinnamon, both of them army green and un-fancy. Our fellow campers piled out of their Honda Odyssey with lots of noise and laughter, and the first thing Cinnamon said to them was, “Hey, guys! This is my friend, Winnie. She got carsick.”

I blushed. I didn't like it when Cinnamon said things like that, and she said them fairly often. To Mr. Fackler, when I was late to history:
Don't be mad at her—her spaghetti gave her the runs.
To the annoying Louise, after Louise said something rude about a girl who supposedly had bad personal hygiene:
You think that's bad? Sometimes Winnie goes three days without taking a shower!
To Lars, taking over my computer when I was IM-ing him:
winnie misses u so much! omg! she's like totally whipped!

Sometimes it felt like she was out to get me. Or at least make me feel dumb. But she was also one of my BFFs, and I knew that in my heart. So it was confusing.

Logan, the younger of the two Gibson boys, said, “Gross. Did she barf?” He glanced at me in the way of eight-year-old boys, loud and show-off-y and not the slightest bit sympathetic.
Icicle-diaper boy
, I thought.

The older boy, Adam, shoved his brother. “Nice way to make a first impression,” he said. To me, he said, “Ignore him. He still watches the
Doodlebops
.”

“I do not!” Logan yelped.

I smiled. The Doodlebops were an Australian kid-music band with fluorescent hair and overly-animated expressions, and no self-respecting eight-year-old would ever be caught watching them. Even Ty, at six, knew enough to scorn the Doodlebops.

“She didn't barf, but she came close,” Cinnamon said, wanting to swing the attention back to her.

“Because you made me ride in the back,” I said. “If I'd ridden in the front, I'd have been fine.”

“Yeah, Cinnamon,” Adam said. He had dark brown hair, cut kind of geekily, and brown eyes. “You should have let her have the front.”

Cinnamon considered this. Then she shrugged. “Oops.”

Mrs. Gibson, who had fiery red hair and wore a blue sweat suit, dug around in the back of the Odyssey and emerged with a bottle of wine. “It's wine o'clock, sweeties!” she caroled. “Mary Beth, please tell me you remembered a corkscrew?”

“Wine?” Cinnamon said. “You're letting us have wine?”

“Ha ha,” Cinnamon's mom said. She fished a corkscrew out of her pack and tossed it to Mrs. Gibson. “You kids are on dinner duty. Call us when it's ready.”

“Ohhh, so that's how it's going to be,” Cinnamon said.

The cork popped out with a satisfying
thwop
. “Yep,” Mary Beth said.

She and Mrs. Gibson laughed, and Mr. Gibson, who looked a bit like an egg, brought over three plastic cups. They dropped down onto a log that had clearly lived by the fire circle for years and years.

“Ahh,” Mr. Gibson said, pouring the wine. “Here's to good, clean living.” The three of them raised their cups.

Adam turned to Cinnamon and said, “Pizza bagels?”

“Aces,” Cinnamon said. “Me and Winnie'll start the fire.”

 

By the time we'd eaten and cleaned up, it was dark. The fire popped and shimmered, and as I stared at the flames, I felt as if I were going into a trance. My muscles were sore and my belly was full, and watching the fire was as good as watching TV. Better, even. Magical.

The only problem was the smoke, which followed me no matter where I went. If I sat by Cinnamon on the log, the smoke found me there. When I scooched two feet to the left, the smoke scooched as well. When I got up and moved to a pig-shaped stump (which Adam informed me was indeed called “the pig”), the smoke faltered for a minute, then murmured, “Oh, there she is,” and curled on over.

“It's chasing me!” I complained.

“It is not,” Cinnamon said. “You just think it is because it keeps shifting to wherever you're sitting.”

I gazed at her. “And the difference is…?”

Adam laughed. It was a nice laugh, though like his hair, a bit on the dorky side. I'd learned over the course of the night that he was going into eighth grade, too. He went to a public school in Asheville, and we'd talked a little about the whole public school/private school thing. Like how Westminster's cafeteria food was actually good, while Adam's cafeteria still supported the “ketchup is a vegetable” rule. Also how not every single person at Adam's school cared about grades and status and going to the right college, which sounded refreshingly relaxing. So there were points in both schools' favor.