Addie Bell's Shortcut to Growing Up

by Jessica Brody

  “I cheated,” I whisper toward the house.

  But it’s my mom who hears. She rests a reassuring hand on top of mine. “Like on a test?”

  “On everything.”

  Mom frowns. “I’m afraid I’m not following.”

  I think about what Grace told me yesterday, after she found out I’d switched the playing cards so that I could be her partner for the project.

  She’s right. I do always look for the easiest way to get places.

  That’s exactly how I got here. In this mess. Because I cheated. I wanted a shortcut to growing up. I wanted to be sixteen so badly, I didn’t care how I got there, or what I’d miss along the way. Rory’s graduation and my first day of high school and my first kiss and the day I got my cell phone and my sixteenth birthday and Buttercup as a puppy.

  I don’t want to skip over all those things. I want to live those things.

  I don’t want to take the shortcut. I don’t want to take the easy way. I want to go back and do it right.

  But I can’t. The indestructible jewelry box is locked and the only other person who even knows about it is gone.

  “I grew up too fast,” I finally admit to my mom.

  Concern flashes over her face. “What do you mean? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No,” I mumble. “Never mind.”

  She pulls me into a hug and I let her. I rest my cheek on her chest like I used to do when I was little and she strokes my wet hair. It may not solve all my problems but, I admit, it feels good.

  “I know what you need,” Mom says, kissing my head.

  “I doubt that,” I tell her.

  But then a second later her voice deepens, her body stiffens, and a low growl rumbles in the back of her throat. “The Yeti Forgetti always knows what you need.”

  I let out a girly shriek as her hands dig into my sides and she starts tickling me. I squirm and laugh and try to get away. But my mom is still as strong as ever and she keeps me trapped in her arms, tickling relentlessly.

  “Mom!” I squeal. “Stop!”

  “Who is Mom?” the Yeti Forgetti booms.

  “Yeti Forgetti!” I plead. “Stop!”

  “The Yeti Forgetti can’t stop! The Yeti Forgetti needs more tickles!”

  By the time I manage to wriggle away, I’m breathless and red-faced and Buttercup is barking relentlessly, wanting to get in on the game.

  I may not have forgotten everything that was bothering me, but she was right. It was exactly what I needed.

  Mom laughs and stands up, smoothing down her hair, which has gotten totally disheveled. “Here,” she says, pushing her green sludge smoothie toward me. “You can have this one. I’ll make another.”

  I sniff it and take a tentative sip.

  It’s not half bad. I down it in two gulps.

  “You should get going,” Mom says, pouring more ingredients into the blender. “Or you’ll be late.”

  I stand up and toss my schoolbag over my shoulder. “Thanks, Mom,” I say.

  I’m not really talking about the smoothie. But I think she knows that.

  She smiles. “Anytime.”

  When I get to school, Jacob is waiting for me on the front steps. Seeing him there all alone, looking kind of lost, I get a strange sense of déjà vu. For the first time since I woke up in this life, he looks like the Jacob Tucker I remember from Sky View Middle School. Not because he’s magically shrunk or regained all his baby fat. It’s something in his eyes I can’t pinpoint. A piece of him that hasn’t changed.

  Then I notice he’s holding a can of Grape Crush.

  I crack the tiniest of smiles but then recall that the last time I saw him he was cuddling with Clementine in the middle of the Human Bean and I quickly banish that expression.

  He sees me and comes rushing over. “Addie,” he says breathlessly. “We have to talk.”

  I push past him and start to climb the steps. “I have nothing to talk to you about. You were using me to get to Clementine. It’s fine.”

  “What?” He nearly croaks the word. “No! That’s not what happened at all.” He leaps in front of me, forcing me to stop. “Please, just listen.”

  I fold my arms across my chest, willing myself not to cry. But every time I think of Clementine leaning over to kiss his cheek, my eyes sting.

  He takes a deep breath before he begins talking a mile a minute. “It was all her. I swear! I was just sitting there reading and she came over and started talking to me. I tried to get her to leave but she wouldn’t take a hint. And then she wouldn’t stop flirting with me and trying to kiss me. It was so weird!”

  “So,” I say, still suspicious. “You didn’t text me to come meet you for coffee just to make me jealous?”

  “Text you?” Jacob looks confused. “I didn’t text you anything about coffee.”

  With a sigh, I take my phone out of my bag and show him the message I received from him yesterday. He squints at it, eyebrows furrowed, and then like a bolt of electricity hitting his brain, he suddenly jerks upright.

  “I can’t believe it,” he mutters under his breath. “She is so manipulative!”

  “What?”

  “She set us up!” he cries. “She asked to borrow my phone to look something up. She said hers was dead. She must have sent this and then erased it so I wouldn’t see it. Don’t you see? She wanted you to see me with her.”

  Huh?

  It takes a moment for my brain to catch up. Would Clementine really do that? Would she really try to hurt me like that? I bite my lip and stare at him, still unsure whether or not to believe him.

  “C’mon,” Jacob says teasingly. “Do you really think I would put a winky face in a text?”

  I turn the phone back around and look at the message.

  Jacob: Hey! At the Human Bean! Come hang w/me?

  And then the lightning bolt hits my head, too. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. It’s full of emojis. The very language of Clementine Dumont.

  I scroll back to the text message he sent me earlier in the week, asking if I wanted to go to the movies. Not a single cartoon picture to be found.

  “So you didn’t write this?” I confirm, feeling the joy and relief rise up in my chest.

  Jacob barks out a laugh. “No. I mean, yes, I would have wanted to hang out with you. But I didn’t lure you there so you could watch Clementine Dumont crawl all over me.”

  That makes me laugh, too. It’s a weak one, but it’s still a laugh. “So you don’t like her?”

  “No way.” He shakes his head adamantly, then takes a step closer, reaching toward my face. It isn’t until his fingertip brushes against my cheek that I realize he’s brushing away one of my tears. Looks like I’m crying. Again.

  He hands me the can of grape soda. “I like you,” he says.

  A small shiver runs through me.

  He likes me!

  A cute boy likes me!

  “Wait a minute,” I say, feigning suspicion. “Is this safe to drink?”

  He laughs, takes the can from me, and pops the top himself. It fizzes and sighs but there’s no purple explosion in his face. Then he hands it back to me and I take a sip.

  It tastes delicious.

  “So you like me?” I ask in a teasing voice.

  He gives me the most adorable half smile. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I shake my head. “I guess not to me.”

  He clears his throat. “Well, then either I have a lot to learn about girls or you have a lot to learn about guys.”

  I bite my lip to stifle a burst of laughter. “Maybe a little of both?”

  His half smile turns into a full-blown, beaming, ear-to-ear grin. “Maybe a little of both,” he agrees.

  Clementine and her minions ignore me all day. No surprise there. I sit as far away from them as possible in both French class and lunch. I don’t care what they think. All I care about right now is rocking this English project and proving to Grace that I can still be a good, reliable friend.
/>   “Are you ready?” Grace asks curtly when I meet her outside our English classroom before final period. I can tell she’s still upset about yesterday.

  “Yes!” I reply, trying to sound bright and upbeat.

  She doesn’t smile. She just hands me the script she’s printed out for our project. “Good. Then let’s get this over with.”

  I sit anxiously through the rest of the presentations while we wait for our turn. One pair performs a little skit. Jacob and his partner do a rap that’s so adorable, I can’t stop smiling through the entire thing. And another group filmed a really awesome movie.

  When it’s finally time for us to present, Grace plugs the small flash drive into Mr. Heath’s computer and our presentation appears on the big screen in the front of the classroom. She begins her part, clicking through pictures of herself with her favorite childhood toys, and her very first trumpet, and her first marching-band competition.

  She recites her lines flawlessly, just like we rehearsed. Then, after she reaches her final slide—the picture of her at her first concert—she hands the small clicking device to me and steps aside.

  I swallow and stare at the screen, clicking the button in my hand to get to the next slide.

  I’ve started with a photograph of me at age five. I’m sitting in the back of a convertible with Rory, the wind whipping our hair into our faces. I remember when my dad came home in that car and we freaked out, thinking he had bought it. It turned out he had borrowed it from a friend at work who was letting us take it for a joyride. My dad drove, my mom sat in the passenger seat, and Rory and I giggled in the back. We drove all around town, stopping only to eat. There was something about that day that always stuck with me. We all had so much fun. Maybe it was because we all knew it was temporary. Soon we would have to give the car back. So we knew we had to make the most of it.

  “Nostalgia,” I begin, glancing down at the script that Grace and I wrote, “is defined by the dictionary as ‘pleasure or sadness caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again.’ ”

  I click the button and the photo changes. The next picture is of me at age seven. It was taken right after my parents completely surprised me by redecorating my whole bedroom with the princess theme, complete with the castle in the clouds painted onto my ceiling by a guy from my dad’s construction crew. I’m standing next to the white dresser and pink chiffon curtains with a huge grin on my face. My two front teeth are missing.

  “There are certain moments in our lives that stay with us,” I go on, glancing down at my script. “That get saved in our mind like a photograph saved to a hard drive.”

  I click to the next slide. It’s me at age fourteen. The day my parents brought home Buttercup to surprise me. I’m sitting on the carpet in the family room, laughing while I try (and fail) to wrangle the bouncy golden puppy who’s crawling all over my lap.

  Looking at the photo now, I remember what my mom told me the other day. How they got Buttercup to help me deal with Rory leaving for college. So even though I look absolutely elated in the picture, deep down, beneath the surface, there was a hole inside of me. A hole left behind by an older sister who moved over two thousand miles away. And I never got to say goodbye. At least, not the part of me that remembers.

  “These are the moments that we look back on with a sense of longing, wishing we could store them as more than just photographs,” I say to the class. “Wishing we could save them as locations in a GPS device. Destinations that we can just hop in our cars and visit whenever we want.”

  I can feel my voice starting to break but I command myself to keep it together. Just a few more pictures and then it’ll all be over.

  I click to the next slide. This one is a picture of me at age six, standing in front of the yellow-and-white playhouse that would soon become our Hideaway. It was right after my father finished building it. Before Grace and I moved in and made it our own.

  I stare at the photograph of six-year-old me and, suddenly, I can’t breathe or speak. She looks so happy. So perfectly content to be right there in that moment. She’s not thinking about the future or the past. She’s thinking about how awesome that playhouse is. How amazing her father is for building it. She’s thinking how lucky she is to be living in that life.

  I don’t realize how long I’ve been just standing there wordlessly staring at the screen until Grace clears her throat. I blink and look over at her. She gestures for me to get on with it. I force a smile and look to Mr. Heath and the audience, who are all sitting quietly, waiting for me to continue.

  I glance down at the piece of paper in my hands. The script of what I’m supposed to say about nostalgia. How it’s like a warm blanket. How it comforts us when we’re feeling sad or lonely. How it’s a good thing. And maybe it is. But right now, I can’t bring myself to say any of that.

  I can only manage to speak the truth.

  My truth.

  A truth I’m not sure I fully realized until this very moment.

  “But maybe…,” I begin, my voice quavering and my hands shaking. I lower the script and face my classmates. My peers. “Maybe we’re just nostalgic for things because we’re so focused on moving forward that we let the present moment completely pass us by. And then, by the time we blink and remember to look around at what’s happening right now, the present moment is gone and everything that made us happy—everything we loved is in the past.” I peer over at Grace, expecting to see that same look of betrayal that I saw the night of the dance. But she’s just staring at me with her mouth hanging open.

  I flip to the next slide. It’s a picture of me at my sweet-sixteen birthday party. I’m dressed in an amazing strapless black dress with sequins, and my sleek, straight hair tumbles over my bare shoulders.

  Of course I don’t remember the picture being taken. I don’t remember if I was truly happy in that photograph, but I know for a fact Grace wasn’t there. So I can’t imagine that I was.

  I take a deep breath and keep talking. “You know, I used to think that if I was just older, everything would be better. My life would be perfect.” I bite my lip. “But then I got older. I grew up. And I realized that things weren’t better. They were just more complicated.”

  I click to the next slide. A picture I found on my phone of me posing with my adorable little green car. It was the day I got it. The smile on my sixteen-year-old face shows how excited I am, but the pain in my heart right now reminds me that it’s a moment I completely missed out on.

  “I used to think that growing up was a destination. A finish line to cross.”

  Click. Next slide. A selfie I took in the Human Bean.

  “But it’s not,” I go on. “Growing up is a journey. It’s not about getting somewhere. It’s about what we do and see along the way.”

  I flip to the next slide. It’s a photograph of me at age twelve. Grace and I were on the floor of the Hideaway in our sleeping bags, looking up at my mom, who was holding the camera. At Grace’s request, she’s been cropped out of the picture so it looks like I’m having a slumber party all by myself.

  “Maybe if we weren’t so obsessed with getting older and moving on to the next big thing, maybe if we started appreciating what we have right now at this very second, then we wouldn’t be nostalgic for the past.” I reach for the mouse on Mr. Heath’s computer and click. A small box appears around the photograph. I drag the left side out until the entire original picture is revealed. Until Grace is back in the photo, smiling up from her sleeping bag right alongside me. “Then we would realize that everything we want, everything—and everyone—that makes us happy, is already right here. Right now.”

  I look to Grace and she looks back. For just a brief moment, I can see something in her eyes. A glimmer. A flicker of forgiveness. And then the smallest hint of a smile.

  It’s not much, but I’ll take it.

  When I get home later that afternoon, I’m feeling a little lighter in my step. A little more hopeful about everythi
ng. Buttercup greets me at the door, almost as if to ask, “How’d it go?” I give her head a rub. “I think it went pretty well,” I reply.

  She runs into the kitchen and stares at her bowl. I sigh. “Wow. You really do have a one-track mind.” I head into the pantry. “Okay, let’s see what we can find for you today.”

  I sort through the contents of the shelves. “Instant rice? No. Pancake mix? Probably not. Chicken and noodle soup? Sure, why not.”

  I grab the can of soup and bring it over to the counter. Just as I’m about to pop off the top, I hear a strange whirring sound. Like an electronic fan that’s just turned on. I glance over at Buttercup’s bowl. She’s still staring at it intently. And that’s when I notice something strange about the futuristic dog dish.

  It’s moving.

  Not the entire thing. Just the plate on the top. The weird V-shaped opening is rotating to the left. I take a curious step toward it, studying it just as intently as Buttercup has been doing for the past week.

  After a few seconds the whirring sound halts and the dish stops rotating, revealing a brand-new, untouched, perfectly portioned supply of dog food. Buttercup immediately attacks it, wolfing it down like she hasn’t eaten in years.

  “Oh my gosh!” I exclaim. “You little sneak!”

  She wags her tail in response but doesn’t look up from her meal.

  “That thing has been automatically feeding you every day and you’ve been acting like you’re starving to death?”

  Her tail wags again. I take that as a yes.

  Well, that certainly explains why I could never find the dog food. It was hiding inside her dish!

  That just goes to show, you should never trust a dog when it tells you it’s hungry.

  I’m about to return the can of soup to the pantry when a text message dings on my phone. I race over to my schoolbag and dig it out, hoping it’s from Grace.