by Nancy Rue
“God?” she whispered. “I guess I’m not blooming very well. Would You help me, please? I’m never going to get to be a doctor if I don’t get smart about this stuff. Amen.”
She opened her eyes and then squeezed them shut again. “And would You please heal Zooey and don’t let her be in pain? I’m sorry about what I did to her.”
The tears wanted to come again, but Lily wiped them firmly away with the backs of her hands, sat up, and reached for her first aid books. If she was going to do this thing, she was going to have to study an awful lot harder.
So she did. Every night that week she hurried to get her homework done so she could go into Mom and Dad’s room and watch Emergency Trauma on cable on their TV. Those shows weren’t made-up stories like House; they were films of the real thing. Sometimes she got so fascinated by what they were doing, she would forget to take notes. Besides, she didn’t know how to spell some of the words anyway.
And of course she kept reading, and she kept monitoring the Girlz’s fitness programs to make sure they were staying healthy. All except Zooey. She didn’t come to school for several days. When Lily called her house, her mother told Lily, in a voice like a pistol going off, that Zooey could not come to the phone and that Zooey would call her when she was able.
“That’s funny,” Reni said when Lily told her about it. “She let me talk to her.”
“Me too,” Suzy said.
“She hang up on me,” Kresha said. She flashed her big smile. “She did not understan’ my English.”
“Then why couldn’t I talk to her?” Lily said. Everyone but Reni looked at the floor.
“She’s probably mad at you for messing up Zooey’s ankle more,” Reni said.
“But I didn’t!” Lily said.
Reni just shrugged. Lily stared at her. She could feel her eyes doing that intense thing that Shad Shifferdecker always said “creeped him out.”
“Do you think I messed it up more?” Lily said.
“I don’t know,” Reni said. “My mama says you did, but . . .”
“She does?”
“So does mine,” Suzy said in her meek little voice. When Lily looked at her, she hooked her eyes into her lap.
“Mamas,” Kresha said. “Sometimes they cray-zee.” She circled her finger around her ear, but it didn’t make Lily feel any better.
“You saw how I took care of Zooey,” Lily said. “I was helping her!”
“Okay, okay,” Reni said. “Can we drop it?”
“But this is making me feel really bad,” Lily said. “I’m trying to help people, and nobody understands that.”
She looked around, hoping her friends would tell her that Reni’s and Suzy’s moms were wrong, that her Girlz all understood, and that they were behind her 100 percent. But no one would even look at her. This time not even Reni.
“I bet if Zooey were here, she’d stick up for me,” Lily said. She knew her voice sounded pouty, but there was nothing she could do about it. It just came out that way.
“I guess we’ll see,” Reni said.
“How?” Lily said.
“She’s coming back to school tomorrow.”
Reni was right. The next day Zooey did come to school, armed with crutches and ready to enjoy the attention they got her. She was the first person in the class that year to break a bone, and even Shad Shifferdecker seemed a little envious. He grabbed her crutches the first chance he got and went racing up and down the aisles with them until Ms. Gooch came out of her cubicle office and threatened to wrap them around his neck if he didn’t put them down.
Lily couldn’t wait until the Girlz Only meeting that afternoon. She had to talk to Zooey about her mother at first recess. Ms. Gooch let the Girlz stay in the room with her while everyone else went out.
“I tried to take care of you, Zooey,” Lily said when they were all gone. “I hope it wasn’t me that made your ankle be so messed up. I don’t think it was—”
“I got to have all the ice cream I wanted this week,” Zooey said, “and it doesn’t hurt that much anymore.” She gave her little bow-mouth smile. “My mom cries every time she looks at it, but my dad says she has hormones or something like that.”
Lily took a deep breath. “Why wouldn’t your mom let you talk to me on the phone?”
Zooey’s eyes widened. “You called?” she said. “I didn’t know that! Suzy called and Reni called. Oh, and Marcie McCleary called, only I knew she was just being nosy, so I didn’t tell her anything, but I didn’t know you called.”
“Then your mom does hate me now,” Lily said. Another pang went through her.
“She doesn’t hate you,” Zooey said. “My mom doesn’t hate anybody. She says it’s wrong to hate. She wouldn’t even let me and my brothers use the word hate when we were little kids. She’s not so big on that now, since my brothers use worse words and she’s busy yelling at them for those.”
Kresha’s face was twisted into a question mark. “Vhat she talking ’bout?” she said.
“I’m saying my mom doesn’t hate Lily. She even said I could go to our Girlz Only meeting. Only she said not to jog if Lily tries to make me.” Zooey’s face shone. “Duh!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Reni said. She popped a pencil out of the slot on the desktop and watched it roll down. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Lily-Know-It-All tried that.”
The biggest pang yet shot through Lily like a laser. “I would not do that!” she said.
Suzy’s whole face got nervous. “She was just kidding, Lily,” she said.
“Yeah,” Reni said. “I was just kidding.”
But the pang in Lily told her not to be too sure about that.
Ten
The thought that Reni might really have been serious, deep down in the deepest, truest part of her, kept sending pangs through Lily all day long, even during the Girlz Only meeting. Finally that night she couldn’t stand it any longer. She had to test the friendship, so right after supper she called Reni.
“You want to come spend the night Saturday?” Lily said. “Just you and me? We haven’t done that since we started the Girlz Only Group.”
“Saturday?” Reni said.
“Yeah.”
“This Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“This coming Saturday?”
“Yes! Yikes, Reni! Yes or no?”
“No.”
Lily felt her hand tightening around the phone. “What?” she said.
“I said no. I can’t.”
“How come?”
“Because . . . I have something else I have to do.”
“What?” Lily said.
“Do you have to know everything?”
It wasn’t a pang this time. It was a stab, and it went right through Lily’s heart.
“No,” Lily said.
“It’s just that—”
“Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Okay,” Reni said.
There was a funny silence on the phone. There was never any kind of silence on the phone when the two of them were talking.
“So what are we doing at the meeting tomorrow?” Reni said.
“I was going to teach everybody how to take their pulse,” Lily said.
“Oh,” Reni said.
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Something different for a change.”
After they hung up, Lily felt awkward, like she’d just lost her seat in a game of musical chairs. Reni was being cold and sarcastic and weird. Without Reni’s warm dimples and their best-friend exchanging of glances, Lily didn’t know quite where to put her hands or what to do with her elbows or where to rest her eyes.
I just have to do something! That’s all, she thought. I’ll just do . . . something!
But no ideas came to her until the next day, and of all the people to get an idea from, it was Ms. Gooch who inspired her.
Ms. Gooch had just returned the class’s narrative essays to them, and she told them she wasn�
�t very happy about their work.
“Lily got an A,” Zooey said, waving her arms.
“Goody,” Shad Shifferdecker said.
Lily turned to glare at him and tried to scoop up a glare from Reni on the way, but Reni just wiggled an eyebrow and turned toward Ms. Gooch. Lily cut the glare short. It was no fun doing it without Reni.
“I think you are all capable of much better than this,” Ms. Gooch went on. “I think it’s just a case of the January doldrums.”
“What’s a doldrum?” Marcie McCleary said.
“It’s what you get when there’s nothing to look forward to, nothing neat to do. Christmas is behind you, and it’s a long time till summer.”
“Oh,” Marcie said. “That’s depressing.”
“Right,” said Ms. Gooch, “so I’m going to give you all something to look forward to. We’re going to go on a field trip.”
The class gave a big gasp as if they were all breathing from the same pair of lungs. But Lily only half listened as Ms. Gooch talked about the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. She had her idea.
A field trip! That’s what the Girlz need! We need to get out of the clubhouse and do something somewhere else! Ms. Gooch had a hard time settling the class down to their math assignment after her announcement, but Lily hurried right through hers so she could write out the rules to the contest she was thinking up: whoever could use the nutrition facts on food packages to come up with the most balanced meal in the grocery store would win. She could barely wait for afternoon recess so she could tell the Girlz—well, at least some of what she had in mind.
By then Zooey had left school to go to a doctor’s appointment. Lily and the others gathered in a sunny spot near the bike racks to try to stay warm, although Lily was too excited to feel the cold much.
“Who’s tired of going to the clubhouse every day and taking pulses and stuff?” Lily said.
Reni’s hand shot up Marcie McCleary–style. Suzy and Kresha nodded.
“Good,” Lily said, “because today we’re going to do something different.”
“Like what?” Reni said. She wasn’t showing her dimples yet as Lily had hoped she would, but Lily kept on.
“We’re going on kind of a field trip,” Lily said. “Everybody meet right after school so we can go to the Acme.”
“The grocery store?” Suzy said.
“Yeah,” Lily said. “And that’s all I’m going to tell you. The rest is going to be a surprise.”
Reni stomped her feet as she tried to get warm. “What surprise could there be at the grocery store?” she said.
“Ice cream?” Kresha said. “Ve are goin’ to have ice cream, Leelee?”
Reni stopped stomping. “Oh, yeah, we need ice cream on a day like today.”
“No, it isn’t ice cream,” Lily said. “It’s more like . . . like a treasure hunt. Now, that’s all I’m going to tell you.”
“Wait a minute,” Reni said. Her brown eyes narrowed in the tiny space between her knit cap and her wool scarf. “We’re not going to go around reading food packages, are we?”
Lily felt that pang again, only this time she stopped it before it could stab her. “Yes, we are!” she snapped at Reni. “But you don’t have to be so . . . so negative about it!”
Lily waited for Reni to look sorry. She didn’t. Lily jammed her fists into the pockets of her jacket and stomped off. She stood by the back door until the end-of-recess bell rang and was the first person into the building.
I don’t care. I don’t care, she kept telling herself. It was the only way she could keep the pangs from stabbing her.
Still, tears threatened to spill over while she was answering her geography questions. Then a figure passed by on her way to the pencil sharpener and dropped onto Lily’s desk a note folded up into a triangle the way only she and Reni did it.
All right, it said, I’ll come to the Acme. I didn’t mean to make you mad.
Lily read it three times before she folded it up and carefully tucked it into her jeans pocket. The tears went away.
She’ll have a blast once she gets started, Lily told herself. I know Reni. She will.
It started to snow just as school was letting out, but it was that light, feathery kind of snow that just fell quietly and didn’t stop people from doing what they wanted to do, at least not until it was all piled up and the sun went down and it got icy.
It’ll be fun walking to the Acme in this, Lily thought as she tucked her jeans legs down into her boots to keep them dry. Even as she squatted there, three other pairs of boots appeared, and Lily looked up at Kresha, Suzy, and Reni.
“You guys ready?” Lily said.
“Yeah,” Reni said, “only I vote we go to Suzy’s and slide down her hill in inner tubes. There’s gonna be a lot of snow by the time we get there.”
Lily stood up slowly. “But I thought you said you’d do the thing at the Acme.”
“That was before it started snowing,” Reni said. She tilted up her chin in a way Lily had never seen her do before. “I say we go play today and do the Acme tomorrow. Or some other time.”
Lily looked at Kresha and Suzy. “What about you guys?” she said. “Do you want to go to Suzy’s too?”
“I like to play!” Kresha said, eyes sparkling.
“Suzy?” Lily said.
Suzy glanced nervously at Reni and then back at Lily. She was blinking fast as if she were going to cry.
“Vote how you want to vote,” Reni said. “Not the way you think somebody wants you to.”
“What does that mean?” Lily said. Her face was blotching like a red-and-white dalmatian, she could tell.
“It means she should make up her own mind instead of you making it up for her all the time.”
“I want to go to the Acme,” Suzy said quickly. “Please.”
Reni pulled in her chin. “Fine. That means we tie.”
“No. Zooey’s not here,” Lily said, “and I know she’d vote with me.”
“Of course,” Reni said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“So we go to the Acme,” Lily said.
“Vhy you are doing this?” Kresha said. Her face was drawn up into a scowl like a WWE wrestler.
Lily stopped. She didn’t know why she was getting closer and closer to Reni’s face and doubling up her fists and keeping on until she won. Except that Reni was doing it too. Right now, that seemed like a good enough reason.
“I’m not fightin’,” Reni said. Her voice was sounding shrill. “I don’t fight about stupid things like this. Come on. Let’s go to the stupid Acme. I don’t care.”
She snatched up her backpack and stormed out the door.
“All right, let’s go!” Lily said with a smile. But as they all filed out of the classroom, she’d never felt less like smiling in her life.
She’ll have a blast once she gets there, Lily assured herself again.
Just to make sure, she fell into step next to Reni as they walked the two blocks to the grocery store, and she began to explain the contest rules.
“When we get there,” Lily said, “you’ll have to remember everything I’ve taught you about a balanced diet. Then I’ll give everybody a card. I have them in my backpack; I made them up when I finished geography. Anyway, you’ll see what you have to find on the card. But it’s going to mean reading the backs of the packages to find the proper nutrition—”
“I knew it,” Reni muttered.
Lily stopped at the edge of the Acme parking lot and put her hands on her hips. Snow immediately started to land on her eyebrows and lips, but she didn’t even brush it off.
“Why are you being so stubborn about this, Reni?” she said. “Don’t you want to be healthy and f it?”
“I don’t know!” Reni said. “Who cares? I’m eleven years old! I’ve got other things to think about. Besides, my mama cooks the meals in our house and—”
But Reni didn’t have a chance to say what else her mama did. Even as Lily was looking at her, Reni was pelted f
ull in the face with a snowball.
When Lily whirled around to see where it had come from, she got hit with one, right on the side of her head. It hit her ear with a smack and broke into icy pieces. Then the frigid water ran down her cheek in icy agony.
“What?” Lily cried.
As if they were answering, three figures bolted out from behind the big green Dumpster and headed straight toward the Girlz, bombarding them with snowballs that hit so hard, they took Lily’s breath away. She could tell the attack was doing the same to Kresha and Suzy, because they were both doing some kind of gasping and screaming combination that came out sounding like panicky asthma.
The snowballs continued to come thick and fast, and they hit harder the closer the attackers came. But even through the onslaught, Lily could see the ski masks that were pulled over their faces, hiding everything but the eyes that sparked with evil.
“It’s them again!” she shouted to the Girlz.
But she was cut short by a snowball that hit her square in the lips and half filled her mouth. The ski masks muffled the trio’s laughter.
Lily sputtered and spat and got enough snow out of her mouth to shout, “Get ’em this time, Girlz!”
That was one order Reni seemed more than willing to obey. She scrambled to stand up, having been knocked over by the last snowball, and without a sound leaped onto the back of one of the three boys.
“Yes!” Lily cried. She lunged toward them, but suddenly she was facedown on the ground, with a wiry figure right on top of her.
“Let go of me, you little creep!” Lily screamed at him. She managed to get up on her hands and kick her feet at the same time, catching “the little creep” in the seat of his pants with a heel. She hadn’t put up with two brothers all these years without learning something.
But that didn’t stop him from completing his mission. Before she could get the next kick in, he grabbed the back collar of her jacket and yanked on it. Suddenly there was icy misery oozing down her bare back.
“No!” Lily screamed.
She got the kid off of her. By the time she could get herself up, he’d disappeared, and so had one of his cohorts. The only one left was still wrestling with Reni, while Suzy and Kresha clung to each other and giggled hysterically.
