The Trouble with Friends

by Claudia Mills

But the next words Nora heard were, “No, Dunk! You can’t!”

  Dunk muttered something else.

  “It’s too mean!” Emma said, sounding almost as upset as she had in the cafeteria line on Monday.

  What was too mean? Nora was sure she heard her own name again.

  “…never going to speak to you again! And this time I mean it!”

  Emma flounced away from Dunk, the same two spots of fury reddening her cheeks.

  “Wait, Emma!” Dunk called after her.

  Emma didn’t look back. She plunked herself down with Tamara and Elise at the table next to Nora and Amy’s. As if nothing had happened, she started telling them about the ode she was going to write to Precious Cupcake. She had already found the best rhymes for it.

  “You can go to the computer and google rhyme and the word you want to find some rhymes for, and they come right up! There are heaps and heaps for Cupcake, well, for cake, but I found rhymes—well, they sort of rhyme—for Precious, too! Dresses! ‘Precious loves to wear dresses!’ And she does! Or freshest! ‘Of all cats, Precious is the freshest!’ ”

  Dunk stood rooted where Emma had left him, clutching his croissant-laden tray. What could Dunk have said to Emma that would make her react that way? And what did it have to do with Nora?

  Coach Joe’s students wrote for another half an hour—Nora left her poem the way she first wrote it—and then it was time to walk back up the hill to Plainfield Elementary.

  The other café customers didn’t look disappointed to see them go.

  Emma snubbed Dunk for the rest of the day. It would have been hardly noticeable, given that Emma had already been snubbing Dunk—and Nora—all week. But there was a new lift to Emma’s chin and a new glint in her eyes.

  Something was definitely going on.

  And it definitely had to do with Nora.

  “Emma?” Nora asked her, as the rest of the class was gathering for the afternoon Civil War huddle.

  “What?” Emma snapped.

  “Is everything…okay?”

  Emma stared at Nora, as if a question like that, from someone as supposedly smart as Nora, was too dumb to believe.

  “Oh, yes!” Emma said. “Everything is totally terrific!”

  When the dismissal bell rang for the day, Nora heard Emma say to Dunk, “Remember what I said!” And she heard Dunk say to Emma, “Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t!”

  Emma turned on her heel and stalked away, heading not toward Tamara and Elise—“See you later!” she called after them—but toward the class garden. Nora followed at a safe distance, not to be seen.

  In the garden, Emma stood motionless as a scarecrow. The thought of a scarecrow made Nora feel guilty again for Emma’s botched haircut, though Emma’s spiky wisps of hair were hidden under her French poet’s beret. And the haircut hadn’t been Nora’s fault, no matter how much Emma tried to pretend it was.

  Scientists are curious people, and Nora was nothing if not a scientist.

  She drew closer.

  Emma wasn’t singing to her pansies.

  She was standing guard over Nora’s radishes.

  Nora approached. What did she have to lose? Emma already hated her.

  Emma looked over at her, startled.

  “What were you and Dunk fighting about at the café?” Nora asked. She might as well ask the question and be done with it.

  “It’s none of your business!” Emma said, but her darting eyes said otherwise.

  “I heard you say my name.”

  Emma hesitated. “Dunk said…Dunk said…he was going to pour vinegar on your radishes.”

  Nora knew the acid in vinegar would kill plants. She was surprised Dunk had paid enough attention to plant science to know that, too. But right now that wasn’t what surprised her most.

  “Why me? What did I ever do to Dunk?”

  As soon as she asked the question, Nora knew the answer: Dunk was going to kill her radishes to get even with her for making Emma sad enough to yell in the cafeteria with big tears in her eyes.

  Little had Coach Joe known what could happen when he set his class the challenge of doing something new.

  Nora had answered the first question herself, but now she had a second one.

  “But—why do you care?”

  “I just do.” Emma’s voice trembled. “Most of your radishes died, and you had only these ones left. I saw you transplanting them—and you were talking to them while you did it! I heard you explaining to them what you were doing and why. So I thought, you love your radishes the way I love my pansies, and even though you hate me, I don’t hate you, and I don’t want your radishes to die.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Nora said over the huge, choking lump in her throat. “I’ve never hated you. I just felt bad being your project.”

  “Being my what?”

  “Your newness project. For Coach Joe’s challenge.”

  Emma stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, how he said to spend time with someone as different as possible from you? So you picked me?”

  Emma’s mouth dropped open. “How could you—Nora, how could you have thought that? You weren’t my new thing! My new thing was always going to be a new haircut. I even told you about it at the sleepover, remember? I was saving it for a big surprise on the day of the newness festival, so I could win the newness prize, but I was so sad last weekend that I went and did it sooner. And then, well, I didn’t expect it would turn out to be this new.”

  “But…you invited me for the sleepover right after Coach Joe had the newness huddle. Like, ten minutes after!”

  “I was thinking about Bethy. And how she had moved away. And how she and I used to have sleepovers all the time. And how you and I had never had a sleepover. And how we totally should! We had so much fun doing our science fair project together, you know we did. And I love your niece Nellie so much.”

  Nora tried to process these new thoughts. Could she really have been so wrong about everything? And not only wrong, but unscientific, to jump to a conclusion without sifting through all the evidence?

  “We’re total opposites,” Nora said. “So I just thought—”

  “True friends can be opposites,” Emma said. “Look at Mason and Brody.”

  Nora was still confused. “At the sleepover, you laughed at me when I did the dance!”

  “It was supposed to be a funny dance. That was the whole dare: to do a funny dance. I laughed because I thought it was funny!”

  “But…I’m not the type to do a funny dance.”

  Though she wasn’t sure anymore that people came in types, the way ants or radishes did.

  “What was really funny,” Nora remembered, feeling her mouth curve up into a smile, “was how Precious Cupcake looked with the mask on for her facial.”

  Emma burst out laughing. “Wait.” She pulled out her phone. “Let’s watch the video again.”

  Standing in the garden by Nora’s radishes and Emma’s pansies, they played the video of Nora holding up the cat to show off her new spa look, both girls giggling as hard as they had at the party.

  “Anyway,” Emma said, “the whole point of Coach Joe’s assignment was to do things we’re not the type of people to do.”

  “I have a cat now,” Nora blurted out. “I got a cat last week from the animal shelter.”

  Emma stared at her for an unbelieving moment, and then she gave a squealing shriek of joy. “You do? You have a cat? What kind? Is it a girl or a boy? What’s its name? Do you have any videos? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s a boy cat,” Nora said. “His name is Cassidy. I don’t have any videos. Well, not yet. I should have told you about him at the sleepover, but I was so sad he wouldn’t come out from under my bed, or do anything with me, so I thought maybe I was going to have to take him back to the shelter. He didn’t come out for days and days!”

  Emma gave another squealing shriek. “Precious Cupcake was the same way! The exact same way! I was sure she h
ated me! And look at how she is now!”

  Nora felt like crying with happy relief.

  “You know,” Emma said then. “The spa snacks? I was too sad to eat them, so my mom put them in the freezer to save for later. I was thinking…if you’d like…”

  “I’d love to,” Nora said.

  Nora had never been to a festival of newness before. No one else in their class had, either. Maybe this was a new thing for the entire world.

  “I’ve never done anything like this with a class,” Coach Joe announced on the day of the newness celebration, held on a Friday afternoon in late May. “My new thing as a teacher has been encouraging you to try new things as my students.”

  Parents had not been invited. But Emma’s mother, as their PTA room parent, had provided balloons with the word NEW on them, and mini-cupcakes from a new bakery in town. On the party table was also a huge bowl of salad tossed from lettuce and radishes harvested from the class garden. A bouquet of Emma’s Ocean Breeze pansies sat in a glass jar, the pansy faces seeming to smile on the proceedings.

  The only outside guest was the poet Molly Finger, who had told Coach Joe she wouldn’t miss a newness festival for anything.

  Nora couldn’t decide if Molly Finger looked like a poet or not. She wasn’t sure what a poet was supposed to look like. Molly Finger was older than Nora’s parents, but a poet could be any age. She was stouter than Nora’s parents, but a poet could be any shape. She had crinkly gray hair framing a smiling face. She didn’t look poetic, exactly, but when she read the class some of her poems, she sounded exactly like a real poet would sound.

  After her reading, Poet Molly went from pod to pod to look at students’ poetry and make suggestions. Nora wished they could skip that part. She loved showing her science fair projects to the judges, but she felt shy sharing her poems with a published poet. But she could overhear snatches of Molly’s comments, and none of them were mean. She even praised Dunk’s pumpkin and cannon poems for their “explosive energy.”

  When she finally arrived at Nora’s pod, she laughed at Mason’s funny negative haiku (“Very clever!”), picked out some good details in Thomas’s persona poem about Robert E. Lee, and told Emma her cat sounded adorable. (It wasn’t exactly a compliment about Emma’s poem, but Emma beamed anyway.)

  “My poems are strange,” Nora apologized to Molly in advance as she handed over her stack of ant poems. “They’re about something most people wouldn’t think is very poetic.”

  “A poem can be about anything,” Molly reassured her.

  “Well, these are…well, they’re about ants.”

  The poet read through Nora’s poems once. Then she read through them again.

  “You have a real gift for observation,” Molly told Nora. “And a gift for making others see what you love through your loving eyes. You might consider writing a few more ant poems and making them into a chapbook.”

  Nora guessed a “chapbook” was a little book of poems.

  “Really?” Nora asked her, disbelieving.

  “Really,” Molly Finger said, with another of her wide smiles.

  That was an amazing thought right there: Nora as the author of an entire book of poems.

  “All right,” Coach Joe said when Molly had finished her rounds. “Now it’s time to do our sharing. I have everyone’s name in this baseball mitt. I’ll pick the first name, and then each one of you will draw the name of the next person.”

  Nora squeezed Emma’s hand.

  Emma squeezed back.

  Coach Joe reached into the mitt. “Thomas, you’re up to bat first.”

  “I gave a talk about my pet lizard at my church,” said the boy who never spoke in class.

  Even his saying that much caused a ripple of surprise in Coach Joe’s room. Thomas played a short clip of his talk on the big screen in the front of the classroom. He didn’t sound shy or awkward; he sounded like a kid who talked all the time.

  “So how did you like giving the talk?” Coach Joe asked Thomas.

  Thomas shrugged.

  “Do you think you’ll give more talks?”

  Thomas shook his head no.

  The next kid had eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant, where diners scooped their food with pieces of bread instead of using forks and spoons. He had brought takeout menus to give to everyone.

  Tamara had started taking ballet, as Nora had predicted. She did some graceful pirouettes to a short piece of classical music. She didn’t wear a tutu, though, just a leotard and a flowy skirt.

  Two kids had adopted new pets—a dog for one and a cat for the other. Coach Joe had said no pets could come to school for the party, so the pet adopters collected their oohs and ahhs by showing pictures of their new family members. Nora had a tingle of happiness, thinking about Cassidy.

  When it was Amy’s turn, she had a PowerPoint called “The Escape Artist.”

  “This is Fred,” the first slide read, with a picture of the snake in its terrarium.

  Some kids—including Emma—gave shrieks at the sight of Amy’s new pet. Others called out, “Cool!”

  The next slide showed the empty terrarium, with the caption, “GONE!”

  Slides of Amy’s messy room followed with the caption, “Where is Fred???”

  Then: “Under the bed!”

  The rest of the slides showed the terrarium, empty once again; Amy’s mother looking horrified; then Fred found again; and finally a picture of Fred released, slithering into the bushes in Amy’s backyard. Amy’s mother had agreed to pose for the photo once Fred was found for the last time and back in the wild. Mrs. Talia never got as angry about anything as Amy thought she would.

  “Nicely done, Amy!” Coach Joe said, when the laughter had died down.

  Nora had expected Elise’s new thing would be a new kind of writing—maybe writing a play, or a script for a movie—but Elise’s new thing was gymnastics, demonstrated with one forward and one backward roll.

  When Brody’s turn came to show the new things he had done, he opened up a three-paneled display board like the ones kids used for science fair projects. On the board, he listed the fifty—yes, fifty—new things he had done, complete with pictures of most of them. In the center was a huge picture of Brody up in the hot-air balloon. His parents had let him do it after all.

  For good measure, Brody counted to ten in French, German, Spanish, and Swahili.

  He would have done an Irish jig and juggled three balls—“I usually drop them right away, but there’s a couple of seconds where they’re all in the air!”—but Coach Joe told him there wasn’t time, given that so many students were waiting to share.

  Brody pulled the next name out of the mitt: “Emma.”

  Emma jumped up, pulling Nora with her.

  “We’re doing ours together,” Emma said. “Because my new thing is Nora, and Nora’s new thing is me!”

  Emma did most of the talking; Emma liked to talk more than Nora did. She explained how Nora had gotten a wonderful new cat and Emma had gotten a terrible new haircut, but their biggest new thing was how they had a big misunderstanding and made up afterward, and now she and Nora were better friends than they had ever been before.

  “Even though we’re opposites,” Emma said, fluffing her short, cute blond curls. “Or maybe because we’re opposites. We had two sleepovers, and the second one was more fun than the first. And look at Nora’s French braid! I made it! And look at Nora’s nails! I did them for her!”

  Nora held up ten sparkly nails for all to see.

  “And here’s the best part. Yes, it’s a cat video!”

  Emma played the video of Precious Cupcake’s facial on the big screen. Everyone laughed when they saw it, even though it had been funnier to see it in real life.

  “Actually,” Emma said, “we have two cat videos!”

  Emma showed Nora’s video of Cassidy trying to get a drink of water from the dripping kitchen faucet and tumbling into the sink. The class roared with laughter at that one, too.

  “Excell
ent, girls!” Coach Joe said. “I’m proud of both of you.”

  Nora thought his smile was especially warm as it fell on her.

  “Are you still giving a prize for the King and Queen of the New?” Emma asked him. “If you do, and you pick me as queen, you should pick Nora, too. We’d be co-queens.”

  “Well,” Coach Joe said, “now that I’ve seen so many terrific projects, I think I’d have to give a crown to every single one.”

  Emma looked disappointed. Then she whispered to Nora, “If he did give out crowns, Brody would be king, and you and I would be co-queens. I know we would!”

  A few more kids presented—a new sport (fencing), a new skateboard trick, a new favorite cartoon, a new state visited on a weekend trip down to New Mexico.

  Dunk’s new thing turned out to be playing the violin!

  “I’m going to play a song for you now,” Dunk said. “I’m dedicating it to someone in our class, but I’m not going to say who it is.”

  Emma blushed.

  The song sounded terrible. A badly played violin sounded even worse than a badly played clarinet. But Nora though she could recognize it as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Maybe all beginners mangled the same song.

  Emma beamed.

  Finally it was Mason’s turn.

  “I haven’t done a new thing,” Mason confessed. “I mean, I haven’t done a new thing yet. I’m going to do my new thing now, for the first time in the life of Mason, right here in front of you.”

  “Oh, my,” Coach Joe said. “Team, this is an honor.”

  “For my new thing,” Mason said, “I’m going to eat a cookie that is not a Fig Newton.”

  Coach Joe pounded out a drumroll on his desk.

  “And it’s not another regular cookie, like an Oreo or a Girl Scout cookie. It’s a homemade cookie. Made by my mother, who puts things like carrots or zucchini or wheat germ, whatever that is, into everything. So this is a carrot–zucchini–wheat germ cookie. I’m not sure I’ll eat the whole thing, but I’ll eat at least one bite.”

  Coach Joe started up his drumroll again.

  Mason took a bite of the cookie.