by Alex Flinn
It didn’t seem super likely that Amanda would come over with Casey to work on a project. The last time Casey had been over, she’d broken a vase in the living room doing a tour jeté, which also scared the cat so badly we didn’t see him for a couple of days. And people thought she was the quieter sister just because she dressed in pink and liked dolls.
Still, I said, “Okay,” and went to tell Mom. “Jackie’s dropping Amanda and Casey off in a few minutes. We have a project to work on, and Jackie has a makeup thing.”
I’d never lied to Mom before. Well, not about anything important anyway, just dumb stuff like who finished the toilet paper and didn’t replace the roll. Probably that was why Mom believed me.
“Let me know when she gets here. I need to talk to Jackie about driving Saturday.”
“Okay.” I knew I wouldn’t, so that was the second lie I told.
When Amanda got there, I said, “What happened?”
“Shh.” She put her finger to her lips. “Let’s go in your room.”
“Mom never came to pick us up,” Casey said.
Amanda elbowed her. “Yeah, that. Now be quiet.”
“Oh, did Jackie already leave?” Mom came up to us. “I wanted to talk to her.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I forgot.” So that was the third lie that day.
We went into my room and closed the door.
“I guess she just forgot,” Amanda said. “She’s forgetful. I called and she didn’t answer. I’ll try again.”
She dialed, and I heard the phone go directly to voice mail.
“I’ll keep trying,” she said. “I just don’t want Dad to know, because . . .”
He’d think she was doing drugs again. Which is what I thought, but I didn’t say it. I mean, moms didn’t forget to pick their kids up from school. At least, not people at our school. Maybe bad moms in movies. Moms at our school called a neighbor if they were running late and had a secret code word people were supposed to use if they picked you up unexpectedly. But I said, “You don’t want him to get mad at her,” at the same time Amanda said, “I don’t want him to think she’s doing drugs again.”
“I saw her take that pill the other day,” Casey said. “Was that drugs?” She looked all wide-eyed, like little kids do when they talk about something bad. Even though she was only a little younger than Amanda, I never remembered Amanda looking that way. Amanda was born a boss.
And she was one now. “No. I told you, that was a prescription. It was in a bottle with her name on it.” She rolled her eyes at me. “I hate dealing with people who can’t read.”
“I can read!” Casey said. “Mommy was supposed to help me with my AR book. I need to get two more points by Friday.”
“I’ll help you,” Amanda said. To me, she said, “Please don’t tell your mom.”
“Okay,” I said even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to add a fourth lie to my list. Or lie to Tim either. I mean, what if Amanda hadn’t been able to come over to my house?
I pushed the thought away. She always could.
We helped Casey with her reading book, pretending to work on a project. Then we made oatmeal scotchies. Amanda finally got in touch with Jackie, but Mom said they could stay for dinner, and she’d bring them home.
“What’d she say,” I asked Amanda.
“She had an appointment.”
“That’s what she said last week,” Casey said.
“Last week?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. Mrs. Garcia brought us home then. I just didn’t see her today. Mom forgets things.”
“Moms shouldn’t . . .” I stopped. I’d been about to say moms shouldn’t forget their kids, but I saw the look on Amanda’s face.
“I won’t call you next time.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said.
Over dinner, my dad remarked I was putting on a little weight. “Maybe lay off the oatmeal cookies,” he said.
Amanda and I exchanged a look. “Chris is bulking up for football,” she said.
One day, when I was over at Amanda’s practicing pitching and catching, her dad came out, singing, “Oh, Mandy, you came and you gave without taking. . . .”
“Stop that,” she said.
“Hey, I’m a Fanilow,” Tim said, because the guy who sang the song was named Barry Manilow.
I knew better than to sing myself. I knew not to get on Amanda’s bad side. Last week, Nolan had called her “Lardass Lasky” out on the playground. A few days later, she’d “accidentally” dropped a pudding on him at lunch. “I think you must have meant badass,” she told him after.
“You know there’s another Amanda song?” I said when Tim left. “My mom had it on the radio once.”
“Yeah, but you’re not going to sing that one to me. It’s all, ‘Amanda . . . I loooooove you.’” She imitated the group that sang it, which my mom had told me was called Boston.
“True,” I said.
“Let’s play, so you can be a better ballplayer than you are a singer.”
“That wouldn’t be hard,” I said, even though I thought I was actually an okay singer.
“No, it won’t,” Amanda agreed. “Okay, let’s play so you can be way better than stupid Nolan and make everyone sorry they didn’t let you in the majors.”
“Hey, I’m already better than Nolan.”
“That’s true.”
6
In summer, Amanda and I spent less time together. That was when Amanda played on a travel team while I went to YMCA camp, where they trapped us inside and made us play dodgeball against teams that included my brother, under banners that said Best Summer Ever. But the summer I was nine was the year I started going to sleep-away camp. That year, my mom was having a hysterectomy (“getting her plumbing removed,” my dad said), so I went away to Camp Evergreen, in North Carolina. Their motto was, “Fourteen days without a mosquito-related fatality.” No, really, it was “At one with nature,” which involved paddling canoes, hiking up mountains, and trying to catch sight of a senior girl’s boob on pajama day. The best thing about it was that Matt was going to a different camp, a computer camp in a whole different state (not that he’d see it), so no one would be there to tell the “funny” story about how I always had to poop when we went to the library (“It’s just something with Chris and books”). The worst thing was that all the hiking and kayaking weren’t helping with my plan to bulk up for football season. Dad had even said maybe I could lose some of that baby fat, and by the end of the first week, I knew he was right. My arms took on the lean look of string beans, an athletic vegetable to be sure, but to be a Junior PeeWee in the fall, with Alex and Brendan, I had to weigh at least sixty-five pounds, preferably seventy to make up for my height. Five-hour hikes and “creative” food by the chef, Zetta, who fancied herself a gourmet, weren’t helping.
But then I discovered the peanut butter. The camp had a “picky eater” table for kids who didn’t like the food. Fortunately, no one had told them about allergies, because it was peanut butter, bread, and this great, gloppy jelly that tasted like the stuff they put in Dunkin Donuts jelly donuts, so every meal, I went through the line, took a serving of yesterday’s Hamburger-Marshmallow Surprise, or We-Figured-Out-How-to-Use-Every-Part-of-a-Cow Goulash, choked that down, then ate two peanut butter sandwiches. I also bugged Amanda and both sets of grandparents for care packages. Amanda’s was the best. She managed to shove eighteen Hershey bars into a small flat-rate box. I signed up for lanyard making because it involved no exercise, and when I got poison ivy, I spent three days in the infirmary with no hikes. It worked. By the third week, I had to ask Dad to send uniform shorts in a larger size. I told him it was because they’d all gotten ripped or dirty, and he was so happy I was roughing it (he didn’t know my original size) that I felt guilty for sitting in the air-conditioning. For the first time, some kid called me fat, but I didn’t really care. I figured I’d eventually get taller. That was, after all, a big part of Mom’s ugly duckling story, that I was just a late bloomer a
nd wouldn’t always be a short little turd. And then I’d be the right weight for my height. For now, I just wanted not to be on the little kids’ teams.
When I got home, the first thing I did was weigh myself. Seventy-two pounds. That, along with my athletic ability, should make me a Junior PeeWee. The second thing I did was call Amanda. I hadn’t heard from her since the care package. I figured that was because she was too busy setting home run records, getting her fastball up to fifty miles per hour, or making friendship bracelets with ponies on them—whatever girls did on travel teams.
I wasn’t ready for what she actually said.
“Can I come over? Please? Like, can your mom pick me up?”
“Um, sure.” I didn’t think Mom would be too happy to pick her up, considering she’d just driven thirteen hours each way to pick me up from camp. “Can’t I ride my bike over? Or can your mom bring you?”
Amanda sniffed. “No, she can’t. She’s not here anymore. She’s gone.”
“What? Where’d she go?”
“I can’t talk. That’s why I want to come over there.”
“Okay. Sure.”
As predicted, Mom didn’t want to pick Amanda up. As predicted, she wanted to know why Amanda’s mom couldn’t bring her. But, finally, when I mentioned it hadn’t exactly been my idea to go away for the whole summer, she agreed.
Amanda was waiting outside when we got there. She was taller since I last saw her, maybe slimmer, and her red hair hung in messy curls around her shoulders.
“Hey,” she said when she got into the car. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“You’re always welcome,” my mother said.
Mom pulled away, and no one said anything.
After a few minutes, I said, “Um, how’s softball?”
“Fine,” Amanda said.
More silence.
“How are your parents?” my mother asked as we passed the school.
“Fine,” Amanda said.
More silence.
When we got to the house, Amanda jumped out of the car the second it stopped. Mom yelled something I didn’t hear. I was running after Amanda, across our front yard, through the hammock to our old clubhouse. It had been months since we’d been there, and the plants had grown. There were even vines attaching themselves to the table with little clawlike tentacles. Amanda pulled them off and sat down. The table itself was wet and faded and a little small now, even for me but especially for Amanda, who was taller. Soon, we wouldn’t be able to sit at it at all. Still, I squeezed into the opposite bench. “So?”
“I’m sure your mother already knows. Everyone knows.”
“I don’t think my mom knows anything about your mom.”
Amanda looked down, playing with a little puddle of water with her finger. “She was arrested.”
“Arrested for what? Drugs?” I was picturing Jackie in her cute tops and bright makeup, being taken away by the cops. “I thought she didn’t do that anymore.”
“We thought so too. I saw her taking pills sometimes, and she’d show me the bottle. It was a prescription from a doctor. But I guess she took too many of them. Like she went to more than one doctor.”
“And that’s illegal?”
“I guess so.” Amanda scrubbed the table back and forth with her hand. “It was bad after you left. Like Dad would take me to travel team because he was the coach, but when I went to a friend’s house or something, she would forget where I was and just leave me there for the whole day. I could see people getting uncomfortable, like they didn’t want to tell me to leave because it would be rude. And I didn’t want to ask them to take me home because, half the time, her car would be out in the driveway. She’d just be asleep. It wasn’t like when I come to your house and can just stay.”
She drew in a deep breath and scrubbed the table some more. The dirt she was trying to get out was obviously permanent, but I didn’t say anything.
“Plus, I didn’t want them to know how messed up she was. Now everyone knows.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Last week, two police cars came to our house, and they took her away. There were all these lights flashing, and everyone—even neighbors we never see—came out of their houses to look. Then more police cars came. I don’t know why they needed so many cars to take away one woman who was half asleep. It was like one of those shows where they bust some big drug dealer, but it was just my mom, and she wasn’t fighting or anything. She just looked tired. Even my dad, he was, like, demanding to know what was going on, but when the cop said prescription fraud, he just threw up his hands. Like, he actually threw them up, like he’d expected it. He told Casey and me to go inside. I heard him on the phone with someone, saying something about again.”
“What’d you do?” I asked, picturing it, sort of wishing I’d been there but also sort of glad I hadn’t been.
“I just went to my room and turned on the music and closed my eyes until it was over. I could still see the red-and-blue lights behind my eyelids, though.”
She put her hand over her eyes like she was demonstrating, but I thought she was wiping at a tear. I wanted to touch her somehow, but I thought she might hit me, so I just said, “Wow, that sucks.”
“So since then, I’ve barely gone out of the house except if I have to for practice or a game. It’s so embarrassing that everyone knows my own mother can’t stand to be around us.”
“What? What does that have to do with you?”
“That’s what she told my dad. My grandmother bailed her out, and when she came to get her stuff, she told my dad she was sorry but it was too much pressure. She said she felt so stressed out, and she needed to take a pill just to play with us.”
Wow. She looked down, and I knew she was crying. I reached over and touched her shoulder. She stiffened for a second, and I started to jerk my hand back. But then she leaned forward across the table and pulled me toward her.
“That’s messed up,” I said. “She’s messed up, not you.” It was something I’d heard a shrink say on one of Mom’s TV shows.
“I know, but—”
“No. It’s not you. It’s about her. She’s . . .” I searched for the right word. “She’s weak. You’re not weak.”
“I guess.”
“It’s like with my dad. He’s always working. He never spends any time with us, and he says it’s because he’s so busy at work. But other people’s dads don’t work all the time. Your dad doesn’t. My dad just likes work more than he likes us.”
“And my mom likes drugs more than she likes me?”
“Yeah.”
“Just part of being an ugly duckling, I guess,” Amanda said, and I knew I should say she wasn’t one. Someone on TV would say that. But sometimes, it seemed better just to be quiet. We sat there a minute, not talking. A car came down the street, but I knew they probably couldn’t see us through the trees, not if they weren’t looking for us. I heard a door slam from my house, and I wondered if Matt was coming out to bother me. Amanda must have had the same thought because she said, “Do you have a softball?”
“I have a baseball.”
“That’s fine. I just want to throw it. You can catch.”
We went up and got my baseball stuff. It took a while because even though my mom had supposedly been recovering all summer, that hadn’t stopped her from cleaning out the closets, but finally, we found it.
“Do you think your mom knows?” Amanda asked.
“I don’t think so. She’s been in the hospital.” I figured if my mom knew, she’d have mentioned it on our drive.
We went to the backyard. Amanda pitched while I caught. Even though it was a baseball, Amanda pitched it underhand like a softball, and it was so hard and fast my fingers ached after maybe the fifth pitch and felt like they might be broken after the tenth. I didn’t say anything, though. I just kept catching until Mom said it was time for dinner, and did Amanda want to stay. “I made tuna casserole, Chris’s favorite.” She knew it was Amanda’s favorite too.
“Okay. And my dad says if Chris wants to come over tomorrow, they could run some plays.”
“That’s nice,” Mom said. “Is that baseball?”
“Football,” I corrected her. “Tryouts are next week.”
Later, after Amanda left, I heard my mom talking to my dad. She said something about “that poor girl.” So she’d known all along.
So it turned out to be a bad year for Amanda and a good year for me after all. The year Amanda’s mom moved out for good was the year I made the Junior PeeWees. I wasn’t big enough to play defense or play much at all, but at least I was with my friends, and Tim said I had potential. “I played high school ball even though I was short,” he said. “No reason you can’t.”
7
Fourth grade was the year everyone switched best friends. They started realizing they were only friends because their parents were friends or they didn’t have anything in common. Or one person shopped at American Eagle or Pac Sun while the other still wore clothes from kids’ stores (overheard on the playground: “I’m sorry, but I find it hard to like people who still shop at Justice”). So everyone kind of shuffled, and then, like the solitaire games my grandmother likes, hearts went with hearts, clubs with clubs, everyone finding their own match.
Except us. Amanda and I were matched from the start. We didn’t get divorced in fourth grade. We didn’t split in seventh either. Amanda switched from pitching to catcher, but she didn’t switch best friends. Our friendship was like an old cell phone. Even though there were newer ones that might support more apps, you keep the old one because of the memories, the secret texts it got at night, the emotion of it. Okay, I sound like a girl, but you know it’s true.
Of course, we had other friends too. Amanda made friends with a new girl, though, a girl named Kendra, who was shortstop on the middle school’s team and also played volleyball, which Amanda had taken up. I stopped hanging with Brendan and Alex so much, after a sixth grade party that involved a really gross game of Truth or Dare, but I met some new guys on the middle school team. By seventh grade, I was playing outside linebacker. It was like Tim said, you could play if you weren’t tall, as long as you were big.