Next Door To A Star

by Krysten Lindsay Hager

  “How was the wedding?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t ask.”

  Later, I overheard her telling Reagan about having to dance with some “loser-dork” guy from the wedding party. At lunch, I ran into Asia.

  “Hey, Hadley. How are your classes going?” she asked.

  I was surprised she asked, but she was by herself, so I guess it was okay to talk to me.

  In science, Simone told me to come over tonight so we could work on our leaf papers. It had rained all weekend so I didn’t get the chance to go out and collect more leaves.

  I went to her house at four o’clock and her mom said she had left with Morgan and Pilar. I was confused because she had told me to come over at four, but I guess I wasn’t as important as her other friends. I walked over to Charlotte’s house and told her Simone had basically stood me up.

  “I can’t believe her. Well, she’s flighty, so maybe she forgot or double booked. I’ll help you,” Char said. “Grandpa, we’re going out for a walk,” she said as she pulled on her jacket. “Hadley needs leaves for her research paper.”

  “You can get some leaves in the yard, but no going into the woods,” he said. “You’re only starting to feel better and it’s too cold for you to be out too long.”

  We went around her yard, but I only found three leaves I didn’t have already. My project was due Wednesday, and I had to classify them and then iron them between pieces of wax paper.

  Charlotte gave me a book she had gotten from the nature center and I asked my grandpa if he’d help me look for leaves after dinner. We went out for a bit, but it got dark pretty fast. He promised he’d help me tomorrow, but I felt like I’d never find enough leaves and get it finished by Wednesday.

  ***

  Simone wasn’t in first hour on Tuesday. I got to science class early and finished classifying the leaves I was able to find. Reagan walked by my table and knocked Max’s project on the floor with her butt. I didn’t know if she did it on purpose, but I picked it up for him.

  “Thanks. Did you get all thirty?” Max asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “I have extras if you want ‘em,” he said, staring at his hands.

  “Seriously? Thanks. Which ones do you have?” I asked.

  He showed me a bunch of leaves and they were all ones I could use. Now I only needed two additional leaves and I’d be done. Simone came up to me after class.

  “Do you want to work on the project after school?” she asked.

  “I thought we were supposed to meet yesterday,” I said.

  “Yeah, sorry. Yesterday was crazy,” she said, brushing her bangs out of her face. “So what time do you want to get together?”

  “I can’t. I have to do something with my grandpa. Maybe Reagan can help you,” I said.

  “Reagan? She hasn’t even started hers yet,” she said. “Well, call me if you guys get back early, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said and walked over to meet Charlotte.

  Grandpa and I went for a walk and I found the two additional leaves I needed to complete my collection. Grandma ironed my leaves for me since she was convinced I’d burn my hands off if I did it myself. To be honest, she was probably right. I had never ironed anything other than my hair with a straightening iron, and even then I burned myself five times.

  Simone called during dinner to see if I was back yet.

  “Do you have any extra leaves?” she asked. “I’m missing seven.”

  “I only have a maple leaf left. Do you have one of those?”

  “Yeah. Shoot, my mom’s working late and I think our iron’s broken or something,” she said.

  “Do you want to use our iron?”

  “Could I? That would be awesome. I’ll come over as soon as I get to the ironing part. You are the best, Hadley. The best!”

  Simone showed up at my grandma’s house at nine o’clock, and I was already finished with my project. Simone was still three leaves short and she didn’t even have all of her information completed.

  “Can I see yours? You know, for help?” she asked.

  Help? Or to copy down all my info instead of taking the time to look it up on her own? Whatever. “All the information is in the book,” I said.

  “I know, but it takes, like, forever to look each one up,” she said. “This project is so dumb. It’s basically like we’re doing a little kid leaf collection and not a real research paper.”

  I wanted to say, that was the whole point—it was a mock research paper to get us ready to write a real one, but she would have had to be paying attention to the teacher to get that. Instead, I said my book was in my room, and she assumed I meant it was at the other house. It was upstairs, but I didn’t think it was fair for her to copy my information when I had to look up all the stuff on my own—especially since she had ditched me yesterday to hang out with her friends. Grandma finished ironing her leaves and Simone went home.

  ***

  I got to science class early the next day to hand in my leaf research paper. Mr. Martin flipped through it and nodded with approval. I thanked Max again for the leaves. Reagan wasn’t in class, but she had been in my first hour and at lunch. I wondered if she finished her paper. We were working with microscopes to examine the parts of a leaf and Simone pulled up the stool next to me.

  “Hi, guys,” she said. Max stared at his feet as I tried to get the leaf in focus. I asked her if she got the rest of the leaves after she left Grandma’s house.

  “I was short two leaves,” she said. “Oh well.”

  “Where’s Reagan?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t feeling well at lunch.”

  Funny, since I saw her at lunch with a tray full of ice cream and spaghetti. She seemed perfectly healthy then. Perhaps it was something about having a major paper due that made her feel so sickly.

  Mr. Martin told us to add a drop of iodine to the leaf on the slide. Max reached for the bottle and he wound up spilling it on Simone’s notebook.

  “Idiot,” she said, grabbing her sopping notebook.

  “Simone, it was an accident. You don’t have to call him names,” I said. She stared at me and then got up to get some paper towels.

  “Thanks,” Max said. “It sort of slipped.”

  Normally, I’d be irritated with Max too if he spilled something on my stuff, but at least he came through for me when I needed help, unlike a certain blonde who only ran to me when her cool friends were too busy.

  Simone came back and wiped up her notebook. Mr. Martin told her she could recopy her lab partner’s notes to make up for the ones that had smeared. I wanted to laugh. Fat chance. The only thing Reagan ever wrote down was a list of makeup to buy, or when she made a list of cute actors and ranked them in order of cutest appearance. It made me sick wondering what Nick saw in her. She was mean, passive aggressive, and superficial.

  Simone always did the labs by herself while Reagan watched. At least I would have helped if I had been Simone’s lab partner.

  Charlotte had a doctor’s appointment and left early during class. I was walking home by myself when Simone ran up to walk with me. I figured she wanted to borrow my science notes, but she asked if I wanted to do something. I didn’t have any homework, so we went to her house. She grabbed a bag of chips from the kitchen and we went to her room. I saw her bridesmaid’s dress hanging in plastic on the back of her closet door.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose but lifted the plastic up. The dress was made of icy-blue satin and it had a long skirt. She said the top had been too big and Tina’s mom had to sew little pads into the front.

  “Did you have fun?” I asked.

  “No, one of Tina’s relatives asked her who I was and she said, ‘Oh, just Simone.’ Not ‘Peter’s daughter,’ or ‘my stepdaughter’, but ‘just Simone,’” she said. “Although, I guess I would have puked if she called me her stepdaughter.”

  She said Tina kept saying she wanted to have a big family. I
thought Simone was going to cry. She pulled the plastic back over the dress and shoved it into the back of the closet. Then she pulled out her hair clip and started twisting her hair up in a bun.

  “If my grandma was still alive she wouldn’t even like Tina. She’d say Tina was fake and super annoying, but now Tina’s talking about naming a baby after her,” she said, twisting her hair. “You know, my mom was supposed to have a boy. Jacob Peter.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I stared around the room. I noticed she had put her Caroline American Girl doll in the hanging wicker chair. The doll’s hair was a mess, and someone had put eyeliner on her.

  “I have today’s episode of Charmed Lives on my DVR. Wanna watch?” she asked.

  We went into the living room and watched TV until Mom called me home for dinner.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Simone was late to class the next day. She didn’t look at Reagan or me when she sat down and she shot up out of her chair and left as soon as the bell rang. Later, I saw her sitting with Morgan and Reagan at lunch when I was in the lunch line. Asia was in line in front of me and she asked if I knew what was bothering Simone. I shrugged.

  “Her step-mom isn’t pregnant or anything, is she?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Pilar walked by and asked Asia to buy her a brownie as she went to sit down. I said I was dying for a brownie too, but there was only one left when we got to the tray.

  “Take it,” Asia said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” she said. “I’ll tell her they were out.”

  ***

  We had a test in science, so I couldn’t talk to Simone in class. Mr. Martin said we could go to the library when we were finished with the exam, but Simone wasn’t in there. I asked the librarian for a pass and went to the bathroom. I walked in and heard somebody crying in one of the stalls. I recognized the Steve Madden shoes under the handicapped stall door.

  “Simone?”

  “Go away.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. Leave me alone,” she said.

  “I’ll give you my Jack Brogger sticker if you let me in,” I said.

  “I don’t like him anymore,” she said.

  “How about my Josh Haven folder?”

  “Loser, you don’t even have one,” she said, but she pushed the door open. She was sitting on the floor, and her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips were puffy.

  I sat on the floor next to her and she told me her dad called.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said Tina’s pregnant and they’ve decided to move further away. Tina wants to live closer to her parents because of the baby, and now they’re moving four hours away to St. Clair Shores. I barely see him as it is, but now he’s gonna have his new family and I’m the leftover kid. I’m like the green thingy they put on plates at restaurants that you don’t need. No one would even notice if they stopped putting it on the plates.” Simone wiped her nose on her Forever 21 sweatshirt sleeve.

  “Have you talked to him about it?” I asked. “You know, told him how you feel about everything going on?”

  “About what? He thinks it’s great. A new house, a new baby, and now free babysitting,” she said. “Tina’s mom seems like a real pain in the butt, and I hope she’s over there all the time driving him nuts.”

  I reached up and got her a piece of toilet paper to wipe her nose.

  “One of the reasons we left L.A. was because my parents were fighting all the time. I overheard my mom on the phone one day saying their marriage counselor thought my career was causing problems. I guess my dad was mad Mom was spending all her time on the set with me, so then he started being the one to stay with me, and then there was this weirdness when my mom found out one of the production assistants on the show had been sending my dad texts.” She paused to blow her nose. “They got into a fight about it and he said my mom was always putting my career first.”

  “Is that why you left the show?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. That whole texting thing was the main reason they started fighting, but the show…the producers were talking about recasting me with an older girl. I found out about it on accident. They brought this girl in and said she was a guest star, but she looked a lot like me, but with breast implants and stuff. I mean, this girl could have been my older sister, and I had a bad feeling the moment she walked on the set.”

  “Are you sure they weren’t going to have her play your older sister or something?” I asked.

  “No, my agent found out they wanted to go with a ‘sexier, older Abby,’ but the girl had issues getting her lines memorized. They sort of put it out there that if I was willing to make myself look more like that girl, then I could keep the role.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “My agent asked me what I thought about getting my boobs done,” she said.

  “Oh, wow. What did you say?”

  Simone shifted. “I was terrified of losing my spot on the show, so I asked my mom if I could have the surgery done and she flipped.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “Mom said between that girl who kept texting and calling my dad, and then the plastic surgery thing, that the whole TV scene wasn’t healthy for any of us,” she said. “So they told me I couldn’t get the surgery. I was so mad, I like, cried my butt off. I thought it would make everything better.”

  “So you didn’t want to leave the show?”

  “No, of course not, but when I told my agent I wasn’t going to have anything done, the show said that my character had run its course and they were writing me out. And right after I left, guess who came on the show? That older, sexy brunette who plays the long lost cousin. That girl’s thirty-two and playing a sixteen-year-old. How can I compete with that? Anyway, then we moved and my mom lost the baby and they split up for good. I dunno, everything stinks. I have no career and now I have no father.”

  The bell rang and we both stood up.

  “How bad do I look?” she asked.

  I gave her a wet paper towel and she wiped the mascara that had smeared under her eyes.

  ***

  After school, I saw Simone walking with Morgan, Asia, and Pilar. She was staring at the ground, but Asia waved to me as I went to meet Charlotte. It was pouring outside and Mr. Lidstrom was outside waiting for us in his car.

  “Ladies, want a ride?” he called and we got in the backseat.

  Simone called me later during dinner. Mom told me to call her back after we were done eating, but Aunt Faith said it sounded like she was crying. I got on the phone.

  “You are not going to believe this,” Simone said. “I told the girls about my dad moving, and Morgan told me not to be such a baby.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “Well, Asia seemed worried—”

  “Asia was nice about it, but why would anybody be such a jerk when it’s obvious their friend is upset? I mean, what is Morgan’s problem?”

  “Did you get mad at her?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t say anything, and Morgan thinks it was the end of it. I’m so sick of her,” she said.

  I gave Simone my Jack Brogger sticker the next day to make her feel better. She put it on her binder and Reagan saw it when she came in.

  “You like this loser?” Reagan asked, peeling off the sticker.

  “Don’t. He’s cute,” Simone said, smoothing the sticker out.

  We had Friday reading and I brought one of Charlotte’s Jane Austen books. Pilar was in front of me and she kept flipping her ponytail and moving around until Mrs. Simpson told her to sit still and read her book. She sighed, opened her book, and folded back the cover. I couldn’t even concentrate on my book because her ponytail kept moving across my desk like a snake. I started to get into the story when the bell rang. I saw Pilar close her book and realized she had stayed on page one the entire period.

  Friday was pizza day and everyone always r
ushes to the cafeteria because they tend to run out of pizza, and the people at the end of the line get stuck with leftovers. I got in line in front of Morgan, Simone, and Asia. The cafeteria lady put the last slice of pepperoni and sausage on the counter, and Morgan and I reached for it at the same time. I would have let her have it, but it was the last piece and I got there first.

  “Excuse me, this is mine,” she said, tugging at the paper plate.

  “No, it’s mine.”

  “Morgan, she got it first,” Simone said. “Give it to her.”

  Morgan yanked the plate away and the pizza hit my leg and landed on the floor.

  “Look what you did you, you idiot,” Morgan said. “There’s sauce all over my shoes.”

  “You pulled it away from Hadley,” Simone said to her.

  “Is it ‘Adopt a Loser Day’ or something?” Morgan said, turning to look at Simone as she wiped sauce off her shoes.

  “Oh, shut up,” Simone said, and the cafeteria lady told us to move along. I grabbed a peanut butter sandwich and hurried through the line. Simone and Morgan were still standing there and arguing. One of the cafeteria workers went and walked both of them out of the cafeteria.

  Asia came over and handed me some napkins. I stared at her.

  “For your jeans,” she said.

  I looked down and realized my upper leg had grease and sauce all over it. Charlotte let me borrow her sweatpants from gym class since mine were all gross. Charlotte and Deidre walked me to science class, but Simone wasn’t there. Mr. Martin handed me my paper when I sat down.

  “What did you get?” Max asked.

  I flipped to the last page. I told him I got an “A” and he said he got an “A” too. I noticed he actually got an “A+,” but it was nice he didn’t brag about it.

  Simone came into the room and nodded at me. I mouthed, “What happened?” and she shrugged. I waited for her after class and she said Morgan had gotten in trouble for taking my lunch.

  “Did you get in trouble?” I asked.

  “No, the cafeteria lady said I was sticking up for you. Morgan may kill me though,” she said. “Wait for me after school. I might need a bodyguard.”