The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  A bunch of kids who’d been watching them play cheered and stomped their feet. Kate let her hand slip into Andrew’s for just a second, and then she went for the rebound. She put her hands up. She opened her arms.

  the secret language of girls

  One day Petey McIntosh is going to write a book on how to be a household spy. At the age of nine he is already an expert. His favorite spying method is to put his ear to the heating duct on his bedroom floor and listen very carefully for voices coming through the vents. This is how he knows his parents are getting a divorce. His sister, Marylin, has no idea.

  Of course, the sun could go supernova and Marylin wouldn’t notice. She’d be too busy writing the name of her latest boyfriend over and over with a purple pen in her diary to pay attention to something as inconsequential as the end of the world.

  Petey’s second favorite spying method is reading things he has no business reading, such as Marylin’s diary. The most interesting thing about Marylin’s diary is that she sometimes writes in code. Yesterday, for instance, she wrote “RBIAC” seventeen times. Petey sits in front of the TV pretending to watch Mighty Monster Brigade when in fact he is trying to figure out what “RBIAC” means. Pretending to do one thing while he’s actually doing another is a spy technique that has served Petey well over the years. Who would guess that at this very minute he is composing a list in his head that goes:

  Red Baboons In Alligator Coats

  Really Big Iguanas All Colors

  Run Battery In Air Conditioner

  “Petey, come set the table, please!”

  Petey considers acting like he hasn’t heard his mom call him from the kitchen, but then he remembers about the divorce and thinks he ought not to make her life any harder than it already is. Besides, it’s possible that his mom knows something about “RBIAC.” Ever since Marylin “forgot” to show her parents her report card last month, his mom sometimes makes random checks of Marylin’s backpack, in case there are any D– math tests lurking in there. Maybe his mom has run across some clues to the “RBIAC” mystery beneath Marylin’s gym socks and social studies reports.

  “Is Dad coming home for dinner?” Petey asks his mom as he takes the silverware from its drawer.

  “He’s got a meeting, sweetie,” his mom says. “But Mazie’s coming home with Marylin after cheerleading, so set the usual number of places.”

  Petey groans. Mazie Calloway has been Marylin’s best friend ever since they both made the middle school cheerleading squad in February. Every other word she says is “like” or “you know,” and she acts like Petey is the family pet instead of an actual person. Petey misses Marylin’s old best friend, Kate, who was always up for a game of make it, take it if Petey could find the pump to blow up his basketball.

  “Hey, Mom,” Petey calls from the dining room, where he is carefully laying out the forks and knives. “Read Books In American Culture!”

  “Excuse me, sweetie? I didn’t quite hear what you were saying,” his mom calls back.

  Petey tries again. “Reckon Bears Insure All Caves?”

  Petey’s mom walks into the dining room. “Either I’m losing my hearing, or else you’re not making any sense.”

  “Really? Been In A Car Wreck?”

  “Of course I haven’t been in a car wreck!” his mom says. She is starting to sound a little bit irritated.

  “Rings Bells If Almost Close,” Petey offers.

  Petey’s mom shakes her head. “I really don’t understand the male of my species,” she says. “I thought I did once, but I must have been mistaken.”

  “It’s not nice to generalize,” Petey tells her, repeating one of his mom’s favorite sayings.

  Try understanding girls is what he says to himself as he straightens out the place mats. Just try it. And then he realizes that that is exactly what he is attempting to do. RBIAC. It is some secret girl code, he’s sure of it, and he is just the man to figure it out.

  “Like, Mrs. Watson is, you know, a witch!”

  Mazie Calloway is chatting to Marylin’s mother through a mouthful of vegetarian pizza. Marylin has thought about telling Mazie privately that she should chew with her mouth closed and swallow her food before she speaks, but she doesn’t. Marylin is afraid that Mazie will turn around and tell her something she does that’s totally gross. What if Marylin sticks her pinkie in her ear and searches around for earwax when they have free reading in language arts period? Marylin sometimes catches herself doing this at night when she’s writing in her diary. If she does it at school, she’s not sure that she wants to know.

  Marylin hates to be told anything bad about herself. She hates reading the slam books that circulate through her sixth-grade class, even though most people write nice things about her, like “Cute!” and “A good friend” and “Not stuck-up for a cheerleader.” Once someone wrote, “She’s okay,” and Marylin felt like she’d been slapped. Why didn’t this anonymous person think she was wonderful or at least nice? She’d nearly worn out her lips smiling at everyone, even Matthew Sholls, for weeks afterward, just to prove that she was more than “okay.”

  “Our new cheerleading uniforms are so cute, Mrs. McIntosh,” Mazie chatters on. “Are you going to come to the soccer game Friday afternoon? Because we have, like, this really cute new cheer we’re going to do.”

  Mazie has a reputation for being good with parents and teachers. It’s because she’s perky, Marylin thinks. Parents and teachers think if you’re perky on the outside, you must be sweet and good on the inside. This is where Mazie has grown-ups fooled.

  “Let’s humiliate someone,” Mazie says after dinner, when she and Marylin are lying on Marylin’s blue carpet with their feet planted against the wall.

  “Who do you want to humiliate?” Marylin asks. She supposes she should ask why Mazie wants to humiliate someone, but Mazie would probably take it the wrong way and end up trying to humiliate Marylin.

  “How about Kate Faber?” Mazie suggests. “I know you used to be sort of friends with her, but she’s so weird, you know? And she has fat knees.”

  “Really?” Marylin has known Kate since nursery school and has never noticed that she has fat knees. Kate is actually a very muscular person, in Marylin’s opinion. Marylin looks at her own knees. They’re sort of knobby, but you wouldn’t call them fat.

  “Like, amazingly fat knees,” Mazie says. “It makes me sick to look at them.”

  The problem with being friends with Mazie, Marylin has discovered, is that she spends a lot of time wishing she were five years old again. Marylin has fond memories of being five, like eating cinnamon toast while she watched cartoons on Saturday morning. She doesn’t remember ever paying attention to people’s knees or feeling like she was always on the verge of doing something terrible.

  Mazie turns over on her side and props her head up with her elbow. “I was thinking we could get Robbie Ballard to write Kate a note that says, like, ‘Dear Kate, Do you want to go to the movies with me Friday?’ or something. ‘Check yes or no.’ Of course she’ll check ‘Yes,’ and then Robbie will tell her it’s a big joke.”

  “I don’t know, Mazie,” Marylin says, stalling. “I think Kate sort of has a boyfriend. You know, Andrew O’Shea?” Marylin isn’t sure about this, because she never sees Kate and Andrew holding hands on the playground. But they spend a lot of time together, and sometimes Marylin catches Andrew and Kate smiling at each other in a secret sort of way, like they know something that no one else does. She would love to call Kate up and ask her what’s going on, but she doesn’t think Kate would tell her.

  “Andrew O’Shea!” Mazie laughs. “Believe me, even if she’s engaged to be married to Andrew O’Shea, she wouldn’t turn down a chance to go to the movies with Robbie.”

  Marylin scrambles for another excuse not to do this thing to Kate. “Robbie wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face. Kate would know something was up, even before she read the note.”

  Mazie considers this. “Okay,” she says after a moment.
“Kate lives down the street from you, right? So, you know, you can slip the note in her mailbox Saturday morning. That’ll give her all weekend to get excited about it, and then Monday morning, wham! The joke’s on her.”

  If her life were a TV show, this is where Marylin would stand up and say, No, that’s a horrible thing to do to someone! Kate Faber is a very nice person. One time she stayed up all night feeding a baby bird whose mom had died. And her mom always made chocolate-chip cookies when I spent the night at their house, so I am not going to do this really mean thing to her!

  Unfortunately Marylin’s life is just her life. On one side of it is Mazie and cheerleading and being invited to boy-girl parties that she’s only invited to because of Mazie and cheerleading. On the other side is Kate. Marylin sighs. She knows which side she has chosen, even if sometimes her choice makes her stomach hurt.

  “Okay,” she tells Mazie. “If you really think Robbie will write the note.”

  Mazie giggles. “Of course Robbie will write the note. He’s in love with me, isn’t he?”

  Of course.

  Petey rolls away from the heating duct and rubs his ear. So RB is Robbie Ballard, and Robbie Ballard is in love with Mazie, not Marylin. Maybe IAC stands for Is A Chucklehead.

  The whole thing reminds Petey of a soap opera. Whenever Petey stays home sick from school, he watches soap operas in the afternoon, not because he likes them, but because other people like them. To be a good spy, Petey knows, you have to understand what makes human beings tick, and that means figuring out why they like the things they like and hate the things they hate. So far Petey hasn’t figured out why some people like soap operas. For one thing, there’s way too much kissing.

  Petey gets up and walks over to his desk. He does his best thinking sitting on his hardback chair and staring at his poster of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein would probably have made a great spy, if he hadn’t been so busy coming up with theories of time and space.

  Petey knows that as a spy his job is to observe, not to act. But what he has just learned calls for action. He leans back in his chair. He will come up with a plan. Good will triumph over evil, if Petey McIntosh has anything to do with it.

  Kate is pretending to watch a video on Saturday morning, but really she is staring at her knees. She is worried that they’re fat. Her mom keeps telling her that she’s not the least bit fat, but that’s what moms get paid to say. It’s bad enough Kate has bone-straight, plain-brown hair and a bad habit of biting her cuticles. The last thing she needs is fat knees.

  Maybe she can find some knee exercises in one of the magazines Tracie has piled beneath her bed. Tracie has six magazine subscriptions and knows everything there is to know about makeup and exercises to improve your figure. Sometimes Kate picks up one of Tracie’s magazines and tries to read it, but she doesn’t get the articles. What is an eyelash curler? And why would anyone wash her hair with eggs and rinse it out with vinegar?

  Well, Kate decides, there’s no use crying over fat knees. She finds her basketball and goes out to the driveway to practice her layups. Kate’s dream is that one day they will let girls play in the NBA. She plans to be the first girl NBA player with a multimillion dollar contract to endorse tennis shoes. She has already planned what she will say in her commercial.

  “Hi there, folks, I’m Kate Faber, basketball champion. You know, when I was a kid, I could have been a cheerleader, but I decided to play basketball instead. Now I’m a famous millionaire! So wear Zippo shoes and be a star, just like me!”

  Kate hopes Marylin will see her commercial and feel terrible. Or else call her and say, “Kate, I’m really sorry about what happened in sixth grade. Can we be friends again?”

  In Kate’s imagination the phone makes a satisfying click when she hangs up without saying a word.

  Outside, Kate’s street is empty, and the hollow ring of the basketball against the pavement startles the birds from the tree in her front yard. Kate lunges toward the basket, pushes off on her left leg, and angles the ball against the backboard for an easy two points. The roar of the crowd echoes inside her head. Kate makes a bow to the azalea bush.

  “Thank you,” she says graciously. “Michael Jordan taught me everything I know.”

  She glances toward Marylin’s house and wonders if she might be watching from her window. Not that Kate cares. She wouldn’t be friends with Marylin again for all the shoe endorsements in the world. Any person who considers Mazie Calloway her best friend is not worth the time of day, in Kate’s opinion. It is a shame that Marylin grew up to be such a shallow person, but there’s nothing Kate can do about it now except forget Marylin ever existed.

  The weird thing is, Kate is pretty sure she saw Marylin in front of her house this morning. But by the time Kate opened the front door and looked out, no one was there. Now she wonders if she dreamed it. Kate did a report about dreams for school a few weeks ago, and she learned that dreams are the language of the subconscious. Sometimes Kate wishes her subconscious would just shut up.

  “Hey, Kate, want to play make it, take it?”

  Kate turns around to see Petey McIntosh leaning his bike against her mailbox. He appears to be stuffing something white into his jacket pocket, but Kate can’t tell what it is.

  “Sure, Petey,” she says. “If you think you’re up to the competition.”

  “You better believe it, babe,” Petey says as he walks down the driveway.

  Kate puts the ball into the air and watches it sail through the hoop without touching the rim.

  “So what’s Marylin doing today?” she asks casually as she retrieves the ball. Not that she cares. Later she has plans to play basketball with Andrew, and tomorrow she and Paisley are going to the movies. Frankly, Kate doesn’t need Marylin McIntosh in her life.

  Petey shrugs. “Stupid stuff. Mazie Calloway is teaching her how to use an eyelash curler. It’s pretty weird.”

  “Yeah, that’s weird all right,” Kate says. She shoots again and this time misses the basket completely.

  “Marylin, I need to talk to you.”

  Marylin looks up from the hand mirror she’s been staring in. Is her mother mad at her for using an eyelash curler?

  “An eyelash curler isn’t makeup, Mom, okay? You never said anything about me not trying to make my eyelashes look longer.”

  Marylin’s mother sits down next to her on the couch. Marylin wishes Mazie had stayed for lunch. Her mother never yells at her when she has company.

  “I don’t care about your eyelashes,” her mom says.

  “Then can I wear mascara?”

  Marylin’s mom lets out a small groan. “Marylin, this is important!”

  Kate got the note and figured out our plan. Kate’s mom called my mom. I’m doomed, Marylin thinks.

  “It’s just a joke, Mom,” she says, defending herself.

  “What’s just a joke?” her mom asks. “You know, Marylin, sometimes I think we don’t speak the same language anymore.”

  “Habla Español?” Marylin giggles.

  Later Marylin sits on her bed and tries to write in her diary. She uses a black pen because her purple pen doesn’t seem right for what she has to say. Then she discovers she has no words for what she has to say.

  “MPAGAD,” she writes. “My parents are getting a—.” But she can’t even think it. And there’s no one she can say it out loud to. How in the world could she call up Mazie Calloway and tell her? You have to be careful what you say to Mazie, Marylin has learned over the past few months. When Marylin told Mazie that Mr. Kertzner and Aunt Tish were engaged, Mazie spread it all through the sixth grade, like they were doing something incredibly weird. Just think what Mazie would do if Marylin told her about her parents.

  Suddenly she thinks of Kate, but Marylin can’t talk to Kate, can she? What would she say? Sorry about not really being your friend anymore, but would you mind if I told you all my problems now that I need you? Kate would probably laugh and hang up on her. Just imagining the receiver’s click in h
er ear makes Marylin want to cry.

  She stands up. “I’m going to wash my hair,” she tells Zuzu, her stuffed panda. “Do you think my eyelashes will stay curly in the shower?”

  But Marylin doesn’t wash her hair. Instead she pulls on a sweater and heads toward Kate’s house. Even though the air is cool, Marylin feels hot, as though someone has set tiny fires all over her skin. She walks along the edges of the flowerbeds she passes, hoping to tempt people to come out of their houses and yell at her. She would like to have an excuse to hit someone.

  Kate’s house looks the way it has always looked, which surprises Marylin. The last few months she has pictured it with the shutters falling off their hinges and the lawn overgrown with weeds, as though the Fabers wouldn’t bother taking care of things now that Marylin has stopped coming over.

  When she opens the Fabers’ mailbox, after looking around to make sure no one sees her, it’s empty.

  “Marylin, sweetheart!” Kate’s mom opens the front door. “Come on in and have some cookies! I just pulled a fresh batch from the oven! I’m in one of my baking sprees. I must have sensed you were coming over.”

  “I can’t!” Marylin yells. “But tell Kate it’s a joke!”

  Mrs. Faber looks confused. “What’s a joke, sweetheart?”

  “Just give her that message, please! Just tell her it’s a joke and not to say anything on Monday!”

  Marylin reels around and runs, crashing against shrubbery and nearly tripping on a clump of weeds growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. When she gets to her house, she doesn’t slow down. She runs like she is being chased by the scariest thing in the world.

  Monday morning Petey arranges his books alphabetically in his backpack, then checks the front pocket to make sure all his spying tools are in place. At all times Petey carries a magnifying glass, a tiny tape recorder, a compass, a small notebook to record his observations in, and a folded sheet of paper with Morse code copied on it, in case he’s ever captured by the enemy.