The Kind of Friends We Used to Be

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “Now, Rhetta was the cutest little baby,” Mrs. Mayes told Marylin. “But boy, was she fussy. She had colic her first year. Charlie here is lucky he ever got born, because, honey, after that first year with Rhetta screaming all day and night, I swore up and down that one baby was all I was going to have.”

  Then she leaned over and gave Rhetta a kiss on the cheek. “But you turned out to be simply wonderful, didn’t you, sweetheart? The cutest two-year-old that ever was, and you’ve stayed cute ever since.”

  Rhetta rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Yeah, right, Mom,” but Marylin could tell she really didn’t mind all that much.

  “Your parents are nice,” Marylin told Rhetta now. “They’re really comfortable to be around.”

  Rhetta blew some blush powder off a brush and began swabbing Marylin’s cheeks with it. “Yeah, they’re okay. They’re way too strict, though. I do something wrong, boom! I’m on restriction for a month. Like this time last summer, when me and my friend stayed out in the backyard talking until midnight, only my parents thought I was in bed. When they realized I wasn’t, they called everybody they could think of trying to find me, and the whole time I was out back. Man, were they mad.”

  “Just wait until that happens to you.” Reverend Mayes stood in the doorway to Rhetta’s room. “Then you’ll understand why we were so upset.”

  He turned to Marylin. “I don’t know what time your folks are picking you up tomorrow, but I hope you’ll consider coming to church with us. Doesn’t matter what you wear. We don’t care too much about clothes at our church, do we, Rhetta?”

  “Well, Mom finally made people take off their baseball caps during the service,” Rhetta pointed out.

  “You have to admit, baseball caps in church is pushing it,” Reverend Mayes said. “But otherwise, just about anything goes. If you’re afraid my sermon will be too boring, you can help Rhetta in the nursery. She has a heart for the little ones.”

  “Okay,” said Marylin. “I might be able to go.”

  Reverend Mayes smiled. “Fantastic! We’d love to have you. Heck, call your folks, ask them to meet us there for the service!”

  Marylin looked at the floor. “Uh, my parents are divorced,” she said, ashamed to admit that to a minister. “So they don’t go to stuff together anymore.”

  “That’s okay,” Reverend Mayes said kindly. “One or the other could come, or they could both come and sit on different sides. We’ve got some folks who do that.” He stepped out into the hallway, then turned back and smiled at Marylin. “Everybody’s broken, sweetie. God helps us get put back together.”

  After her dad had walked down the hall, Rhetta said, “Excuse all the God talk around here. It gets old after a while.”

  “It’s okay,” Marylin said. “I don’t really mind it.”

  Rhetta stepped back and peered at Marylin. “Well, that’s good news. The even better news? You look fabulous.”

  Marylin turned to the mirror to see, almost afraid to look. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she let out a little gasp. She was—well, beautiful. What had Rhetta done? You could hardly tell that Marylin had makeup on at all, but at the same time, she’d been totally transformed.

  “I look like someone in a movie,” she told Rhetta. “I can hardly believe it’s me.”

  “You look exactly like yourself, but with maybe a little more of what’s good on the inside shining through.”

  Marylin laughed. “I think you have a heart for makeup.”

  “I do,” Rhetta said. “I really do. Well, what I have a heart for is beautiful stuff. Like art and music and fairies. I like everything that’s beautiful.”

  Marylin was puzzled. On the one hand, sure, she had seen Rhetta’s notebooks filled with fairies and magical creatures and beautiful forest ferns and arbors laced with flowers. On the other hand, she’d also seen Rhetta’s wardrobe.

  An idea suddenly hit Marylin with the force of a hurricane. If Rhetta could make her look beautiful, maybe she could make Rhetta look beautiful. Unlike Kate, Rhetta actually cared about beauty; she was just too stubborn to let her beautiful side out.

  Marylin knew she’d have to be subtle, though. She’d have to make it seem like she and Rhetta were doing some sort of art project together.

  A warning sounded in her brain: Becoming friends with Rhetta Mayes meant there were all sorts of people who wouldn’t want to be friends with Marylin. Mazie, to start with, followed by Ashley, Ruby, and all the other middle-school cheerleaders.

  So what, Marylin thought, trying to feel brave about it, though really, what she felt was nervous, like she was about to take a walk along the edge of a very high cliff.

  I should get a pair of boots like Kate’s, she thought, finally understanding why Kate wore those big, black clodhoppers. Shoes like that would hold you to the ground, keep you from falling. Then she giggled. You couldn’t pay her to wear those boots. She had way too much fashion sense.

  “Would you like to come over to my house sometime?” she asked Rhetta, making herself take the first step out onto the cliff. “You could see my room and meet my mom and stuff.”

  A blush spread across Rhetta’s cheeks and nose. “Yeah, that would be awesome,” she said, sounding pleased. “Maybe over Christmas break?”

  “Sure,” said Marylin, the thought of Christmas making her feel a little bit giddy. Just that afternoon, taking out the trash, she’d sensed the first little molecules of Christmas in the air, a crisp pine-tree smell, the promise of cookies sprinkled with red and green sugar. Now she found herself excited thinking of a periwinkle blue sweater she had that would look perfect on Rhetta. “We’ll have fun.”

  Marylin might let Rhetta keep one or two black items in her wardrobe, but otherwise it was going to be a complete transformation.

  “You know, you’re really a lot different from how I thought you were when I first met you,” Rhetta said. “You’re much more of a real person.”

  Marylin nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I am.”

  After only an hour laughing and talking at the Student Organizations Holiday Extravaganza, Marylin realized she had a heart for Benjamin Huddle.

  Only she really wished he’d stop staring at her.

  “I can’t help it,” he said after she complained. “You’re so pretty, I have to stare.”

  “But that’s not what’s important about me,” Marylin insisted, though she had to admit she’d be upset if Benjamin didn’t think she was pretty, especially tonight. Still, it was weird to have someone look at you all the time, like you were a painting or a television screen.

  Benjamin covered his eyes with his hands. “Okay, I’ll stop looking. Let’s talk. What do you want to talk about?”

  “We could talk about school, I guess,” said Marylin, feeling unsure about what the best topic of conversation would be. “Or maybe that’s boring. I don’t know. What’s your favorite class?”

  “History,” Benjamin said, his hands still over his eyes. “Next question?”

  Marylin giggled. “I think it’s your turn to ask me a question. And it’s not like you can’t ever look at me. Just don’t stare.”

  Benjamin put his hands down and blinked, like the light was hurting his eyes. “Well, what do you think about this amazing party?” he asked. “Do you like parties? Or are you more of a homebody? Or is that a stupid question to ask a cheerleader?”

  “I like parties,” Marylin said. “I like places where there are lots of people. But sometimes I like quiet, too. It just depends, I guess.”

  She looked out across the room. As parties went, this one wasn’t the most exciting in the world. It wasn’t as good as her Back-to-School party, with all the cheerleaders and football and soccer players. This party was for all the Student Government representatives, plus the Student Government officers and all the school club officers, all the kids who had been elected by other kids to run things. The boys here were quieter, skinnier, and they didn’t mix very much with the girls, who stood in boun
cy, eager groups by the food tables, giggling and occasionally pointing over to one cluster of boys or another.

  Marylin wasn’t sure that she fit in here. But she wasn’t sure she fit in with the cheerleaders and the football and soccer players anymore either. She wanted to fit in somewhere, but where? Her home was broken now, and how could you fit into a broken place? She wished she could fit in with Kate, and sometimes she still did, but Kate was changing shape, it seemed to Marylin, and it was hard to know exactly how to fit in with her anymore. She liked Rhetta, but she knew they weren’t a perfect fit, and she didn’t know Benjamin well enough to know whether they fit together or not, though she hoped they did.

  Marylin felt herself wobble a bit, like she’d gotten too close to the edge of the cliff and was about to tumble over. She reached out and grabbed Benjamin’s hand, to steady herself.

  “You okay?” he asked, tightening his hand around hers.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” she told him. “Just, well, I don’t know. Ask me another question.”

  “Okay, let’s see.” Benjamin got a serious expression on his face. “If you could have anything in the world for Christmas, what would it be?”

  Marylin thought about this for a long time. She considered the clothes she’d like to have, thought about the iPhone with the hot-pink case Caitlin Moore had gotten for her birthday and the makeup kit she’d seen at Nordstrom’s with forty-seven shades of eye shadow.

  And then she thought about Benjamin and Kate, and her mom and dad and Petey. She thought about the middle-school cheerleaders and the soccer and football players. She thought about Student Government, and about how maybe next year she’d run for president, and she thought about Rhetta, picturing her with long, flowing red hair. She thought about a story she’d been meaning to write, one about a girl who saves a dog from the pound, and after that, she thought some more about the iPhone.

  “Everything,” Marylin answered finally. “I think I would like everything in the world.”

  “Kinda greedy, aren’t you?” Benjamin laughed.

  Marylin nodded. “You could say that. Is that terrible?”

  “Terrible? No,” Benjamin said. “Impossible? Probably.”

  Marylin sighed. That’s what she’d been afraid of.

  Rhetta was waiting at the front door when Benjamin’s dad dropped Marylin off at the Mayeses’ house. “All right, spill it,” she said, ushering Marylin into the house. “How was Prince Charming? Did the glass slipper fit or what?”

  They sat on Rhetta’s bed. Marylin looked in the mirror and saw that her makeup had worn off, and she looked like her real self again, pretty, but also normal, and a little bit tired.

  “We talked a lot,” Marylin began. “Which was fun. He’s pretty easy to talk to.”

  “Do you like him?” asked Rhetta. She raised an eyebrow. “I mean, really like him?”

  Marylin nodded. “He’s kind of this mix of regular and special, you know?”

  “Just like you,” Rhetta said. “That’s exactly the way you are.”

  Marylin thought about this for a moment. “Maybe that’s exactly how everyone is.”

  Rhetta shook her head. “Not me. I’m just special.”

  Marylin laughed, and Rhetta joined in, and before long they were laughing in big, gulping fits of laughter, the sort of laughter you couldn’t stop once you got going, laughter that was about laughing and not whatever got you started laughing. Marylin’s stomach began to hurt, and when Rhetta actually rolled off the bed, Marylin thought there was a chance she might break a rib, she was laughing so hard.

  Finally the laughter slowed, and Marylin took in big breaths to steady herself. Rhetta lay on the floor, holding her stomach with one hand and wiping tears from her eyes with the other. It would have been nice if Kate was there, Marylin suddenly thought, and Petey. Kate and Petey could keep the laughter going, and they would probably laugh all night and keep saying funny things until somebody finally smothered them with pillows, which would make everyone laugh even harder.

  Then I’d feel safe, Marylin thought, not sure what she meant by that, except that she imagined everybody’s hands holding on to her, so that she wouldn’t fall off the cliff, so that she could keep walking until she got to where she was going.

  a christmas carol

  It is Christmas Eve, and Petey McIntosh is still working out the physics of Santa Claus. Yesterday, the last day of school before the holidays, Gretchen Humboldt argued that his equation was incorrect, and he finally had to agree with her. He had used the Earth’s circumference—24,901.55 miles—as the distance that Santa Claus had to fly in twenty-four hours, but as Gretchen noted, Santa doesn’t fly in a straight line around the globe. He goes north and south and all over the place. So now Petey is trying different ways of figuring out the actual distance Santa Claus flies on Christmas Eve.

  He and Gretchen are secret Santa believers, and they have spent much of the last two weeks of school by the swings, whispering facts to each other about reindeer, the North Pole, and the true identity of Mrs. Claus. Other kids started to tease them about being boyfriend and girlfriend, and Petey and Gretchen didn’t argue with them. They knew it was better to be thought a romantic item than babies who still believed that a jolly old elf with a bag of toys slid down their chimneys every December 24.

  Petey likes working on the Santa Claus problem. This way he doesn’t have to think about the Mom and Dad problem, or the Christmas Will Be Different This Year but You’ll Get Used to It problem. After dinner, Petey, his mom, and Marylin will meet Petey’s dad at the Church of New Hope to see a Christmas pageant, and then Petey and Marylin will go to their dad’s apartment and eat popcorn and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, before hanging their stockings from the built-in bookshelf in the living room and going to bed.

  Petey has convinced himself it doesn’t matter that his dad’s apartment doesn’t have a fireplace. Santa Claus, Petey thinks, could land on the balcony and come through the sliding glass doors. As Gretchen Humboldt has pointed out, millions of kids all over the world live in houses without fireplaces. That Santa needs a fireplace to enter a house is a myth, in Gretchen’s opinion.

  It means a lot to Petey that Gretchen believes in Santa Claus too. He knows that if she didn’t, he would have to give up Santa Claus once and for all. Belief in Santa Claus is not something you can hold on to all by yourself, especially not in fourth grade. Besides, Gretchen is right about everything, and if she said there wasn’t a Santa Claus, then Petey would finally have to give up and admit the likelihood of an old man driving a sleigh filled with presents around the world in a twenty-four-hour period was not great.

  But thanks to Gretchen, he doesn’t have to. He can happily sit at the kitchen table, the smell of banana nut bread baking in the oven floating over him, the blinking Christmas tree lights reflected in the living-room window, and punch numbers into his calculator, working out the exact science of Christmas.

  It is Christmas Eve, and Flannery sits on the couch in the living room, listening to her stepbrother Ellis go on and on about college and all the wild, out-of-control things he’s been doing this semester. Flannery’s stepdad, Stan, nods his head like crazy, as though he doesn’t mind that instead of attending classes and studying, Ellis seems to be spending his college years taking spur-of-the-moment crosscountry rides to see bands no one has ever heard of and running around the campus’s main quad at three a.m. wrapping the lampposts with toilet paper. Stan seems to find it all too hilarious for words.

  Flannery’s mom walks into the room with the phone in her hand. “They can’t find his luggage anywhere,” she says to Stan. She turns to Ellis. “They’re doing everything to track it, honey. They think it probably flew on to Atlanta after you made your connection in Chicago.”

  Ellis shakes his head, like he can’t believe how cruel the world is to him. “I don’t care about the clothes,” he says. “I can borrow some of Dad’s clothes. But I need my guitar. If I go more than twenty-four hours without pla
ying, it’s like my hands get arthritis or something. All the tendons and stuff start tightening up.”

  Flannery’s mom’s face lights up with a smile. “Flannery has a guitar,” she chirps. “You can play hers while we’re waiting for yours to show up.”

  Ellis looks at Flannery. His expression is doubtful. “What kind of guitar do you have?”

  “Electric,” Flannery says. “Fender.”

  “More specific, please,” Ellis says in a snotty tone of voice, like he is Mr. Guitar Expert of the Universe.

  “Stratocaster, blue finish, medium-heavy strings.”

  “Yeah, whatever, okay,” Ellis says, shrugging. “I’ll make do. The only Fender worth playing is a Telecaster, and Fenders suck in general. You want to play guitar? Get a Gibson, man. A Gibson Les Paul.”

  “Is that what you play, honey?” Flannery’s mom asks, sitting down next to Stan on the couch and smiling brightly at her stepson.

  Ellis turns away and mumbles, “I wish.”

  Flannery’s mom turns to Flannery. “Go get Ellis your guitar, sweetie. I’d really love to hear him play.”

  “I can’t,” Flannery says. “Kate Faber has it.”

  “Then go get it from Kate,” her mom says, the bright and shiny smile still pasted on her face. “I’m sure she’s not using it.”

  Shrugging into her jacket, Flannery wonders how her mom can be sure Kate’s not playing her guitar at this very moment. It’s the sort of thing her mom says all the time, as though you can wipe away problems or stress or difficult situations by denying the very possibility they exist in the first place. It can be pouring rain outside, but in her mom’s mind all you have to do is say, Rain, what rain? and, poof, the rain is gone. The fact is, Kate may be jamming out right now in front of the mirror, pretending she’s the greatest rock star who ever lived, and by asking for the guitar back, Flannery’s going to ruin her whole Christmas Eve.

  Outside, the light is already dimming, even though it’s only a little after four. The sky is a pinkish gray, and it won’t be long before the first star of the evening shows itself, a little silver dot that winks and blinks over the world. Flannery thinks she should go back into the house and get Rocko, so she can have a little company on her walk down the street, but then she pictures Rocko snoozing by the fireplace and figures it wouldn’t be fair to wake him just so she won’t feel lonely. Lately, the fur around his eyes has gotten whiter, and he’s stopped chasing squirrels. Flannery has had Rocko since she was three, and it is hard to believe she won’t always have him, but she knows he’s getting old. He’s already lived past the age the books say a bulldog will live. Maybe there’s some sort of operation Rocko could have, Flannery thinks vaguely, not exactly able to say what the operation would be for. Immortality?