Get Real

by Betty Hicks

  “Well, okay … Thanks.”

  “Dez?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  We sit there a minute, both sipping on our iced tea as if we’re used to having fancy lunches every Wednesday.

  “About tonight,” says Jil, tugging on her left earlobe.

  I take another sip of tea. I want to say, No. Please. Not now. This is too much fun. Let’s talk about that later. With my index finger, I make a path through the cold beads of sweat that have formed on my glass.

  “I’ve got a backup plan,” says Jil.

  I groan out loud.

  She giggles. “No, really. Listen. The movie complex here is having a celebrate-summer, get-out-of-school special tonight. They’re staying open all night and showing old movies. You know, kid-friendly ones—like Star Wars. It’ll be one giant sleepover. Without the sleep part. If you’re over twelve, you can get in without a parent. Dez. We can stay up all night.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope.”

  I’d been all set to tell her she was crazy again, and to talk her into coming home, but today’s been so much fun. This freedom thing is cool. Besides, a whole night of movies sounds awesome. And my parents are trolls.

  Jil is watching me expectantly.

  “My mom’s picking me up at four o’clock,” I confess.

  “I knew it,” says Jil, slumping back in her chair. Abruptly, she sits up straight again, leans forward, her elbows on the table, her eyes dancing. “Call her,” she says. “Call your mom. Tell her you need to stay a week.”

  “A week?” I ask. “The movie special lasts a week?”

  “No, but we’ll figure something else out tomorrow. Okay? Come on, Dez. When, in your whole life, will you ever be able to do this again?”

  She has a point.

  “Can I borrow your cell phone?” I ask.

  She hands it to me, with my mom’s number already punched in. All I have to do is push Send.

  Jil’s eyes are doing that amazing thing they do—radiating energy and enthusiasm enough to light a city.

  For one brief second, I think, No—I have to keep Denver tomorrow. Then I remember. No, I don’t. I’m not babysitting him tomorrow, or ever. Because Mom and Dad lied. They had so much faith in their one-and-only daughter that they never even cancelled day care. I smile back at Jil and push the button.

  “Mom. Hi!” I say. “The piano class is awesome. Can I spend the rest of the week with Jil?”

  Chapter Twenty

  All these lies are making my stomach jerk. The excitement of a night with no parents has flooded my entire body with a million vibrating hummingbird wings. And the caffeine from my fourth glass of iced tea is making my heart vroom like somebody revving up a race car.

  In a way, it feels fantastic. In another way, I want to throw up. Is this what it feels like to be drunk? I don’t know. The only alcohol I ever tried was two forbidden swallows of the Lewises’ Christmas eggnog. And that was two years ago.

  “Jil,” I say. “I think I’ve drunk too much tea.”

  “Me too,” she answers gleefully. “Let’s go shopping.”

  We take a cab to the mall.

  “This is so cool.” We race from one store to the next. “No curfew. No chores. No Denver to watch.” As much as I hate how my parents dumped all over my Denver commitment, I’m feeling secretly happy to have my summer back. And I’m feeling totally ecstatic to have Jil back.

  As far as my piano goes, I might as well have wished for a planet.

  We check out boys, try on jewelry, shoes, goofy hats—until our caffeine drops us both like two bowling balls. Jil crashes harder than I do.

  “Dez,” she says. “I’m dead.” Her face is the color of a pair of Mom’s sweatpants.

  We find a seat at a small Formica-topped table in the food court and share an order of fries. She dumps the backpack she’s been lugging around all day on the floor beside her chair. I’m guessing it has her things from Jane’s house in it. Or at least the stuff she had time to grab before she took off.

  The whole area smells like an overdose of world cookery—Mexican tacos, Chinese sweet-and-sour sauce, peppery Italian sausages, barbecue with hushpuppies, spicy egg rolls. All of it sizzling in too much overused peanut oil.

  “Multicultural grease,” I mumble, wiping lettuce and mustard off our table with a clean paper napkin. “Why can’t people clean up their own mess?”

  Jil shrugs and picks up her elbows so I can clean under them. “Tell me what happened,” she says.

  “About what?”

  “About babysitting Denver.”

  I take my grungy napkin to the nearest trash receptacle, then sit back down with Jil and explain how Mom and Dad didn’t believe I could do it. And how they never even cancelled day care. “So,” I say, “it doesn’t matter when I go home.” I shove three French fries in my mouth, feeling yesterday’s anger rush back over me. “I don’t even care if I go home.”

  “Me, either,” says Jil, double dipping her French fry into a tiny paper cup of ketchup.

  I sit back in my chair and glare at her.

  She pops the red-tipped fry into her mouth. “What?”

  Suddenly, I’m so annoyed, but I don’t want to spoil our day. How do I tell her that I think she’s crazy? That I hate what her birth mom did to her, but what’s that got to do with going home to her real mom and dad? The ones who, if you ask me, are the two best parents on earth!

  “Jil,” I say. “I know you’re hurt. I totally get that, and I don’t blame you. But why can’t you go back to your real mom?”

  Her eyes flash. “Because I hate her. I’ll never go back.”

  “But why? She didn’t do anything.”

  “Are you kidding? She accused me of stealing. Of introducing her daughter to a life of crime, of—”

  “Jil,” I interrupt. “I meant your real mom, not Jane.”

  “Jane is my real mom.”

  “Why does everybody keep saying that?” I hiss through clenched teeth. “Real isn’t popping you out of the birth canal. It’s raising you. Teaching you to tie your shoes. Holding your head when you barf. Knowing your favorite ice cream. Knowing you.”

  “Dez! Geez! Calm down. Who pushed your button?”

  “You did!” I exclaim. “And stop sounding like my mom,” I shout.

  Jil gapes at me.

  I wad up my napkin and scrub fiercely at the permanent ketchup stain on our tabletop, as if removing it can erase how stupid I just sounded.

  “You know what I think?” says Jil. She’s about to giggle.

  I jerk my head up in disbelief. How can she be about to laugh when I just blew up at her?

  “I think”—she circles a French fry gracefully in the air—“that we have parent issues.” Jil’s too tired for her eyes to radiate their usual megawatt energy, but the tips of them are crinkled up slightly, like her mouth. Radiating warmth. Friendship. Humor.

  We both burst out laughing.

  But just as suddenly, I stop. “Jil. Look. Don’t pay any attention to me. I have no clue what’s real. Obviously, Jane doesn’t know you well enough to know that you would never swipe a necklace.” I glance at her and feel the makings of a joke tugging at the corners of my mouth. “A soon-to-be-replaced street sign, maybe. But not a necklace.”

  Jil nods in grateful agreement.

  “And my parents,” I complain, “don’t know me well enough to know that I’d keep Denver for a whole year if it meant I could get a piano. So,” I say, tossing the mangled napkin onto our take-out tray, “maybe none of them is real.”

  Jil props one elbow on the table and rests her head against her upright hand. “I wanted her to be,” she says softly.

  There’s no hint of a joke anywhere. She just sounds sad.

  “I know.” I reach across the table and gently touch her arm.

  “I won’t go back there. Even if she begs me. But I don’t want to go home, either. I
’d have to tell Mom and Dad what she did, what Penny did, and then they’d never let me see either one of them again.”

  “Uh … Jil. I thought you didn’t want to see either one of them again.”

  “I don’t. But … but … I don’t know … she’s my mother!” Jil jerks her head up, then drops it back onto her hand. “Isn’t she?” she almost whispers.

  I want to help her. I want to say the perfect thing. But I don’t have a clue what it is. Jil has found the people who look like her. They have her DNA—and her ear-pulling genes. And, in their own way, they love her. I think.

  If I found a mom or dad who was that much like me, would I want to give him or her up forever?

  “And, Dez. I’m sorry I made you lose your piano money. You can come play mine anytime you want.”

  “Play your piano?” I jokingly shove her arm so hard that it pops away from supporting her head. “Yesterday, you said I could have your piano!”

  “Oh, yeah,” she grins. “I did, didn’t I? Well, you can come get it. Maybe Mom won’t notice.”

  I picture Mrs. Lewis not detecting that there’s a grand piano missing from her living room. I picture trying to put a grand piano in my den where it wouldn’t fit, even if I removed all the trash and most of the furniture. Jil must have pictured the same thing, because we look up at each other and say, in perfect unison, “Parent issues.”

  * * *

  After one more hour, even I am tired of the mall. How did Jil and Penny manage to spend whole days doing this? Did Penny swipe a necklace out of boredom? Who knows? But I can’t wait for my whole night of movies.

  I try not to think about what we’ll do tomorrow. I especially try not to think what will happen to me if I get caught lying and living on the street like a homeless person. Well, not exactly a street—a movie theater.

  The gang of kids in my library book The Thief Lord lived in a movie theater. An abandoned one—in Venice. That sounded incredibly cool when I read it, but now that I’m doing it, it’s different. Nervous-and-scary different.

  And my theater’s not even deserted and cobwebby. No. It serves hot popcorn and thirty kinds of candy, but when tomorrow morning comes, then what?

  At first, Mom freaked out wondering how I’d manage without a toothbrush, but I assured her that Greensboro does have drugstores. “Mom,” I’d said. “Come on. I can buy one.” So, she agreed to let me spend a few nights with Jil.

  If you ask me, it’s a trade-off for her guilt—for selling me out with Denver duty. But then Jil reminded me that Mom thinks I came to Greensboro to goof off and to go to piano camp. She has no clue that I came to save my best friend.

  Whatever. It’s exactly like Mom not to wonder what I’ll do about clean clothes.

  What will I do?

  Chapter Twenty-one

  About twenty minutes before five, we take a taxi to the movie theater. Our cab driver gives us the same curious look that the last one did. In Greensboro, North Carolina, thirteen-year-old girls ride around in cabs almost as often as they leap tall buildings with a single bound. It’s just not normal.

  We pay the special all-night price and rush inside—out of the heat. Immediately, I wish I had more clothes. Not clean ones. Warm ones. It’s freezing in here!

  I eye Jil’s backpack. “Have you got a blanket in there?”

  “Nope.”

  “A sweater?”

  She shakes her head.

  “What do you have?”

  “I don’t know … a toothbrush. Some makeup. Noxzema.”

  “Peachy,” I say, with all the sarcasm I can muster. “We can keep warm with eyeliner and globular chunks of zit cream.”

  Jil drops her bag to the floor, unzips it, and rummages around inside. Finally her hand touches something that makes her smile. Triumphantly, she pulls out a pair of thick white tennis socks. “We can share,” she announces proudly.

  I will take her up on that.

  We stroll over to a padded bench and plop down with the movie schedule—so we can decide which movies we want to see and in what order. Meanwhile, the place is filling up with kids—mostly hyper nine- and ten-year-olds with their parents. I figure older kids will show up later. We would’ve done that, too, but our current life situation gave us nothing better to choose from.

  We thought about splurging on a fancy dinner somewhere, using Jil’s credit card, but we’ve already eaten so many times today, we’re just not up to it. Besides, I’m looking forward to a jumbo tub of buttered popcorn, a giant box of Junior Mints, an extra-extra-large Dr. Pepper, and some Sour Patch Kids for dessert.

  The first movie that jumps off the page at me is The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I’m pretty sure Jil notices it, too, because she’s looking at me as if she’s trying to pretend she doesn’t see it, while trying, at the same time, to figure out whether I noticed it.

  That’s the great part about being best friends. You know what the other one is thinking.

  For instance, I know she’s wondering if that particular movie will make us happy or sad. Happy, because it’s supposed to be a fun movie. Or sad, because every second of it will remind us of our Sisterhood of the Traveling Shirt—the one that never even saw its first swap because Penny still has the shirt.

  “What the heck,” says Jil, proving me right about reading her mind. “Let’s go see it.”

  I borrow Jil’s pen and carefully write #1 beside the 5:00 showing of Sisterhood. Then we agree on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Johnny Depp version, at 7:10. Movie #3, at 9:10, will be Titanic. Jil loves Leonardo DiCaprio, and I love blockbuster movies that make me cry. So. There you go.

  I tap my head with the pen, and study the schedule. Titanic is over three hours long. “That takes us to 12:30. We need at least three more.”

  “Planet of the Apes?”

  “Nah.” I shake my head. “I’ve seen that a jillion times on TV.”

  “Clueless?”

  “What’s that about?”

  “Some ultrapopular girls at a Beverly Hills high school.” Jil flips back her hair dramatically and thrusts out her chest.

  Which reminds me—we should probably check our tantoos again.

  “One girl gets this brilliant idea to make over a nerd,” Jil adds.

  I glance up, seriously doubtful I want to spend two hours watching that.

  “It’s supposed to be good,” Jil claims. “Honest. The plot got swiped right out of a Jane Austen novel.”

  “Jane Austen? The author? As in, Pride and Prejudice—the book I loved? That Jane Austen?”

  “Yeah.”

  Neatly, I write #4 next to Clueless.

  Jil reaches across me and points to March of the Penguins. “What’s that about?”

  “I think it’s a documentary. In Antarctica. Rated G.”

  “Sounds boring,” says Jil.

  “Sounds cold.” I shiver.

  “Pirates of the Caribbean?”

  I picture two more hours of Johnny Depp, plus Orlando Bloom. Perfect. I ink #5 beside it. “Okay. We need one more.”

  “Jaws? Jurassic Park?”

  I tap the pen back and forth. “Eeeny, meeny, miny, mo…”

  Jil leans on me. “Let’s decide later.”

  “Good idea.” I grab Jil’s wrist and squeeze it. “Jil! Can you believe it? We’re going to six movies! And stay up all night!”

  Jil pumps her other fist. “Bring ’em on!”

  * * *

  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants does make us sad. And happy. We each pull on one of Jil’s socks and joyfully declare ourselves the Overly Air-Conditioned Sisterhood of the Traveling Sock.

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has dazzling candy-making scenes and is funny, but it keeps making us want to go back to the concession counter for more sugar.

  “Dez,” Jil asks as the final credits roll. “Was all that stuff about Willy Wonka’s childhood in the book?”

  “No.” I think about the dog-eared paperback I read at least five times.
“Definitely not.”

  “So, why do you think they added the part about him never being allowed to eat candy because his father was a dentist?”

  I shrug. “Maybe they think you need a reason to be a candy inventor when you grow up.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  Titanic is one of those movies that makes me cry, even though I’ve already seen it twice. By the time it’s over, I’m beat—as if I spent three hours treading water, all by myself, trying to keep that amazing ship from sinking.

  When we straggle out, it’s after midnight, and the crowd scene has totally changed. Parents are dragging their nine-year-olds to the exits. The kids are rubbing their red eyes, yawning, and arguing, “I did not fall asleep.” High school kids fill the lobby, buying caffeine and candy, and killing time between movies.

  I feel so grown up.

  Then we realize we have to wait twenty-five minutes for Clueless to begin, so we slip straight into Pirates of the Caribbean because it’s just starting. I leave the numbers on our list the way they are, though, because if I try to change #4 to #5, it’ll just make the whole thing messy.

  I know. I’m a freak. I can’t help it.

  Two real loser guys follow us into Pirates of the Caribbean, then scrunch down in the seats directly behind us. They make gross kissing noises, laugh obnoxiously, and share with us every dirty word they know. If Mom were here, she’d tell them to wash their mouths out with soap.

  The movie’s great. Action-packed and funny. The only bad thing is that, while cannons boom on the screen in front of us, gross and stupid sound effects blast from the two creeps behind us. I think Jil or I should find an usher and complain, but when I turn to suggest it, she’s sound asleep. Totally zonked from being up all night last night. No way I’m leaving her alone with Creep One and Creep Two.

  When we file out of the movie, they stick to us like Band-Aids. In the hallway, we get our first good look at them. One guy has major zits and a slouch so curved I don’t know why he doesn’t slither to the floor. “Hey, babe!” he says with a goofball leer, tossing his car keys into the air and catching them. “How tall are you, anyway?”