“No, I don’t, not really. I have people who sometimes hang out with me, but mostly because they need a crowd. Or maybe they like something I put on Instagram, because it’s super easy to do, and they know if they like my stuff, I have to like theirs. But it’s not like they’re real friends, like we were.”
Past tense.
“Rae, I wish I could take the whole Klaus thing back. It was stupid.”
“Yeah, it was,” she says bluntly. “But it’s not just about that.”
“If it’s about Mitchell, you’re the one who—”
“It’s not really about him either. Or the snakes—”
“I didn’t really lie to you about the snakes, Rae. I just didn’t really tell you how scared of them I really was.”
“But that day in the shed, I gave you a chance to tell me why you don’t trust me with, oh, anything, and you started talking about a trip to the zoo when you were six!”
So when she had said, “I don’t always understand you,” she meant she didn’t understand why I just didn’t trust her with these things. She wasn’t looking for the history of my snake issues!
I do feel bad, I do. But—
“I’m really sorry about not always telling the truth,” I say. “I really am. But haven’t you told me some lies this summer too?”
She looks at me, puzzled. “Me? No.”
Wait. What? I thought we were getting somewhere here. I’d confess, she’d confess, and maybe we’d be friends again. “But—I still don’t really understand what you were doing over at Mitchell’s that night.”
“Yeah, I tried to tell you and you wouldn’t listen!” Her voice is full of frustration. “All summer long you’ve been like that!”
“Rae, I try to listen! I try to be your friend, but sometimes it’s hard because—” I stop myself. I start to fidget with a jagged fingernail.
“What, Edie?”
“I don’t know, Rae, sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes what?”
My pulse is racing. It’s becoming harder to breathe.
“Edie, please. Just tell me.”
And then I realize why I’m so incredibly scared. Even with all the adventuring, and sneaking, and snaking, and whatever, this may be the scariest thing I’ve done all summer. I’m finally about to speak the truth—and apparently, telling the truth takes a whole lot of guts. Which I have, I remind myself. Who knows? I’ve probably grown an extra spleen over the summer.
Her eyes are wide open, like she wants to hear what I might say. And I know that maybe she needs to hear it.
I sit down on the floor near her. I center myself. Or at least I think I do. I take a breath. Three counts in, four counts out.
“Well, sometimes . . .” I need to choose my words carefully. “Not always, but sometimes . . .”
She nods, still looking at me.
“Sometimes it feels like you just want an audience, not a friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the movie quotes and Shakespeare—I mean, that’s great for performing. But I want to know things are real. That they’re not just part of an act.”
“But they’re not an act!” she says. “When I quote from something, it’s still real! It just means that someone said it better somewhere. It’s still what I believe.”
“I like it better when you just say what you believe.”
“It’s just that—” She stops for a second and looks at me. “I always feel like I have to say the right thing. Like if I don’t, people won’t, you know, like me.”
“Well, that’s why I made up Klaus,” I say. “I just thought you’d, you know, think I was cool. Or more like you, at least. And you’d want to hang out—and do the list with me.”
“His name was Klaus!”
“Yeah, uh, bad choice,” I say. “At least Leo is real.”
She’s quiet.
“Wait. He is, right?”
“He’s real,” she says, pulling her knees in closer. “But he’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore. He broke up with me.”
“What? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I kept trying to, but you just weren’t listening.”
Memories appear like snapshots in my mind: the day I couldn’t find her, because she was in the shed trying to reach him; the time she quoted Leo via Shakespeare—“’tis better to be brief than tedious.” He’d been avoiding her; she sensed that it was going to happen.
“You know how Leo wanted to FaceTime me? The night of Corkscrew Swamp?”
“Your month-iversary,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, a little sheepishly. “I thought he was going to apologize for avoiding me, but you know why he wanted to FaceTime? He didn’t want to apologize—he wanted to dump me! It took about five minutes for him to put an end to the last six months. Happy month-iversary to me,” she jokes.
I wince. “I’m sorry. I wish I had been paying more attention.”
“Well, the whole thing pretty much sucked, and I didn’t really feel like I could come back and talk to you. So I went over Mitchell’s and we just hung out and watched a movie, and he made cookies. He really can be a good friend.”
I realize she’s right. I’ve seen how kind Mitchell is—taking care of his little brother, being a good sport when Henry and Beatrice attack him with trivia. Offering me his sweatshirt that night we stayed out and watched the stars. It makes sense that he’d want to be a good friend to Rae that night, and I’m starting to feel really stupid that I wasn’t a better one.
“Rae, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. About everything. About Klaus. About lying. And I’m sorry about Leo too.”
“Yeah, I think deep down I knew he didn’t really like me like that. I might have forced the whole boyfriend role on him in the first place. I just didn’t want to admit it. He’s another drama geek like me . . . and you know, this whole time, I think he was just playing the part.”
“Playing the part? But you’ve kissed him!” I remember all that weird pillow and vacuum talk from the beginning of summer. “Haven’t you?”
“Only onstage. And you know what he does when we have to kiss? He starts counting on his fingers—one, two, three. And his face is all scrunched up like he’s in pain. It’s horrible, Edie. Terrible.” She sighs. “Well, I guess I see your point then. I do some performing.”
I take a deep breath. “No, you know what? I guess I did some performing myself this summer.”
“Maybe we both did,” she says. We look at each other and smile at the same time. I think back to when I first saw her—how it seemed like we were so different, despite sharing some common genes. It feels like I’ve finally found that mysterious twelve and a half percent.
And she seems to have found it too. “Edie, it just hit me. Like, really hit me. We’re related. We’re going to know each other for the rest of our lives.”
I wonder if that’s why Petunia made it a requirement in her will that we all come down and work on the house together. To somehow bring together in her death what she couldn’t in life.
“So let’s make a pact. From here until forever,” she says. “No more pretending, no more performances.”
“Deal,” I say. “Except there’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“You know how you kept asking why the list meant so much to me?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, here’s the thing. I’ve wanted to do the things on the list so I could prove to my best friend, Taylor, that I’m not a boring, no-fun scaredy-cat.” I give her a half smile. “So she wouldn’t ditch me for this new friend.”
She looks surprised. “That’s why you wanted to do the list?”
“Yeah. But so much for that. I didn’t actually accomplish a single thing.”
“But you did. And anyway, you’re not a no-fun scaredy-cat. And you’re not boring.”
It’s not exactly the ringing endorsement I’d have wanted. Meet Edith! She’s not boring! And she’s not no-fun!
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“Well, I haven’t caught a snake.”
“Frogs are much harder to catch, trust me.”
“And we never did find any hidden treasure.”
“But we found a bunch of other things instead. Hoof-flavored ice cream! And toothpick trucks. And a stuffed alligator. Come on, Edie. Forget gold. This stuff is priceless!”
I smile. “And I never actually danced in the Hurricane.”
“You can’t possibly be a scaredy-cat and still break into an abandoned building in the middle of the night!”
“Well, okay. Maybe you’re right. But I never mastered flirting. I failed that pretty badly.”
“But you still somehow managed to ask a boy out—that night you saw the stars. And because you’re such a bad flirter, that’s an even bigger win! How exactly did you do that, anyway?”
“I, uh . . . have no clue. But I never saw a shooting star, so I couldn’t make a wish on one.”
“Doesn’t matter. Science has proved that wishes on shooting stars don’t come true any more often than wishes on your average nightly star,” she says.
“Thank you, Henry.” I laugh. “And I never actually wrote something scary.”
“Well, I know you wrote something.”
“Yeah, I wrote the real-life story about the zoo, but when I did, I realized it wasn’t all that scary anymore. Like, this whole time, it’s been taking up way too much room in my mind. And when I got it out, it just seemed a little ridiculous.”
She smiles at me—the kind of smile that only a good friend could give. I start to feel a little melty, but I clear my throat. “And you know how Corkscrew Swamp went.”
“Tragically,” she agrees.
“Oh, and hug the person you least want to? You know, I thought about it that night, and I didn’t hug you on purpose. I was too mad.”
“You can hug me now, if you want,” she says.
“Yeah, but now, I actually sort of want to hug you, so it doesn’t even count.”
She leans forward and wraps her arms around me. I laugh again, and hug her back.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you didn’t do this summer, Edie. You are brave. And you’re going to do something else pretty gutsy now.”
“I am?” I ask.
“Yep. Go give Mitchell this photo. Go see him.”
She slips it into my hand. I look at the picture again. It’s sweet.
I hesitate. “Will you come with me?”
“Nope.”
“But what about the dynamic duo?” I ask.
“We’ll always be the dynamic duo, but you’ve got to do this on your own.”
Maybe it’s her certainty that convinces me. And that little trill of nervousness I feel—I realize that may never go away. Maybe it’s just one small part of being brave.
Then she says, “Oh, Edie, there’s one thing left on the list that you haven’t tried yet, in case you really do want a checkmark.”
That look alone tells me she’s talking about item nine. Kiss the charmer.
“Right,” I say.
The mischievous Rae smile is back.
Wait. “I mean that in a sarcastic way, not a ‘you’re right, I should do it’ way.”
She shakes her head. She laughs. “Just go.”
I knock on the screen door, and it sets off Colvin. Byebye-byebye.
Mitchell appears on the other side of the screen. “Sorry, he’s playing with his Legos and doesn’t really want company,” he says. “Let me get him settled and I’ll be right back.”
I take a seat on his porch steps and try to be calm despite the reminder that my heartbeat can get a little haywire around him, even though we’re just buds.
The screen door screeches open behind me. He sits down next to me, and we look at each other. There is serious eye contact going on. He opens his mouth as if to declare something, maybe something important. His affection? His true regrets? And he says—
“Testudinal means looking like a tortoise shell.”
Wait. My eyebrows crunch together. “Testudinal?”
“Yep.” He shifts around a little and leans forward. “And a turtle shell is made up of sixty bones.”
“Oh. Okay?”
“And a group of tortoises is called a creep.”
“A creep?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Okay, then,” I say. “You’re acting like a group of tortoises then.”
He gives me an almost smile.
“You said you wanted to talk about turtles,” he says. “Last time I saw you.”
Oh. Right. My wonderful ability to think on my feet. The night I found Rae here with him.
“So I did some research. So we could talk.”
“Okay, then,” I say. “Let’s talk. Because I’ve been wondering why you’ve been acting weird around me ever since the sea-stars night.”
“Yeah, uh, about that,” he says, stammering a little. “Well, uh, the next morning, when I was trying to tell you it was fun—”
“A good night,” I say.
“Yeah . . .” He gets a little pink.
“What?”
“You—you laughed at me.”
Ugh. When I snortled and chortled and made those awful involuntary laugh grunts.
“So that’s why you called me your bud?”
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” he says. “You know, just to be friends.”
“Oh, I do. I mean, I want to be friends, but not, like, buds, where we arm wrestle.” What am I saying? “And, like, catch frogs, and—”
“You don’t like the frogs?”
“No, I do, I do. I love the frogs. I mean, I like them. Let’s keep catching frogs . . . uh.” I make myself stop talking. And I take a big breath. “Mitchell, listen. That laugh . . . is just a thing that sometimes happens when I get nervous.” And I finally say what I only wish I’d had the nerve to say a while ago. “Especially around someone I—I kind of like.”
He starts to dimple. I smile and look away.
“Here,” I say, dropping the photo in his lap. “It’s a picture of you. And Petunia. And some kids.”
He picks up the photo and studies it. I expect his face to light up, but it doesn’t. He just says, “Cool. Thanks.”
“Who are they?”
“Some friends. From my old school.”
He’s acting weird again—I decide to try a joke. You know, like Rae once said, give him a sort of hard time. “Well, it’s good to know you have friends. The only other people I’ve seen you with are those kids in the Pinne Mafia.”
But he doesn’t really crack a smile. “Yeah, and those guys aren’t my friends.”
“I mean, I kind of figured. They don’t even know your name. Weren’t they calling you Ed that day we saw you with them?”
He stares straight ahead. “They weren’t calling me Ed by mistake or anything. They were calling me Ed as in special ed.”
“Oh” is about all I can manage, because I feel so stupid for another great flirt fail. Way to joke with him!
He glances over at me. “I used to go to a special school. Those kids in the picture, they were my classmates.”
“So those guys that day—they were being jerks?”
He nods. “Try going to regular school after people like them find out you used to be in special ed.”
I have a flashback to the night of stargazing, when he told me he went three years without talking. “Does this have anything to do with those three years you didn’t talk?”
“Yep. Selective mutism. That’s what it’s called when you don’t talk, even though you can,” he says, and then jokes, “Although I didn’t really select it.”
I’ve heard about this. That sometimes young kids can develop this if something traumatic happens.
“A lot of people thought I was really weird. But not Petunia. She let me bring my classmates here. She taught us all how to handle the snakes. And it helped me. I started talking again.”
I’m reminded of the conversation
I had with Dani at the diner. “So snake therapy—it’s a real thing?”
“Yeah,” Mitchell says. “Snakes are really sensitive. They can sense if you’re panicky, or nervous, or anxious, or anything.”
I can sense a little of that in myself at this very moment. I guess maybe we could all use a snake sometimes.
I can’t believe I just had that thought.
“I didn’t want you to think I was weird, so I didn’t tell you.”
“Oh.” I can understand that, but . . . “Well, I wouldn’t have thought that just because you were in a special school.”
“People say that, but . . .” He looks at me for a good minute with those blue-wait-no-green-no-aqua eyes. “You mean it really doesn’t freak you out?”
“No. Not that. Plenty of other things about you do, but not that.”
“Oh, yeah, like what?”
“Like—” I think about the first time I saw him. “The fact that you’re a frog whisperer.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“And a testudinal expert.”
Wait. Am I flirting? Nope, because that’s the worst line ever.
I look over at him. The way his eyes lock on mine seems to lighten the force of gravity in my body, somehow. My heart soars, my stomach lifts into my throat, and my mouth corners seem to be working on their own terms, smiling really stupidly, and—
Oh, no.
Snort. Chortle. Snort. SNORT. CHORTLE. It is just as horrifying as the first time. No, wait, it’s worse than the first. It’s louder, gruntier, and more incessant. I’ve never been so unhappy to laugh before.
“I’m . . . sorry,” I manage to say. I worry if he might think I’m laughing at him again.
But this time, he’s looking at me altogether differently. He’s smiling. He’s taking this as a compliment. He gets it. He gets me. He’s—oddly enough—flattered.
“Oh, here’s another thing about turtles—something really crazy,” he says. “The soft-shell turtle pees from its mouth.”
“Oh, ew.” I make a face, despite being pretty flattered myself. He’s flirting!
And he may be an even worse flirter than me.
Chapter 26
Ten
The list of good ideas for summertime has been revived.
It was Rae’s idea to add a tenth item to the list, the one that Petunia left blank. She’s convinced that I can’t end the summer without checking one item off the list. So . . .
The Summer of Bad Ideas Page 18
