Twelve (9 page)

I pulled away. I'd let her be motherly for
that
?

“Duh, because she's at her piano lesson,” I said. I saw Mom's frown and quickly added, “
Probably
. And afterward, she usually goes out to eat with her dad. So?”

“That's not what I mean, and you know it.”

I sighed. “Can I just go now? Please?”

“Go,” Mom said. “Have fun. Just remember to be careful.”

Sitting cross-legged on the trampoline, far from the jagged hole, Amanda and I chomped on Mike and Ike's and traded seventh-grade horror stories. The girl who got her period in the middle of math (wearing a yellow dress!); the girl who showed up with a pair of underwear stuck by static cling to the back of her pants (her mother's underwear at that); the girl who was forcibly held down while two other girls shaved her eyebrows off.

“
Why
?” I said.

“Who knows?” Amanda said. “But it's true. It happened to the daughter of one of my mom's friends. The mean girls told her she should wax because her eyebrows were hairy, but she didn't. So they invited her to a slumber party, and she was all excited because she thought, ‘Oh good, I'm finally in their group.' And then they held her down and shaved her eyebrows off.”

“That's
terrible
,” I said. I passed the Mike and Ike's to Amanda and drew my knees to my chest. Stories like these made me want to stay in elementary school forever. Seriously. And Mom was worried about me being with Amanda? She was crazy.

“What'd she do?” I asked. “The shaved-eyebrow girl.”

“I don't know. Probably switched schools—I would.”

“But then you wouldn't be with me anymore,” I said.

“If I was eyebrowless, I wouldn't want to be with anyone, ” she said.

“Still,” I said. I worked at a bit of candy with my tongue. “Anyway, that would never happen. And the reason it'll never happen is because we
will
be together. Right? I would never let anyone shave your eyebrows off.”

“Thanks,” Amanda said. “But my eyebrows aren't the slightest bit bushy. My mom says that's lucky, because I'll never have to pluck.”

“You've talked about plucking your eyebrows?” I said.

She looked at me, like
you haven't?

It caught me off guard, this feeling of being one step behind even with someone I'd known all my life.

“I wish Gail would get back from camp already,” Amanda said wistfully.

My heart twinged.
I
was the one who'd made a point of bringing her Mike and Ike's, not missing-in-action Gail.

“What, I'm not good enough?” I joked.

She snorted. “Right, you're not good enough. You're just a replacement until she comes home.” She flopped back on the trampoline. “Come on . . . don't you miss Dinah?”

“Why would I miss Dinah? She's not out of town.”

“Oh,” Amanda said. It was obvious she was surprised.

“I just called her this very day,” I said, feeling as if I had to go on.

“Well . . . good,” Amanda said. “I like Dinah.”

“I do, too,” I said.

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

This was dumb. I hopped off the trampoline. I liked Amanda
and
I liked Dinah—was that so hard to understand? Did we have to go through all this again, just when we'd refound each other? Maybe this was what Mom meant when she said she didn't want me getting hurt. Maybe, secretly, Mom knew I wanted Amanda to like me better than she liked Gail, just as maybe, secretly, I liked Amanda better than Dinah.

I think.

Sometimes I did, even though Dinah and I had fun in a way that never left me feeling stranded.

But seventh grade would be easier with Amanda by my side; harder with Dinah. That much I knew. Dinah would be the one, if it fell upon anyone, who got de-eyebrowed. Which would be terrible! That's not what I wanted at all.

All of a sudden I wasn't sure
what
I wanted, and I started back toward the condominium complex. In my confusion, I headed in the wrong direction.

“That's not the way,” Amanda said from the trampoline. “What are you doing?”

“I'm taking a shortcut,” I said.

“To
where
?” Amanda called. “You're not leaving, are you?” I didn't answer, just pressed on ahead. I was tangled up inside myself. Maybe people sometimes got hurt—or hurt each other—without it being on purpose. But did that mean you should just . . . walk away from it all? I felt in some unclear way like that wasn't the answer. I also, for no good reason, felt mad at Amanda. Like I needed to get away from her and forge my own path.

I pushed through a dense bushy area. When I felt the first sting, I thought it was a branch scraping my forearm. Then came another, and another—darts of fire all over my body.

“Help!” I screamed. I pitched forward, trying to escape the jabs on my shins, my thighs, my back. I heard Amanda behind me, her voice pitched high, but the cloud of yellow jackets made it hard to move or even think. “Amanda! Help!”

The yellow jackets droned around me. One stung my cheek, and it hurt so bad I thought I would faint. Another stung the side of my mouth, and I gagged. I felt its body against my lip, fuzzy and hard, and it left me light-headed.

Fingers grasped my upper arm. “Move, Winnie!” Amanda commanded. “You've got to move!”

I turned and staggered toward her. I hardly remember getting to the path, and I hardly remember Amanda pounding on the door of Mrs. Grayson's condominium. I do remember being herded into the front seat of Mrs. Grayson's silver Lexus, because I thought,
She's still got that fake tan
and
Whoa, her perfume is strong
. I also remember how fat my lower lip grew, swelling like one of Ty's microwaved marshmallows. And I remember the taste of salt when I touched it with my tongue. Salt and a sticky sweetness, left over from the Mike and Ike's.

“Tell me again how scared you were for me,” I said. We were sitting side by side on my bed, me under the covers and her on top.

“So so
so
scared!” she said. “I was like, ‘Poor Winnie! I would have collapsed right there on the spot!' ”

“I practically did,” I said. “Dr. Harper said it was a good thing I wasn't allergic, or I might have died.” It was a dramatic thing to say, but true, and as I watched Dinah's eyes go wide, I felt a welling of love. I'd almost chosen Amanda over Dinah
again,
when it was clear that I wasn't Amanda's first choice at all.

After Mom and I had gotten home from the Youth Clinic, and after Ty had counted all thirty-two of my stings to make sure I wasn't exaggerating, I'd asked Mom for the phone so I could call Amanda. I figured she'd be worried sick.

But before I could tell Amanda anything, her other line beeped. “One sec,” she said. Then, when she came back, she said, “Winnie, I am so sorry. It's Gail, and she only gets this one chance every day to use the phone. I'll call you right back, I promise!”

But she didn't. Two hours ticked by, and her call never came.

So I called Dinah, without Mom having to tell me to. Steady, loyal Dinah, who made her dad chauffeur her over right away with a bag of my favorite chocolate-covered pretzels from Whole Foods.

“Well, I am so glad you
didn't
die,” Dinah said now. “I can't even imagine if you died.” She was struck by a thought. “Oh my gosh. If you died, we wouldn't be able to go to seventh grade together! I'd be all alone!”

“Don't worry,” I said, patting her arm. I felt woozy from the pain medication. “I didn't, and you won't. Be alone, that is. You goof!”

She giggled and leaned against the pillow. She touched her toe to mine. “Back to the dramatic reenactment. You ran into the yellow jackets' nest, and you were stung five zillion trillion times . . . and then what?”

“And then a hand reached out through the blur of burning pain”—I made my hand descend from above—“and snatched me from the jaws of death.”

“Amanda?”

“She got stung three times. But I got stung thirty-two.”

“I know. You told me,” Dinah said.

“And now I'm telling you again.”

Dinah touched one of my welts, her fingers as light as a moth. She hesitated, then said, “Don't you think it's weird? That she's not here with you now?”

“Who? Amanda?”

She looked at me, like
who else?

I almost defended Amanda—she was busy, she only got that one call from Gail a day—and then I just . . .
poof
, let it go in my mind.

“I guess it is,” I said.

“It's not very cool,” Dinah said. It sounded strange coming from her, the word
cool
.

“No,” I said, giving the point to Dinah squarely and soundly. “Not cool at all.”

I thought about what Mom had said, about how Dinah might not always be there when I came back. But Dinah hadn't even known I was gone. At least, I didn't think she had.

I looked at Dinah as if from a high-up place. I wanted to tell her how enormous it was, this realization of who my friends were and who I myself wanted to be. Amanda wasn't evil, and she'd probably always be in my life. She'd probably always be someone I secretly admired.

But Dinah was here beside me, and I was immensely grateful. Because it could have gone the other way. I'd had a very narrow escape.

“From the yellow jackets?” Dinah said.

Whoa.
Did I just say that out loud?

“Um, yeah,” I said. “The yellow jackets, the world . . . everything.”

I offered her a chocolate-covered pretzel, and she happily took three.

September

OKAY, SEVENTH GRADE WAS HUGE. Freakily huge.

And not as in tons of people—although there were— but as in,
whoa, big life moment, everything's different and I can't deal
.

“Too bad, because you have to,” Sandra said as she drove us to Westminster on the morning of our second day. She shifted into fourth gear, and her lips curved into a barely there smile. She always smiled like that when she changed gears, because she was proud of herself for being so smooth. She'd used her summer savings to buy an old, beat-up BMW, and one of its selling points was that it had a manual transmission. “So many girls don't even know how to drive a stick shift,” she'd said to me sternly. “Don't let that be you.”

I wouldn't—
if
I ever made it to sixteen. But manual versus automatic was so not my problem right now.

“You don't understand,” I said. “I truly can't handle it— and I'm not being dramatic. Yesterday I saw a guy get pantsed in PE, and—”

“For real?” Sandra said, glancing over at me. “You
saw
this?”

“Well, no, but I heard about it,” I said. “And they gave this other guy a full-frontal wedgie! They hung him up on a towel hook!”

“Urban legends,” Sandra said, dismissing my reports with a wave of her hand. “Nobody at Westminster has ever been hung up on a towel hook, I promise you.” She flicked her blinker and turned into Westminster's back gate. To our right was the wooded trail the cross-country runners trained on; to our left were the back tennis courts. There was a second set of tennis courts out by the front gate, along with a rifle range and a ropes course. The place was huge.

I scrunched low in my seat. “But . . . nobody knows me.”

“So? You're a seventh grader. Nobody's supposed to know you.”

“Gee, thanks. Thanks for being such a great big sister.”

“I'm letting you ride with me, aren't I?”

“Only because you have to.”

Westminster went all the way through high school, so of course Sandra and I rode together. It only made sense. Westminster had an elementary school as well, up on the hill where the cross-country trail led. But none of us had attended the elementary school, because we went to Trinity. Trinity was nice. Trinity was small. At Trinity, everyone knew me.

Sandra pulled into the girls' parking lot. She cut the engine and yanked up the emergency brake. Then she looked at me, a look that was for real. “Just act confident, even if you're not,” she said.

Easy for her to say. She was a junior, and she was sassy and tough and drove a golf ball-yellow Beemer. Plus she was beautiful in her “I'm not trying only secretly I am” kind of way. Plus she was dating Bo.

I sighed. I didn't get out of the car.

Sandra slammed her door. There was no point in locking it, since it was so old. Dad had suggested we wear our bike helmets to stay safe. “Ha ha,” we had said.

“I'm leaving,” Sandra said, taking a token step toward the part of the campus where she spent her day. “You're going to look really stupid sitting in there by yourself.”

I gazed at her plaintively.

“What, you'd rather be homeschooled?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She strode back and tugged me out of the car. “Go,” she said, pushing me toward the junior high. “You're going to be fine. You really and truly are.”

In Mrs. Potter's homeroom, which consisted of only girls because the boys had their own homerooms, I sat next to a girl with pink braces named Malena. Next to Malena sat Gail Grayson. Malena had honest-to-God boobs just like Gail, and apparently that was enough to bind the two of them in snobby aloofness. They talked to each other, but neither talked to me. Gail acted as if she didn't even know my name.

Amanda was in Mr. Gossett's homeroom, and Dinah was in Ms. Myzchievich's homeroom. Dinah said she told them to call her Ms. M. Louise was in Ms. M's homeroom, too, and Dinah said she seemed lost without Karen, who was off in Alaska. I felt lost without Dinah, and she was only two rooms down.