The Battle of Darcy Lane

by Tara Altebrando

  “Pace yourself,” Peter called out. “I’ll let you know if she’s really on your tail.”

  I did my third and fourth turn and felt good.

  My parents came down onto the street when I was on my seventh spinning move, and I realized I actually wanted them there, closer. They clapped and Mom said, “You’re doing great, Julia.”

  Alyssa’s mom said, “Dammit, Alyssa. Hurry up!”

  Mom called out, “There’s really no need for that kind of language, is there?”

  If there was any reply, I didn’t hear it.

  I was up to my ninth throw when Peter said, “No reason to rush, Julia. But she’s up to nines, okay, so just keep going slow and steady.”

  “Who’s this guy?” Alyssa’s mother asked. “Alyssa, HURRY!”

  “Julia,” Mom said. “Laney called to wish you good luck.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Give me some room, okay?”

  She said, “Sorry,” and backed off a bit.

  “Who’s Laney?” It was the first time Alyssa had spoken in at least several minutes. “Your girlfriend?”

  I stopped, frozen still, and stared at her.

  Exhibit A.

  I pictured her small and trapped under a glass and wondered if that was what her life felt like for real.

  She stared back.

  “Where do you even get this stuff?” I asked.

  “What?” Alyssa also stopped her game.

  She looked so nasty to me that I couldn’t even remember why I’d ever even tried to be her friend, why I’d ever let her make me feel bad or scared. I said, “You just say the most ridiculous stuff sometimes.”

  She made her lips pouty and looked around. Then she just made a puffing sound and said, “Whatever, Julie.”

  So I puffed, too. “Whatever, Alicia.”

  “Alyssa!” her mom called out.

  “Mom! Just shut up!” Alyssa yelled back and everything got incredibly quiet.

  I had one more thirteen to do for the win. With Peter there and Laney out there somewhere and the lingering orchestra swell in my head, I knew that my last throw was going to be the easiest thing in the world.

  Like even a monkey could do it.

  So I went for it.

  I threw the ball, and I spun around, and I clapped in front—and I could feel the sweat of my left hand meeting the sweat of my right—and I clapped in back—and kept my eye on the ball because only an idiot can’t clap without looking—and clapped in front and held my hands out, almost like in prayer—and I felt the hard smack of the ball on my palms.

  My parents cheered.

  Alyssa’s mother said, “Unbelievable,” and went inside.

  Alyssa just stood there, looking mad, and said, “You said it yourself. It’s a dumb game.” She dropped her ball, and it rolled to the curb as she walked away.

  Taylor stood up and said, “Well, you did it,” and strolled back to her house.

  I’d really done it.

  Peter rushed over, pulled me into a hug, and screamed, “YES!”

  22.

  He came back to my house, and we went straight through the front door and out the back and jumped into the pool with our clothes on.

  Instant, cold relief.

  Peter said, “That. Was. Awesome.”

  “I can’t believe it.” I popped an inflatable tube over my head and began bobbing with my arms crossed in front of me. My shorts were floating up around my thighs.

  “Well, I can.” Peter dunked his head under.

  Then we just floated around for a while, reliving some of the best parts of the morning, and also the weird parts.

  “Her mom’s pretty intense,” Peter said at one point.

  “Yeah.” I felt bad for Alyssa, but only so much.

  “What the heck happened to your garden?” Peter asked, after a while.

  I looked over. In a matter of weeks, my poor garden had fallen into chaos. Splitting overripe tomatoes dangled too close to the ground on vines that needed staking. Weeds towered over my pepper plants. “I guess I forgot about it.”

  Peter hopped off his raft, and his wet purple T-shirt clung to him. He pulled it away with a sucking sound. “Come on. I’ll help.”

  We started pulling weeds and picking the ripe stuff, and I got to thinking about a younger Peter digging in the woods. “Hey, so how did you find out that the treasure wasn’t real? That your brother had put it there?”

  Peter wiped his forehead, and his hand left a smudge of dirt there. “He told me, the idiot. He couldn’t even last an hour without telling me it was just a big joke.”

  “But why would he do that?” I shook my head. “It’s so mean.”

  “I don’t know.” He was patting some soil near the base of tomato plant. “But I think he felt really bad afterward, by how upset I was.”

  “Maybe he was jealous.” I’d just pulled a red pepper off a plant and the air smelled sweet.

  “Of what?”

  I rubbed some dirt off the pepper. “That something exciting was happening to you.”

  “But it was fake.” Peter wiped dirt from his hands, brushing them together.

  “But you thought it was real.”

  Peter stood up and stretched. “I’m not sure you’re making sense.”

  I stood, too, lifting the basket of veggies. “Me neither.” But I knew I was onto something.

  “I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure, Julia.” Peter stretched his back.

  “Yeah?” Was this flirting? “What’s that?”

  “When I do get around to going to a movie with a girl”—he hooked an arm around my shoulders as we went inside—“I most definitely want it to be you.”

  Peter planted a kiss on my cheek.

  I called Laney after Peter went home and squealed, “He kissed me on the cheek!”

  “But did you win?” she asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Of course you did!” Her voice sounded close. “Tell me everything!”

  So I told her about the game and the kiss—every last detail—and then we talked for almost an hour about silly things like what kinds of dogs we liked and why we hated our hair.

  My parents ordered Chinese food for dinner as a treat, and we ate outside while fireflies, probably glad—like me—to have seen the last of the cicadas for seventeen years, blinked in the yard. I was so happy that it almost made me sad, because summer was ending and school was starting and there’d be homework and Halloween and then winter and snow.

  “For the record,” Mom said, with an eggroll in her hand, “we’d be just as proud of you if you hadn’t won, Julia. It’s just a game.”

  I had some lo mein in my mouth and decided to chew and swallow before I said, “But it’s better that I won.”

  We all smiled, especially Mom, who laughed and said, “It really is.”

  Later, after dinner, I took a long bath and lay on my bed in my pajamas, feeling tired but also happy. Spying Snow White up on a high shelf, I grabbed Dopey and went downstairs. Mom was in the kitchen, writing something on a notepad.

  I put the pieces on the table and sat down.

  “Yikes,” Mom said, ripping her note off the pad. “What happened to Dopey?”

  “An unfortunate accident,” I said. “We have any Krazy Glue?”

  “Check the junk drawer,” she replied. I got up and opened the drawer near the fridge and found a small tube.

  “I’ll be right back,” Mom said, and she left the house walking at a quick pace, sliding her note into an envelope as she went.

  I went to the notepad and found a pencil in the junk drawer. Turning the tip on its wide side, I lightly ran it back and forth across the blank page so that the impression her writing had left appeared as white letters. When I’d covered the whole thing, I set the pencil down and read:

  Be mindful of your bedroom window and state of undress. People (children!) can see in.

  Signed,

  A Friendly Neighbor

  I tore the paper off th
e pad, put it in the trash, and went back to the table, not knowing where to even begin with Dopey. I thought about asking Dad for help, but he was in the den with a baseball game on and, also, it seemed like something I should be able to figure out.

  A minute later, the front door opened and Mom sat down at the table with me.

  She held up two pieces of Dopey’s purple hat.

  I lined the edges with glue.

  23.

  On Sunday, I mostly hung out in my room, getting everything organized, throwing away old clothes and other things I’d outgrown. Taylor came over when I was walking a bag of trash out to the curb.

  “What’s new?” she asked me as she followed me up to the porch. We sat on the swing.

  “Nothing much.”

  What was new? I’d beaten Alyssa was what was new.

  When she didn’t immediately say anything else, I said, “Is she mad?”

  “Yeah.” Taylor sounded bored. “But she’s gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “Jamaica. Some crazy expensive resort. For like two weeks or something. A big company retreat for her dad’s job. She’s so lucky.”

  This was all great material for a game of Millionaire, but all I could think to say was, “Why would anyone want to go to Jamaica in August?”

  Taylor huffed. “Because it’s gorgeous, Julia.”

  This was a ridiculous conversation, and yet I couldn’t stop it. “But it must be like a million degrees!”

  “You know”—the whites of Taylor’s eyes seemed extra bright—“just because somebody isn’t exactly like you doesn’t mean they’re not a good person.”

  “All right. So she’s not a bad person.” I turned away and rolled my eyes. So maybe nothing had changed.

  “I’m not just talking about Alyssa.”

  “Well, then who?” The girl was making no sense.

  “Forget it,” Taylor said. Then we both sat there for a while. Finally she said, “What should we do today?”

  “Anything but Russia.”

  “Agreed.”

  We went inside and asked my mom if she’d take us bowling or to a movie or, well, anything.

  That was pretty much how the next two weeks passed: Mom and I getting ready for school, stealing last bits of summer fun—sometimes with Taylor, sometimes without. Like we went to the beach a few times, and waded in the waves and built sand castles. We went to see my grandparents—my dad’s—at their lake house a few hours away, and I got to ride a pontoon boat and fish. In between, Peter and I planned to catch up on End of Daze before the big finale, but somehow we never got around to it. We were too busy floating milk-carton boats on the pond and plowing through the summer reading list, and, of course, he was giving me skateboarding lessons. When End of Daze finally ended, everyone seemed happier for it. In our house, we decided that Friday night was going to become a family dinner-and-a-movie night. (My idea.)

  Everything seemed so great during these two blissful, Alyssa-free, postwar weeks that I asked Mom if I could have a little end-of-summer bash the day before school started. I invited Taylor, Peter, Andrew, and Wendy, plus Laney—we’d squeed when her mom said yes.

  And everybody got along really well. We did dives and cannonballs and ate watermelon and had a tetherball tournament, and when Wendy and Laney ganged up on me during Marco Polo, I didn’t mind one bit.

  “I seriously don’t see what all the fuss was about,” Laney said to me in a whisper about midway through. “Taylor’s a little bit . . . dull?”

  I might have laughed a little too loudly when I checked to see whether Taylor had heard. Then Laney said,

  “Wendy, on the other hand, is really cool.”

  I felt so very foolish about so very many things but also hopeful about the year ahead.

  Mom had made ice pops out of fruit juice, and by the time we were all saying good-bye, we were sticky and chlorinated and goose-bumped from too much time in the pool. It felt like how it should on the last day of summer vacation.

  That night we had one call that was a hang-up.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  Each ring was like a hammer to my head, a fist to the gut. And I looked across the street and saw lights on at Alyssa’s—different ones than the light they’d put on a timer while they were away—and felt that sick feeling come back.

  Nothing had changed.

  Nothing had changed except that Alyssa had gone away.

  And now she was back.

  The first time, Mom picked up and said “Hello?” then hung up and walked away. The second time, she picked up the phone, hung it up, and held it. She did that the third time, too.

  After that one, she looked at me. “Did something happen today that I somehow missed?”

  “No!” I said. “But Alyssa’s back.”

  The next time the ringing started, I grabbed the phone from Mom and answered. “You don’t scare me anymore,” I said. “Taylor and I are friends again, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.”

  We’d spent two weeks just the two of us.

  We’d joked that maybe Alyssa had fallen off a cliff in Jamaica and wasn’t coming back.

  The line clicked dead.

  “Tread carefully here, Julia,” Mom said.

  “What do you mean?” I waited for the ringing to start again, thinking about what I’d say this time.

  Mom just silently unplugged the phone.

  Usually on the night before the first day of school, I had a hard time falling asleep. But this time I nodded off easily, thinking happy things.

  Everything was going to be fine and Alyssa would see; Mom would, too.

  I hadn’t only won the battle; I had won the war.

  24.

  Mother Nature had clearly gotten the memo about school being back in session because I woke up to a cool, crisp morning. Instant fall. I showered, got dressed, checked the clock in my room, and knew that Taylor would be ringing the bell in about ten minutes.

  I went downstairs and had a Pop-Tart and joked with Mom about how much she was going to miss spending all day with me and how I was not going to help her grade papers this year. After I brushed my teeth, checked my hair in the mirror again, and repacked the stuff in my backpack, I looked at the clock. It was seven minutes past the time when Taylor usually came and got me for the walk to the bus stop.

  Mom looked at the clock, too. “Honey, I think you’re going to miss the bus.”

  “But Taylor always comes and gets me.”

  “Come on.” Mom took a swig of coffee and picked up her keys. “I’ll drive you to the bus stop. We can just make it.”

  “But what about Taylor?” I knew I sounded desperate.

  “Taylor is her mother’s problem,” she said flatly.

  We hurried to the car and she backed out of the driveway super fast and spilled coffee on the car’s center console. She sped up to the bus stop, rolling through two stop signs on the way.

  We made it just in time.

  Just in time to see Alyssa and Taylor strolling up to the bus doors arm-in-arm. They were wearing the same shade of lip gloss—a red color I’d never seen Taylor wear before—and matching string bracelets that looked in some vague way Jamaican clung to their left wrists.

  If I was going to make the bus, I would have to bolt out of the car and run, shouting, “Wait for me!”

  I popped my door open and put one leg on the ground, but then I could hear Taylor saying, “And she said, ‘Taylor and I are friends again, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’”

  Alyssa laughed.

  The bus doors closed.

  And I could . . . not . . . move.

  Taylor had made last night’s calls. Maybe even all of them.

  My head hurt, trying to make sense of it.

  Taylor had made the calls.

  Taylor who’d said, “Not everybody has to be like you,” and “yes, I read, Julia.”

  Mom put the car in gear again. “I’ll driv
e you.”

  “But you’ll be late.” It was Mom’s first day back, too.

  “We don’t really have any other options.”

  I closed the door and let go of the door handle and exhaled and watched as houses and trees and lampposts whirred by my window. I wondered what Laney was doing right now. Whether she was already having a better first day of school than I was.

  “Do you think Laney could come over again sometime?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Mom said. “We’ll find a way.”

  When I looked over at her because of a weird sound she made, I saw tears coming out from under her sunglasses.

  “Mom?”

  She shook her head, pressed her lips together, and wiped tears away with one hand. “I could kill them.” Her voice was deep and shaky. “I could seriously kill them.”

  I should have felt the same way. I knew that. But I didn’t.

  I’d beat Alyssa at her game, and it hadn’t changed anything.

  And nothing I could do ever would.

  She would never like me, and I would never like her, and I was through being Taylor’s yo-yo friend. Maybe I’d hurt her feelings along the way, the same way she’d hurt mine. The way I’d hurt Wendy, even if she didn’t know the whole of it.

  It didn’t matter.

  “Life is so long, honey,” Mom said. “So long. Ten, twenty years from now, you’ll barely be able to remember their names.”

  I looked out the window as tons of kids milled around my school. I remembered the feeling I’d had during the Russia showdown, when I’d gotten to thirteen. The way the movement itself, the spin and the clap altogether, had felt celebratory, joyous. The way Peter had been watching so hard. The way I knew he, and maybe everybody else, was rooting for me.

  Maybe I’d find someone like Laney at school this year—someone like me, or at least more like me than Taylor ever was and Alyssa ever would be. Grown-ups didn’t have best friends that lived next door. They had neighbors. That was what Taylor and Alyssa were and that was it.

  I was pretty sure I would always remember their names no matter what Mom said, but it suddenly seemed possible that in a year or two or ten I’d forget how to play Russia, have no idea whether you had to clap first or turn first or which leg you did what with however many times.