Better Than the Best Plan

by Lauren Morrill

  Every cell in my body is vibrating, just begging me to explode with a Hell YES! And maybe even a fist pump for good measure. But I manage to wrestle the energy into a confident, yet still somehow cool, “That sounds great.” Though I’m pretty sure I’ve got a manic smile on my face to give me away. Which is fine, because Ali’s giving me one of his trademark giant smiles. I swear, even his ears look happy.

  “Awesome. Pick you up around six?”

  “Perfect,” I say, already mentally scanning the meager contents of my closet for the perfect, not-trying-too-hard outfit.

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you tonight,” Ali says. He gives me one parting smile, then heads off to his car, his keys swinging around his index finger. I wait until he’s backed out and his taillights are disappearing out of the parking lot before I race off toward Lainey’s usual spot at the back of the lot. By the time I get to her, all of the excited energy is bursting out of me like a faulty water fountain. When I skid to a stop at her rear bumper, where she’s leaning against Barney looking smug, I’m actually squealing.

  “Dinner tonight at Margaritas!”

  “The one on Division?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good, because the one on Third is ass.” Lainey grins and heads for the driver-side door. I take my spot at the passenger side, waiting for her to get in and lean over the center console to unlock my door. When she does, I pull it open, my shiver at the usual creak of metal coming a beat early. Barney, short for Barnacle, is what we call Lainey’s ancient Volvo, so named for the ring of brown rust that clings to the lower half of the car. She inherited it from her grandmother who moved into a nursing home sophomore year. I climb in and adjust the frayed beach towel on my seat so the old, cracked leather, which has been cooking in the parking lot all day, won’t scorch my thighs. It’s only May, but May in Florida is like late July anywhere else, hot and thick with humidity.

  “Cherry limeades?” Lainey asks as she shifts the car into reverse. “My treat.”

  “Yes, please.”

  We roll down the windows, since the air conditioner in Lainey’s car is barely a suggestion of cold air. I turn on the radio, tuned to STAR 102.1, the oldies station, and before we’re even out of the parking lot, we’re singing along at the top of our lungs to a Motown hit, attempting harmonies only dogs can hear.

  There’s usually a long wait to get out of the student parking lot after school, as people linger, rolling down their windows to chat with friends or make weekend plans. But today everyone puts the pedal to the metal, off to the beach or the pool or somewhere else to celebrate our three months of freedom. Some more free than others, of course.

  “Did you hear Vera Braxton talking about going on a cruise?” I ask when we stop at a red light. “Apparently, her dad won it from his company.”

  “You couldn’t pay me to go on a cruise,” Lainey replies. She reaches into the center console and digs out a pair of sunglasses. “People are always getting norovirus on those boats. I can’t imagine anything worse than crapping your pants on the high seas.”

  “Okay, but not everyone gets norovirus. And wouldn’t it be nice to take a trip?”

  “Sure, a trip would be nice. But when Mommy and Daddy aren’t paying for it, the costs add up. And seriously, do you really want to spend every penny of your sandwich-making money on five days at the beach?” Lainey squints into the bright sun, her sunglasses no match. “When, by the way, there’s a perfectly good beach twenty minutes away.”

  I sigh and prop my feet up on the dashboard, a move I’ve done so much there’s practically an outline of my flip-flops there.

  “Buck up, Reed,” Lainey says, flipping her signal as she turns into the Sonic parking lot. “Soon enough we’ll graduate and leave here. And then you’ll be glad you saved all that money.”

  I wince at her reference to my savings account, because it’s not exactly what it used to be. But even though I usually tell Lainey everything, I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell her that yet. I think I’m hoping the situation will resolve itself, but it’s been two weeks now with no end in sight.

  Lainey’s been saving every penny she can from her paycheck at the library (minus the occasional Sonic splurge), which she took because it was the only job where she could both study and earn minimum wage. For Lainey, it’s all about leaving not just Jacksonville, or even Florida, but the south entirely. I don’t blame her. Lainey is one of the few black kids in our school. She tries to downplay all the ways that she feels like an outsider at Southwest, but I’ve known her long enough that I see how much the lazy, offensive jokes of our classmates and casual bias of our teachers gets to her. I know her well enough to know that even as her best friend, I still can’t grasp even a tenth of her experience here.

  Lainey and I met freshman year in detention, which is notable because it’s the only detention Lainey and I have ever had. Lainey was there because she poured her soda on Nate Blackburn after he pulled one of her braids in the cafeteria. I was there because my mother had embarked on a spiritual quest (her words) to live a simpler life, so she unplugged every electronic device in our apartment. This included my alarm clock. And Mr. Hardiman, my homeroom teacher, was a stickler about tardies.

  I was halfway through writing an essay on punctuality (like I said, Mr. Hardiman equals stickler), when I heard a whisper coming from the table behind me. “You got a pencil?”

  I turned to Lainey. “Just pens. You want one?”

  “Nah. Doing math. Pencil’s a must,” she said with a shrug. “I like your sweater.”

  I was wearing my favorite cardigan, which I’d found at Darcy’s Closet, a thrift store near my house. Not a trendy thrift store, with actual vintage clothes the girls in my school might think were stylish or cool. Darcy’s Closet was a thrift store for people who actually needed to be thrifty. And since I was too young to have a job, I was still at the mercy of my mother’s clothing budget. On top of her spiritual quest, she was also deep in her “make, do, mend” phase and had convinced herself that with just a little more practice she could knit all the clothes we’d ever need. Thus far, she’d only succeeded in crafting a series of wonky dishcloths, so I needed to buy my clothes on the cheap.

  Darcy’s Closet had a back room with a dollar-a-pound pile, which was an enormous mountain of fabric. You pulled out what you wanted, the cashier weighed it on an old-fashioned produce scale like they have hanging in the grocery store, and you paid based on weight. It sounded like a great deal until you realized that 99.9 percent of the clothes in the pile were utter garbage. Stained, moth-eaten, smelling vaguely like attics and cigarettes and one time, in the case of a particularly putrid-looking puffer vest, tuna fish. Most of the stuff was decades old and not even in fashion when it was new. There were a lot of clothes that looked like they were once part of someone’s work uniform, a lot of khaki and button-up shirts and mom jeans. I almost never bought anything from the pile, but that didn’t stop me from digging.

  Which was how I came to find my cardigan, my one and only big score. It had arms that were just a little too long, which was perfect for pulling my hands inside when the air-conditioning in school got too frigid (which was often). It was long enough to cover my bum, which meant every once in a while I could get away with wearing leggings to school, in direct defiance of the sexist dress code. It had two big pockets on the front, perfect for holding a phone or some cash or a plastic baggie full of tortilla chips that I sometimes had to sneak during third period when we had last lunch. The best part? The cardigan was tie-dyed. Rainbow tie-dyed, and the colors were still completely vivid. My mother called it the fashion equivalent of a bad acid trip, but I loved it.

  I told Lainey the whole story, and as soon as she nodded, familiar with Darcy’s Closet and their dollar-a-pound policy (she’d scored a yellow rain slicker from the pile, which she said made her look like the Morton Salt Girl), I knew we could be friends.

  * * *

  We order our cherry limeades and bop along
to the piped-in oldies, stumbling through the words to “Leader of the Pack,” a song that is 100 percent ridiculous and fun to sing. When our drinks arrive, we hand over our cash and an extra dollar for the carhop. Lainey takes a long sip, the only source of cool in the stagnant humidity. I pry off the lid to fish out the maraschino cherry. Lainey always saves hers for the end, but I can never wait. I love the sweet crunch of the fruit, which has been processed to the point that it barely resembles something that grew out of the ground. As soon as I pop the lid off, I grin. Sometimes I have to dig for the cherry, performing delicate surgery with the red straw to bring it to the surface amid the lime wedges and crushed ice, but today, floating right on top, is not one but two cherries.

  “Score!” I pop one off the stem, then fish out the other, letting the cold sweetness linger on my tongue. I throw my feet up on the dashboard and lean back into my seat, breathing out a satisfied sigh. “Best day ever.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The apartment is empty when we get there, just as it’s been every day since my mom left. At first it was unnerving, being there alone. You never realize how much noise another person’s mere existence makes until they’re gone. Footsteps, sniffles, banging around the kitchen, even the occasional sleep talking all serve to fill up a space. The silence felt oppressive in the days after she left. I took to leaving the TV on all the time, until all my dreams started to involve home renovations and the words stainless steel appliances, and I had to stop.

  But over the last two weeks I’d gotten used to my mother’s absence. I became accustomed to living alone. I threw out the disgusting hemp milk she insisted upon and replaced it with a half gallon of skim. I moved my speakers into the living room and started to listen to music that wasn’t chant based when I ate. I stopped closing the bathroom door. There was no one to see me pee anymore.

  I’d managed to find more than a few upsides to abandonment.

  Lainey and I drop our bags by the door, though since we turned in our textbooks today, they don’t make much of a thud (which is good, because Mrs. Sazonov one floor down doesn’t like it when we’re loud, a fact she makes known by thumping her cane on her ceiling). Lainey heads for the bathroom while I make a beeline for the thermostat, cranking up the AC. According to the digital display, it’s 84 degrees in the apartment. After the shock of the electric bill that arrived last week, I’ve been making an effort to cut costs by turning the AC off while I’m at school so I won’t waste the electricity when I’m not home. But I’ve only been in here a few minutes and already I can feel my shirt starting to stick to my back, so I drop it down to a chill 68 and hope it won’t take long to work its magic.

  I wander into the living room and collapse onto the sofa, digging the remote out from between the cushions. I begin flipping through the channels, wondering how much longer I’ll be able to afford the bill. If Mom doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to have to cancel the cable.

  “Looks like the options are the last half of a Lifetime movie, the last half of a James Bond movie, or a Brady Bunch marathon.”

  “Definitely the Bradys,” Lainey says, plopping down next to me.

  “But it’s one of the Lifetime movies with Tori Spelling!” I say, less out of enthusiasm for Tori and more out of apathy for the Bradys.

  “Unless it’s the one where she’s the cheerleader who gets knifed, I’m not interested.”

  “I think it’s the one where she’s the girlfriend who gets knifed. Or the sister. I can’t tell yet.”

  Lainey rolls her eyes. “White girls screaming is not really my genre. Brady Bunch, please.”

  Lainey is obsessed with retro TV. I can’t tell if it’s part of her love of history or if she just really enjoys a good laugh track. I find anything made before I was born to be 90 percent boring, but since she spotted me the money for the limeade, I go with it. But not happily.

  “Ugh, fine,” I mumble, and flip to Marcia carefully brushing her hair a bazillion times. The episode bops along, hitting the familiar beats before each commercial break, cruising toward a lesson learned and a happily-ever-after, all in the span of twenty-eight minutes. We zone out in front of it as we let the end of the school year and the beginning of summer wash over us. On-screen, the Brady Bunch’s maid is wagging her finger and rolling her eyes at the boys as she wipes her hands on that blue dress she’s always wearing. When I was younger, I was sort of obsessed with the idea that maybe, if my mom met some nice architect or someone else who wore a tie to work, our family could double in size overnight like the Bradys’ did. I could go from lonely latchkey kid moving every couple of years (sometimes more, if my mother’s schemes came fast and frequent) to being a sister with matching comforters and dinner at home every night. I liked imagining us moving from any of our string of crappy apartments to one of the Spanish-inspired subdivisions across town, where all the houses have tile roofs and stucco exteriors with elaborate palms as landscaping. Maybe we’d even have a pool, one that’s just for us and not to share with the six million little kids in the complex and the creepy guy who likes to sit on a lounge chair and chain-smoke over his lunch break.

  But it only took a few of my mom’s boyfriends for me to realize that the Brady Bunch was not in my future. I mean, Hunter, the freegan lumberjack she dated when we lived in Oregon, was never going to move us into a subdivision (his screeds on the American suburb could have you trapped in a conversation against your will for hours). And Haven (whose real name was Bill, but his face got incredibly red if you pointed that out) was too busy rehearsing with his steel drum band (which I quickly learned was code for getting stoned with three guys named Jared) to attempt a home-cooked meal. No, my mother had a yen for guys whose futures involved a beanbag chair and long lectures on the evils of factory farming. I don’t think a single one of them even owned a necktie, unless it was ironically.

  And besides, even if Mom had stumbled into a relationship with some upwardly mobile, upstanding citizen with a job and a suit, she had no desire to get married. She never made any noise about shopping around for a dad for me. Mom loved that it was just us girls, a sparkle in her eye always accompanying the phrase. Maybe it was left over from the semester she spent as a women’s studies major, or maybe it was the womynist colony we lived in when I was five. Whatever it was, none of those dudes was ever going to put a ring on it, and after meeting a few of them, that was just fine with me.

  “So what are you going to wear tonight?” Lainey asks when the show goes to a commercial break on a cliff-hanger over who Marcia is going to take to some dance.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I say. I suck the last of my limeade through the straw until the ice rattles in the cup.

  “Liar,” Lainey replies. “You’ve been planning this date for forever.”

  I grin and spin on the couch, crossing my legs so I can face her. “Okay, true. I was thinking maybe that white eyelet lace skirt, the one that’s short but not like ‘come and get it’? And then just a tank. I’m not sure what’s clean.”

  “You’ve got to wear the green one. It brings out your eyes,” Lainey says. “There’s probably time to run it to the laundry room if you need. I’ve got quarters in Barney.”

  I glance at the clock and start doing the math (twenty-three minutes on the short cycle, then probably thirty in the dryer if it’s a small load), but my calculations are interrupted by a knock at the door. The sound nearly makes me drop my empty cup. The only people who knock on our apartment door are people who are going to cause a problem: our landlord, looking for the late check again, or a guy from the power company, threatening to turn off our electricity. Sometimes it’s Mrs. Sazonov, waving her cane and threatening to call the cops if we don’t “walk nice.”

  Lainey is focused on the TV, where the Bradys are resolving their conflict right on schedule, so she doesn’t see me get tense. I’ve never liked when people come to the door, but it’s worse now that I live alone. If Lainey weren’t here, I’d probably go grab one of the sharp knives out
of the kitchen before checking the door.

  The blinds are closed already, but the TV volume is up high enough that whoever it is might wait us out if properly motivated, so I decide I better face the music. I tiptoe over to the door and peer out the peephole. The view is blurry and more distorted than normal thanks to some condensation trapped inside. Despite that, I’m pretty sure I can see a woman standing there. I don’t recognize her, and her clothes, polished and professional, are too nice for her to be from the electric company or the city water department. She’s clutching what looks like one of those thick leather pad folios that lawyers have.

  “Shit,” I mutter, then take a few steps backward. A lawyer? What could a lawyer want with me? Sure, last month’s rent came in a few days late, but I still paid it. And this month’s isn’t due for another couple of weeks. I know, because the date is circled on my calendar several times in red pen. I don’t know what will happen if I get evicted from this apartment, but it won’t be good.

  “What is it?” Lainey asks, and I wave my arms wildly to shush her.

  There’s another hard knock on the door, this one louder than the first, and after a beat of silence, a voice calls out, “Maritza? Maritza Reed?”

  Okay, this is bad. Usually, people who come to the door are looking for my mom, and I can smile and put on my youngest-sounding girl voice and weasel out of whatever it is. But getting out of someone looking for me? That’s not a strategy I have in my arsenal.

  “Maritza, I heard the TV. I know you’re in there,” the female voice says. It has a touch of a southern twang that she’s trying to mask with sounding official. “I promise you’re not in trouble. I just need to talk to you.”

  I tiptoe back across the living room toward Lainey. “You should go out the back,” I say. I try to make it sound like I’m trying to protect her, but really I’m just protecting myself. At this moment, I wish I’d told Lainey right away, even called her the moment I realized Mom had actually gone. Why didn’t I? Maybe because I didn’t really believe she’d actually left, and by the time I did, it felt too weird to admit that my mom had abandoned me. And it definitely wasn’t as tragic as all that. So I was living alone. So what? Other than the need for money, which I was handling, it wasn’t that bad. Besides, Lainey has her own problems. I didn’t want to burden her with mine.