by Rachel Vail
“I don’t know,” Sienna whispered. “I guess?”
“He’s super sweet,” I said.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” she agreed. “I mean, I like him, sure, but . . .”
“But?”
“I don’t know. Anyway. Are you still coming over after school today to bake?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We can talk about it then!”
“Okay,” she said, but she didn’t seem that happy about it. “But we can stop off at the pet shop on the way, yeah?”
“Sure!” I said. I know, I know: no pets for me. Still, I could fantasize.
Obviously.
Hey, there’s another major skill of mine: imagining what if something that is never, ever going to happen magically happened?! Like: me having a pet tortoise and an alive older sister and a boy who likes me. A sad skill, but still, with that plus the sweating and the cute toes, I am obviously on a rocket to fame and fortune. So why would I care one bit about who AJ Rojanasopondist likes? I got bigger fish to . . .
“What’s tomorrow’s bake sale for?” Sienna was asking me. “Gracie?”
“Oh. Sorry. Um, First Book,” I said, once my brain processed her question. She looked back at me blankly. “They provide new books for children in need, remember?”
“Right, sorry,” Sienna said. “I’m a little . . . I can’t . . .”
“We could split it with Sierra Club if you want.”
“Okay,” she said. “Or next time. Whatever. My dad said he’d buy enough supplies for a quadruple cupcake recipe today. Red velvet, okay? White frosting?”
“Great. He’s gotten really cute, don’t you think?”
“My dad?”
“Um, sure? Your dad is very handsome. But I meant AJ.”
“Oh.” Sienna watched her feet going up the last few steps. “I guess, yeah. I never really . . . I mean, we’ve been friends since kindergarten, and I just never . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Now I feel all weird.”
“You do? Like, can’t-remember-how-to-breathe funny?”
“Like, how-am-I-gonna-act-normal-at-lunch? funny.”
I laughed. If only that were all, for me.
Sienna groaned and then headed toward the soprano section, where Riley was already stationed, her posture perfect, her pretty face calm and composed.
Maybe there are advantages to not being the one in the spotlight, I decided. I stood in the back row of the altos, with my hands in my pockets. So what if I’m not it, not the one AJ has a crush on or everybody expects to be beautiful, perfect, even mildly awesome. I don’t want the solo! No, thank you. I’m good back here, singing the harmony, thanks!
I’m just the wingman. Not just. I am the wingman! Which is great! That’s the best part in any show, everybody knows: the best friend. I’m the one you text when you can’t figure out the math or you want to watch a zombie-movie marathon or need to find out if somebody likes you. The comic relief. The neuter. The alto. The harmony. The other one.
I could just turn into particles of mist and float away.
12
UGLY
On our way to lunch, Riley pulled me back.
“Can I talk to you a sec?” she asked.
“Sure,” I told her, even though we really do get only seven minutes to eat and I spend a lot of the morning looking forward to the eating part of my day. We went into the big main-floor gender-neutral bathroom. She locked the door behind us.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I think we should talk.”
“Okay. What’s up?”
She glanced at herself in the mirror, adjusting her shiny dark hair over her left shoulder. I waited.
“I understand why you were so rude and insensitive this morning,” Riley said.
“Me?”
“I know that you sometimes feel jealous of me, you know, because I’m a model, and my popularity, whatever.”
“Riley,” I said. “I’m really not.”
“Don’t try to deny it, Gracie. I see how you react when it comes up that I’ll be doing commercials. Even how you’re always looking at my bag, my boots, my hair, at all of us, you know, my group of friends—and what I want to tell you is: relax. I’m not mad. I’d like to think we are friends too, you and I. Well, friendly.”
“Um, okay, yeah, sure.”
“And as a friend?” she said, her voice soothing, like she was on a commercial for baby cough medicine. “I want to help you. So I have to tell you—what’s really unattractive? Worse than body size or bad facial features? Is how jealous you’re acting.”
“Wow . . .” I started, but stopped myself. Mom says people say nasty things when they feel embarrassed or insecure; the challenge for an ethical person is to recognize this and not respond. Mom is an ethics professor at Columbia so we’ve talked about ethics basically since I was born and she expects me to be ethical. I don’t want to let her down, but I think she sometimes forgets that I’m not Bret, angelic and impish. I’m Gracie, big and blunt.
I started again. “Riley, I don’t—”
She interrupted, “Beauty, or the opposite, comes from the inside.”
“I completely agree,” I said. “Well! Glad we had this talk.”
I reached for the doorknob, opened the door, and walked out, thinking, She’s right that I’m not beautiful on the inside, either. Just like Riley, I’m jealous that AJ likes Sienna instead of me.
“And nothing is quite as ugly as jealousy,” Riley said, following me into the café.
“You’re right,” I agreed quietly, so not even the kids at the tables near the entrance could hear.
“Except maybe selfishness.”
I stopped without turning around. Selfishness?
“I know it’s not easy for you to hear, Gracie,” Riley continued, right behind me. “But it’s what everybody thinks about you. You only care about yourself. Nobody else’s feelings matter to you.”
“Come on, Riley.” I wasn’t fighting back exactly because I was thinking at that literal second about her feelings! “Stop. Let’s go eat.”
People looked up from their lunches at us. Sienna cocked her head to the side like, What’s up? I raised one eyebrow at her; she smiled back, in sympathy. Thinking I was just trying to get away from Riley, who was probably humble-bragging about how much of a drag it is that she has to get her picture professionally taken so often. Auditions.
“You march around like you deserve special treatment,” Riley continued cluelessly as we got nearer to the tables. “Just because your parents lost a child.”
“Wait, what?” I stopped again. This time I turned around to face her.
“But the truth is, that happened way before you were even born,” Riley whispered. “It’s all just stories you’ve heard, really. I’m sure it was a tragedy to your parents. Though from what I’ve read on the Internet, well—”
“What you read on the Internet?” I interrupted. She had saved herself momentarily by being so random that I needed some clarification.
“That’s not the point.”
Yeah, obviously, milkweed. But still: What? “You were just randomly reading on the Internet about how parents feel when their seven-year-old gets run over and dies?”
“This is exactly what I mean, Gracie. You bend every conversation so that it turns into everything being about you.”
I was sweating so much by that point that some of it, horrifyingly, was coming out of my eyes. Or possibly I was starting to cry. Which is too weird. I am not a crier. I never cry. And especially not at this. I didn’t feel sad! Confused, maybe. I will not cry in front of the entire school, I vowed, my back to them all except Riley. No way, especially not because of Riley.
“But the real tragedy of your life,” Riley went on whispering, fully compose
d, one fist on her slender hip, “as opposed to the tragedy of your parents’ lives, is that because of the death of their first daughter, your parents have raised you as a veal child.”
“As a what?” I managed to croak out.
“As if you don’t ever have to take anybody else’s feelings into consideration.”
“Veal child? Are you kidding me?”
Which was a stupid question. She is never kidding.
“Girls?” Awesome Ms. Washington prompted us as she passed on her way to the gym. “What’s good?”
“Everything.” Riley flashed a smile you’d buy a more expensive brand of toothpaste to get.
“Four minutes,” Awesome Ms. Washington said over her shoulder. “Better eat.”
We couldn’t. Riley and I were locked in on each other.
“I’m sorry if that hurts,” Riley said quietly. “The truth sometimes hurts—but then it helps. The truth will set you free, is what my father says. And he’s CFO of a Fortune 500 company. So he should know. I’m not bragging; I’m just saying.”
“Okay.”
“And, truthfully, everyone can see you only care about yourself.”
“It’s . . . But that’s not the truth,” I said.
“Gracie, you obviously think you’re perfect, but nobody else thinks—”
“No! I’m not saying I’m perfect,” I said. “At all! I have, like, a million faults. We could spend all day listing them, hahahaha, but I really don’t think that’s what—” I stopped myself. I didn’t need to state the obvious thing that she was hurt about, right? No. Hold it in. “But not caring about other people doesn’t even make the top ten bad things about me. You know that. Come on. If you’re gonna insult me? Is that really all you’ve got? Veal?”
Riley pursed her pretty lips.
“You can do better than that,” I said. “If you’re trying to insult me, how about, Hey, Gracie! Your hair is so out of control, you should wash it with Ritalin?”
A bunch of kids behind me laughed. I guess I was being loud. Okay, then.
“Or, like, Hey, Gracie! Your nose is so big, if you wore glasses, you’d need glasses to see your glasses on it?”
Pretty much everybody behind me was cracking up now.
“How about, You know what’s uglier than your face, Gracie? Racism!?”
I heard a few kids go, “What!” and a few more yell, “Yes!”
“But to say . . .”
She smiled gently, so pretty, so tight. “I think in your heart of hearts, Gracie,” she said almost inaudibly, “you know it’s the truth. You only care about yourself—you only think about yourself. You hate yourself so much and still so desperately need to be the center of attention, you’ll stand here insulting yourself in front of the whole school.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not the one who—”
“Think about it,” Riley said, touching my arm gently, briefly, as she walked away.
13
THE PACT
Luckily we were all rushed into the gym to run laps around the room, so neither of us could say anything more. I guess we had both said plenty. I kept my head down to avoid anybody’s reactions.
I honestly do not enjoy being the center of attention. I wasn’t just saying that.
“Subtle,” Emmett said, beside me. No teams in running laps.
“Yeah,” I agreed, without making eye contact with anyone but my sneakers. “That’s the truest thing about me. Subtlety.”
Emmett shrugged. “She’s pond scum.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Sienna slowed down to jog with us. “Amazing, right?” Emmett asked her.
“Gracie is the best,” Sienna agreed.
“You guys, stop.” I appreciated the support, but I also disagreed. “Really.”
“You okay?” Sienna asked.
“Always!”
“What was that all about?” Sienna whispered.
“Dorin,” Emmett said. “Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just, you know, Riley being . . . Nothing.”
Awesome Ms. Washington blew her whistle, so we filed out. Riley and I avoided each other in the halls. I kept my eyes on my books.
“That was hilarious,” Michaela whispered to me on our way in to social studies.
I didn’t say anything back.
At the lockers at the end of the day, Beth whispered, “You are so funny, LOL.” She wasn’t actually laughing out loud, though.
Sienna and I walked out of the building together, without stopping to chat with anyone near the café, even though people were murmuring stuff like, “What’s uglier than your face? Racism.” Hard to say whose side they were on, and I so didn’t want to be on a side, never mind be one of the sides.
We got in line for Italian ices from the Coco Helado lady outside school, even though we were going to be baking. Not for a while, though, because we were stopping off at the pet store on our way. Plus icies are mostly just ice, right? We watched Riley flounce out of the school building and into the black town car waiting for her at the corner, her nanny and sister already in the backseat.
“Phew,” Sienna said.
“Yeah,” I said, and breathed out.
“Did Dorin get picked up early?” Emmett asked, rainbow icie in hand.
“Dunno,” I said. “Probably. Icies are mostly ice.”
“Absolutely,” Emmett agreed. “Food coloring and sugar are nothing.”
“Yeah,” AJ said, loping over to join us. “They basically don’t exist.”
We all concentrated very much on our icies then.
“See you guys,” Emmett said. He has opera after school on Thursdays, so he has to take the 1 train down to Lincoln Center.
When I told Mom in second grade that Emmett sings at the Met, she was like, Oh, honey, if little Emmett Barnaby sings at the Metropolitan Opera, I will eat my hat. Which I thought was kind of an alarming if/then. So she called up Emmett’s mom like, Gracie said the funniest thing about Emmett singing in the—No way, really? Because Emmett’s mom was like, Yeah, he’s in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus. Instead of eating her hat, Mom took me to see him in Carmen, and she ate a smoked salmon sandwich at intermission, which at the time sounded equally gross to me. I ate a cookie and fell asleep before the end, but still it was fun to see Emmett in that. He looked tiny up there on that huge stage, like a toddler. He doesn’t talk about it much, but I think he likes it. He misses school sometimes for rehearsals, though, which sucks for me because everything’s less fun when he’s not there.
When I turned from watching him cross Broadway, the line at the Coco Helado lady had disappeared so it was just me and AJ and Sienna left standing together on the sidewalk. In case there hadn’t been enough awkwardness for one day.
AJ kicked at a crumbling bit of pavement a couple of times. Just as Sienna was starting to say, “Well . . . ” he said, “I forgot I have . . .”
“Go ahead,” Sienna said.
“Oh no, it’s okay.”
They were both blushing and looking hard at the sidewalk, like maybe a heads-up penny would please appear and give them some luck.
Eventually AJ said, “You don’t have volleyball?”
“Not today,” she mumbled.
“I should . . . I have . . .”
“Sure,” Sienna said.
AJ galumphed back into the school building. Usually he runs so gracefully.
“Well, that was horrible,” Sienna said.
I had to agree. There was no getting around it.
“Let’s go see some Russian tortoises,” Sienna suggested.
We tossed the dregs of our icies and didn’t talk much on the way down to just past Ninety-Ninth. We don’t need to chatter all the time like the Loud Crowd girls. We just enjoyed the walk, and being together, the sun on our he
ads. It had been a long cold winter, and the icies had cooled us enough to enjoy the heat.
“You’re so funny,” Sienna said, around 102nd. “But you don’t need to insult yourself so much.”
“I don’t usually, do I?”
“Yeah,” Sienna said. “We both do, I’ve noticed. We should try to not do that. Boys don’t do it. Just girls. And we shouldn’t, you know?”
“You’re right,” I said. “Okay.”
“We’ll try to catch each other. We don’t have to keep saying how bad we are at stuff, as an antidote to being braggy like Riley.”
“Good point.” I shrugged. “I might suck at that, but . . .”
Sienna laughed. I love making her laugh.
“This is going to take some work.”
“We’ll practice,” Sienna said. “Promise we’ll both try?”
“Promise,” I said. “No insulting ourselves.”
“So, Riley was on your case about standing up for Dorin?” Sienna asked. Before I could answer, she added, “Riley is such a cramp.”
“She so is,” I agreed. “Just clarifying: we can dump on Riley, just not ourselves?”
“Absolutely,” Sienna said.
14
THINGS I CAN’T GET
The pet shop is small and narrow. When you go in, the balding hipster-dad guy at the counter doesn’t say anything, but the parrot on its perch says, “Hello! Hello!”
“Hi,” we answered.
“Hello!” the parrot said.
“How’s it going?” I asked, halfway down the stairs.
“Hello!” it answered.
In the basement, it’s hot and humid. I guess so the reptiles will be comfortable, though there are also gerbils and guinea pigs and some parakeets down there. I don’t know, maybe all those kinds of animals like swampy weather. The huge tortoise was near the bottom of the stairs, his head under a shelf, like he was trying to hide.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We can’t see you, big guy.”
“He’s afraid of the speed demon here,” said a familiar voice. We looked over toward the back corner—Dorin.
