This Is All Your Fault, Cassie Parker

by Terra Elan McVoy

  You still want to go shop at Del Monte, right? she asks me before I know how to respond.

  Of course.

  But she must be typing the next message at the same time because it comes immediately in: Well they want to meet us there!

  My thumbs freeze in the air above my screen. On the one hand I’m excited, and on the other hand something in me still feels wary. I don’t really think Aja’s trying to trick me, but the back of my head is still burning from where that pencil hit it in English. I need to make sure.

  I suck in a breath, glad at least none of this can get copied to anyone else.

  Do you like River? I ask her.

  She sends back a stream of hearts, and then, You like Tyrick too, right?

  Her asking so directly makes me pause again. I have never told anyone about my crush on Tyrick besides Cassie. Having the whole seventh grade know about it (even if they haven’t identified him) definitely doesn’t count. But if I don’t have Cassie anymore, maybe I need someone else.

  It’s scary but I send it anyway: Yes.

  It takes forever for her to answer. Long enough for me to start regretting I said anything, but when her response comes in, my lips press up in an involuntary smile.

  I thought maybe. Just from, you know. That time with what happened to you. And how you look if he ever is around. I think he likes you too, though. And don’t worry, unlike with SOME people, your secret is 4eva safe with me!!

  When we finish chatting, there are still a bunch of questions whirling in my mind, and since I’ve already broken open my diary once today, even if it hasn’t felt the same, I grab it and a pen and start writing before I think too much more.

  Things I Need to Know Before Meeting Pencil with Aja:

  Does it count as a date if we’re meeting at the mall with two other people?

  What do I wear?

  And what do we talk about?

  * Sports?

  * Summer plans

  * Writing camp?

  * Reading, since we definitely have that in common:

  * Favorites in class this year

  * Favorites in general

  * Summer goals

  * Rereading: yes or no?

  * Books into movies

  * Family?

  * Trips?

  How do I keep my brain from going on the fritz like it is now before I even see him?

  Chapter Ten

  The questions about Tyrick stay in my mind, and Dad stays cold and silent before Leelu and I go back to Mom’s, but before I know it, Aja’s middle sister is dropping us off at the mall Tuesday afternoon. We’re early, because Aja wants to get some of our own shopping in before meeting the boys at Dylan’s Candy Store. I haven’t looked for clothes with anyone other than Cassie or my mom before, and right away I’m surprised at the places Aja knows that I’ve never considered entering.

  “Ooh, Fiona, these would look so good on you.” She pulls me into a store of nothing but accessories, and goes straight for a rack of earrings, holding up a long pair that look like a rope made out of silver spikes.

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure those are me. They’d work for you, though.”

  She lifts them to her own ears, considering. “Well, you should think about it. You can be a little plain Jane sometimes, no offense.”

  Usually when someone says “no offense,” they really mean the opposite, but the straightforward, nonjudgmental way Aja does it, I know that’s not the case.

  I catch my reflection in a small strip of mirror on one of the racks hung with Jennifer-sized necklaces and consider myself: hair tightly smoothed down into a bun, small stud earrings, striped button-down, leggings, flats—the exact kind of outfit Cassie says is stylish without being too flashy. I’ve never thought about trying anything else, since Cassie has so much fun helping me pick out just the right thing, and is always so on point. Next to Aja in her flowing maxi dress and stacks of ivory bangles, though, maybe it is a little plain Jane.

  I remind myself Cassie doesn’t care what I wear now anyway, so I don’t have to keep dressing the way she likes. Maybe it’s time to experiment.

  I go over to a wall covered with hats, take down one at random, and turn to Aja. “What about this?”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Too big for your face. But here.” She hands me a red beret.

  When I arrange it properly to the side, she smiles. “Very fab. But I still think you need bigger earrings. In fact, we should go sometime to this shop my sisters adore that has amazing accessories. Plato’s Closet?”

  I shake my head, not knowing what she’s talking about.

  “It’s this secondhand place, but the stuff they get in is so groovy. Like this.” She moves over to a rack of flowing scarves and takes one out to drape around my neck.

  By the time we leave, thanks to Aja and my wardrobe allotment from Dad, I’ve got a bag full of new accessories, including three pairs of dangly earrings that aren’t too big for my taste, but still meet with Aja’s approval. I’ve even looked up Plato’s Closet on my phone, and feel excited about going with her when she’s back from Seattle.

  Aja wants me to put in one of the new earrings I bought before we meet the boys, but there just isn’t enough time. We’re almost late as it is.

  “I’m telling you, he’ll like you better if you make a visual statement,” Aja says out of the side of her mouth as we approach. “My sister told me.”

  But River and Tyrick are already waiting outside the candy store. “Hey,” they say to us.

  “Hey,” we say back.

  And then we all look at each other, not saying anything else. I’m waiting to follow Aja’s lead, since she seems so smart about this kind of thing, but she just bites the side of her lip. The bold, sassy girl from Reverse Spirit Week and our sleepover seems to have disappeared. It’s disorienting.

  “So, should we go in?” River finally gestures toward the entrance with his elbow, leaving his hands still in his pockets.

  We follow him, gazing around at giant bins of rock candy on a stick, Runts and Skittles by the pound, malt balls big as cake pops, stands of chocolate-drizzled pretzels. The smell of sugar in the air is overwhelming, and the Crayola colors everywhere feel like a circus.

  “Do you have a favorite?” Tyrick asks as we move past a roll of candy dots on a spool of paper.

  All I can picture are the truffles Dad gets Leelu and me for Valentine’s Day from a fancy chocolatier near his office.

  “Chocolate?” I say.

  Tyrick scrunches his nose and shakes his head. “Sour gummies.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. Gummy candies of any kind are disgusting to me, and now all I can picture is Tyrick holding a big wad of them in a mouth full of chewy sugar and spit.

  “Here, see?” he says. We’re in front of a tower of clear plastic bins, each one with a different gummy inside: worms, apple rings, sour frogs, fiery cinnamon hearts. “Pick out what you want to try.”

  I don’t want to try any of them, but Aja and River have caught up to us and at the sight of so many gummy choices, Aja squees like a four-year-old in a room full of cupcakes and kittens.

  “The peach rings are the best.” She reaches for a plastic bag and a scoop.

  This somehow transforms both Tyrick and River from awkward, speechless dummies to boys tumbling over each other to say something next. The three of them start pointing, choosing, and comparing all their favorites, as though the gummy candy wall is suddenly the most fascinating and interesting thing any of them has seen in their lives.

  I linger for a while, trying to be engaged, but since I don’t have much to add to the conversation, and they hardly notice I’m not saying anything, I let myself wander to the front, where there are trays of hand-dipped truffles on silver and gold doilies. I choose four—two for me, two for Leelu, plus a chocolate frog and a tube of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds—to take home later. They aren’t custom princess T-shirts, but I hope Leelu will like them.

  “O
h, I was going to get you something,” Tyrick says behind me as I finish paying, though he looks more relieved than disappointed. He holds up his bag of neon-colored candy. “Do you want one of these?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ve got plenty.”

  He shrugs like it’s my loss, and doesn’t ask me what I bought. The boy in my English class who read out loud with such a clear voice, who had considerate opinions about Phyllis Wheatley and Gilgamesh, seems to have disappeared.

  We stroll as a group around the food court, trying to choose where to have lunch. I’m leaning toward a Mediterranean wrap myself, but Aja can’t make up her mind, and River seems more interested in telling gross stories he’s heard from his brother who’s worked at several different fast food places. But of course Aja and Tyrick are enchanted.

  “You know they scrape up all the old brown bits from the hamburger grill and just mix that with canned tomatoes to make the chili.”

  “Oh God!” Aja cries, like this is both the funniest and most disgusting thing she’s ever heard. “I am never going there again.”

  “Don’t even ask me about the milk shakes,” River adds conspiratorially. “That stuff isn’t even milk.”

  Everyone knows that, I want to say. It’s why my parents never take us there. But even in my head it sounds snotty.

  “Let’s just get a slice,” Tyrick says, indicating the Sbarro. “At least we know that’s safe.”

  “Well, except for the pepperoni.” In my mind it’s a joke connected to River’s gross-out a minute ago about breakfast sausage, but Tyrick looks at me like I’m from another planet.

  “You don’t like pepperoni, either?”

  Of course I don’t, I want to say. At least not pooling with grease, on top of cheap pizza made with canned sauce and plastic cheese, stuck under a heat lamp until someone orders it. But I don’t need the weird look he’s giving me to know I shouldn’t say something like that out loud.

  The gross-out conversation doesn’t stop when we have our food, either. To take it to an even more foul level, Aja starts telling River about some icky video, and he counters it with another. They’re doing everything they can to out-revolt each other, making it hard to choke down my slice of mushroom and cheese. Tyrick isn’t any help either, since he seems as entranced with Aja’s tales as River is.

  It isn’t just the conversation that bothers me, though, or that the up-close version of Tyrick is far less interesting than the Pencil I’ve admired from afar. Sitting there, doing my best to pretend to pay attention, I can’t help thinking that if Tyrick and I were spending the afternoon with Cassie and Cory, everything would be going much differently. We would’ve talked about books and trips or something else I wasn’t able to think of in my diary the other day but Cassie would, and there’s no way Cassie would have tolerated anything gross (especially having to do with food). She also would’ve seen how I’m struggling to connect with Tyrick, and would ask good questions to help get us talking, instead of being carried away with her own fun.

  “What do you think, Fiona?” Aja says, pulling me out of my stew.

  “About?”

  “Seeing a movie next?” River says, sliding his eyes at Aja.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I reflexively hold my hand to my stomach. “I’m not sure I’m feeling that well.”

  Aja’s brow furrows in concern—the real, tender kind she gives Evie. The kind I’ve wanted from her way before now. “Are you okay?”

  “Maybe walking around a little more will help,” I say. I don’t want to cut short the afternoon, but the idea of waiting around with them for a movie to start, and then sitting there in the dark with Tyrick not knowing what to do, and not being able to ask Aja about any of it, makes me feel queasy for real.

  “No, you do look weird,” Aja says. “I’ll call Jonesy to get us. We can go relax by the pool or something.”

  “Give me your number,” River says to Aja when her sister arrives.

  “Yeah.” Tyrick turns to me, and I can tell it wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask if River hadn’t said something. When he finishes typing it in he looks up, straight into my eyes with those golden ones of his, but they don’t hypnotize me now. “I hope you feel better.”

  We say good-bye, and as soon as we’re in the car, Aja giggles with delight, and starts telling her sister all the details.

  “Ooh, he likes you,” Jonesy says when Aja finishes narrating.

  “Tyrick likes Fiona too, you can tell.” Aja looks at me happily for affirmation.

  I try to smile, and say something like, “Yeah,” though to be honest I’m not sure I like him anymore. And even though I can’t pinpoint exactly why, that feels like something else that’s Cassie’s fault, too.

  Chapter Eleven

  Almost the second after Jonesy drops me at Mom’s from the mall, Aja texts OMG SO FUN TODAY THANK YOU SWEETIE YOU ARE THE BEST!! T + F & A + R 4EVA. FEEL BETTER OKAY??? I’LL MISS YOU WHILE I’M ON VACAY!! ˂3 ˂3 ˂3 ˂3

  It’s sweet but also disappointing—she obviously didn’t notice how disastrous the outing was for me.

  A second message, from Tyrick, makes knowing how to feel even harder:

  Dear Fiona. Sorry you feel bad. Hope River wasn’t too disgusting. He and Aja still want to catch a movie when she gets back. You want to come too?

  I need to get my things together before Maritza takes us over to Mom’s, but first I think I need my diary.

  Pencil, Revised: A Vocabulary List

  In Person:

  Confusing

  Perplexing

  Disingenuine (??) Uncertain?

  Mundane Average Surprisingly Disappointingly Normal

  Plebian

  And Yet, in His Text:

  Polite

  Thoughtful

  Hopeful? Expectant (??)

  Interested

  It’s frustrating, not being able to articulate exactly how I feel, especially since I still don’t trust putting everything down on the page. I keep stopping to look at Tyrick’s text again. And again, and again. I’m flopped on the couch, still staring, when Mom walks past with a stack of folded towels and gets a glance at my screen. “Who’s that?”

  “The boy I told you about,” I admit.

  “Everything okay?”

  “I think so.” But even I can hear how unconvincing I am. The thing I haven’t said to Mom, and couldn’t put in my diary either, is that I’m wondering if Tyrick somehow actually knows about the Pencil thing, and is only being nice because he feels sorry for me.

  Mom glances at Leelu, and when she sees she’s engrossed in her iPad, she jerks her head in the direction of the stairs up to the loft that’s her room. “I need to put these towels up and then do my stretches.”

  Mom’s stretch time is always a good opportunity for talking, so I follow her upstairs and lie across her pillowy bed. I hand her my phone so she can see. “I just don’t know what it means.”

  “It means he wants to see you,” she says, reading. “He’s very polite, I think.”

  “Maybe. But don’t you think it’s more about River and Aja? She practically forgot I was there as soon as we met them. It feels like he might like her more than me, too. He hasn’t said anything else since I texted him back yes.”

  Mom sits on the floor and extends her legs in a wide V. “There are lots of reasons why someone may not respond immediately. And perhaps Tyrick’s more comfortable in a group setting. Which is a good thing, yes?”

  She means it’s good if he likes group settings, because I’m not allowed to go on a real date—one-on-one with no parents anywhere—until I’m fifteen, and even then I’ll have a curfew and he’ll be required to meet my parents and give them his cell phone number first. Those are rules Mom and Dad made up before I was even born.

  I rest my chin on my hands. “But, Mommy, I’m not even sure I like him anymore. I mean, I think I liked liking him more than actually being with him.” Or when Cassie was around to make a game of the whole thing, I think but don’t
say.

  “You had a rough first encounter,” she says, raising her arms over her head and letting out a long breath. “Some things need time to grow.”

  “But I’m only in seventh—I mean eighth—grade. I don’t need a boyfriend.”

  “Who says boyfriend?” She chuckles, bending her torso over her outstretched knee. “I’m not rushing boyfriend.”

  “Then why do you want me to go out with him again?”

  She straightens up to look at me. “Fiona, I’m just saying you’ve made some new friends, they want to see you, and maybe even if everything isn’t completely perfect right away, that doesn’t mean it will always be a disaster. Not every relationship falls magically into place on the first day of camp the way it did for you and Cassie. Maybe you need to give them another chance.”

  By the pointed way Mom’s looking at me, I suddenly know she knows what happened with Cassie. Maybe not all the details about my diary, and Kendra, and everything else, but somehow even without my ever figuring out how to tell her, she definitely understands that Cassie and I are in a fight, or not friends, or whatever we are, and more than that, she knows I’m unsure how to talk about it. It dawns on me that probably she and Serena have discussed it, which makes me feel embarrassed, and guilty. Suddenly I do want to try to tell her.

  “It’s probably a phase, anyway,” she says, moving on from the topic. “You may simply need to be the friend who can wait it out with her.”

  I’m not sure if she’s talking about Cassie or Aja, but I do know if my upcoming movie outing is going to be anything like today, I’m not sure I can wait in that case. But Mom’s mention of Cassie—and her silent reminder that we’re not friends anymore—provides me the final good reason I need to give Aja, and Tyrick, a chance.

  Because Cassie would die of jealousy if she knew I went out twice with my dream crush, while the only boys she has access to now are Gates Morrill and his jerk friends.

  After some excited messaging, plus a boring week of yoga camp later, Aja’s back in town, and we’re standing together scanning the movie theater parking lot for Tyrick and River.