Meanicures

by Catherine Clark

  Beside me, Olivia and Alexis were talking and munching on the Rice Krispies Treats, while they leafed through hairstyle magazines, laughing. So far, so good, I thought. Maybe the three of us, Olivia, Taylor, and I weren’t on speaking terms, but if everyone else was—

  Suddenly Alexis sat forward in her seat. “Why are you asking me so many questions? What are you up to?” she asked in a loud voice.

  “N-nothing,” Olivia said.

  “You’re going to use this information against me or something. Aren’t you?” Alexis demanded.

  “What? No!” Olivia shook her head. “Don’t be so paranoid. I’m just trying to catch up after all this time.”

  “All what time? What are you talking about? I see you every day, almost,” said Alexis. “So what’s with the nosy, third-degree stuff?”

  “She’s right,” said Cassidy. “You guys are asking way too many questions.” She stared at me, looking genuinely hurt. “Was that why you were being so nice to me? Because this is a setup?”

  “No!” I said.

  “I don’t believe you. You know, I should have known you guys were up to something. You never just invite us anywhere anymore,” she said.

  “Us? What about you?” I said. “You only talk to us when you want to trick us or insult us!”

  “As if.” Cassidy got to her feet, waving her nails in the air to dry them. “Come on, guys. We’re out of here. Let’s get our coats.”

  “But—” Kayley looked up, her feet still soaking in the pedicure bath.

  “Now,” said Cassidy, tugging at her sleeve.

  Kayley got to her feet, and slipped on the paper flip-flops that she was supposed to wear after her pedicure.

  And just like that, they whisked through the dangling, clinking nail polish bottles and were gone.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” said Poinsettia. “Go after them!”

  Chapter 19

  The table by the sofa was covered with abandoned gift bags and plates of half-eaten treats. The inside of the angel’s food cake was so jagged that it looked like it had been sliced—no, sawed—with a nail file.

  “I told you this wouldn’t work,” Olivia muttered under her breath, straightening the magazines. “I told you it was a dumb plan.”

  Taylor turned to Olivia, hands on her hips. “You know what? The plan was working. But I should have known you couldn’t pull this off. I should have known you’d—”

  “This isn’t the time to point fingers,” I said. “It’s like Poinsettia said. Let’s go find them already!” I headed right for the door. I knew there were only a couple of places they could have gone without a car, and the quicker we moved, the better. We dashed down the red carpet to the sidewalk.

  “Look.” Taylor pointed at the sidewalk. “Kayley left footprints.”

  “Man. No socks, and wet feet? She must be freezing,” I said.

  “Could those footprints be any smaller?” asked Olivia. “They’re like a child’s feet.”

  “So we’re small—sue us.” Taylor hustled alongside me, in a half walk, half jog, following the footprints. She was waving her three freshly painted nails in the air to dry them.

  All of a sudden, the footprints ended. Nothing on the sidewalk. No clue.

  “Okay …,” Olivia said. “Now what? Did someone start carrying her?”

  “I know—we can look for crumbs,” said Olivia. “Alexis was eating a Rice Krispies Treat when she ran out.”

  The three of us stared at the ground, desperate for cereal crumbs. We were like three pathetic birds on the lookout for a morsel.

  “This Nancy Drew detective thing is lame. Why not just try the coffee shop?” I asked. “I mean, where else are they going to go?”

  “I guess,” said Taylor, like she was only agreeing in order to humor me. Seriously, where else would they go? Roadrunner Records? Eastern Cycle Supply? Hal’s Hearing Aids?

  We jogged the half block to Bean-a-While, our town’s ancient coffee shop that is usually full of aging hippies, even older and more hippie-ish than my mom, and smells vaguely of patchouli, herbal tea, and espresso.

  As I stopped outside the entrance, I heard a crunch under my foot and found a fake silver nail tip stuck to the bottom of my shoe. “See?” I said. “They’re in here.”

  “Great!” Taylor reached for the door, but I put my hand on her arm.

  “Wait, stop!” I said.

  “Why? Do you see them somewhere else?” asked Olivia.

  “No. It’s just … we haven’t talked about this yet. What are we even going to say?”

  They both stared at me as if I was ruining the thrill of the chase. But really, we had to decide on something before we just marched in. Cassidy was right; this was a setup. We had done it with good intentions, but would they care?

  “Oh. Hadn’t thought about that yet,” said Olivia.

  “Well, I have,” I said. And I knew that to make this right, we’d have to team up. I wasn’t sure if we knew how to team up anymore. Would everyone just turn on me when things got difficult. I wasn’t up for any more Madison-bashing. “And before we go inside to try to fix things with the Original Mean Girls, I think we need to fix things between us first.” I knew I sounded braver than I felt inside.

  “Fix what?” Olivia asked.

  Taylor tucked her hands under her armpits. “I’m freezing. Can we talk about this later?”

  I shook my head. “No. Listen, if we’re being fake, then there’s no way we’ll convince them to come back with us.” I took a deep breath. “We’re only pretending to be friends right now. We’re not really being friends.”

  “We’re not?” asked Olivia.

  “Not to me,” I said. My voice came out a lot weaker than I wanted it to. But I was still hurt.

  “Madison’s right.” Taylor stepped a little closer to me. “We’ve really been acting like jerks to you lately, Madison. And I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” said Olivia.

  “I know I haven’t exactly been nice, either,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but we shouldn’t have blamed you for everything,” Taylor said. “We’re all in this together.

  Right?”

  “Right,” agreed Olivia. “And we’ve all made mistakes.”

  “Big ones. So let’s agree that we’re not going to act like that toward each other ever again,” Taylor declared. “Okay? Because when we do, we’re not being friends. We’re being mean girls. And not even original ones. We’re like copy mean girls, which is weak.”

  We put our hands together, stacked on top of each other. One of my fake nails clattered onto the sidewalk, and I stomped on it, so now it was stuck to the underside of my other shoe. As I walked, I sounded like a tap dancer. But the pack was back together. That meant I could handle almost anything.

  “So when we go in there, we’ll just be honest and tell them everything,” I said. “Right?”

  “Um, how about almost everything?” Olivia suggested. “Let’s leave out the part about the fire and exploding pom-poms. We’ll be mostly honest.”

  Snow suddenly started to fall, thick, fat flakes swirling around us. We had these furious snow squalls from time to time in the spring and fall—they didn’t usually last long. They were temporary, kind of like fights between friends.

  “So what are we going to say?” asked Taylor. “That we did this because we want to be friends with them again?”

  I thought about it for a minute. I didn’t want to be friends with anyone who was mean to me most of the time. “No … I guess we don’t want that, exactly. That’d be phony. Let’s just tell them that we want to not be enemies.”

  “Great. Let’s go inside!” Taylor threw open the door and we raced in, brushing snowflakes off our shoulders and hair.

  Cassidy, Kayley, and Alexis were huddled in a booth by the side window. Between them, they had one can of soda, and three paper cups. They looked miserable. When they looked over and saw us standing next to their table, they didn’t smile.


  “It’s snowing,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Thrilling,” Alexis commented dryly. Kayley glared at us. Cassidy wouldn’t make eye contact.

  “I bet it’ll stop soon,” said Taylor. “One of those snow squall–type things. Um, can you guys slide in and make room?”

  “No,” said Kayley.

  “Fine.” I shrugged.

  “Not until you explain what’s going on,” said Cassidy, eyes narrowed.

  “We’re going to explain everything!” I said. “Just give us a second.”

  Us. I looked to Olivia and Taylor for help, but for some reason they were avoiding eye contact with me, too. Sure, leave the hard part to me! I thought. But then I realized: I’m the one who got us into this … I can get us out.

  “The reason we invited you and wanted to talk was really simple. We just wanted to reconnect,” I said.

  Cassidy wrinkled her nose. “Reconnect what?” she asked. “You make it sound like we’re lightbulbs.”

  “Extension cords, actually,” Taylor said.

  I glared at her. Was that helping? That was not helping.

  Thankfully, Olivia chimed in. “You know, reconnect with you guys, because we drifted apart. Like a sailboat going off course.”

  “We felt like we just were kind of, um, on the wrong foot. Feet.” Taylor laughed nervously. “You know, like every time we talked to you, or didn’t talk to you … anyway, it wasn’t good. We thought maybe if we all just got together and hung out, we could make things better.”

  “Why do things need to be better?” asked Cassidy.

  She really had no clue. This was so interesting. And so awful, too.

  Kayley coughed. “We don’t trust anyone who’s that nice to us. Because why would you be that nice without wanting something in return?”

  “That’s just weird,” I said. “People can be nice for no reason.”

  “Not usually,” Cassidy said. “Ever notice how when your parents are really nice, it’s fake? Like, they only act that way long enough for you to agree that you have to do your homework and you don’t care about having the newest iPod. Which is a total lie. They distract you with all this niceness.”

  “But we weren’t trying to trick you or get information to use against you,” I said. “We have completely innocent intentions.” Complicated, maybe, but innocent. I thought, or, actually, Poinsettia thought that maybe if we found out why you were being so mean to us all the time, we could stop being mean ourselves, undo the ceremony, and then maybe we could keep it all from happening again. But I couldn’t say that to them. “We really just wanted to kind of make things right.”

  Cassidy looked at me like she still wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. That made sense. She’d known me longer than anyone; she could probably tell when I wasn’t being totally honest. “You know what? Let’s get out of here.” She suddenly got to her feet. “I left my wallet in my coat, which is back at the salon, so we only had enough change in our pockets to buy one root beer. Do you think you guys could go get our coats, and bring them back here for us? It’s freezing out there.”

  “No. We don’t even have our coats,” Taylor said.

  “Well, speaking of shoes, do you think one of you could carry Kayley? She’s getting frostbite,” Cassidy said.

  “Sure,” said Olivia. “I can do it. I have to carry my little sister all the ti—” She stopped as she realized Kayley was glaring at her. “Of course,” she added, “Laney’s much smaller than you. Much.”

  “So, will you guys come back and finish the me—the manicure?” I asked. “It’s all been paid for, plus we have tons of snacks, and then there are the gift bags. It would be a shame to waste everything.”

  “I guess,” Cassidy said, holding out her hands to admire them again, even with the one missing artificial nail. “She really is good.”

  “Cassidy? I wasn’t being phony when we were talking. I meant every word,” I told her as I followed her to the door. “You can always still just show up at my house, any time you want.”

  “Yeah, right. Why would I want to?” she replied.

  Whatever Cassidy had been willing to share with me before, she was done sharing now. It was like a little window had been opened but now it was closed again.

  But now I knew a little bit of what was going on with her. It didn’t explain why she was mean to me sometimes, but it did explain what she had to deal with.

  “You know what? It’s impossible to make a dramatic exit around here,” she said now. “You forget your coat, your wallet—”

  “And your shoes,” added Kayley.

  “And then it starts snowing.” Cassidy shook her head.

  “It’s Payneston.” I opened the door and got a wet, fat flake of snow right in my eye. “What do you expect?”

  About an hour and a half later, we all had nice, colorful nails (Poinsettia had fixed our broken ones), and people were being a little bit more real with each other. It was like we were in a mean-free zone; they weren’t being horrible, and neither were we.

  Everyone gathered around the gift bags on the table as I packed the leftover snacks into my backpack, deciding to leave all the sodas and waters behind for whoever wanted them. I couldn’t let the day end without some kind of official statement, some attempt to finally put this behind us. But I had no idea how to do it. I wasn’t ready for this moment.

  And inside, I was freaking out about it. What if getting your nails done and just catching up wasn’t enough? Would I have to swallow fire or make up a recipe for angeled eggs?

  Dejected, I picked up my backpack and followed the group to the door, stopping by the front desk to thank Poinsettia. “Help?” I mouthed silently.

  She was already way ahead of me. “I like to keep a record of manicure parties. It helps market them to other clients.” She handed out a printed photo collage to everyone. I hadn’t noticed her with a camera, but she’d taken separate photos of us getting our manicures, and the collage showed all of us laughing and talking and having a good time.

  “When did you take these?” Olivia asked.

  “Did I forget to mention that I have special powers?” Poinsettia smiled. “Not to mention co-workers. Now you’ll have a memento so you can remember what it’s like to just hang out and be friends.”

  “We don’t need a record,” Cassidy scoffed, but I noticed her smile as she looked at the photos.

  “Yeah, we’ll remember,” Alexis insisted.

  Really? I thought. We’ll see.

  “But, uh, do you sell the nail polish, too?” Cassidy asked. “I’d like to take some home, because I’ll probably need a new coat next week.”

  Everyone lined up to purchase a bottle of nail polish.

  “Thanks so much. And can I make an appointment for a haircut next week?” Olivia asked Poinsettia when it was her turn.

  “It’s about time. Shaggy much?” commented Alexis.

  Cassidy and Kayley held their hands over their mouths and snickered.

  “It’s amazing how often people forget to make appointments. Even you two.” Poinsettia applied a fresh coat of bright red lipstick. “Now, if you’ll excuse me …” She gestured to her next client.

  We gathered by the coat rack. “So,” I said.

  “So.” Cassidy grabbed her coat from the hanger and slipped it on.

  “Nice jacket,” I said to her.

  She didn’t thank me.

  As we stepped out onto the sidewalk, we looked at each other like we hadn’t just spent the afternoon together, hanging out and having fun. Like that wasn’t allowed. Like we weren’t all holding gift bags from the same event. Immediately we separated into our normal pattern: their three and our three. It was like that was the only way we knew how.

  “We have to go,” said Cassidy.

  Kayley nodded, adjusting her tiny purse on her tiny shoulder. “Yeah, we’re meeting someone at the movies.”

  “What movie?” asked Olivia.

  “Um …” Kayley tapped
her index finger against her cheek. “I don’t know. Did we decide yet?”

  Alexis shook her head. “No. We didn’t.”

  “Definitely not,” added Cassidy.

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. What did they think, that we were going to show up at the movies? That we’d follow them around like puppies? Meanicure or not, they were back to their usual selves. Did it matter that I’d sort of reconnected with Cassidy, and my friends had gotten in touch with their former friends a little bit, too?

  “See you around?” I asked, turning to walk in the opposite direction.

  “Right. I’ll see you!” Cassidy called over her shoulder.

  And that was that. We went our way, and they went theirs.

  “We have plans, too!” Olivia shouted after them. “Big plans!”

  “We do?” I asked in a soft voice, so they couldn’t overhear.

  “No, but if they’re going to act like that again, like they’re the only ones who can make plans, I am not going to just stand here and take it,” said Olivia. “Anyway. Laney has a soccer game at the park near here. Want to go watch?” she asked.

  Taylor and I looked at each other, considering it. “Sure, why not?” I said. “I don’t have anywhere else I have to be.”

  “Me neither,” said Taylor.

  I started to unlock my bike, then stopped. “You know what? Since you guys are walking, I’ll walk, too. I’ll just come back later for my bike,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Olivia.

  “Definitely,” I said.

  We started down the sidewalk together, walking side by side. Then we put our arms around each other’s shoulders and walked, three across, laughing, giggling, pushing, and leaning our way across town through the snow, which had almost stopped.

  The best thing about the meanicure was that if the mean girls were back to being themselves, that meant we could go back to being ourselves, too.

  Friends.