Seventh period was language arts, and their teacher, Mr. Holm, made them work in pairs. They would interview each other, and for homework they would write up their interviews into reports, which they would give in front of the class the next day. “I want at least three interesting facts or stories about your partner,” Mr. Holm had insisted. “No boring stuff!”
Mazie, who sat on the other side of the room, waved at Marylin to move her chair over so they could work together. But Mr. Holm made them count off like kindergartners, one-two, one-two, and Rhetta was one and Marylin was two, and that made them a pair.
Rhetta had turned around and looked Marylin straight in the eye. “I’ve got twenty-three interesting facts about me right off the top of my head. You ready to write?”
Marylin had nodded mutely. She pulled her notebook and a pen out of her back pouch. She noticed that Rhetta’s fingernails were alternately painted sparkly black and silver. It was actually sort of cool-looking, although not really Marylin’s style.
“Fact number one: I am a Gemini,” Rhetta reported. “Sign of the twins. Which is important, because I have a twin, only I don’t know where.”
“Were you adopted?” Marylin asked. She hadn’t meant to get involved in an actual conversation with Rhetta, but she’d heard stories about twins separated at birth, how one twin would break his arm and the other would feel the pain all the way on the other side of the country. She’d always secretly wished for a twin, although one who lived with her, with whom she could communicate telepathically and also trade clothes.
Rhetta shook her head. “No, I mean like a soul twin.”
“A soul twin?”
“Yeah, someone who’s just like me, who really gets me, you know? I haven’t met my soul twin yet, but I will one day. They’re for sure an artist like I am. Do you like graphic novels?”
Marylin wasn’t sure what a graphic novel was, so she shrugged. “I don’t know.”
And then Rhetta did something that surprised Marylin. She put her hand on Marylin’s wrist, her silver and black fingernails sparkling like a handful of diamonds. “I think you’ll like them if you give them a try. You’re not like those other cheerleaders, I can tell.”
“How do you even know I’m a cheerleader?”
Rhetta grinned. What was surprising was that she had a very friendly grin, and two dimples that Marylin was automatically envious of. When she smiled you could see how Rhetta Mayes must have looked when she was a little girl, before a veil of black hair and clothing had descended over her life. She had been cute, Marylin could tell.
“I saw you sitting with those girls at lunch, and I knew you were the cheerleaders. You can always tell. So’s she”—Rhetta nodded toward Mazie—“but she’s got a really cruddy aura, if you want to know the truth.”
Then she reached her hand into her big black bag and pulled out a sketchbook. “This is the second amazing fact about me,” she said, handing the book to Marylin. “I’m doing a graphic novel. I plan on publishing it when I’m finished.”
Marylin opened the sketchbook. Inside, she discovered, was a world of fairies, some of them beautiful, others with squinched-up, mean faces, all of them looking so alive, Marylin was surprised they didn’t fly off the pages. There were airborne fairies and fairies perched in trees, fairies having conversations with each other, and fairies dancing in circles around flowering bushes. The pages were laid out like a comic book, and the fairies spoke in balloons, except that there weren’t any words yet.
“I’m not great at writing,” Rhetta admitted. “I’ve got an idea for a story, but when I try writing it down in a script, it sounds dumb. Not like people—or fairies, really—would talk at all.”
Then she leaned toward Marylin again. “You want to do it? I bet you can write, can’t you? I can tell by looking at you that you have a way with words.”
Marylin sat back in her seat. How did Rhetta Mayes know this about her? She couldn’t, of course. They’d never seen each other in their lives before today. Rhetta couldn’t know that Marylin had a journal she wrote in every night, or that she wrote poems that she never showed anyone, and at night she told stories to herself while she was waiting to fall asleep. Sometimes they were simple stories about having a nice boyfriend and going to dances. Other times her stories were more dramatic. Over the summer she had spent weeks working out a story where she saved a little girl who had been kidnapped by a wicked stepmother. In her story, there’d been a trail of clues she’d followed to where the little girl was hidden, and after she’d rescued the girl, she’d been invited to the White House to meet the president.
And some nights Marylin liked to imagine magical things as she drifted off to sleep. Kings and queens and dragons, good witches and bad witches, fairies and monsters. Paging through Rhetta’s book, she saw pictures that could have been in the stories in her head, and a sudden constellation of ideas burst over her. What if the young fairy at the beginning of Rhetta’s book got lost in the woods and the evil queen fairy, who ruled over all the others, refused to let them search for her because the evil queen fairy knew that the lost fairy was destined to take her throne upon being found? Marylin’s fingertips tingled, and she grabbed her pen, ready to write.
But she made the mistake of looking at Rhetta. The spell was broken. She couldn’t write a book with this strange girl and her jet-black hair and sparkly black and silver fingernails. How would she explain it to everyone? The very idea of writing a book with Rhetta Mayes didn’t fit in with the ideas Marylin had about seventh grade and being a middle-school cheerleader and becoming best friends with Ruby Santiago, who, nice as she was, would definitely think Rhetta was weird and someone Marylin shouldn’t be friends with.
“I wish I had time,” Marylin said in her best middle-school cheerleader voice, handing the book back to Rhetta. “But with cheerleading and homework and everything, it’s like I’ve got every minute of my day prescheduled.”
Rhetta took the book and put it back in her black satchel, her eyes boring into Marylin the whole time. “I don’t think ‘prescheduled’ is a word,” she said icily. “Or if it is, it shouldn’t be.”
She turned her desk to face the front again. Marylin leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. “We have to do a report, remember? I haven’t told you any interesting facts about me yet, and I need at least one more interesting fact about you.”
Rhetta didn’t say a word. She didn’t even bother turning around.
Marylin sighed. She opened her notebook and began to write. Rhetta Mayes is new to our school. She wishes she had a twin who liked art as much as she did. She is a good artist and one day hopes to write books called graphic novels. She has interesting fingernail polish.
Then Marylin closed her notebook and put it back in her back pouch. She looked out the window at the woods that stood at the far edge of the soccer field. There, for just a second, she thought she saw a twinkling of light. Then it was gone.
Excitement tingled at the tips of Marylin’s fingers again. The words of a story were gathering in her imagination. All she had to do was write them down. If she closed her eyes, she could see that lost fairy flying, hovering at the edge of the woods, looking for signs that would help her find her way back home. All Marylin had to do was grab her notebook out of her back pouch. All she had to do was write.
Marylin shook her head as though she were trying to shoo the very idea of fairies out of it. She had cheerleading practice and homework and chores to do. She didn’t have time for writing stories.
“Come on, Marylin, I’ll walk you to your locker.”
Mazie stood beside her desk. The clock’s second hand ticked forward and the bell rang. Marylin stood up, picked up her back pouch, and followed Mazie out the door and into the hallway, where the lights flickered and burned, but did not sparkle, not even for a second.
dallas goes to the moon
Kate’s first song was about rain falling softly against the windows on a summer night, but it was so dumb, she cr
umpled up the paper and threw it away. Her second song was about dogs. It was okay, but it didn’t really fit with the idea of what kind of girl guitar player she wanted to be. She didn’t want to be the kind of girl guitar player who wore gauzy skirts and had a dreamy expression on her face, and she didn’t want to be the kind of girl guitar player who sang about pick-up trucks and how she wished she lived in the country, where everything was simple like in the good old days.
The more she thought about it, she realized she wanted to be the kind of girl guitar player who wrote songs about a boy named Dallas. She did not personally know a boy named Dallas, but she could imagine a boy named Dallas, a boy with sandy brown hair falling over his blue eyes, a boy who thought girls who played guitar were the only girls worth knowing.
Kate’s first song about Dallas was about how lonely Dallas got sometimes, even when he was hanging out with a bunch of his friends. She wrote about Dallas walking his dog down his street on an autumn day and seeing the last leaf fall from the oak tree on the corner. He looked at the leaf, then looked up at the window of a nearby house, where he saw a girl reading The Giver, which Kate just happened to be reading for language arts. At the end of the song, Dallas walked his dog back home, wondering if the girl in the window was as lonely as he was.
Kate started writing songs about Dallas on the first Saturday afternoon of October. By the following Saturday, she had written five Dallas songs. There was “Just a Boy Named Dallas,” “Blue Skies Over Dallas’s House,” “The Girl in the Window,” “I Wonder How Dallas Is Today,” and a sad song called “Dallas Goes to the Moon,” about Dallas falling in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back. The girl’s name was Alice, which was the only girl’s name Kate could think of that rhymed with Dallas.
Flannery thought all the songs were too slow. “The words are good,” she admitted, “and the music isn’t bad, except that it sounds like you’re playing at somebody’s funeral.”
Maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea to go over to Flannery’s house to get songwriting advice, Kate thought. In Kate’s imagination, Flannery was like a slightly older sister, a little wiser, a little more experienced in the ways of the world. In real life, hanging out in her room, Flannery seemed more like an older sister who found you pretty irritating, but could put up with you for short periods of time when she was in the right mood.
Flannery leaned across the bed and took the guitar from Kate. “Close the door, would you? My stepdad gets all hyper when I rock out.” After Kate shut the door, Flannery turned up the amp and slid her fingers up and down the neck of the guitar, turning “I Wonder How Dallas Is Today” from a ballad into a punk rock song.
When she was finished, Kate took the guitar back from Flannery and played the song the way she had written it. “I just think it sounds better slow,” she said when she was finished. “How you played it was good, but it doesn’t sound like the song I was trying to write.”
Flannery leaned back and propped her head against a giant teddy bear. “Who is this Dallas guy anyway?”
Kate shrugged. “Just somebody I made up. He’s like a character in a story.”
“Why don’t you write about yourself instead of your imaginary friends?” Flannery asked, only sounding halfway sarcastic.
“What would I write about?” Kate strummed an F chord, the hardest chord there was. She spent thirty minutes a day practicing the F chord, and it still didn’t sound right. “I’m not very interesting.”
Flannery sat up. “Maybe. But you’re more interesting than you look. I’ve always said that about you. Have you ever thought about bleaching your hair?”
Kate tried another F. “No, because I’m not insane.” She glanced at Flannery’s hot pink hair. “No offense or anything.”
“None taken. But you know what your real problem is right now?”
“I didn’t know I had a real problem,” Kate said, even though it wasn’t true. She could name at least four real problems she had at that very minute, including a three-page paper she had to write about the causes of the Civil War and a pre-algebra test on Tuesday.
Flannery stood up. She walked over to her dresser and leaned in closer to her mirror, like she was trying to get a better look at herself. Then she turned around and faced Kate. “Your real problem is that you’re in love with this Dallas guy, and he’s not even alive. You need somebody who’s actually alive to be in love with.”
She turned back to the mirror and combed her fingers through her hair. “Not that I believe that love exists or anything.”
“One, I am not in love with a make-believe character,” Kate insisted. She strummed the guitar hard, to underline her point. “And two, even though I believe love exists, I do not need to be in love with anyone. All I need to do is write songs and get at least a B-minus on my pre-algebra test. Preferably a B.”
“Well, if you ever need some advice about how to get a real boyfriend, as in a boyfriend who’s actually alive, let me know,” Flannery said, applying mascara to her eyelashes. “I have lots of good tricks.”
Kate did not want tricks for getting boyfriends. She just wanted to write songs about Dallas. She knew Dallas wasn’t real, but she believed a boy like Dallas was out there somewhere, and she wanted to be ready for him when he showed up. Listen to this song I just wrote, she’d say, and he’d grin a wide, happy grin, because he’d finally found a girl who could play guitar and write songs. He’d finally found the girl he’d been looking for.
Sometimes at school Kate would look around for other seventh-grade girls who might be guitar players. She couldn’t be the only one, could she? She couldn’t be the only girl whose fingertips were so callused from holding down the strings that she could tap against them with her fingernail and hear a little click.
She was pretty sure she was the only girl wearing big, black lace-up boots, because so far most of the girls she’d seen wore tennis shoes, mostly white or grayish white, depending on how old the shoes were, with either pink or blue stripes. Really, she was a little surprised by how boring most people’s shoes were. In Kate’s opinion, what shoes you wore said a lot about your personality.
“Have you ever thought about ballet slippers?” Marylin asked her on the bus Monday morning. Even though they didn’t walk together to the bus stop anymore, Kate and Marylin almost always sat with each other. It was nice, Kate thought, sort of like a family reunion with relatives you didn’t see any other time of year. “I mean, I really like your boots, they make a total fashion statement and everything, but think about how light ballet slippers would feel on your feet.”
Kate knew that Marylin was lying about liking her boots. She had seen Marylin looking at her boots with a definite “keep those things away from me” expression on her face. Still, she had to admire Marylin’s restraint. It showed a certain maturity. In sixth grade, Marylin would have told Kate straight out how horrible she thought her boots were. Now she was trying to manipulate her. It was a big improvement, in Kate’s opinion.
“I am not a ballet slippers kind of girl,” Kate told Marylin. “I’m pretty sure you know that about me.”
The weird thing was, sometimes Kate found herself wishing she were a ballet slippers kind of girl. She thought it might make life easier. Unfortunately, every time she tried to be that kind of girl, she felt like an entirely different person from who she actually was. She’d put on a dress and automatically feel like she should talk in a supersweet voice and never think mean thoughts and take baths instead of showers.
“Okay, so maybe ballet slippers aren’t right for you,” Marylin finally admitted as the bus pulled into the school driveway. “But I bet we could find some really cute shoes for you. I mean, cute shoes that are just your style. They could even be black, if you wanted.”
“I have black shoes already,” Kate said, pointing at her boots. “And they’re the right shoes for me. Maybe you should think about getting some boots. They could change your life.”
Marylin laughed, but Kate was serious.
She worried about Marylin. When she bothered to look over at the middle-school cheerleaders’ lunch table, Marylin seemed like a tiny mouse surrounded by hungry red-tailed hawks who were about to eat her alive in one tasty gulp. Sometimes Kate wanted to stomp over to the table, the thunk of her boots ringing through the cafeteria, and say, Marylin is better than all of you added together, even if she cares too much about her hair. Then she would sock Mazie Calloway in the nose and say, You’re not such a big deal. You’re not even pretty.
But as a rule, Kate was not the sort of person who socked people in the nose. So she sat at her usual table with Marcie Grossman, Amber Colbaugh, Timma Phipps, and Brittany Lamb, the same people she’d been eating lunch with since third grade, and didn’t say or do anything except eat her sandwich, look at people’s shoes, and make up song lyrics. Every once in a while she’d look toward the door, just in case a boy with sandy brown hair and blue eyes walked in and needed someone to sit with.
At lunch on Monday, just as Kate was finishing up her turkey and cheese sandwich and trying to come up with a word that rhymed with “aqua,” Marcie Grossman asked her if she was staying after school that day. “It’s Club Day, you knew that, right?” Marcie said, pulling some papers out of her backpack. “I’ve got the list right here of all the clubs seventh graders are eligible to join.”
Kate had spent the weekend practicing guitar and looking up important Civil War facts on the Internet. She’d never gotten around to pulling out all the papers she’d collected from the previous week and stuffed in her binder—announcements for yearbook pictures and Pep Squad tryouts, forms for people interested in participating in the gift wrap and Read-a-Thon fund-raisers, the most recent updates to the student handbook. She supposed there was something in there about Club Day she’d never gotten around to reading either.
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be Page 4
