The Battle of Darcy Lane

by Tara Altebrando

  “An actual baby.”

  How could I be so stupid? How had I read this all wrong?

  “I’m not actually sorry I threw the ball at you.” I stood up. “Not at all.”

  She looked up, her mouth hanging open.

  Flip.

  I managed, “My mom made me come over to apologize.”

  I knew I had to leave before I either got beat up or cried.

  Her eyes returned to her magazine. “Then why are you still here?”

  I tossed the remote onto her bed as I left the room. “Good question.”

  “I’ll see you Saturday!” Alyssa called out after me, all fake cheery. “If you have the guts to even show up!”

  11.

  Mom had made tuna salad with celery and onion in it, and she was setting the table when I got home.

  “Fancy,” I said, because lunch didn’t usually involve placemats. I wondered if I appeared nervous about what I’d just done.

  She said, “Oh!” and put a third and fourth placemat down. “Wendy called for you, and I got her mom on the line and invited them over.”

  “Mo-om.” This was the last thing I needed. What I needed was more Russia practice, and fast.

  “What? It’s fun to be spontaneous. And you haven’t seen Wendy since school let out. Besides, they say the cicadas are coming tomorrow or—”

  “I’m so sick of waiting for these cicadas.” I slid into a kitchen chair.

  “I would think you’d be a little bit more excited about something that only happens once every seventeen years. It’s a scientific wonder!”

  I rolled my eyes. This was all a good cover for how sick I felt.

  She studied me and I thought she was going to say, “What happened?” or “Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” But she just said, “Go run a comb through your hair or something. And change out of your suit for lunch.”

  Upstairs, I changed and brushed my hair and opened the drawer of my desk and put back that picture of me and Wendy. In it, we were sitting on lounge chairs in her backyard, holding fancy old-fashioned fans and wearing silly hats. That might have been the day I’d invented Millionaire. Maybe it would be good to see Wendy after all.

  “Julia!” Mom called after the doorbell rang. I went out into the hall and down the stairs and into a hug from Wendy and then her mom.

  “Come on.” Mom grabbed the placemats off the kitchen table. “Let’s have lunch out back instead.”

  We talked about the cicadas as we ate, and about the vacation Wendy’s family was taking that fell right smack in the middle of music camp.

  “We leave the day after it starts and get back the day before the concert,” Wendy said.

  “She’s so disappointed,” her mom said. “But what can you do?”

  “Well, we’ll bring Wendy to the concert if she wants?” Mom looked at Wendy. “We’ll get an extra ticket and you can come see Julia and the rest of your friends from school?”

  “That’d be fun,” Wendy said. “Thanks, Mrs. Richards.”

  After lunch, the moms decided to go inside to talk about some curtain project my mom was cooking up. Wendy and I sat under the table umbrella in awkward silence for a minute. I wasn’t sure whether it was all in my head—if it was just me being awkward because of Russia and Alyssa—or both of us. I was relieved Wendy wouldn’t be at camp if we were this miserable around each other; hopefully she’d just forget about the concert by the time it rolled around. Finally I said, “You want to go swimming?”

  “If you want.” She shrugged a pale shoulder. Wendy was a girl who knew her way around a bottle of sunscreen.

  I stopped myself from shrugging back. But it was true that I didn’t really care one way or the other. I went swimming every day, and it wasn’t even that hot out.

  “I brought my clarinet,” she said. “We could play some duets.”

  “Maybe later.” I wasn’t in the mood.

  “I got new stickers.” She reached for her beachy tote bag. “You won’t believe how much the piña colada scratch-’n’-sniff ones actually smell like piña colada.”

  Scratch ’n’ sniff! She was still into stickers.

  “How do you know what a piña colada smells like?” I snapped.

  “I just do,” she said.

  Why was I being so mean? What was wrong with stickers?

  The wind rustled the leaves overhead and we were quiet again. Then Wendy said, “So what have you been doing? Did you do any of the summer reading yet?”

  “No, mostly I hang out with Taylor and this new girl who moved in across the street. Alyssa. She knows this game you play with a ball. It’s called Russia. I can show you if you want.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “I could use the practice,” I said, and then I braved it. “I’m going head to head with her this weekend.”

  “Why?”

  I could tell from the way she said it that she didn’t care, and I didn’t see the point of trying to explain everything that had been going on, even though Wendy would totally understand what it was like to be made fun of for freckles or holding your nose or a flat chest. I guess I didn’t want Wendy to tell me how weird it all sounded and how I should just stop hanging out with them because they sounded horrible. Because even if that was true, this was where I lived, and Taylor was still my best friend. Not hanging out with them wasn’t really an option.

  “Maybe we should go swimming,” Wendy said.

  “Yeah. Let’s.”

  For a while things seemed almost fun and I forgot about Alyssa. Wendy and I raced each other and tried to do cartwheels underwater, and I told her all about The Haunted Pond and she was totally into it. I told her, too, about how I now officially had a crush on Peter and how we had been sneaking his Dad’s iPad out to watch End of Daze.

  “Yikes,” she said. “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s awesome. Scary but awesome.”

  “I’m not allowed to watch it.”

  “I figured.”

  I watched my beach ball glide across the surface of the pool. Wendy was lying on a raft and the ball bumped into her, so she nudged it with an elbow and it came back my way. The sun was warmest on my thighs, and when the ball hit my elbow I popped it up in the air like I was a seal.

  Upstairs, later, Wendy wailed, “Oh, no! What happened to your unicorn poster?”

  “Oh. It fell and ripped.”

  “I loved that poster.” She stood in the middle of my room, and I could see now that she was starting to develop even though I wasn’t. It made me want to strangle her.

  Wendy said, “And something else is different.”

  “Well, I’m probably moving to the other room soon.”

  “Oh, no! Really?” She looked suddenly concerned and seemed to be waiting for an explanation.

  I was entirely confused. “Why ‘oh no’? It’s going to be awesome.”

  She looked like I’d said just the wrong thing, and looked away. “Oh, yeah, totally. Forget I said anything.”

  “Wendy.” I waited for her to look at me. “What’s going on?”

  She sighed. “You can’t tell anybody I told you.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  She looked away again. “My mom thought your mom was going to have another baby. I guess she was wrong. You can’t tell them I told you.”

  Everything got blurry. Then I thought about the weirdness about the room down the hall—the way it was so mysterious, so complicated. They had thought it was going to be a baby’s room. And now . . . it wasn’t? Because Dad had told me he was working on it, the room. So what did that mean?

  Maybe that was something they still wanted? Another kid?

  I liked the idea of it.

  Someone to be lonely with.

  “I’m sorry,” Wendy said. “I think my mom thought there’d be official news today, that that was why we were invited.”

  “No,” I said. “No news.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Let’s just play Spit
, okay?”

  “Your carousel!” Wendy practically screamed, noticing, I guessed, the circle of missing dust on my dresser when she got up to get the cards. “Did it break?”

  “No. I still have it.”

  “Oh, good. I thought maybe there’d been an earthquake that only hit your room or something.”

  I said, “That would be pretty crazy,” but as we started to play cards, I felt like I was experiencing some serious tremors and aftershocks. I could barely shuffle the deck.

  “So.” Wendy lowered her voice. “I finally got a bra.”

  “That’s great. I’m happy for you.” And then we just played and played while I struggled to hold it together.

  “I broke my Dopey,” I said, after a while. “You know, the Seven Dwarfs I’ve had since I was little?”

  “Stinks.” Wendy was going to town with fours and fives and sixes on one of the piles, but I had nothing to add, just jacks and queens and some nines and tens. “I bet your mom can fix it.”

  When Wendy and her mom were gone, I helped clean up more than I ever did without being told to. “Well, aren’t you helpful,” Mom said. She never missed a beat.

  I wanted to ask her about the office, the baby’s room, whether that was happening or not and if not, what had happened. I wanted to tell her that I’d dug my own grave over at Alyssa’s. But I couldn’t get the courage up.

  I did find myself just brave enough to say, “I was wondering if we could go shopping.”

  “What for?” She was washing plastic tumblers in the sink.

  I lowered my voice. “A bra.”

  “Oh, honey.” She turned to me. “When you need one, we’ll go.”

  She’d used that line a few times when I’d asked about a cell phone, too, but I didn’t remind her of that, or of how ridiculous an argument it was. I wanted to stay focused.

  “Mom.” My ears felt like they were on fire. “I’m telling you I need one.”

  She looked up—almost like she didn’t recognize me at all—and then her features softened. “Okay, then. Tomorrow morning?”

  12.

  I was up and dressed and ready to hit the mall in record time Thursday morning. But when we got to the store and Mom asked a saleswoman to show us to the “training bras,” I wanted to curl up and die. Or, at the very least, tell Mom to forget the whole thing and just go for a cinnamon bun instead. The wide grin of the saleswoman—a grandmother type—didn’t help.

  “Mom,” I said, when she tried to follow me into the fitting room. “I think I can handle it from here.”

  I ended up having a hard time with the clasps, so the whole thing was taking a while.

  “Julia.” Mom’s voice was so close. “I can help.”

  “I can do it!” Could this be any more awkward? I thought I might dislocate my shoulder. Then it finally hooked.

  The first one was too tight around my back, though, and the second one, too big in the cup. I handed them over the door and held my hands over my chest as if she could see through the door. “I need something in between these.”

  “I’ll be right back.” A minute later Mom handed another bra over the top. It fit just right.

  “This is the one,” I said when I came out, dressed again and feeling strangely naked under my top.

  “Okay.” She was all business. “We’ll get a few more in this same size.”

  Normally, I tried to stay at the mall as long as possible if it meant the possibility of Mom buying things for me, even if it really was just a cinnamon bun. But today I just wanted to get home so I could go to my room, put one of my bras on, and study myself in the mirror. Maybe it was true that I didn’t really need one, but maybe having one would trick my body into changing that.

  I was lying on a float in the pool later in the day, feeling dozy after swimming a bunch of laps, when the phone rang. I braced myself for a hang-up, for it all to start again. But instead Mom called out, “Julia? It’s Peter. He says his mom made cookies and do you want to go over for a while?”

  That pepped me right up. “Sure!”

  I hurried upstairs to change and headed out to Peter’s, my hair still damp.

  He was sitting on the front porch with the iPad resting on his bony knees. “Hope you didn’t have your heart set on cookies.”

  I smiled. “Cookies are overrated.”

  He got up. “Let’s go.”

  He hopped onto his skateboard, and I walked beside him. “Hey, can you teach me to do that—skateboard—sometime?”

  “Sure. Whenever you want.”

  So we found our spot by the pond and we sat and watched episode two.

  Alyssa had told me the truth, at least. After Mack picked up his dead wife’s phone and there was a man on the other end who said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up, Mack started to suspect an affair. He and Archer went back to their apartment, in a building now surrounded by bodies and uncollected trash, and Mack went through his wife’s things, looking for more proof. Archer was only about six years old, so he went to his room and started to play with Legos, and I got to thinking how nice it would be, to be young enough that when the world was ending, you could still find a way to play with Legos and not just sit around freaking out.

  After that, though, I started to have a hard time concentrating. There was a new story line that followed some other survivors in another city. A couple of the guys looked the same, and I was having trouble remembering which one was which.

  “I’m going head to head against Alyssa in Russia on Saturday,” I said when the show was over and Peter closed the iPad cover.

  “What? Because you threw the ball at her?”

  “I don’t even know.” I stood up to stretch and told him about my mom forcing me to apologize and then me taking it back. “Alyssa said I was mad that I wasn’t good at Russia, so I told her I could beat her.”

  “Julia, Julia, Julia.” Peter shook his head.

  “What?”

  He just shook his head some more.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. I started to think that maybe that was something people just said when they really didn’t want to explain anything for real. Because, sure, Peter knew she’d been “mean” to me, but I didn’t want to tell him all the gory details, like about the prank calls or the fact that Alyssa had made fun of my freckles and flat chest and clothes and bedroom and the fact that I held my nose that one time—or that she hadn’t exactly come out and said it, but how I knew she thought I was ugly and that no boys would ever like me.

  A strong, warm wind blew and the leaves overhead sounded like their own kind of swarm. I looked up and wondered whether bugs were going to start raining from the sky, and shivered at the thought of it, but they didn’t.

  “I guess you’ll need a coach,” Peter said, and I smiled.

  We went to his backyard patio and ran through the whole game so that he knew all the moves. He picked out nines for me to focus on, and I did it maybe thirty times without dropping the ball once.

  “Good work,” he said when it was time for me to head home.

  Maybe it was a weird, random thing to be proud of, but I felt that way anyway.

  13.

  I sprang out of bed on Friday and started practicing Russia in the backyard. I didn’t think about Taylor or Alyssa or the prank calls or candy or babies or anything. None of it mattered but the game. Nothing mattered but concentrating on throwing the ball just so, and staying focused.

  Tomorrow, if I could pull this off, everything would be different.

  When I was completing my seventh turn-clap-turn move, ready to go for the first time onto eightsies, Peter said “Hey!” and I dropped the ball.

  “Crap.” I chased after it. “You made me miss!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m coming over.” He pushed something up to the fence and climbed onto a tree that bordered our yards—the trunk was on his side—and dropped down on my side like a bag of limbs in an orange T-shirt. “That used to be easier.”

  “You cou
ld have walked around.”

  “Takes too long.” He fixed his shirt. “How’s it going?”

  “Feeling good. I think.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, brushing out a leaf, and I wondered if boys’ hair felt different than girls’ and how long it would be before I found out. He said, “Let’s see what you’ve got,” and sat in one of our loungers and pulled up his sweat socks.

  I started the whole game over.

  I got up to tens without dropping anything.

  Peter said, “She’s just jealous, you know.”

  I snorted. “Of what?”

  Boys could be so dumb.

  “Of you, you idiot.”

  It was hard to count my Russia moves while talking so I stopped midway through tens. “Why would anyone be jealous of me?”

  He blushed a little, I swear he did, and said, “Because you’re smart and, you know . . . pretty and stuff.”

  “She doesn’t think I’m pretty.” The very idea of it was ridiculous.

  But then I thought: He does.

  He does!

  He does?

  My mom brought us sandwiches around lunchtime and asked, “What’s with all the balls lately?”

  I always thought of my parents as sharing everything with each other, and the fact that Dad hadn’t told Mom anything about our chat in the yard the other night surprised me some.

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

  I explained the basics, leaving out the bit about the showdown and Peter being my coach.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “I know this! I used to play it. Or something like it! But we called it something different.” She pinched her head with her fingers. “Oh, what was it. Onesies, twosies. No! Leansies Clapsies, Onesies Twosies. Wow. That takes me back. That was a long time ago.”

  It was a little embarrassing how excited she was.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said on her way back inside. “It’s better than reading trashy magazines, at any rate.”

  I felt bad not telling her the whole story, about Alyssa and me being on a path to mutual destruction, but I was too busy feeling hopeful to do anything about it. Because if Mom had been any good at Leansies Clapsies—talk about a ridiculous name—maybe Russia was in my blood.