The Kayla Chronicles

by Sherri Winston

  The message was from Rosalie.

  Obituary notice: The friendship is dead

  Roger Lee Brown was holding my phone. I had read the message, gasped, and taken a giant step back. He’d moved forward, then took the phone. Read the message.

  “You all right? You look kinda freaked.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. I felt shaken, like I’d been bum-rushed in an alley.

  He was back in front of me, handing me back the phone. “Don’t let it shake you up or nothing. I know that girl. I thought . . . you and her, friends right?”

  I shook my head. It was as if the heat had found all the places where my body was tired and hung to my muscles and bones like bags of hot, wet sand. I felt exhausted. Didn’t even think about kissing him.

  Didn’t think about too much, anyway.

  He touched my cheek, then real quick drew his hand away. His touch had been cool, surprisingly cool. I looked up and he gave me this kind of weird, lame little clip on the nose with the crook of his index finger. Like it was something he’d seen in a movie.

  “Don’t let it mess with your head or nothing. She’s just, you know, a weird, bookwormy type. Probably don’t have no other friends. Probably jealous.”

  Weird and bookwormy. Like me.

  By the time I got home, I’d gotten six more text messages—three from Rosalie and three from other past members of SPEAK. All angry. All condemning me.

  At first, I’d been feeling hurt. I guess, despite the fight we’d had, I’d figured Rosalie would be working at trying to get us back together, you know, make the friendship thing tight again.

  But oh, no. She had pushed the “go” button on her crazy and unleashed it like a virus.

  Scientists Discover New Virus

  Caused By Ego Trippin’ and Too Much Spare Time— Cure Unknown!

  So when I fell into the kitchen at home, all I wanted was to get something to drink and race up to my room. I needed time to think.

  Instead, I fell into the kitchen and ran smack into Mom.

  She was, like, “Oh, you’re home later than usual.”

  And I was, like, “Yeah.” Didn’t say “whatever,” but you know I was thinking it.

  I should have realized she was looking extra bright and shiny. She had on this tight white tank top and low-slung jeans. My mom has the kind of body supermodels hope to have when they grow up. But the thing about her is she acts like she could take it or leave it. She is one of the few people I know who probably exercises because she truly likes being outdoors, not because she’s afraid her butt will double in size in her sleep.

  Anyway, it wasn’t her clothes that were all bright and shiny. It was her expression. Hopeful. Expectant.

  But in my foul state of mind, I couldn’t see that. Or maybe didn’t want to see it. So I just blew past her to the fridge, opened it, and grabbed a half-gallon of Florida orange juice. I mumbled something about being insanely tired and hot.

  The bright shininess in her eyes glowed. Still I ignored her.

  Then as I tried to rush past her for the stairs, she let it drop. “Kayla, baby, since your fifteenth birthday is next Sunday . . .”

  I froze. I was hot and sweaty but I broke out in a rash of “please, Mom, don’t go there” bumps.

  “. . . Well, I know you and Mama had special plans. The book. The first edition.”

  I turned around slowly. I’d never discussed that with her. “How? What . . . I mean how did you know about that?”

  Her dark brown eyes were liquid with need as she waved a small card at me. The postcard I’d had tacked to my bulletin board. From Books ’n’ Books. Without even thinking, I snatched the card. “Why do you have this? Why were you in my room?”

  “I-I just thought . . .” Mom was stammering.

  Then when she took a step back, I felt myself fill up. Like, whoosh! A fire inside me, all the anger, pain, frustration, exhaustion, everything from the past several days that I’d buried under the surface—oh, yeah, it surfaced. I went off:

  “Why can’t you just let it go? You are not JoJo, all right? We can’t make up for all the time we’ve lost. Me and you and the whole mother-daughter thing, it’s not happening. Don’t you get that?”

  I was ranting, pacing, foaming at the mouth. Now if I was her and my daughter said something like that, I’d tell that girl she needed to get out of my house. I swear, I wouldn’t take that from some mouthy teenager.

  At least, when I pictured myself as the mother of a mouthy teenager, that’s how I saw me handling it. Never really pictured myself as the mouthy teenager.

  Mom, however, looked more determined. She grabbed both my shoulders, looked right at me, and said, “Kayla! The mother-daughter thing with us is working, okay? It is working? I am your mother. You are my—” Her voice broke. She took a breath.

  “You are my big, beautiful, intelligent oldest child. Kayla, I love you and I want—”

  “Mother!” I said it with The Tone. “I know about the biology, okay? I know you’re my mother. So stop trying to force these touching moments like you’re producing a long-distance commercial for Sprint.”

  She released her grip, took a step back. I snatched away. Have you ever been so mad you actually felt yourself vibrating from the inside out? That’s how it was for me.

  I was almost out of the kitchen when she said, “Kayla.” Just said my name. Not loud. Not soft. Just Kayla. I stopped.

  “What about your birthday? I was thinking we could go pick up your book, maybe plan to have dinner and cake with the rest of the family.”

  I turned slowly, still vibrating from the inside, hating myself for talking to her like that, hating myself for being too dumb or stubborn or dumb and stubborn to reach over and accept the love she wanted to give. Hating myself for using her as a whipping post for the anger and frustration that had been building inside of me all summer.

  “Mom, I do not want to go to the bookstore with you. I do not need to go to the bookstore with you. The trip to the bookstore was going to be special because it was supposed to be me and JoJo. Me. And JoJo. Not me and you. I thought you were supposed to be trying to get back into photography, now, anyway. Now that you finished putting your life on hold for your husband.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Kayla! That’s enough. You’re not being fair. I didn’t just put my photography on hold for your father. I did it after we came back from Africa because I wanted more time to be with you. To be with both my girls.”

  Inside my chest burned like some crazy acid was being squeezed right out of my heart. But I shook my head and said, “JoJo always said you lacked determination. She said you never took your work or yourself seriously. Well, I do. I’m really stressed right now. I’ve got a lot on my mind. I don’t care about my stupid birthday. Just forget it, okay?”

  An entire third-act drama of emotion played across my mother’s face. She went still and she gave me a tight little nod.

  And I went to my room where I slammed and locked my door, went into the shower, blasted the water as high and hot as I could stand it, and cried until the mirrors were fogged and the water ran cold.

  THE DEAD ZONE

  Trapped in an angry void, confused Kayla needs to bury her ghosts.

  You never find yourself until you face the truth.

  —Pearl Bailey

  Zombif ication. The act of becoming or acting like a zombie. Which is what happened to me all day long after that awful scene at home. Practice the next day was brooo-tal!

  Couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t keep up. It got so bad, even Roman wouldn’t yell at me anymore. They actually kicked me out of practice. “Your mind is elsewhere, Baby Diva, so you need to be somewhere else, too.” Ouch!

  BREAKING NEWS . . .

  Kayla Dean confronts the truth—and Rosalie Hunter!

  So after spending the day avoiding home, avoiding my reflection in storefront windows . . . avoiding everything, I realized something.

  The crappy feeling wasn’t going away. And I
needed to reclaim my spirit.

  JoJo would have liked that. She used to tell me, never let life pull you down so far that you can’t reclaim your spirit. She said I needed to always be willing to ask myself the tough questions and not be afraid of the answer, no matter how my answers made somebody else feel.

  And my “answers” were simple:

  I liked being a Lady Lion.

  I liked being involved with SPEAK.

  I liked how I was beginning to feel about myself—except the way I’d been feeling the past few days, being such an over-the-top dragon drama queen. Komodo Kayla!

  So, before the day was over, I took a deep breath, then did what needed to be done.

  I went to Rosalie’s house. She answered the door with a look of shock. Then a scowl.

  “What?” That was her total greeting.

  I didn’t answer. Just pushed past and went into head-quarters.

  “I’m busy, Ms. Dean. I am planning a protest at the marina because some selfish yachters think their leisure time is more important than the health of the manatees. So I don’t have time for—”

  “Rosalie,” I said. “Shut up.” I said it matter-of-fact-like. Not angry or loud, just simple. Shut up. So simple, in fact, that she actually did shut up.

  Her eyes were huge and round, then narrowed. She flopped hard into a chair across from me, but I stayed on my feet, hands on hips. “Rosalie, stop sending me text messages, you hear? And stop organizing your little goon squads to send text messages. If you need to talk to me, just call me.”

  Nothing. She just gaped at me, then she grinned. “You’re here because you know you can’t do it without me. You came here to beg me to come back and take over, right?”

  She sounded so hopeful. So gleeful. So filled with the need of my failure to make her feel strong again.

  I shook my head slowly. “Sorry, Rosalie, no begging. I really wish you would come back. I wish you would reconsider and accept that maybe all kinds of girls have something to contribute, not just the girls you pick.”

  She looked like I’d punched her. Instead of jumping up and getting in my face, she sagged back in the chair. “I can’t believe you’d pick them over me,” she said.

  I shook my head again. “No, Rosalie, I’m just picking me. Here’s the thing: I know how important SPEAK was for you, but you seem to have forgotten it was important to me, too. Look, I’m not here to point fingers or play dirty. I just wanted you to know we don’t have to be nasty to each other. No more texting, all right? Me and the rest of the girls are swamped getting this thing together. You want back in, just let me know.”

  She looked up at me, but she stayed in the chair. She said, “Being around them, it’s making you crazy. You’re not acting like yourself.”

  “Rosalie, did you ever ask yourself, of all the make-a-name-for-ourselves projects we could have done to launch SPEAK, why the first thing on our agenda was to take down the most powerful group of girls at the school?”

  She looked confused. Shrugged. Said, “They aren’t our type of girls.” She stood, paced. I caught her arm.

  “Even if that’s true. Even if there’s a ‘right’ type and a ‘wrong’ type and we somehow have cornered the market on right, why is it that instead of building them up to make them even stronger, we—and by ‘we’ I mean you—feel the need to tear them down?”

  She yanked away from me, her eyes hot and shiny. She almost snarled, said, “We—and by ‘we’ I mean me and you—we can’t go back to being friends like we were before. It can’t be the same. Not with you . . . you like this!”

  I shook my head. “No, Rosalie, we can’t.”

  One truth down,

  One to go

  Father left for North Carolina. Something to do with the military. A couple times before he left, I’d caught him glaring in my direction. My mom had been like a ghost in the house—I knew she was there, but I hadn’t seen her.

  Later that night, after he was gone, I was having trouble falling asleep, so I headed down to the kitchen. Halfway down the stairs I heard a strange sound.

  Voices? It was hard to tell, but it didn’t seem right for that time of night. I crept back up the stairs and followed the semicircular hallway to my parents’ bedroom door.

  It wasn’t closed all the way. A light from the television flickered inside. My mom sat on the bed, a box beside her. She had her back to me and her face in her hands. She was crying. Softly. But deeply.

  I drew a deep breath and did the only thing I could do.

  Oranges on a little tree,

  So sweet, so round.

  Mama reaching up to me,

  Am I afraid to look down?

  Smaller and smaller,

  That is how she looks

  As I rise into the sky.

  Mama will you remember me,

  Now that I’ve learned to fly?

  —Kayla Dean, 5th grade

  Clink! Rattle! Jingle!

  When I’d realized she was crying, I practically ran down to the kitchen, went in the pantry, and pulled out the little tea set from The Morikami.

  “Mom,” I called from the doorway. She turned around, quick, like I’d startled her. “Can I come in? I brought tea.”

  All of a sudden she was laughing and crying so I started laughing and crying, and she ran around the bed to get to the tray and we almost collided.

  We settled ourselves and left the tea set on the bureau. I blurted “I’m sorry” over and over and started bawling harder. She pulled me to her and just held me like that for a while.

  Black sky and night looked back at us. And our reflections. We were sitting on her bed now, Mom’s arm still locked around my shoulder; my head resting against her shoulder. Her holding on. Me not pulling away. Since the second floor was a circle, her bedroom had a semicircle of windows like mine. And like mine the room looked out into a dense blackness. Darkness made of nighttime sky and thick bushes.

  I tried to make myself smaller, tried to shrink into her like I was going to sneak back into the safety of the womb. My voice felt smaller, too, when I said, “I miss JoJo so much. So much it hurts.”

  Mom turned to face me and when she did I saw tears glittering on her cheeks. “Me, too.”

  Then I got a chill. Like a big, freaking shocking chill that shot through me. As much as I missed JoJo, I still had a mother. Mom didn’t. It was as if she sensed the change in my body language. I climbed onto my knees then pulled her head against my chest.

  We switched roles. Now I was comforting her. She let her head sag against me. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. I guess I was so busy feeling sorry for myself, I couldn’t even think about the fact that your mother was gone. She was just my grandmother. I’ve been so selfish. I’m so, so, so sorry.”

  She pulled away, told me to let her be the mom. We both laughed, shaky little laughs that fell out between sobs. Then we started talking. Really talking. And it was absolutely great.

  I told her she was right. “JoJo could be bigger than life, overwhelming sometimes. She had so many ideas. And she was never wrong, you know? Most of the time, just being with her, I was in awe of her confidence, her faith, her strength—”

  “But,” Mom cut in, “figuring out who you were with such a strong, outspoken person around telling you who you should be, it was tough, right?”

  I nodded.

  Then she told me how much she admired me, how much she believed in me. That meant a lot. “Kayla, Mama always taught me to be strong and be certain about the kind of woman I wanted to be. But what I’ve learned is that the best kind of woman any girl can grow up to be is one that is capable of growth, capable of change. Mama wouldn’t want you to stay stuck in being who you were two years ago if that wasn’t right for you today.”

  Dang. Really, sometimes moms are the absolute best.

  THE JUMP OFF

  Sophomore year is just the beginning!

  Crunktacular!

  Okay, work with me on this. Crunk is already a made-
up word. Southern rappers, Miami I think, came up with it. A verb. As in, “Hey, let’s get crunked.” Like getting hyped, psyched, wil’ing out, like that. A crunktacular, then, is an event whose very nature is hyped up, psyched out, and leads to extra-wild reactions. Just so you know, these are very, very good things.

  So, with only thirty minutes remaining until the close of “Kick the Crown,” I had to admit it a had been a crunk-tacular!

  Time for my closing speech. The Lady Lions were dancing as the finale. Yesterday we were on the radio and television. Now there were cameras everywhere. At least a hundred and fifty girls had showed up, not to mention curious teachers and some parents and librarians.

  And Roger Lee Brown. He was standing to the side of the small staging area, smiling. He’d given me a soft, quick kiss on the cheek earlier. For luck.

  “I just want to thank everyone for contributing to a spectacular event,” I began. Over the past several days Mom and even Amira had helped, along with the other SPEAK members and their parents. We hung flyers, stuffed bookbags, wrote thank-you letters, picked up decorations, made banners—-everything.

  “Kick the Crown” started at noon, but I’d gotten to the park around nine. I looked out at all the young faces. Girls who’d be sixth and seventh, even eighth graders when school started. I said, “People might want you to fit into a mold, be a certain kind of girl. My advice: try being many kinds of girls. Break the mold. Be funny and a brain; cute and athletic; shy and tough. Why settle for being just one type of girl? I say be greedy and be as many types as you need to be true to you!”

  When I’d started out, I was sort of shaking. But toward the end, I was really feeling it. Funny thing, though, was that I wasn’t really looking at anything. Between the bright TV light in my face, the sun, and the sea of shining middle school faces, everything was a blur.