“I don’t know if Fred is a boy or a girl. It’s hard to tell,” Amy said.
“Do you take Fred out sometimes?” Nora asked.
“I try to, but so far it hasn’t worked. I think Fred misses life in the world. The last time I took her—him—out, she—he—wriggled away and slipped under the bed, and you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find him—her.”
So far, Fred sounded like Cassidy.
“I guess I should set Fred free,” Amy said sadly. “How long do we have to do the new thing for? Did Coach Joe say?”
Nora tried to remember. “I think he said a month. It probably depends on what the new thing is.”
Amy considered Nora’s comment.
“If the new thing is a pet,” Amy said, “I think you need to have the pet long enough to form a relationship. Fred and I haven’t bonded yet. Have we, Fred?”
She leaned over the terrarium. Fred made no response.
Amy hadn’t bonded with Fred any more than Nora had bonded with Cassidy. If Amy was going to set Fred free, did that mean Nora should take Cassidy back to the shelter? Cassidy had certainly seemed happier there than living with Nora.
“Oh!” Amy said. “I almost forgot! How was your sleepover with Emma?”
For some reason, Nora didn’t want to tell even Amy the truth. Her hair was unbraided now, her nails scrubbed clean of polish with plenty of rubbing alcohol, which had taken forever (nobody in Nora’s house owned any nail polish remover). She had tried her best to forget all about it.
But she couldn’t forget Emma’s pale, strained face as she had shown Nora the platters of uneaten spa snacks. And the tears in Emma’s eyes when Nora had said goodbye.
“It was okay,” Nora said. “But I don’t think we’ll be having another one any time soon.”
Emma’s newness project was a total failure, too.
Emma caused a sensation by arriving at the Plainfield Elementary School playground on Monday morning wearing brightly patterned, flowing, pantaloon-style pants, topped with a scarlet vest. On her head, she wore a turban.
“This is my Arabian Nights look!” Nora heard Emma telling Elise and Tamara. “What do you think?”
Emma twirled in place, ankle bells tinkling faintly.
She was avoiding looking in Nora’s direction, unless Nora was imagining it.
“What is that?” Amy whispered to Nora.
Nora shrugged. Something about Emma’s new style had her worried.
The other girls seemed clearly impressed.
“Ooh!” Elise gushed.
“I want a turban like yours!” Tamara cried.
“Maybe your new thing could be a turban,” Brody said to Mason.
“Or maybe not,” Mason replied.
Even Coach Joe, once the morning bell had rung, couldn’t refrain from commenting. When the class assembled for their morning huddle, he called Emma “Scheherazade,” and explained that Scheherazade was a famous storyteller who had kept a Persian sultan—or king—mesmerized with her stories for 1,001 nights.
The poetry prompt for the day, Coach Joe told the class, was “I remember…”
That was all. The idea was to write a list of things you remembered, with a few interesting details, starting each line with the same words: “I remember…”
Right now Nora didn’t like any of her memories.
But Coach Joe had said sometimes bad memories can make the best poems.
So she started writing.
I remember when my ants were all alive instead of mostly dead.
I remember when Cassidy purred on my lap at the shelter, so soft and so warm.
I remember how Cassidy hasn’t purred on my lap even once since he came home with me.
I remember how Emma and I used to be friends, instead of this weird thing we are now.
I remember when Emma and I laughed so hard at Precious Cupcake’s facial.
I remember how Emma looked when I left the party early, like she was ready to cry.
I remember when I wasn’t even trying to do anything new.
I remember when I didn’t know yet how hard new was going to be.
Outside in the class garden, the radishes and lettuce were growing into little plants. Emma’s pansies had poked up, too. Emma claimed it was because she had sung so many songs to them to encourage them to push their way up through the dirt.
Dunk’s pumpkins hadn’t sprouted. But Dunk didn’t seem worried.
“Wait till they do!” he said to everyone around him. “Then your radishes will be sorry!”
It was the day for thinning the plants, pulling up every other one so each remaining plant would have more room to grow.
Nora looked at her short row of non-baked, non-frozen, non-microwaved radishes. It seemed so sad to pull up half of them, after she had already destroyed three-quarters of the original seeds with her scientific experiments.
Instead, she decided to transplant the ones she would have thrown away, moving them over into the section of her row where the experimented-upon seeds would have sprouted.
It was slow work. The plants were so small! It was hard to dig up each one, with its tiny roots, get it settled into fresh dirt, and pat the dirt into place around it.
Nora looked up from her toil to see Dunk watching her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
He sounded genuinely curious, so Nora answered honestly.
“I’m giving them a chance to live,” she said.
“They better do their living fast before my pumpkins come,” Dunk said, but he reached down and righted one of her radishes that had tipped over.
That was a surprise.
Nora realized she didn’t know what Dunk’s new thing was going to be. He hadn’t talked about it, unlike the way a lot of kids—well, mainly Brody—were doing.
But as far as Nora was concerned, being kind to a radish plant counted.
“No, Dunk!” Emma said as Dunk turned around in the cafeteria line at lunch to give a playful tug on her turban.
Standing behind Emma, Nora heard panic in Emma’s voice. This wasn’t Emma’s usual giggling no. Emma meant it this time.
Nora knew this.
Dunk didn’t.
“What’s under there?” he taunted, with the big, happy grin he wore when teasing Emma. “Did you grow horns?”
Thomas, the silent boy in Nora and Emma’s pod, had fallen into line behind Nora.
“What do you want to bet Emma grew horns?” Dunk called over to him.
Of course, Thomas said nothing. He didn’t even bother to answer Dunk’s question with a shrug.
“Or lice!” Dunk chortled. “Thomas, what do you want to bet Emma has lice, and she got her whole head shaved off, and she’s bald now?”
Dunk didn’t even wait for Thomas not to answer. Tucking his still-empty tray under his arm, he made another snatch at Emma’s turban as Emma was picking up her own tray.
“Stop it!” Emma shouted, with no hint of a giggle. “Dunk, I told you to stop!” Her tray clattered to the floor as she clapped both hands over her head.
Dunk set his tray down on the rails in front of the serving station and gave one last two-fisted yank at Emma’s turban.
It came off in his hand.
Emma was bald.
No, Nora saw, not completely bald, but Emma’s hair was as short as a boy’s, sticking up in trampled spikes like the stubble of harvested corn in an autumn field.
Emma shrieked.
And shrieked.
And shrieked.
Instantly, one of the lunch ladies descended upon Dunk, wrenched Emma’s turban from his hands, and plopped it back onto Emma’s head.
Nora stared, appalled.
Even Dunk was too shocked at what he had done to utter another word. He flushed brick red with shame, as if somehow his prank had caused this terrible thing to happen to Emma’s head.
“Your hair…,” Nora whispered, before she could stop herself. “What happened to your hair?”
Emma whirled around to face Nora, her pale face dotted with two flaming spots of fury, one on each cheek. “It’s your fault!” Emma accused Nora.
“What? How?”
All Nora could think of was the butterfly barrettes from the spa hair salon. Had Emma’s hair somehow come off when she removed them?
“Did it…happen at the sleepover?”
“No!” Emma almost shrieked. “What happened at the sleepover was a big fat nothing! I tried so hard to be a good friend, Nora! I made you a friendship bracelet, and I invited you to a sleepover, and came up with the best theme for a sleepover ever, with the best activities, and the best snacks. And then you didn’t like any of it—don’t say you did, because you didn’t. You left early with a lame excuse, but I knew you just couldn’t stand being there with me anymore!”
“But—” Nora tried to protest, but Emma cut her off.
“I was so depressed the next day that I decided to cheer myself up and finally do my new thing, do the newest new thing of anybody in our class, and get an extra-new hairstyle. My regular stylist wasn’t there that day, but I decided to go through with it anyway, so I told the other stylist I wanted a pixie cut, and I guess she was an extra-new stylist, or at least she was an extra-terrible stylist, because this is what she thought a pixie cut was. This!”
Nora was definitely sorry about Emma’s disastrous haircut. But it wasn’t Nora’s fault, it wasn’t!
“I tried to like the party,” Nora said.
“You tried to like the party,” Emma shot back.
“I did like it! I liked lots of it!”
But all I could think about was how your cat loves you so much and my cat doesn’t love me at all. And how you kept acting like we were friends, when all the time I was just your project for school!
Emma wasn’t even listening. “You wouldn’t even say what you liked best and liked least about me. Because you don’t like anything best about me, do you? You like everything least about me. Don’t you, Nora? Go ahead and tell me what you like least about me. Just say it!”
Nora had been pushed far enough. So Emma really wanted to know what Nora liked least about her? All right, Nora would tell her.
“Here’s what I like least about you. You’re silly, and unscientific, and you have to be the queen all the time, and make everyone do what you want, and if they don’t, you rush off and get your hair chopped off and then you have the nerve to blame them!”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears. “Here’s what I like least about you. You’re like a machine, a science machine. You may know everything about science, but when it comes to people, you don’t know anything. You should live in a world with nothing but ants. And even your ants probably don’t like you!”
“Girls! Girls!” the lunch lady said. “You’re holding up the line. If you’re going to call each other names, get your food and do it at your table!”
Stunned, Nora accepted whatever the lunch lady dumped on her tray and stumbled over to a table on the far side of the cafeteria, as far away from Emma’s table as she could find.
It wasn’t true that nobody liked her.
Amy liked her.
Brody liked her.
Even Mason, who hardly liked anything or anybody, liked her.
Tamara and Elise liked her, though probably not as much as they liked Emma.
Her ants would have liked her, if liking people was something ants did.
Maybe Cassidy would like her someday. He used to like her, before she had taken him home to be her forever cat.
So why did she feel like putting her head down on the table to cry?
“What was that about?” Amy asked Nora at lunch recess. She had found Nora on one of the playground swings, not swinging, just sitting, her feet scuffing the ground.
“Emma hates me,” Nora whispered.
“Well…,” Amy said. “She shouldn’t have made you her newness project. That was a crummy thing to do.”
Nora reflected for a moment.
Maybe…maybe Emma had just wanted them to be closer, better friends? But why now, in the very month Coach Joe had challenged his class to do something new?
Yet…Emma had sent her a sympathy card the last time all her ants had died.
Emma thought Nora’s niece, Nellie, was adorable. She had organized a whole party so the other girls could come over and admire Nellie.
Forced by Coach Joe to work together, Nora and Emma had won a prize at the science fair. Nora could still hardly believe that had happened.
Nora and Emma had even had fun making the video of Precious Cupcake’s facial.
“Are you going to take off her friendship bracelet now?” Amy asked.
Nora looked down at the faded strings knotted onto her wrist. She gave a tug at the bracelet, wondering if the last threads would snap. They didn’t. “I’ll cut it off tonight, with scissors.”
At home that evening, after a whole afternoon of cold silence from Emma in their pod, Nora found a pair of scissors and got ready to snip the bracelet off her wrist.
But then…she didn’t.
Instead, she sat by her ant farm, where the last two ants lay dead now, with no other ants left to bury them, and cried the tears she hadn’t let herself cry at school.
As she wiped her eyes, she felt something brush against her bare leg.
Something like a cat.
Exactly like a cat.
Nora didn’t let herself breathe, or utter a single word. She gave her lap one gentle pat of invitation.
Cassidy looked at her. She looked back.
Avoiding any abrupt motions, Nora pulled the afghan from the bottom of her bed and spread it over her lap to make it more soft and alluring.
Then Cassidy jumped up onto the bed and crept onto her lap, kneading the afghan with his front paws before settling into place. Nora wasn’t sure if he would allow her to pet him or not. She ran her hand timidly over his ginger fur.
He started purring.
He kept on purring. And purring. And purring. And purring. And purring.
And then he purred some more.
As Coach Joe’s team of poets walked to the Café Rive Gauche on Friday morning, Emma led the way. A French beret, tilted at a becoming angle, covered the cropped curls. She was dressed all in black: slim black pants, silky black top.
“French women wear black because black is so sophisticated,” Nora had overheard Emma telling Tamara as the class had lined up for the ten-block walk from school to downtown. Emma and Nora hadn’t spoken a word to each other since their quarrel on Monday. At least Cassidy now slept curled in the crook of Nora’s legs every single night.
Amy was telling Nora that Fred-the-snake had escaped again. “Even though I had two rocks holding the lid in place! And I can’t find him—her—anywhere! And if my mom finds her—him—first, she’s going to kill me!”
Mason carried a plastic bag containing three Fig Newtons, since he had no intention of trying croissants.
Brody’s face glowed with poetic inspiration. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and a big peace sign on a chain around his neck. Coach Joe had told the class that poets had written poems in cafés not only in Paris, but also in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. This was Brody’s try at a 1960s hippie look.
Dunk swaggered along, kicking a can he had found in the gutter. “Pow! Kaboom!” He looked over at Nora as he did it, as if he was kabooming her instead of the can. It was clear he blamed her for the shock he had gotten when he pulled off Emma’s turban, and for Emma’s frosty silence ever since.
The other customers at the Café Rive Gauche looked up from their lattes and laptops, visibly startled, as Coach Joe led the class into the café.
“Don’t mind us,” Coach Joe told them with a grin. “We’re here to write poetry.”
This answer didn’t appear reassuring. Evidently the other coffee drinkers had never seen so many poets crowded into one space.
It took a long time to order all the croissants and chocolat, eve
n though Coach Joe had alerted the café so extra baristas would be ready to assist. When Nora and Amy finally had their food—apricot-almond croissant for Nora, chocolate croissant for Amy—they found a table for two outside in the café courtyard, under the shade of a large tree in new leaf.
“My poem is going to be called ‘Eek! My Snake Escaped!’ ” Amy said.
“Good title!” Nora agreed.
She didn’t know what her own poem would be. All she could think about was her fight with Emma.
Had she been wrong about Emma?
Or had Emma been wrong about her?
Or had they both been wrong about each other?
She started writing.
Sometimes it’s hard
To know what’s true and what isn’t.
Sometimes it’s hard
To know who’s right and who’s wrong.
Sometimes it might not even matter
When all you want is to be someone’s friend again.
It looked short on the page, but Nora couldn’t think of anything else she wanted to add. How could she be done with her poem already, when she hadn’t even had the first bite of croissant?
Well, Coach Joe had told the class that a poem was whatever length it was. A poem took however much time it took.
Dunk and Emma headed outside, too, Dunk with four croissants on his tray. Emma must have forgiven him for the turban yanking, because when he said something to her, she giggled as in days of yore.
“Oh, Dunk!” Nora heard Emma say. Her own pencil rested motionless as Amy’s pencil raced across the page.
Dunk said something else to Emma.
Nora was almost sure she heard her own name.
She waited for Emma to giggle again. Maybe Emma and Dunk were laughing together at the girl who loved only (dead) ants. Emma didn’t even know that now Nora had a cat of her own, a cat who finally loved her back.
The Trouble with Friends Page 7
