The Battle of Darcy Lane

by Tara Altebrando

  I said a quick prayer—whatever, Alyssa—that the world wouldn’t end while I was still on it, and definitely not before I’d been kissed by Peter.

  8.

  “So are there any cute boys around here?” Alyssa said from a lounge chair on my back deck the next day. I’d wanted to sit there—it was my chair, my favorite—but I felt silly saying so. “In my old neighborhood there were cute boys everywhere.”

  I had spent a good part of the morning thinking about Peter, imagining us in scenes like some of the ones in The Haunted Pond, all dramatic and tense. We were going to watch the second episode of End of Daze tomorrow morning if he could get the iPad and we could both get away. The plan was to meet in the woods at ten, and if one of us didn’t show, abandon mission. It all felt secretive in the best way possible.

  “There’s just Peter and Andrew, and they’re not that cute,” Taylor said, which was a change of tune but then I realized she had pretty much stopped flirting with Andrew. It was true he’d never really flirted back.

  I said, “Peter totally is,” before realizing I probably didn’t want Alyssa knowing who I thought was cute. Because if Alyssa decided to like Peter, I’d be so mad. And worse, what if he actually liked her? Maybe she was mean to him because she liked him. Maybe he actually liked it? Maybe he’d only kiss me if he couldn’t kiss her instead.

  “Yeah, if you like band geeks.” Taylor looked at Alyssa, who smiled approval.

  I was so beyond mad that we had even ended up here in my backyard. It was exactly the scenario I’d been putting all of my energy into preventing. I thought if I could spend enough solo time with Taylor, Alyssa would never really compete. But when I called Taylor in the morning to get to her first and invite her over, she’d said she’d love to “. . . if Alyssa can come, too.”

  How could she not know that that was like the rudest thing in the world? How could I say no without seeming like I was doing more suffocating?

  I’d made a fist while saying, “Sure, of course!” in the sweetest tone I could manage.

  So here we were.

  Alyssa had brought some magazines of her mom’s, and they were both flipping through them. I reached for the sunscreen on the table next to my chair.

  “I think it’s a little late for that,” Alyssa said.

  I studied the white lotion in my palm, and had a quick thought about clowns and pies. Specifically the ways clowns smash pies into people’s faces. I said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I just mean you already look like a tomato.” She turned a page. “A freckled tomato.”

  “Alyssa,” Taylor said, like it was a warning.

  So Alyssa was mean! Even Taylor thought so!

  “What?” Alyssa sniffed a perfume sample in her magazine. “It’s true.”

  “But you don’t say it!” Taylor shook her head, but she was smiling.

  I put the sunscreen tube down. “At least I won’t get cancer.”

  “I don’t burn; I tan.” Alyssa closed her eyes and looked up at the sun.

  “Doesn’t matter.” I rubbed in my lotion. “You can still get cancer. Tell her, Taylor.”

  Taylor’s grandfather had to have a chemical peel on his nose because of skin cancer. And he was Italian and dark-skinned. We’d both been horrified when he turned up at her family’s Memorial Day barbecue with his face practically falling off.

  “Chill out, Julia.” Taylor shook her head. “It’s just a little tan.”

  “Your grandfather’s nose practically fell off!”

  “He’s old,” Taylor said.

  I put my sunglasses on to hide my eyes. I tried to talk myself through a game of Russia in my mind as a distraction.

  Throw, catch.

  Throw, bounce, catch.

  Throw, bounce, catch.

  Throw, clap, clap, clap, catch.

  And on and on . . .

  Mom came out of the house a few minutes later with a pitcher of lemonade and some polka-dot plastic cups. Her freckles were even worse than mine, and I felt horribly embarrassed of her in her tank top and shorts that showed so much of her skin. Freckles everywhere.

  “I thought you girls might like some lemonade,” she said.

  Alyssa smiled real wide and said, “Thanks, Mrs. Richards.” I didn’t even know how she knew my last name. “That’s so sweet of you.”

  Mom raised her eyebrows at Alyssa. “Well, aren’t you polite.” She poured a glass and handed it to Alyssa, and I could see that Mom was reading the headlines on the magazine on the table. One of them was, TEN MOVES THAT WILL DRIVE HIM CRAZY.

  “I hope you’re wearing sunscreen,” she said to Alyssa.

  Alyssa sat up straighter, like she was offended. “Of course I am.”

  Taylor snickered when my mom was gone. “You’re unbelievable,” she said to Alyssa.

  An hour later, when we got tired of swimming and lounging, Taylor suggested we go hang out in my room. I tried and tried to talk them out of it but there was no escaping—Alyssa said she really wanted to see it—and then there we were, standing in front of my unicorn poster.

  “So are you sure you don’t believe in unicorns?” Alyssa giggled.

  “Oh,” I said. “That old thing?”

  With Alyssa in my room, everything looked unbearably babyish. I wanted to cut my flowery bedspread to pieces and shatter the carousel on my shelf before Alyssa could spot it, but then she did.

  “How old are you?” Alyssa snorted, and Taylor laughed.

  While they were looking at the clothes in my closet, I swept the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs figures on my dresser into a drawer in a panic. Dopey hit his head on the drawer edge too hard, and cracked into pieces. I gasped.

  “What happened?” Taylor asked.

  I closed the drawer. “Oh, nothing.”

  I took down a photo of me and Wendy that had been stuck in the edge of my mirror and slipped it into the same drawer. If Alyssa got a look at her, I’d never live it down.

  “Julia, my dear,” she said. “Your room is in serious need of a makeover.”

  “Well, I haven’t done anything in here because I’m moving down the hall.”

  Taylor sat on the bed. “Since when?”

  “Since this weekend,” I said. “Me and my mom looked at bedspreads and stuff when we were in the city. It’s going to be awesome.”

  My mom called out from downstairs. “Girls! Sorry, but it’s time to go home.”

  It was still only midafternoon. If they left, I knew they’d probably just go to one of their houses and hang out some more without me. And the more often they did that, the more I was sunk. “But Mom!” I yelled out.

  “Sorry! Time to go!” Her voice may have sounded normal to Taylor and Alyssa but not to me. So I showed them to the door and stormed into the kitchen. “Why did you make them leave?”

  “I need help with dinner.”

  But she didn’t look like she needed help with dinner. She was reading the newspaper, and dinner wasn’t for at least two hours.

  I turned and looked at her and was about to say something about how she was ruining my life, but then I felt this feeling of relief come over me, like someone had pulled a plug on my feet and tension could just drain out through my toes. I was glad they were gone. I had to work so hard all the time when they were around.

  Mom flipped a page in her paper and sighed. “What can I say”—she shook her head—“I don’t like her.”

  She pushed the paper aside. “And you, dear daughter, are not going to spend your whole summer throwing a ball around and reading trashy magazines. I’ve signed you up for a music day camp starting next Monday. For two weeks.”

  “What?” I felt that fist form again. If I was off the block for two weeks, I’d never be able to keep Taylor on my side. “You can’t do that!”

  “I can. And I did.”

  “You’re ruining everything,” I said, now that it was officially true.

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “Sometime that’s my job.”


  “Well, what did you decide about the room?” That would be at least one good thing that was happening to make my life not entirely miserable. “Can I move, at least?”

  Her shoulders drooped. “Honey, we’re going to need to hold off on that right now. But we can certainly spruce your room up a bit.”

  “But I just told my friends it was happening.”

  “That wasn’t very smart of you.” She got up and dumped her water into the kitchen sink and refilled it with newer, colder water. “And what do they care, anyway?”

  “You don’t even use that office!” I shouted. “Ever!”

  She put her glass down and just stood there, looking out the kitchen sink window. Her voice was deep when she said, “Go to your room.”

  I stormed upstairs and took the unicorn down off the wall, rolled it, and shoved it in the back of my closet. I flipped over my flower bedspread to the solid green side and put the stuffed monkey in a drawer with some winter sweaters that I couldn’t imagine ever needing to wear again.

  I put the carousel in the closet, too, and declared war on some old mermaid decals on the wall. But when I tried to peel one off, it ripped, leaving a mermaid amputee behind. I groaned and flopped down on the bed, where I was left looking up at a shelf that held a whole row of glassy-eyed dolls—dolls!—each of them dressed in the traditional garb of their country of origin. I wanted to box them up and send them all back to where they’d come from.

  I wanted to get rid of everything.

  The problem was this: I had nothing to put in its place.

  I played Russia in the backyard after dinner and wished Peter would come out but he didn’t. After a while, Dad came out with a beer, sat in a lounger, and said, “What on earth are you doing?”

  “It’s a game,” I said. “It’s called Russia.”

  “Why’s it called that?” He snapped the can open.

  “Some Cold War thing from the eighties or something?” I was on sevensies, so I dribbled the ball seven times, hit it toward the side of the house, and caught it.

  “Fascinating,” he said.

  “Do you remember it? The Cold War?” I wasn’t really sure what it was.

  “I was young, but yes.” He put the beer down beside his chair. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well,” I said. “What was it?”

  He sighed. “It was basically years and years of conflict and tension between Russia and the US. You’ve heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  “That was the peak of it.” He relaxed back into the chair. “Basically, we—the US—tried to overthrow the government of Cuba and failed. And then Russia offered to put missiles in Cuba so that we could never do that again, and the whole thing escalated into a situation where everyone thought we were headed for nuclear war. Total mutual destruction.”

  “Yikes.” I was moving on to eights.

  “Yeah. But mostly it was everybody making veiled threats, nobody really wanting to confront each other for real. A ton of psychological game playing and power grabs.”

  “Sounds like my life right now.”

  He sipped his beer. “That bad?”

  I didn’t want to get into it with him—the Alyssa-Taylor Crisis—so I just said, “Mom signed me up for camp without even asking me. Sounds like a power grab to me.”

  I threw and caught my fourth of eight, but I was losing interest in the game.

  “I’m sure she thinks it’s what’s best for you,” Dad said. “And she is, you may have noticed, often right.”

  “But why won’t she let me have her office?” I threw the ball against the house and caught it.

  “It’s complicated, Julia.” He sat up, straddling the lounger. “But I’m working on it, okay?”

  What could be so complicated about it?

  “Don’t stay out too late.” Dad got up. “Your mom wants to say good night.”

  He drifted in to watch TV, and I went up to say good night to Mom, who was going along with my strategy of pretending we hadn’t had that fight that afternoon, and went to my room. I climbed into bed with my book, which was starting to get really good, especially now that one of my main daydreams was that my parents would send me away to live with some relative I’d never heard of, where I’d meet some tragic boy who saw ghosts in the pond in the backyard and who also just happened to be Peter.

  I read page after page after page, grateful that the book pushed out the bouncing balls of Russia—and thoughts about the inevitable end of the world—for a while.

  Girl.

  Cripple.

  Haunted pond.

  Kiss and catch.

  Peter.

  9.

  When I asked Mom if I could go over to Peter’s on Tuesday morning, to find out if he was going to band camp and to see if he maybe wanted to play Wii in his basement for a while, she said sure—like it was the best idea she’d ever heard. So I went around the corner to meet him in the woods. He was waiting, right on the same log where we’d watched episode one, so I took a seat beside him. I realized that I had a ball in my hand, and I put it on the ground beside me. We’d barely started the show before we heard voices.

  Girls’ voices.

  Taylor’s and Alyssa’s.

  When they appeared by the pond, Peter and I froze.

  “Well, looky looky,” Alyssa said. “What are you two lovebirds doing?”

  “Shut up, Alyssa.” I couldn’t believe she was here in the woods, mine and Peter’s.

  “Good comeback.” She swatted at a bug that may or may not have been a cicada.

  “Does your mom know you’re here?” Taylor asked.

  Andrew arrived behind them. “Wait up, guys!”

  “What do you care?” I picked up my ball, preparing to leave. I would have given my left arm for a unicorn to appear in the woods just then, to prove Alyssa wrong about something, anything.

  “She thinks she’s such a badass,” Alyssa said, and Taylor laughed.

  And I thought about my tomato face and those circus clowns and I threw my ball at Alyssa.

  At Alyssa’s hideous face.

  Hard.

  She screamed.

  “How did you get to be so mean?” I said, and the last word came out as my own sort of scream. My throat hurt from it.

  Alyssa’s hands were covering her face and when she pulled them away she was all red—like sunburned. “I had no idea you were such a . . .”

  Birds took off—a full flock by the sound of it—right as she called me the very word I’d been calling her in my mind since meeting her. We all heard it. Even with all that squawking and flapping.

  “Oh, man,” Andrew said. “I’m outta here.”

  Peter looked at him and looked dazed for a minute as Andrew took off down the path. Then Taylor took Alyssa’s arm and calmly said, “Come to my house. You need ice.”

  I took off running toward home—Peter called out, “Julia, wait!”—and went straight to my room and buried my face in my pillow and cried.

  How dare she call me that?

  A minute later, I got up, wiped away tears and turned on the air conditioner in the window, even though Dad said never to run it during the day. I lay back down, took a few deep breaths, and decided to read. The girl and the crippled boy were sitting by the pond together, and a storm was brewing in the skies above them, and I got the sense that it was all building toward some big event. Like a kiss or a declaration of love or a horrible disfiguring accident.

  But all of a sudden I didn’t want the book to end—it was the only thing I had to truly look forward to—so I put it down and closed my eyes and imagined that it was me who was the victim of some horrible disfiguring accident. And that it was all somehow Alyssa’s fault. And how sorry Taylor would be for not being nicer to me and how she’d be my best friend again and tell Alyssa to buzz off. Everyone would hate Alyssa at school, where I’d walk the halls like a war hero. I wouldn’t be able to play Russia anymore because of
my injuries and everyone would think that was horribly tragic.

  My door opened.

  Mom, of course. “Are you sick?”

  “No.” I rolled to my side away from her and could almost feel my imaginary wounds in my bones.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m relaxing. Can’t I ever just relax?” I rolled my eyes before closing them again.

  “Yes. For ten more minutes. Then I want to hear the sweet sound of your clarinet wafting down the hall.”

  “Mo-om!” I noted the exact time on the clock.

  “I’m serious.” She closed the door but came back a second later and turned off the air conditioner.

  I got up exactly eleven minutes later and pulled my clarinet case out of my closet and sat with it on the bed. The smell that came out when I opened it wasn’t entirely pleasant. And something about it—some weird combination of cork wax and old spit and wood—made me feel sad.

  I popped a reed into my mouth to get it wet while I put the four pieces of the instrument together, and slipped the reed into its holder and screwed it into place. Resting the clarinet on the bed, I set up my music stand and pulled out some music from the school concert last year. I selected the Swan Lake Ballet Suite, op. 20: Scene, picked up my clarinet, and started to play.

  I was hot.

  I opened a window.

  The curtains shifted a little, so there was at least a tiny breeze. I heard balls bouncing, and voices. Alyssa and Taylor were back at it, back at Russia.

  I didn’t care.

  I just played the piece the whole way through and noticed for the first time how it started off sad, then got angry, then got strong, and I imagined the sound of a concert band around me as I carried the melody.

  I played it again, and it sounded better that time.

  After one more run through that was almost perfect, I went downstairs and made a snack, melting fake cheese onto nachos and dipping them in salsa. When I burned my tongue, it sort of felt good.