by Beth Turley
We’d gotten our ears pierced together at Farrah’s in the mall the week before. It was my first piercing, and your second. The needle hurt more than I thought it would but then it was over, and I inspected the little diamond in the mirror. I liked how it made my whole face look brighter, like a social media filter in real life. You wanted us to wear matching silver hoops to the tree farm. The piercer at Farrah’s had said not to swap out the earrings for a few weeks, but I wanted to match you too, so I took the diamonds out and replaced them with the hoops. I pressed the sharp end of the earring into my still-healing earlobe. The pain was enough to make me suck in my breath, and it still hurt when we climbed onto the bus for the field trip. I ignored it. Because our silver hoops were the same, and we were sitting next to each other, and that made things better.
Until Kendra leaned over the seat.
“Elena, I didn’t know you were an alien,” she said.
A blush shot into my cheeks. My mouth went dry.
“What?” I managed to croak.
“Your ears are green.” Her voice was louder now. Loud enough to make you and our other classmates sitting nearby turn their heads. Sara popped up next to Kendra.
“And bleeding. The transformation to alien must be painful.”
I put a hand to my ear. When I pulled away, there was a smear of blood on my fingertip.
“It’s just the. Um. Metal. A reaction to the metal in the earring,” I said. I had read the instructions and cautions on the bottle of cleaning solution. It warned this could happen, it just didn’t mention the hazard of it happening on a school bus.
“Nah, I think you’re part Martian.” Kendra said “Martian” in a pinched voice that made some kids in the other seats laugh.
I waited for you to say something, Summer. Tell everyone that we’d gotten our ears pierced together last week, and squeezed each other’s hands when the needle went through, but you didn’t. Your nose wrinkled.
“It does look pretty gross,” you said.
Kendra and Sara giggled and sunk back into their seat behind us. I undid the clasps on the hoops and pulled them out of my ears, stuck them into a deep pocket of my backpack. Then I made sure my hair was covering the sides of my face so no one would be able to see my ears anymore. I could barely look at you for the rest of the bus ride, or while we walked around the tree farm. But you chattered like nothing had happened. You never said you were sorry, and your silver hoops sparkled like the drops of frost on the pine trees.
I guess what I’m trying to say is we’re not in the same galaxy at all. We’re in completely different universes.
“Freeze!” Mindy shouted. Her watch beeped to the tune of “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid.
I looked down at my sheet and didn’t recognize the words, like they’d come from a part of myself I didn’t know existed. I wanted to throw the whole thing away. Discard it like all the texts I’d drafted to Summer and then deleted.
“That was fun,” Whitney said. She flipped her notebook around to show us. She’d sketched out an outfit. A flowy tank top with a knot at the waist, shorts with lacy fringe, a pair of high-top sneakers. “I don’t know how this will turn into an essay, but I may have just designed my outfit for the first day of school.”
“First day of school outfit. Back-to-school September issue of Spread Your Wings. Spread Your Wings essay. It all connects,” Mindy said. She poked her temple. “That’s what sprinting is about. Anyone else want to share?”
In the trees birds sang songs that sounded sort of like speeeak. I pressed my notebook into my chest and grabbed another bite of cheddar so my mouth was too full to read what I’d written. The heat in my cheeks was turning me as pink as the raspberry jelly. Cailin took a picture of the corner of the picnic blanket, where it turned from red and white checkers to thick green grass. We sat close enough for me to see her post the picture. It wasn’t what she usually posted to her page. I wondered why she’d chosen to do so now.
“I’ll go,” Harlow said. She cleared her throat. “ ‘There was a crime committed at the Vernon Daily newspaper building on the night of June twenty-first. The statue of Dasha Clark, placed in the lawn after her death five years ago, was vandalized. Spray paint was the method of destruction. The crime was committed by four teenagers who legally cannot be identified here. The motive for their destruction is unclear, and as a reporter who used to sit in the shade on the benches surrounding the statue, I am left bewildered by what has been done. It was my place of inspiration. Now it’s gone.’ ”
Everything was quiet when she finished, except for the birds.
“Is that true?” Cailin asked.
“Of course it’s true,” Harlow answered, her voice thick. “I only report the truth.”
Diagnosis: the loss of something you loved. Treatment: write about it. Hope that some of the bad feelings get left on the page.
Harlow reached down for a breadstick, but instead of eating it, she stuck it behind her ear. Whitney burst out laughing and Harlow stared at her.
“What?” she asked.
“You just put the breadstick behind your ear instead of a pencil.” She reached toward Harlow, into her wispy dark hair, and pulled the skinny stick out.
Harlow cracked up and the rest of us joined in. James took pictures until we stopped.
Mindy had us do more writing exercises, but we mostly laughed and devoured the cheese board and lay back in the thick grass. The birds kept singing.
On our walk to the hotel I fell behind so I could look at Cailin’s page. I wanted to see the picture of the checkered blanket and the grass she’d posted. I wondered what kind of comments her followers would leave about the piece of our picnic. But the picture wasn’t there.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Fall
Mindy told us we had an hour to get ready for what she called our “Flyer gourmet dinner experience.” I wouldn’t have minded delivery pizza in our hotel room again, but a fancy dinner out in the city could be fun. I imagined all of us eating on a garden terrace, twinkle lights and woven vines mixed in a leafy green canopy above our heads. The only leafy canopy in our room was the palm frond fan blades on the ceiling, whirling around and around.
I lay on top of our bed and watched it spin. The light coming in from the window was bright gold.
“It looks like a bomb went off in here,” Whitney said, walking out of the bathroom. She wore black jeans with an olive-green tank top tucked in. “And we are the bombs.”
“The messier you are around someone the more you like them,” Cailin answered, sorting through her makeup bag on the dresser. It was black with a red rhinestone C.
“Fact,” Harlow said, holding up a finger. She sat cross-legged on the other bed and smiled at the pages of her tiny notebook.
“We must really like each other then,” I said without thinking whether it was my turn to talk. It just felt like it was. It felt like in this group of the four of us there were places where I fit.
After we got dressed, we all ended up at the long bathroom counter together.
“Try this,” Cailin said to me, and handed over a shiny tube of pink lip gloss. “It’ll look good on you.”
I took it, pinching the tube between my fingers; it all felt normal. Like we had been friends for years instead of days. Real friends, not just Flyer friends. Friends who shared things. Happiness exploded in my chest like fizzy bubbles.
Whitney inched a tan belt through the loops on her jeans and buckled it. A second later she shook her head and took the belt off, dropping it on the floor.
“What makes you like fashion so much?” Harlow asked. She was dressed in her resporty style, a blue blazer over her Yankees shirt and the same khakis she’d worn to Central Park.
I wondered if Whitney would tell Harlow the truth—about how the perfect outfit made her thoughts settle down. Whitney pulled a floral scarf out of her bag on the floor and started easing it through the loops. She tilted her head in the mirror.
/> “The way I see it, I have one small piece of this world. And I want to decorate it the best I can. Make it something beautiful.”
“I love that,” Cailin said.
“Yeah, thanks…” Whitney’s voice trailed off. She knotted the scarf at her waist. When she was done, she snapped her head back up. “Getting ready like this reminds me of those shots of you and your teammates before competitions.”
Cailin held a mascara wand up to her eyes.
“It’s kind of like this. Except your body doesn’t know whether to be nervous or excited, and you keep thinking of all the things that could go wrong.” She blinked into the wand and coated her lashes in black. “There’s also more glitter. A lot of glitter. And hairspray.”
We laughed. Harlow put her brush down on the counter and gathered her hair to the side.
“What was it like when it did go wrong?” she asked.
“It was…” Cailin trailed off.
Summer and I had watched, gripping the edge of the sofa while Lone Star Elite’s routine started, perfect at first. Then Cailin’s stunt group hoisted her up into the air, and instead of Cailin’s legs staying straight and sturdy, they bent. She crumbled, her group catching her in a cradled position, the big smiles falling off their faces. I felt my palms go sweaty now just thinking about it, still holding Cailin’s lip gloss tube.
“Freeing.”
Whitney’s eyes shifted to Cailin in the mirror. I unscrewed the top of the lip gloss and my head filled with the artificial strawberry scent. After that competition, when her team walked away with the fourth-place trophy, the camera followed Cailin but she wouldn’t turn around. She kept her red sunglasses on.
“You were happy about it,” Harlow stated like it was a fact. She tied her inky black hair to the side and used silver clips to make it stay.
“I wasn’t happy.” Cailin snapped the mascara shut. She put it back in the makeup bag and pulled out a bottle of perfume. “I’m an athlete. I didn’t want to lose. But the pressure was finally gone. I went into every competition knowing I’d never fallen before. Now I had. It took the weight away.”
“That makes sense,” Whitney said.
Harlow shook her head.
“Not really, though, because at your team meeting you said falling was what you were most afraid of.”
“How much sense would it have made to the story if I said it was a relief to fall?” Cailin pressed the nozzle on the perfume and the liquid shot out in a flowery-sweet mist.
Harlow pushed in her last clip.
“It’s your story. It doesn’t have to make sense as long as it’s the truth.”
I swiped the lip gloss across my mouth and put it back in Cailin’s bag. The motion made it tip, and a bottle of lavender Sunny Days Gel Polish rolled out. Harlow had been so upset when Cailin revealed that the polish didn’t really last.
“It’s not always that simple, Harlow,” Whitney said.
I thought about Whitney’s secret panic attacks, and a pit formed in my stomach.
“Sometimes it is.” Harlow’s eyes were full of hurt when she walked out of the bathroom, and the pit in my stomach turned to suspicion; I had an inkling that Harlow wasn’t talking about Cailin anymore.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Gourmet Experience
Harlow seemed less angry on the way to dinner. She told us a story about Francine Mayfield, a woman who lived in Vernon, New York, for all ninety-six years of her life. The Vernon Daily had run an article about her. She made funny needlepoints and sold them online. She stitched words like TGIF, Not Listening, and Every Day Is Taco Tuesday If You Believe. According to Francine the general public deserved more from needlepoint than flowers. Harlow saved up her money to buy one that said Don’t Waste My Time, and when she went to hang it on the wall, she noticed the underside. The thread was messy and knotted. The words were fuzzy, backward, and unrecognizable. I walked behind her, next to Whitney, and thought about how things usually look different from the other side.
La Rosa Fine Italian was a few blocks from the hotel. When we got inside, the host waited behind a stand that looked like a marble column. He wore a vest and had shoulder-length brown hair. He led us to a table in the center of the restaurant with a little Reserved card on it. Akshita was there, and a long-stemmed rose stretched across each of our red placemats. The thorns had been picked off.
“What about menus?” Harlow asked while the host filled our glasses with water. The ice cubes clinked together.
“La Rosa put together a fixed menu for us,” Akshita said from the end of the table. She wore an almond brown dress. “Three courses.”
Cailin picked up her rose and twirled it between her fingers. She captured the movement with a video on her phone. The stem spun, the petals splaying out each time. The host and another server, a girl with a tight ponytail, came back and dropped a basket of bread on each end of the table. Mindy clapped her hands from the spot next to Akshita. I wondered if she felt like she was in Beauty in the Beast, and the candle in the center of the table was going to come to life and sing “Be Our Guest.”
Whitney handed me a roll before lowering her head to say grace. I tore it open, expecting steam and the floury smell of a bakery. Instead the roll stretched open like chewed gum. The inside looked like it had never seen an oven.
“Does it seem a little doughy to you?” Harlow leaned in to whisper in my ear. She sliced a slab of butter off with her knife and spread it inside the bread.
“It’s made of dough,” I answered.
“I mean uncooked.”
“My abuelita lets me eat the raw dough when she makes empanadillas. It’s like eating goo,” I said, and took a bite. It was tough and sticky in my mouth.
“What about foodborne illness?” Harlow asked, louder this time. Cailin and Whitney stopped mid-bite.
“Foodborne what?” Cailin asks.
“Food poisoning.”
“I never got food poisoning from it,” I said.
“Hey, Flyers,” Mindy said. “Let’s stop talking about food poisoning at the four-star restaurant.”
I put my uneaten roll down on the small plate at my setting. I noticed Cailin take a picture of her line of utensils, the phone held close to the polished knife.
Akshita cleared her throat.
“I like to use the Flyers dinner as a check-in point,” she said. “How is everyone so far?”
“Amazing,” Whitney answered. She laid her cloth napkin on her lap.
“I’m glad. Any highlights? Anyone?”
“James let me use his camera at the donut shop,” Cailin said. She took another picture, this time of the salad fork.
“Making sparks with the Life Savers,” I added.
The other Flyers nodded like they agreed. I felt bright and shiny, lit like the tall white candle in the middle of the table.
Akshita smiled.
“It’s often the moments the magazine doesn’t get to see that become favorites,” she said.
We added a few more highlights to the list, like eating the cheese board while sprawled out in the grass in Central Park, and the day of the staff meeting, before garden salads were delivered to the table.
Grape tomato halves and chunks of cucumbers were spread on a bed of romaine with thick slices of mozzarella. The whole affair dripped with balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I scrunched my nose. Balsamic reminded me of muddy footsteps on a floor. Everyone dug into the soggy salad. I picked up my fork and took a delicate bite, because I didn’t want to complain. The sour taste of balsamic tortured my tongue. Harlow picked wrinkled tomatoes out of hers and left them in a semicircle around her plate.
“Do you like it?” I whispered to Whitney.
“It has walnuts in it,” she said, moving the salad around with her fork.
“Does that mean yes?”
“It means it’s classy. My parents take me to this fully vegetarian salad restaurant every year for my birthday, and the one with the walnuts and grapes in it is called
the Class Act.”
“When’s your birthday?” I asked.
“March sixteenth.”
“You’re a Pisces,” I said, and smiled at the slimy salad. Pisces had a fish as their symbol. I imagined Whitney’s Pisces fish swimming alongside my Cancer crab.
“Is that a good one?” Whitney asked. I nodded, and she picked one of the walnuts out of the salad and ate it.
The spaghetti came out next, picture perfect and flecked with oregano. My stomach groaned like it was saying thank you, finally. Akshita picked up her water glass and held it toward us.
“Every Flyer experience is different,” she said. “But we hope you are loving yours. Cheers.” We all said “cheers” too and took a sip from our fancy drinks. I’d ordered the apple cider, and it came with a cinnamon stick straw that reminded me of autumn. It was spicy and sweet. Whitney’s lemonade had a pineapple slice on the rim, and Harlow and Cailin both had Shirley Temples full of maraschino cherries.
I put my chilled glass down and took a bite of the pasta. It clumped in my mouth, somehow slimy and dusty at the same time. The sauce had a sharp, salty bite that lingered even after I chugged half my cider.
I looked at everyone else eating. Cailin held up her fork with spaghetti twirled around it. The pasta looked like something on the cover of a food magazine. She took a picture.
“Are you for real?” Harlow asked. She glared at Cailin.
Cailin put the tightly swirled bite back down.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You must have some deal with this restaurant because the food is disgusting and you’re still going to post a picture like it’s not.”
“Whoa, Harlow,” Whitney mumbled under her breath.
“You don’t know what I was doing,” Cailin snapped.
“I do actually. You’re lying to your followers.”
Akshita cleared her throat and held up her hand.
“Take a breath, guys,” Whitney said.
Harlow turned to Whitney.
