by Jenn Bishop
“Stop it!” I giggled. “I’ve never been to a high school party. Remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But someday you will.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t imagine me or Becca ever going to one of those parties Austin goes to on the weekends, when his friends’ parents are out of town.
“You just need to find your people,” he said, his head settling further into the pillows. From that angle, it looked like he had three chins. No, maybe four?
“My people?” I asked as Austin’s eyes started to close.
His eyelids fluttered open and he shifted upright. “Yeah, Em. Your people. You know, most of my friends now, I didn’t know them in elementary school. God, in elementary school I was friends with Brian Fitzgibbons! Ol’ Fitzy! It takes a while to find your true friends. The ones who really get you. Your herd.” I glanced up at the Modest Mouse poster above Austin’s bed, the one with the ginormous buffalo. “Some people don’t find them till college, which must suck, but a lot of people, they find them in middle school or high school. There’s tons of people out there, Em. You just gotta look.”
In my head, all I could see was Becca wrinkling her nose at the idea of art club. But what if Austin was right? What if that was where I met my people? Found my herd. To be fair, my brother, a high school junior, had a whole lot more expertise when it came to making friends than Becca or I ever did. Maybe he was right.
“Do you think…?”
“I do.”
“No!” I laughed. “I wasn’t done asking the question—”
“Well, speed it up, Em. It’s one in the morning and some of us need our beauty rest.”
I rolled my eyes. “Do you think I should join the art club?”
“How are you not already in art club, Em?”
I shrugged. “Becca wasn’t into it.…”
“Oh, I’m sorry, since when does Becca call all the shots?”
I had no answer for him.
“Em, you’ve got to do some stuff without Becca sometimes! No shade to Becca, but just because she doesn’t want to do something doesn’t mean you can’t. What if the artsy weirdos are your people? Spoiler alert: they probably are. I mean, you’re up in the middle of the night doing art for fun! Why should you have to miss out on that because it’s not Becca’s jam? You’re your own person, Em. Promise.” He lay back down on his bed and mumbled, “I think that was a pretty good motivational speech.”
“You know I can hear you, right?”
“It’s been a long night. The border between thoughts and speech is a little hazy.” He closed his eyes again, and I had a feeling this time it was for good.
“Don’t fall asleep in your clothes.”
“Okay, Mom.” His eyes stayed closed. His chest rose and fell with each breath, and I started to wonder if he might really fall asleep like that.
“Hey, Austin?”
“Yeah,” he murmured.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime, Em.”
I slid off his bed and tiptoed out of the room, shutting off the overhead light on my way out.
“Night, Austin,” I whispered, closing his door gently behind me.
CHAPTER THREE
You’re your own person, Em. Promise. My brother’s words echoed in my head the following Tuesday as I hung around my locker a few extra minutes before going upstairs to the art room.
I didn’t know why I was nervous. It wasn’t like Ms. Patel was scary. And in any case, no matter how awkward it was to go to a club where I didn’t know a soul, at least I was going to get a homemade brownie out of it.
Right. A brownie! Mmm. There was my motivation.
When I got upstairs, the early-afternoon light was streaming through the big windows of the art room. The eighth graders, I think, had made stained glass, and the very best ones—and okay, maybe some of the very worst, too—were hung over the window so that fragments of blue and red and green light glittered onto the tables below.
“So glad you decided to come.” Ms. Patel turned from the easel where she was working on a painting in all black and white. It was abstract, and still at an early stage, so I couldn’t tell what she was going for. “Brownies, as promised, are out on the table. I hope you like double chocolate chip.”
“Who doesn’t?” I replied.
“Exactly,” she said. “Oh, and once the bell rings for the day, I am done being Ms. Patel. Call me Nisha, okay?”
I was pretty sure I could never call a teacher by a first name even if I tried, but I said, “Sure,” anyway, and made my way over to the brownies.
Besides Ms. Patel—sorry, Nisha—no one else had really gotten started on anything yet. The other students were clustered around the brownies. Two eighth graders I knew from when we had to take the bus back in elementary school, Aisha Simmons and Danica St. Clair, and two girls I didn’t recognize. One of them was Asian, with long super straight black hair and wearing a hat with a fox head. The other was tall and white, with shoulder-length blond hair that had a chunk dyed hot pink.
“Hey,” Fox Hat said as I reached in for a brownie. “You new?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Emma. I’m in sixth grade.”
“Us too!” she said. “I’m Lucy and this is Kennedy.”
“We just transferred this year from Comey Valley Charter,” Kennedy said. She had a gap between her front teeth, just wide enough that you could slip a quarter between them. “Do you want to sit with us?”
“Sure,” I said, following them over to a table by the window. “Have you been coming since the beginning of the school year?”
Kennedy nodded. “Our parents said we had to do something after school to meet people, but there aren’t a whole lot of sixth graders in art club.”
“Except Henry.” Lucy pointed to a boy I hadn’t noticed, in the corner. He was dressed in all black and wearing headphones while making something out of clay.
“Right. Yeah. And no.” Kennedy laughed. “Now we can tell them we met you! See, we are meeting people. And we’re so good at it, right? Not at all creepy.” She opened her eyes extra wide and reached over, grabbing Lucy’s shoulders.
“You see what I have to deal with,” Lucy deadpanned.
Kennedy seemed like a lot, that was for sure, but not in a bad way. She reminded me a little of my cousin Baxter when he had too much caffeine. While Lucy excused herself to go grab her project, Kennedy pulled out a notebook from her backpack. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”
I reached into my backpack, suddenly hesitant. I’d never shown my notebook to anyone, not even Becca.
“Oh, come on, it can’t be weirder than this kid Kyle back at Comey. Kyle drew nutso pictures of murdering people. And then he mysteriously stopped coming to school one day. Now that I think about it, what did happen to him?” She tapped her chin and raised one eyebrow.
When Lucy returned, I noticed her slip-on sneakers had sloths on them. She set down a collage made from the teeny-tiniest magazine clippings. It wasn’t completed enough for me to see where she was going with it, but I was intrigued. “Yeah, Kyle was super shady,” Lucy said.
“Okay, fine.” I traded notebooks with Kennedy. “But it won’t make sense if I don’t—”
“One, two, three—oh, whoa!”
I chewed on my lip as Kennedy flipped through the pages. The first quarter of the notebook was an inventory of the shoeboxes under my bed. The pages after were sketches, ideas of what I could bring to life with all those pieces.
“Do you make these boxes from scratch?” Lucy asked, peering over Kennedy’s shoulder.
“My dad has a lot of leftover wood in the garage. And sometimes I find old ones at the Take It or Leave It.”
I felt like a jerk all of a sudden, looking over my own stuff when I should have been looking at Kennedy’s art. I flipped open her notebook. Inked inside were manga sketches. Some of them were characters I recognized, but others were completely original. Their eyes, wide and detailed, their mouths s
o animated and expressive. A girl with big black boots, one of them raised like she was about to kick someone’s butt. “These are incredible.”
“They’re all right,” Kennedy said. If I knew her better, I’d say she was being modest, but I still didn’t know her that well. “Your boxes… are any of them done?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the growing gallery on my bedroom wall. Seven, not counting the one I’d just started for my mom.
My best was probably the one that came in first in mixed media at the town art show this summer. Not exactly a major accomplishment given that I’m too young for the teen category, but still. It had a shattered window with a baseball and a broken teacup resting at the bottom. Dad asked if it could be “on loan” for the year, so like a real collector, I was lending it to him. It was up on the wall in his office at NBC Boston.
“I hope we can see one sometime,” Kennedy said.
“Yeah,” Lucy chimed in. “Those are way cool. I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“Thanks,” I said. For a second I imagined Austin watching us. What did I tell you? Your big brother knows everything.
Kennedy handed my notebook back carefully, like she got that it was a treasured object. Hers probably was too. I passed it back, and for the next hour and a half, until the late buses lined up outside, we drew.
Well, Kennedy drew. I’d packed some magazines to look through for my mom’s shadow box. My hope was to find something delicate and beautiful to adhere to the inside of the glass, but I still wasn’t sure what. Sometimes the best parts were the images I stumbled upon by chance. Lucy cut and glued, humming along with the music. When Kennedy got stuck or frustrated, she would color on her nails with markers.
“So, why did you transfer?” I asked.
Lucy and Kennedy looked at each other like they were trying to decide who should answer, and then Kennedy started talking. I had the feeling this was how it always was with the two of them.
“One of my moms changed jobs,” Kennedy said. “And her new commute made it tricky to do drop-off and pickup at the charter school.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
“And then Lucy”—Kennedy uncapped a brown marker—“couldn’t imagine life without me, so she decided to transfer, too.” She quickly drew a little squirrel on Lucy’s biceps.
“You like animals, huh?” I said, thinking about Lucy’s fox hat, sloth sneakers, and now this.
“Yeah, she—” Kennedy started to say something, but then Lucy cut her off.
“She asked me.” Lucy ignored Kennedy sticking out her tongue. “When I grow up I either want to be a vet or work in the music industry. Like in Nashville or LA or New York City.”
“Those are pretty different things,” I said. “And places.”
Lucy shrugged. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Was it weird that I didn’t know yet? All I knew was it wasn’t going to be something like what Mom and Dad did. Every day, surrounded by so many people, having to be on all the time. “I’m not sure,” I said.
Kennedy eyed my arm. “My tattooing urge has not been quenched.”
“Okay, fine.” I took an arm out of my hoodie and extended it toward her.
The marker tickled my skin, and it was hard to hold my arm straight without giggling. At first I couldn’t tell what she was drawing, but as she continued it became clear.
“It’s you!” Kennedy let my arm drop. “And okay, I hope your parents don’t get mad, but these markers are not super washable.…”
“They won’t care.” I twisted my forearm for a better look at my manga self. She’d gotten everything right. My long ponytail, my black-and-white-checked leggings, my huge hoodie, my New Balance. And my sketchbook, clutched to my chest.
She’d seen me. Me.
CHAPTER FOUR
The following day at school, I found Kennedy and Lucy in the cafeteria. Turned out, we’d all had fourth-period lunch the whole time and never even knew. Which was good news for me, since Becca had fifth-period lunch, and I’d been sitting with a bunch of girls from my ELA class who were nice, sure, but they spent most of lunch talking about which jeans made their butts look good. As Austin said, they weren’t exactly my people. But the more time I spent with Lucy and Kennedy, I was starting to think they were. And I wanted Becca to meet them, so I invited them to my brother’s football game that Saturday. The high school team was in the state finals, which was a pretty big deal. Or at least a big deal to people who care about football.
“I think you’ll like them,” I told Becca Friday morning on our walk to school. “Kennedy’s kind of loud, but she’s funny. And Lucy can be really quiet, but then she’ll just slay you with something. Like the other day at lunch, you should’ve seen her impression of this contestant from The Voice. She could be on SNL someday.”
“Do they like football?” Becca asked.
“Do we?”
Becca laughed. “Good point.” We’d been tagging along with my parents to Austin’s games ever since he was on JV. And sure, neither of us would ever be able to explain all the rules of football, but we could tell when a touchdown happened. And honestly, that was really all that mattered. When everyone around us cheered, we cheered too. When everyone around us was bummed, we were bummed.
And when everyone around us lost their minds because of something amazing that happened on the field, that was when we lived it up. My arms would turn into confetti rockets. Pretend, obviously. And Becca would mime amazement at all of the confetti blasting out of my arms.
It was a whole thing.
Kennedy and Lucy were getting a ride from Lucy’s stepdad, who was meeting up with some old friends at the game. Becca rode with us.
“Did I tell you about Stoughton’s linebacker?” Dad said as we idled in traffic, heading onto the Pike. “Three hundred pounds.”
Even though she was in the front seat, I could hear Mom grit her teeth. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
For the past few years, Mom had been reading studies about the long-term damage from concussions and trying to convince Austin to switch to cross-country. Dad said it was pointless—you couldn’t take football away from Austin now—and he’d remind Mom that Austin wasn’t good enough or big enough to play in college anyway. Plus, Dad had played football in high school too, and his brain was perfectly fine. Mom said that was “debatable.”
The twenty minutes to the stadium might’ve felt like forever with Mom and Dad getting testy, but having Becca in the back always saved me.
Ever since we were little, we’d been playing the same game on long car rides. Especially when we went to the Cape. We’d make up stories about the people in the cars that we passed or that passed us, trying to top each other.
A Mercedes-Benz station wagon pulled up alongside us. The driver’s shoulder-length gray hair was blown out, and she had on huge black sunglasses.
“She’s going to the funeral of her secret lover. They’d just gotten back together after twenty years apart when he died unexpectedly,” I said.
“How’d he die?” Becca asked.
“Choking to death on a hot dog.”
Becca snorted. “Glamorous.”
“It was an across-the-tracks love affair. He was a hot dog vendor at Fenway.”
“How tragic,” she said playfully, glancing out her window as we passed a beat-up Mazda pickup. “Ooh! That’s a good one! He is a part-time geophysicist. Full-time serial killer.”
“But is he going to work?” I asked. “Or on the hunt for his next victim?”
“Both!” Becca was cracking herself up. Me too. I was starting to realize I should’ve peed before we’d left the house.
“This game’s kind of morbid, no?” Mom asked.
“It’s fun, though,” I said. “And it’s just pretend.”
“Sorry, Mrs. O’Malley. We can stop if it’s bothering you.”
“Maybe tone it down a tiny notch? Perhaps I’m a little more squeamish than your parents.”
>
She definitely was. I’m pretty sure anyone was. Being surgeons, Becca’s parents had been deep into all that gross body stuff for so long it wasn’t even gross anymore. Well, to them. One time I was at their house for dinner and her dad told us this story about how one of his patients hadn’t pooped for twenty-six days. I’d like to unhear that one, actually.
“Ooh! Great one coming up on the right,” Mom said. A Peter Pan bus had broken down on the shoulder.
Becca and I locked eyes. “Tag team!” We took turns concocting an elaborate story about how the bus driver had spent his whole life searching the streets of Boston for his long-lost love, only to find her today. Unfortunately for both of them, she was now trapped in the bus bathroom and it was about to explode.
* * *
Lucy and Kennedy were waiting for us at the stadium’s main gate. Kennedy had dyed her streak bright green for the occasion—our high school’s colors were green and yellow. She and Lucy had already written GHS on their cheeks with green and yellow face crayons.
“Luce! Ken! You’re here!” I squealed.
“Are. You. Ready. For. Some. Football?” Lucy deadpanned before breaking into a smile. “Just kidding,” she said. “It’s like a rite of passage. At least, that’s what my dad said. Everyone should go to one high school football game in their life, right?”
“One.” Kennedy held up her pointer finger. “One.”
Becca coughed.
“Oh, right! Sorry. I’m bad at this. So, Kennedy, Lucy, this is my friend Becca. Becca, this is Kennedy. And this is Lucy.” For some reason I was gesturing wildly with my hands like I was on an infomercial, trying to sell Becca on all the features of my exciting new product.
“Cool,” Becca said. “Should we go find some seats?”
“Right! Right, right, right. Wouldn’t want to miss one moment of the football! Do they do cheers?” Kennedy asked. “I love me a good cheer.”
“We can teach you the cheers,” I said.
We ended up sitting a few rows back from my parents, who were sitting with all the other players’ parents. I let Kennedy and Lucy head down our row first, so I’d be right in the middle in between them and Becca.
