Nixie Ness

by Claudia Mills

  “Hi, Nixie!” Elyse was the first to greet her, as if she was Nixie’s friend as much as Grace.

  “Hi, Nixie!” Grace said. “You guys totally have the cutest cookies and the yummiest-looking cake!”

  Nixie let herself return Grace’s smile. That was exactly what a best friend would say. Best friends were supposed to think everything the other person did was the best.

  “They’re almost as cute as our puppy cupcakes,” Nixie agreed. It didn’t hurt to give Grace a reminder of the fun the two of them had shared before Nixie’s mother’s bombshell had ruined their lives three long weeks ago.

  “Let’s get smiley-face cookies and some cake,” Elyse said. “Dad? Can Grace and I get both? Extra snacks because we’ll need extra energy to stay up extra-late at our sleepover?”

  No.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  But when Nixie stole a glance at Grace, Grace’s cheeks were flushed and she was staring very hard in the opposite direction.

  How could Grace do this to Nixie? She wouldn’t, she couldn’t.

  Nixie stood absolutely still, shock frozen on her face, like an emoticon Popsicle—arms, legs, mouth encased in a block of ice that would never ever thaw.

  Then Grace and Elyse headed off to select more sleepover snacks at other tables.

  Suddenly Nixie unfroze, the rage inside her hot enough to shatter the ice and send shards of it flying across the room.

  She dashed over to where Grace and Elyse were admiring another team’s alphabet-shaped cookies and double-fudge cake.

  “Your mother doesn’t believe in sleepovers!” she accused Grace.

  Grace avoided meeting Nixie’s eyes. “We wore her down,” was all Grace said.

  We wore her down?

  How had Grace and Elyse turned into we? Why hadn’t Grace ever worn her mother down with Nixie?

  Nixie hurled the next words at Grace: “The only reason you go to Elyse’s house is because your parents are too poor to send you to after-school camp with everybody else! Her family felt sorry for you!”

  It was the worst thing Nixie had ever said to anyone.

  And she had said it to her best friend.

  Her former best friend.

  Grace’s face crumpled.

  “That’s not true!” Elyse glared at Nixie and wrapped a protective arm around Grace’s shoulders.

  The way a true best friend would do.

  Nixie wanted to run away from the bake sale, to run away from cooking camp, to run as fast and as far as she could go. But if she ran away, Colleen would call her father again, and her parents would be even madder than when she had lied about being sick.

  Slowly she walked back to the bake sale table, where Vera, Nolan, and Boogie stood gaping at her, apparently wondering what was so urgent for her to tell Grace that she had raced off, abandoning them.

  “Is everything okay?” Vera asked.

  “Of course!” Nixie said brightly. “Everything is completely wonderful.”

  But she knew it wasn’t only Nolan this time, but all three of them, who knew she was lying.

  THUNDERSTORMS canceled the soccer game on Saturday morning. At least Nixie wouldn’t have to see Grace and try to figure out what to say to make up for what she had said yesterday. Had Grace told her parents? Would they call Nixie’s parents? Nixie knew both sets of parents believed in letting kids work out their quarrels without adult interference. But this was bigger than one little squabble. This was the end of everything.

  “I have an idea,” her dad said, as rivulets of rain streamed down the kitchen windows. “How about I take you and Grace bowling?”

  For a moment Nixie let herself have a tingle of hope. Grace loved bowling. But then she remembered the stricken look on Grace’s face at the bake sale.

  “Grace doesn’t want to be my friend anymore,” Nixie said, as if she was reporting one more fact from a long list of true statements: It’s raining today. Soccer is canceled. Grace has a new best friend now.

  “Really?” her dad asked, sounding skeptical. “What happened?”

  “What happened is that Mom got her new job, and I had to go to cooking camp, and Grace goes to Elyse’s house now, and Elyse has a kitten, and my parents won’t let me have a dog. That’s what happened.”

  Even as she said it, she knew there was one huge, hideous, horrible thing left off the list.

  And I said something so mean to Grace that she’s never going to forgive me, ever.

  Her dad raised an eyebrow. “You and Grace have been good friends for a long time,” he finally said. “I don’t think a friendship like that ends because of somebody else’s kitten. Let’s give her a call and see if she’s up for knocking down some bowling pins on a rainy morning. What do you say?”

  If Nixie said anything more, she’d start to cry. So she scrunched her eyes shut, pressed her lips together, and shook her head back and forth. No. No. No. No. No!

  “Okay,” was all her father said.

  But nothing in Nixie’s life was ever going to be okay again.

  * * *

  On Monday morning Grace didn’t exchange a single glance with Nixie during math or spelling or stand in her usual spot next to Nixie during yoga stretches in P.E. She acted as if a person named Nixie Ness didn’t even exist.

  At lunch Nixie couldn’t make herself carry her lunch to Grace and Elyse’s table, formerly known as Grace and Nixie’s table. She stood uncertainly clutching her purple-pansy lunch bag, looking around for somewhere to sit instead.

  Across the room, Vera waved to her.

  As Nixie slipped into place beside Vera, she was grateful Vera didn’t say, I thought you always ate with Grace, so Nixie didn’t have to say, That was then. This is now.

  She listened as Vera talked about how sad she was that this was the final week of cooking camp, but how excited she was that they were going to be cooking the stupendous foods for their grand finale Trip Around the World.

  “It sounds like fun,” Nixie agreed, to be polite.

  But nothing could be fun when your best friend was gone, and it was your fault, and there was no way you could ever make it right again.

  * * *

  Chef Michael explained the plans for Trip Around the World Week. Monday: Italy! Tuesday: Mexico! Wednesday: West Africa! Thursday: India! Friday would be the gala Trip Around the World Feast. Campers would get two guest tickets each to invite family members or friends.

  “My mom’s going to come,” Vera told her teammates once Chef Michael had finished talking. “But I sort of wish she wouldn’t.”

  “Why?” Nolan asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that she’ll want to know exactly which foods I made, and she’ll want them to be better than everybody else’s foods. And she’ll call Boogie Brewster.”

  “That’s okay,” Boogie reassured her. “My mom calls me Brewster sometimes. Well, only when she’s mad. Well, I guess that’s pretty often. Anyway, my mom’ll want to come, too, but I have three little brothers who’d have to come with her, so I guess she can’t.”

  “Why don’t you go home after school if your mom’s there with your brothers?” Nixie asked.

  “I used to, but my mom said I could do the camp stuff this year because it sounded like such a blast.” He lowered his voice: “Plus, I think she wants me to burn up some energy, if you know what I mean.”

  Nixie and Vera exchanged a grin.

  “You can have my extra ticket,” Vera told Boogie. “I just need one for my mom.”

  “You can have one of mine, too,” Nolan offered. “I don’t need any. My parents can’t ever take off from work, and my big sisters are busy with their own stuff.”

  Nixie took a deep breath, then the words came tumbling out. “I would have invited Grace, because she used to be my best friend, but now she’s not, so I have no
one to invite, either.”

  There. She had said it out loud to her whole cooking camp team. She wondered what they’d say, or if they’d say anything at all.

  “You could invite her anyway,” Vera said slowly. “Just in case.”

  Nixie shook her head. “She only likes Elyse now.”

  “Invite Elyse, too!” Boogie suggested. “Everyone likes free food!”

  This time Nixie gave another eye-scrunching, lip-pressing head shake. “You don’t understand. I said something terrible to Grace. Like, really terrible. Really, really terrible.”

  “Have you told Grace you’re sorry?” Nolan asked.

  Nixie stared at him. How could someone who was so brainy and brilliant, who knew so many facts about everything, ask something so dumb, dumb, dumb? She could tell Grace a million times that she was sorry, in a million different ways, but it wouldn’t change a thing.

  She didn’t have to answer Nolan, though, because Colleen swung by their station and handed them two feast tickets apiece, except to Nolan, who only wanted one to give to Boogie.

  Nixie wanted to rip her tickets into tiny confetti pieces and toss the whole handful at Vera, Boogie, and Nolan so they’d stop looking at her with their sympathetic, worried eyes. But instead she shoved the tickets into her back jeans pocket, not caring if they got bent.

  She’d go ahead and take their advice so they’d see exactly how useless and pointless it was.

  She’d invite Grace to the Trip Around the World Feast. Not that she’d come.

  She’d invite Elyse, too. Not that Elyse would come, either.

  She’d apologize to Grace. Not that it would make any difference.

  Or—maybe—maybe—it would?

  What if Nixie made Grace the best, yummiest, cooking camp apology ever?

  IT was Thursday, India day, and Nixie’s team was making saag aloo, which Nixie had never heard of until that afternoon. She hadn’t even known what the two words meant. Saag? Aloo? Nor had she ever tasted any of the spices used to make it: garam masala, turmeric, cumin seeds.

  But now she knew: saag was spinach, aloo was potato, and the spices, when she sniffed them, smelled delicious.

  Nolan had heard of saag aloo, of course, not only because Nolan had heard of everything, but also because his parents were from India, and his grandparents still lived there, in Delhi.

  “Saag paneer is spinach with cheese,” he told the others. “Saag gosht is spinach with goat or any kind of meat.”

  “Spinach with goat?” Boogie asked.

  Nixie hoped he wasn’t going to say Yuck! She could tell Nolan wanted them to like India day. And she did.

  She had liked every day of the Trip Around the World. Vera had chopped the garlic and onions for Monday’s lasagna with surprising speed. Boogie had kept his fingers out of Tuesday’s enchilada filling. Nolan had shared extra-fascinating facts about Nigeria and Ghana as they made African nut stew and jollof rice (rice with all kinds of yummy things in it like onions, green peppers, and ginger) on Wednesday.

  But Nixie couldn’t love Trip Around the World Week with her whole heart because she hadn’t apologized to Grace yet. She kept waiting for the special alphabet-letter cookie cutters to arrive by express mail.

  Please, please, please, please, let the cookie cutters come today!

  The whole Apology Plan depended on them, and Nixie didn’t have a Plan B. Actually, this new Plan was really Plan D, her fourth and final Get Your Best Friend Back Plan. Plans A through C—making Grace a healthy lunch, starring in an online video, and pretending to be sick—had all failed. If the apology failed, too, Nixie was out of Plans completely.

  Please, please, please, please, let this Plan work!

  The Trip Around the World Feast was tomorrow.

  “India has over a billion people,” Nolan said, as he stirred the spinach they were “wilting” in a big pot on the stove. Nixie would never have guessed how much a huge box of fresh spinach shrunk down when it was cooked for just a minute or two. “Guess how many languages are spoken there?”

  “Ten!” Boogie shouted.

  “Fifty?” Vera guessed.

  “Well, it depends on what counts as a language, and the number keeps changing, but it’s hundreds,” Nolan told them.

  “Wow!” Nixie said.

  It was exciting to add the unfamiliar spices to the simmering onions, garlic, ginger, and tomato, to be making food from such an amazing country, on the other side of the world, where a billion people talked to each other in hundreds of different ways.

  But right now Nixie just needed to say I’m sorry to one person in the only language she knew.

  * * *

  The instant her father pulled the car into the garage, Nixie leaped out and ran to the mailbox. The cookie-cutter package was there!

  “I have to bake some cookies,” Nixie told him. “I have to bake them now. Like, right now. Before we make dinner. Before we do anything.” She and her dad could eat whenever they wanted to; her mother was working at the bookstore until it closed at nine.

  “Whatever you say, Nix,” her dad said good-naturedly.

  She hadn’t told her parents exactly why she needed the cookie cutters, but she knew they knew it had to do with whatever had happened with Grace.

  Nixie had prepared the cookie dough earlier in the week and chilled it in the refrigerator. Now she sprinkled flour on a long piece of waxed paper spread out on the kitchen table. With a floured rolling pin, she flattened the dough to an even thinness. She had already figured out the message she was going to make with the cookies. The recipe was supposed to make four dozen cookies—forty-eight—and she cut carefully to squeeze out one letter more.

  The cookies looked beautiful once she had frosted them in stripes and polka dots of five different colors, even though the F in FRIEND broke and she had to use extra frosting to stick it back together. She found a box in the garage, lined the bottom with foil, and spread out the letters:

  I AM SORRY

  FOR THE MEAN THING I SAID

  PLEASE BE MY FRIEND AGAIN

  Then she took the cat cookies she had baked yesterday for Cha-Cha (star-shaped because she didn’t have any fish-shaped cookie cutters) and layered them in a shoe box covered with pictures of cats cut out from magazines. She slipped the two Trip Around the World Feast tickets into an envelope decorated with hearts and flowers and taped it onto the side of the alphabet-cookie box.

  It was the best she could do.

  “Can you drive me to Grace’s?” Nixie asked, once she had gobbled down her father’s chicken stir-fry which didn’t taste anywhere near as good as their saag aloo.

  “Sure,” her father said. As Nixie carried the boxes to the car, balancing the cat-cookie box carefully on top of the apology box so as not to jostle a single frosted letter, he added, “I’m proud of you, honey.”

  “For what?” She hadn’t done much to make anybody proud of her lately.

  “For trying to fix things with Grace and make them right again.”

  At Grace’s house, Nixie wanted to set the cookies on the doorstep, ring the bell, and race back to the car. But she couldn’t do that with her father sitting at the wheel watching her. He’d hardly be proud of her then.

  Her heart thumped inside her chest like a hollow drum as Grace’s mother opened the door.

  “Why, Nixie,” Grace’s mom said, her voice rising with surprise.

  Surely Grace had told her mother the terrible thing Nixie had said. Did Grace’s mother hate Nixie now, too?

  “I baked these for Grace,” Nixie blurted out. “Elyse can have some, too. Everyone can have some. And I baked cookies for Cha-Cha, but nobody else should eat any because they have tuna fish in them, and who, except for a cat, would want to eat fishy cookies? And the envelope has two tickets for the big cooking camp feast tomorrow. And I hope Grace and Elyse can co
me.”

  And I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope Grace will be my friend again.

  “Don’t let the letters get messed up!” Nixie told Grace’s mother. “Okay? Keep the box really level. Okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Grace’s mother said. She opened her mouth to say something else, but Nixie couldn’t bear to hear it.

  She thrust the boxes at Grace’s mother and, swallowing back tears, fled to the car.

  * * *

  Grace wasn’t at school on Friday.

  Nixie’s heart twisted like a wrung-out dishrag. Had there been something wrong with the cookies? Had her eggs, even baked, been the bad kind that gave people salmonella poisoning? Maybe Grace was sick, dying, even dead, and Nixie would be a murderer, and no one would believe she hadn’t done it on purpose, and she’d go to prison for life.

  Plan D would be the hugest failure of all: D for a devastating, distressing, depressing disaster.

  Maybe she should ask Elyse if she knew why Grace wasn’t at school. But Nixie could just imagine Elyse snapping that she wasn’t going to answer questions for anybody who could say something as mean as what Nixie had said to Grace on the bake sale day.

  “Are you okay?” Vera asked Nixie at lunch. “You look kind of—I don’t know—jumpy.”

  Vera would be jumpy, too, if she was about to be arrested for giving someone salmonella poisoning.

  “I’m worried about Grace,” Nixie confessed. “I baked some cookies for her—to apologize, the way Nolan said to do—and I took them to her house yesterday, and now she’s not at school. What if my cookies made her sick?”

  “Your cookies wouldn’t make Grace sick,” Vera reassured her. “Not unless she got a stomachache from eating all of them, and nobody would do a piggish thing like that except for—”

  “Boogie.” Nixie finished the sentence for her. Even though she might be going to jail for life for poisoning her former best friend, Nixie found herself giggling, and Vera giggled, too.