And I close my eyes like that will make her stop talking. Like closing my eyes will undo everything that I did to screw this up.
“Since you didn’t want to come over, Adrianne and I already planned our outfits, sorry.”
Really? I just lost my best friend all because I wanted to be a peacock. This totally blows. And all I want to do is see Hayden more than ever.
“You’ve changed Roxie,” Ally says.
She has no idea.
“Oh, and don’t worry I’m sure the rumors about Hayden aren’t true,” she giggles and then hangs up.
There are a few knocks at my bedroom door.
“Come in,” I say. Wow so formal. What happened to the family that used to just barge in my room for any reason at all? They sort of changed too. I was just gone like the span of the time for a sleep over and now, everyone is treating me weird. And what the freak was Ally talking about? What happened to Hayden?
“Hey,” Brian says. He stares at the floor.
“Hey,” I say trying to catch his eye. He never looked so down.
I think about the cage and what sometimes happens to animals that have been with humans or around them. It’s never good. And I hear Mitch again in my mind, I’ll die. He didn’t say he’d turn into a freaking puma.
Brian stares at the floor and rubs the back of his neck with his hand over and over again. “He left to save you,” Brian said. “Lola didn’t want him to go, she knew what would happen.”
“What are you talking about,” I say. Brian knowing more than me about what happened drives me freaking crazy. I need him to spill all of it. Now. I needed him to actually talk, which Brian never likes to do.
Besides, I’m the one who lost her best friend. I’m the one who killed her brother. Or at least turned him into a puma. I’m the one who woke up in a freaking cage. I’m the one that astral projected away from the one life that felt right. I deserve to know. I’ve earned the right to know. The truth. I’m the one that knows what happened on Planet Popular. I’m the one who turned into a woman overnight. I don’t need Brian filtering things from me. I kick the covers off my bed and put my robe on. My head still hangovery, not that I’d know how that feels, but the word fit me perfectly.
Brian sits on my bed and he doesn’t say a word. He just stares at the floor and keeps rubbing his neck. A Brian specialty. I’ll have to pry whatever-it-is out of him. But I just stare, like he does. I stare at my birthday cards. Mom set them all out on my desk like she does every year. This year the cards aren’t just from family. This year, there is a card from The Peacocks. The one tied to a purple and black bow. The one that says “To Roxie, Happy Birthday.”
Before my birthday, I wanted to be a peacock. I wanted to be a teenager as fast as possible, because life in-between is so incredibly boring. I was too young for all the firsts I had left to look forward to, so I just wanted to sort of skip it all and get to the good part. And because that’s what I wanted, that’s what Planet Popular gave me. Hayden told me it was different for everyone.
I thought being a peacock and being a teenager was golden, this perfect wonderful thing. I couldn’t wait to drive and to make my own decisions. But when I all of a sudden got everything I wanted, it isn’t what I imagined at all.
See, nothing is perfect. Not even peacocks. Or teenagers. Or getting to that place your think is totally golden. I can’t do anything about growing up. But I can do a lot about what I really want. And I guess I just want to be me. With weird lucky outfits. And dodo tendencies. I mean I can’t bring Mitch back from the dead, but I can turn into my own kind of peacock to honor him. And what I realize about being a peacock is that it isn’t everything. The only thing that matters is what feels right––my friends, even if I don’t have very many of them. And staying away from as many star-nosed-mole moments as possible.
But there were cool things on Planet Popular. If only Hayden and I had a chance to go on the treasure hunt, then I would have donated the Homecoming Dance money to help The Society Against Cruelty to Animals. I wouldn’t have had the power to do that unless I wore the tiara. And, I would have succeeded where Adrianne failed, if I had more time. I want to know what is buried under the X. Bad.
And then it hits me, like some sort of meteor out of the sky. That big. That epic. I have to save Mitch.
“We don’t have much time,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” Brian says.
“Listen, Mitch is in trouble and you and I are the only ones who can save him.”
Brian lifts his head for the very first time. “You know where he is?”
“Turn around,” I tell Brian. So he does without complaining at all which is as weird as me not caring about getting dressed in the same room as Brian. I get into my jeans and pull on my puma sweatshirt to remind me that I have the powers of the puma. That the puma is who I am. Who I need to be. What I’ve always been. Puma’s can’t be peacocks.
I run down the hall and Mitch’s door is locked. Double, triple, quadruple locked. I punch in a bunch of random numbers.
Brian stands so close to me as I punch in numbers that I feel his breath on my neck.
“I have the combination,” he says all calm, in a whisper.
“Well, give it to me.” I say, feeling like a fool.
“3-8-2-4-3-6-1-7-1-8”
“Got it. How the hell did you remember that?”
He raises his eyebrows when I cuss. It’s just so different being thirteen again.
“It’s Lola’s measurements, her age and Mitch’s age.”
I run into Mitch’s spookily clean room, to his desk and open the very top drawer. The skinny drawer. I grab his car keys and head for the garage. Brian’s two steps behind me.
“What are you doing?” he says.
I grab my coat out of the hall closet and bundle up.
“Look come with me or not. But I’m going.”
He grabs his coat and follows me out the door.
I press the button that beeps the car open. Mitch would never let me even touch his precious Mustang, he named Sally. Why is it that nothing can make a person angrier than a brother? That no one on the planet can embarrass a person more than a brother but when that same brother is in trouble, there’s no one who will help him faster than the sister he teased mercilessly all his life.
Somehow, and I really have no idea how, Brian and I are about to slip out of the house without alerting Mom and Dad who have been helicoptering ever since I got home, when they weren’t searching for Mitch themselves. I place my hand on the door handle and am about to pull up on the latch. But, we’re instantly surrounded. Mom walks up beside me and Dad flanks Brian with a million questions.
I slide the keys into my jean pocket so Mom and Dad won’t see. Brian gives me a look like it’s over. He stares back down at the ground and rubs his neck with his hand again and I follow him up the stairs to my room We don’t have very much time to talk. After my mom tucks me in bed, Brian walks into my room and whispers, “We tried.” Then he walks back out again.
“One more day, Mitch, just hang on,” I whisper to no one who can hear. And as I fall asleep I can’t stop wondering about Hayden. Why he hasn’t come over.
***
The next day, Mom and Dad don’t want me to walk to school, so they actually drive me. It’s ridiculous. They never drive me unless there’s a freaking blizzard, mostly because driving me makes them catastrophically late for work. They not only aren’t going to work, so they are even more helicopter-y, they’re on the hunt for Mitch too. I don’t have the heart to tell them what Mitch told me. Not until I know for sure. Not until I go back to the zoo.
Twin Day painted posters hang on the walls of the halls at school. I don’t have a twin. And normally that would be horrifying. I mean epic. Normally, if that happened to anyone at school you were instantly marked as banished from Peacockdom for the next year, until Twin Day came around again and you had a shot at proving that you had one actual friend. My problem is that my
one-and-only friend abandoned me while I was busy being the Peacock Queen.
So I wait until the perfect time to ditch. No one will notice I’m missing. I mean nobody really notices me anyway. It’s not like I’ll be leaving a twin behind. No. One. Will. Notice. I’ll be fine. I keep telling myself this over and over while I’m at my locker.
“What are you doing?” Adrianne says. I close my locker door. Adrianne stares me down. Ally stands right behind her and she slides her hands on her hips. I throw Ally an I’m-so-mad-at-you stare. A stare I never ever threw at her before. The kind I used to save for peacocks. Adrianne and Ally just look so darling in their treacherous matching ponytails and turn-coat matching jeans and blue, baby-doll t-shirts. And what’s that I see? The same highlights in their hair, fake nails and, yep, makeup. I look like a kindergartener next to them. They definitely look like high school material, not me.
The first chance I get after lunch, I sneak down the long hallway to the deserted kindergarten playground. I eye the portable classroom and the playground to make double-sure no one sees me leave the building. And I run to the bushes. I sit in the middle of the bushes staring. At the parking lot. The playground. The portable classroom. The sidewalk that leads to Chatham Lane. And back at the parking lot.
The coast is clear. I run home. Down the sidewalk to Chatham Lane. I run all the way home and when I get there I pull Mitch’s keys out of my pocket. I click the unlock button. And his car beeps. I open the driver’s side door, throw my backpack onto the driver’s seat and sit on it checking to see if I’m high enough to see over the front of the car. And I hear a scurrying behind me.
I adjust the rearview. But only see feet pounding pavement. People running. I turn around to take a peek at who’s busted me. But they already opened one of the car doors. Adrianne slides into the front seat.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
Ally sits in back. Weird.
“Mitch is missing because of me,” Adrianne says.
“No Mitch is missing because of me.” Jeez, she’s irritating. “You know everything doesn’t revolve around you,” I say.
“Listen, just go!” Adrianne bounces her knee up and down and looks over her shoulder like she expects the cops to come arrest us or something.
I was older than them up until yesterday. I was even older than Brian. And I wonder what’s in store for all of us in the next four years. Will Brian and Ally actually date? Ewww. One crisis at a time.
“It’s happening. Because of me it’s happening. All of it.” Adrianne practically spits the words out and has to catch her breath after.
I look at Ally in the rearview. She shrugs her shoulders.
And I’m freaking out looking at the garage door hoping my helicopter parents won’t come out screaming for me to stop. To stop me from saving Mitch. And make me tell them what I know. I’ll die. And, I just can’t go there. Not yet. I can’t say what he told me out loud. I put the key in the ignition and give it a turn, the engine roars. This time I know that I need to set the thingy to R before I press the gas. It’s that simple. I look for grassy knolls. And I press the gas super-slow like a grassy knoll might sneak up on me out of nowhere. And I back out of our driveway and drive down Croydon Lane, at a crawl. Going the way Ally and I have walked to school our whole lives. Roads look so much different in cars. And even though it’s just the afternoon, the sky gets black.
I click the directional to turn left down Windsor Drive. The street me and my ex-best-friend Ally used to walk to go to school together, until my peacock obsession pulled us apart. And I think about how much trouble I’d be in if a cop pulls me over, but then I think about how Mitch isn’t here and how it’s all my fault. Not Adrianne’s, like she said. And I get to the entrance of Oak Woods, the name of the subdivision where I live. The traffic on York Road is super-busy. Sweat beads up on my forehead. A finger of lightening lights up the sky. The thunder makes me jump a little in my seat.
“Which way to the zoo?” I say.
“Why are we going there?” Ally says all white-knuckled.
“Wait for the arrow and go left,” Adrianne says totally calm, like she knows where I’m headed. She knows way more than any of us.
I put my iPod in the dock and select technodancefantasyparty mix. Life is so much better with music and so irritating with a nervous best friend who thinks you’re about to kill her. It’s getting darker. A storm comes up on us fast.
“You should turn on your lights,” Adrianne says. I glare at her, she’s gnawing at her perfect fingernails.
“Ok, Mom,” I look down but I can’t find the button to turn the lights on. I look again. Nothing.
Adrianne reaches down by the radio and clicks on the headlights. “What would you do without me?”
“So, Adrianne, what’s going on?” Ally says.
I say nothing. Because, if I start yelling at Adrianne, I’ll never stop. Because I’ll yell at her on behalf of all peacocks, because it’s everything about them that makes me freaking sick. And it’s everything about myself that makes me sick too. Because I freaking fell for it. All of it. All the peacock stuff. That being popular is the be-all-end-all, that one single thing will make a puma like me happy. The fact that there is something lacking in non-peacocks because we are so pathetically ourselves. But the Adrianne I met on Planet Popular was cool. So there must be that girl down deep inside of Adrianne. Maybe she’s like me. Trying to figure it all out. Maybe Adrianne isn’t really a peacock either. Maybe she isn’t all loopy-hearty.
“I didn’t just want to be popular, I wanted to be epically popular. Famous. Celebrity famous. So, when my time came I took as many friends with me as I could. I even forced Lola to come. I used them,” Adrianne says.
Finally we drive down Forest Drive and come up to the big sign made out of bricks that reads BROOKFIELD ZOO. Rain pours over the windshield. I find the windshield wipers and click them on.
“And while I was busy using them, getting deeper and deeper into trouble on Planet Popular a freaking shadow tricked me. Instead of bringing my sister back, I brought back her shadow,” Adrianne says with tears in her eyes.
I almost miss the turn off to the parking lot.
“That violated rule number two. Shadows will do anything to escape, and you mustn’t give in to them. I gave in to Lola’s shadow.”
There’s no one in the parking lot. No one. I park anyway, by the trees, out of the way. On the edge of the lot so no one will spot Mitch’s car super easy. Damn doppelgangers. Now it all makes sense. Why Lola and Adrianne were fighting in the attic on my birthday. Why Lola is going out with Mitch. Because she isn’t Lola at all. She’s just a shadow.
“So because of my epic lameness, we all––all twelve of us, one by one, will lose our popularity. My dad and mom lost their jobs. Hayden’s voice freaks out and he can’t speak without sounding like a frog. Romulus’s face looks like a full on plague.”
I turn off the ignition, take a deep breath and open my door then slam it shut.
Adrianne opens her door and steps out of the car. “But it’s worse than that,” she says.
Nothing can be worse than my brother dying. I take off running.
Your brother fell in love with a shadow!”
“Where are you going?” Ally yells.
“Roxie!” Adrianne says. A warning I don’t slow down for.
I hear her steps coming up quick from behind, now she’s running.
I run right up to the gate and climb the tree that will help me jump the fence. The whole time Adrianne talks to me like I’m some kind of lunatic.
“See instead of Lola’s shadow taking over her animal spirit in the in-between, she trapped the real Lola and my sister’s animal spirit on Planet Popular. Lola’s shadow came back with us instead. Lola’s shadow tricked us all.”
I kept climbing.
“She said if you AP’d all by yourself there would be nobody to help you spot the light that would take you back. No one ever APs by themselves. It’s
the rule. You know why, Roxie? Because most people have actual friends.”
She is such a jerk. I was dangling from a pretty high branch when she said that and I let go hitting my feet as hard as I wanted to slap her for saying what she did. She isn’t a climber. Peacocks don’t climb. She doesn’t have the powers of the puma, the powers I do. Ally is a puma too, I know that. But she just stays by Adrianne’s side. Because she’s trying to be a peacock too. She’s trying to be what she isn’t.
I keep walking.
“You need me. I know something that will help you,” Adrianne says.
I turn around and decide whether to believe her.
“Mitch has a tattoo,” she says.
I tilt my head and stare at her trying to decide if what she’s saying is a lie or not.
13 on Halloween (Shadow Series #1) Page 16