You Can't Sit With Us

by Nancy Rue

  In the meantime, don’t stop trying.

  Blessings,

  Lydia

  P.S. Eat healthy food.

  I slid down in the chair and leaned my head over the back of it to look at the ceiling. Small cracks spread out from the overhead light. I thought that’s what I must look like inside. Every time I thought I saw some hope, it was just another place splitting open.

  Don’t stop trying, Lydia wrote. I wasn’t sure I could anymore. If she were right there in my kitchen, she would make me food and do some kind of exercise with me that seemed like it didn’t make any sense and then it would and I’d be better. She wasn’t there, though.

  But don’t stop trying.

  I sat up, curled my hand around the mouse, and clicked reply.

  Dear Lydia.

  No.

  Dearest Lydia,

  Thank you for letting me know you can’t be there tomorrow or next week, and I totally understand.

  I promise I won’t stop trying even though it doesn’t seem to be helping much right now. I’ll talk to you about that Monday.

  I will start the new list. It will be a short one because I don’t like that much about myself. But what you tell me to do always helps ME. It doesn’t stop other people from doing what they do, but, yeah, it helps me be better.

  Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Ginger

  I read it three times. Once to make sure I didn’t spell anything wrong and look stupid. The second time to see if I really wanted to be so honest about it all. And the third time to let what I said sink into me.

  I didn’t know it before I wrote it, but it was true. Trying helped me be better. And I wanted to be better than the girl who blurted things out to the wrong people and then didn’t stand up to them. I had to be better because it wasn’t just about me anymore.

  I clicked send. And then I went to my room and started that new list.

  After I wrote three things: I write fantasy in my head, I’m smarter than people think, I love The Lord of the Rings, it started to sound familiar. Because it was. They were all on my list of Things Nobody Knows About Me.

  Really?

  I pulled out my binder from between the mattresses and looked at my Nobody Knows list. There was also I love costumes even though I don’t have any.

  That could go on the other list too. I liked that I loved costumes, even though mine were gone. When my mom first died, I took some of her scarves and hats and necklaces and her bright green skirt that swirled, and I kept them in her purple suitcase in the back of my closet. I used to take them out and put them on and pretend I was a princess or a damsel in (great) distress, and later the skirt turned into a cape given to me by the Elves for my journey to Mordor.

  The hats were the best, though. They covered up my funky hair and let me be in any time period I wanted. Any time period but the awful one I was in.

  But when we moved from Stockton to Fresno, Dad said we had to downsize. He never asked about the purple suitcase before, but that time he opened it and his face got so white his freckles stuck out, and he said I shouldn’t keep them, I should move on. That was one of the worst time periods of all.

  I shook that off now before the tears could start and considered the look-alike lists again. Show someone one of those qualities, Lydia said. Even if I’d had costumes, I wouldn’t have paraded around in them at school. And I sure wasn’t going to announce that I had a whole six-volume fantasy story in my head.

  I sighed as I slid the binder back into its hiding place. It was so hard to do this without Lydia. But I had to keep trying. I wasn’t sure why. I just had to.

  The next day, Thursday, I sat down at the lunch table with Colin.

  “You’re here,” he said, face all blushy.

  “My meeting got canceled.”

  He tossed the silky bangs out of his eye. “You want some of my lunch?”

  “I brought mine,” I said and dumped the contents of my brown bag on the table. “Do you think this looks healthy?”

  The place between his eyebrows pinched, just above his glasses, as he checked out my banana and my granola bar and my pickle wrapped in cellophane. That was everything I could find in my kitchen that I thought might be good for me.

  “I think so,” Colin said. “Maybe you should get some milk too.”

  I blotched. “I don’t exactly have any money.”

  “I have money.”

  “No—”

  “I’ll go get you a milk.”

  He was gone before I could stop him, and that was probably a good thing because we both probably looked like embarrassed lobsters. I was peeling the wrapper from my granola bar when Riannon slipped into Colin’s chair.

  Run! my mind screamed at me.

  But another voice said, No, don’t stop trying.

  Okay, then. I wouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, totally without snarkiness, “but that seat’s already taken.”

  “I know.” Riannon’s green eyes came together so close they almost crossed. “That’s why I’m here. Kylie said to tell you that you aren’t very smart.”

  “She’s already told me that herself,” I said. My Stone Face was firmly in place.

  “She warned you, but you’re still friends with Tori so . . .”

  So you painted a lie on my dad’s van. That made so much sense. I pulled my notebook out of my backpack and opened it.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Riannon said.

  “Yes,” I said as I calmly wrote.

  “Unless you get it, things could get worse.”

  I looked up from the notebook. Her Pointy Face was firmly in place.

  “The Code says not to threaten people,” I said. “You did sign it.”

  “Only so I wouldn’t have to go to that stupid class.” She rubbed her hand in the air like she was erasing that. “I’m just giving you the facts. Tori isn’t in charge. Kylie is. She just says to tell you that until everything gets back to normal, things could get worse.”

  I wrote, I’m not sure how they could. You’ve already messed up just about everything for me. Then I looked at it. Should I say it? Not all weepy and whiney, but just to show her they couldn’t do anything more to hurt me? That I was going to focus on being better now?

  Riannon pointed a pink-sparkled nail at the notebook. “Why are you writing down what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not writing down what you’re saying. I’m writing down what I want to say.”

  “Well, that’s weird. Why don’t you just say it?”

  “Excuse me,” Colin said. “That’s my seat.”

  “I’ll sit wherever I want,” Riannon said, but she got up and went back to Kylie’s table. I guessed. I didn’t watch her go.

  “Looks like that went well,” Colin said, putting the carton and a straw in front of me.

  “It kind of did,” I said. “Like, for the first time ever.” My face felt like it was coming out of a dark place.

  “What?” Colin said. “You have an idea, don’t you?”

  “I think I do. For how our story can end. I don’t have all of it but—”

  Colin hunched in and so did I. “Let’s wait ’til next period to talk about it. Not here.”

  “Right,” I said.

  By then lunchtime was almost over, and we had to hurry up and eat while we talked about why Mr. Devon wore a ponytail and whether we would actually want to be Hobbits since they had those hairy feet. We were both smiling without turning tomato-colored when yet another of Those Girls stopped at our table. This time it was Heidi, wrinkling her little pug nose.

  “I just have one question,” she said.

  We both just looked at her.

  “Are you two going out or what?”

  No, she did not just ask that.

  “Going out where?” Colin said.

  His face was perfectly serious. I stopped shredding the straw wrapper and watched him.

  “Out,” Heidi said, rolling her eyes so far back I tho
ught she might never find them again. “You know, together.”

  Colin looked at me. His mouth was still straight, but I could see a gleam behind his glasses. “Have we ever been out anyplace together, Frodo?”

  I loved it so much. “No, Sam, we haven’t.”

  “You have pet names for each other,” Heidi said. “So you are boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “Am I your friend?” Colin said to me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And I’m a boy, so . . .” He stretched his neck up like he’d just made a great discovery. “Then I’m her boy friend.”

  “And I’m his girl friend,” I said.

  “Cute,” Heidi said. “You know what I mean.”

  Colin looked at me again. He was so close to laughing it was practically coming out his ears. “Do you know what she means?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  Right then Heidi’s picture should have been next to the word exasperated in the dictionary.

  “What am I supposed to tell Kylie?” she said. She was almost sputtering.

  “Well,” I said, “like I told Kylie already, I’m mistress of my own tongue, not yours.”

  I shrugged. The bell rang. Kids scattered like ants, and Heidi scurried off, and Colin finally grinned at me, the whole way.

  “You did good,” he said.

  “So did you,” I said.

  We were both in a—can I just say joyous?—mood when we got to the library. It only took us about fifteen minutes to get our story almost outlined. We had the big Bleakest Moment, and we knew how we wanted it to end. We just didn’t know how we were going to get there.

  “No worries,” Mr. Devon said. “I’ll want to see what you have on Monday, and perhaps I can help you along, yes?”

  “We can probably figure it out tomorrow,” I said.

  “Not here,” Mr. Devon said. “No school tomorrow. It’s Good Friday.”

  When he went to the counter to check some people out, Colin looked all shy again.

  “We could still work together tomorrow,” he said. “Just not here.”

  A giggle came out of me.

  “What?” he said.

  “Then we would be out somewhere together. Kylie would love that.”

  “Do you care?” Colin said.

  I gave that a thought. “No,” I said, “actually, I don’t. I’ll ask my dad if you can come over. My brother will be there—well, you won’t see him, but he’ll be there, so it should be okay. If it’s okay with you, I mean. You don’t have to—I just thought maybe . . .”

  “What time?” Colin said.

  He gave me a big ol’ smile, and for a minute, it was better.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dad said it was okay for Colin to come, and when I called him, which was way weird because I had never called a boy before, he said he could be there after lunch.

  Jackson was in his room, and Dad went to work, so I spent the whole morning cleaning the house and putting wildflowers in a jar on the table and trying to do a snack platter like Lydia always did. That part didn’t turn out as well because all we had were cheese crackers in packages, which I unwrapped and arranged on a plate, and iced tea in a big jug.

  Then I wondered if Colin would think that was all lame. Of course, the minute he walked in the front door and smiled and handed me a whole jar of pickles, I knew it was going to be okay.

  And it so was. We spread all our index cards, including the new ones we made the day before, out on the table and organized them into our story about two unlikely heroes named Samantha and Frank who had to defend the Sacred Code by getting past the people who tried to stand in their way, without slaying them, and undergo worse and worse trials until they could return the silver circlets of friendship to the Heights. As they went, the circlets became thinner and thinner, and at the Bleakest Moment, they thought they would dissolve completely before they could reach the Heights and find whatever the Mentors had told them would be revealed to them before the Mentors—the Dwarf and the Gray Wise One—were taken away to deal with the Others who wandered in the Fog of Friendship Confusion.

  We had that all in place, and Colin knew which clip art to print on his computer at home to paste on the cards. It was going to be “visually splendid,” he said (which he must have picked up from Mr. Devon). We still didn’t have our ending: how Samantha and Frank were going to reach the Heights with the circlets weak but intact, and what was going to be revealed to them.

  So I got out the snack tray, with some of Colin’s pickles on it, and the iced tea, and we sat outside by the grill on the back steps and brainstormed some more. Daffodils had cropped up in random places all over the yard, and the purple and white wildflowers I hadn’t picked nodded their heads at the breeze. I think it was what you called idyllic.

  “Okay,” Colin said, “all this time they’ve been fighting might with right.”

  “And they’re climbing higher,” I said, “but the Others aren’t giving up, and it’s like nobody else is getting it.”

  “But they don’t give up.”

  “They don’t stop trying.” I swallowed. If I cried, it would ruin this whole awesome day. Colin might be my friend, but he was still a boy, and since boys didn’t cry that much, he probably wouldn’t know what to do about tears. Except go home.

  “What do you want to do?” Colin said.

  “Make this a great ending,” I said.

  “No.” He swirled the ice around in his cup. “I mean in real life. What do you want to do about the people that are spreading rumors about your dad and keeping you from hanging out with your friends and making you feel like a loser?”

  I had to close my mouth with my hand.

  “I only know because the same thing’s going on with me,” Colin said. “It’s kind of different with guys, but not that much. I used to have a lot of friends in fifth grade, and then we got to sixth and I was getting As and they weren’t—because they didn’t do their homework, so, duh. And I played basketball because I’m tall for sixth grade and they’re shorter. And teachers were okay with me because I was, like, halfway polite and they were acting like jerks. So . . .” Colin shrugged. “They didn’t dump me. I would’ve been kind of okay with that because I really didn’t want to hang out with them anymore. They started doing all this stuff to me. Giving me wedgies in P.E.”

  I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded bad, so I just nodded.

  “Poking me with pencils in class. Stepping on my homework on the bus. The guy that used to be my best friend?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He peed on my math book.”

  “Oh.”

  Colin’s face went way red. “I shouldn’t have told you that part.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Once, Those Girls put all my notes for our science presentation in the toilet and then . . . did the same thing.”

  “Gross,” Colin said. “Worse than that though? The names they called me. Still call me. It’s like they’re stabbing me in the stomach. My mom tells me to be tough, so I don’t even talk to her about it anymore. She thinks it’s fine now, but they still tell me I’m a brainer and I must be a girl because I collect Lord of the Rings stuff.” He gave me a look with no expression. “I don’t know how that makes me a girl.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “I collect, too, but I don’t do it because I’m a girl. I do it because I’m me.”

  We were quiet for a minute. At least on the outside. My mind was talking to me, low and slow and clear. That was it. Samantha and Frank were going to find themselves in the Heights, and that would be a place the Others couldn’t get to until they left their false selves behind. Like shedding.

  “We need cloaks,” I said.

  “So Samantha and Frank can hide in them,” Colin said. “Until they realize they don’t have to hide anymore.”

  “Then you’re thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  I told him.

 
“That’s what I’m thinking,” he said.

  “So, can I get this straight?” I said. “Bad stuff is going to happen to them all the way up, but they keep going because they can’t change the people who are doing the bad things.”

  “That’s why the heroes don’t slay the bad people. The heroes just get stronger.”

  We looked at each other, and at the same time, we said, “Epic.”

  We finished our last cards, and Colin left before Dad got home. I was trying to stay in joyous mode, but it was hard for two reasons. One, it was one thing to figure out how the story should end, but it wasn’t that easy to see how the real-life story could end that way.

  The other was that it was Friday and Dad was always tired on Friday. He was going to be over Jackson staying in his room and mad because he had to spend money to have his van painted and probably funky because his boss was “difficult.” Besides, I felt guilty every time I looked at him. That was one obstacle I couldn’t get over.

  But when he came in the house, he knocked on my door and poked his head into my room and said, “You want to go shopping?”

  “Grocery shopping?” I said. Didn’t he already go that week?

  “Clothes shopping,” he said. “You should have a new dress for Easter.”

  “Is Goodwill still open this late?” I said.

  “Don’t know. Thought we’d go to Target.”

  And get something new?

  “Leaving in twenty,” he said.

  That gave me plenty of time to get my mouth closed.

  Target was bustling with moms with carts full of Easter baskets, and bags of candy, and kids begging for stuffed bunnies and dads looking like they wished they were someplace else.

  My dad didn’t look like that. He looked like he took shopping for a dress very seriously. That was no surprise, since he’d never done it before.

  “Pick your color first,” he said.

  “Green,” I said.

  Dad looked at me. “Okay. That should work.”

  We found the dress section in the girls’ department. There were three green ones, but two of them were, um, not me. One was poofy, like a tutu, which would have made me look like some kind of freaked-out elf, and one was so short I thought it might be a top. For a five-year-old.