Puddin'

by Julie Murphy

  “Malik,” I say, suddenly finding myself a little annoyed that he’s upset that I gave him a note instead of talking to him. “All I did was present you with facts. My mom doesn’t want me to date. I can’t keep sneaking around. I didn’t get into journalism camp and she didn’t even want me to go in the first place, so I’m going back to Daisy Ranch.”

  “Weight-loss camp,” he says.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “The camp you’ve sworn up and down that you’re done with?”

  I pause for a moment and then nod as I study my sneakers far too closely.

  “Millie, you love rules. It’s one of my favorite things about you. The way you find comfort in order. But whose rules are you even following?”

  I throw my hands up. “You’re telling me to lie to my mom? To keep sneaking out?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s not what this is about. I mean, yeah, you’re my girlfriend, I want to see you, but you shouldn’t waste another summer at Daisy Ranch if you don’t want to.”

  “Well, then what the H am I supposed to do, Malik?”

  He begins to pace again. “Protest your rejection to journalism camp. Or just don’t go to Daisy Ranch! Stay home this summer. Help at the gym!”

  He doesn’t know how impossible his suggestions are. “And what am I supposed to do about us?” I ask.

  His voice is tiny, but his words aren’t. “Fight for us? Let me meet your mom. I’ll do whatever it takes. But we’re almost seniors, Millie. She can’t expect to run your life forever.”

  He’s right. This last year has been this precarious balance of trying to be her little girl forever while still becoming a functioning adult. But I don’t know. My whole life feels impossible right now. Like one giant uphill battle. “I can’t make any promises,” I tell him.

  “I can,” he says. “I promise to not give up on you and to never let you give up on yourself, Millie. And that means all your larger-than-life dreams, too. But you gotta stand up to your mom. That’s where it all starts.”

  He steps forward and kisses me on the lips. It’s a silent plead. He wraps an arm around my waist, but then he pulls away too soon, leaving both of us breathless. He walks out, leaving me alone in the AV studio.

  Callie

  Thirty-Four

  If my mother were to describe herself this afternoon, she’d say she was all in a tizzy! After school, I meet her in the front office. She grabs me by the elbow, and I have to practically run to keep up.

  “Okay,” she says as she’s pulling out of the parking lot. “I’ve gotta pick up Kyla and then grab her recital costumes from Rosie Dickson. She put a rush on the alterations for us. And then I’ve gotta get dinner going somehow and get Kyla to her dress rehearsal.” She clicks her tongue. “I just hate to leave her there, but Keith won’t feed himself. Well, he will, but if he does it will be delivery pizza. And he doesn’t even order the good kind.”

  Mama and I haven’t spoken much lately except for the sake of logistics. Who’s giving me rides where. Whether or not Mitch can come over. If I’ve done my chores or if I can stay home with Kyla. It’s not that I think she’s mad at me anymore. Just a little disappointed still, and that’s turned out to be harder to live with than I thought.

  She glares up at the traffic light, willing it to change as she taps the steering wheel impatiently.

  “I can make dinner,” I say, surprising even myself. Claudia always helped out with things like dinner and packing lunches, but I’ve never been quite so domestic.

  “Pfft. It’ll be fine. I’ll just have to time it so that I’m taking Kyla while the casserole is in the oven.” She looks over to me. “Maybe with all this extra time on your hands this summer, we can finally get your driving test over with.”

  “Really, Mama, just leave me the instructions. You’ve got plenty going on tonight.”

  The light turns green and she takes off. After a moment of thought, she says, “I’ll write out each and every step in detail. It’s just King Ranch casserole. You oughta be fine.” She glances over to me. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if I did.”

  Mama runs me home and writes out detailed instructions down to every minute and measurement for her casserole. As she’s walking back out to the car to pick up Kyla, she turns back for a moment and says, “Keith won’t be home for another couple hours.” She pauses. “Callie, I appreciate this a whole lot.”

  I nod firmly. “No problem.”

  I keep waiting for this one big moment when she won’t be disappointed in me anymore, but maybe that’s not how you gain back someone’s trust in real life. Maybe it’s a slow, frustrating thing that takes lots of King Ranch casseroles, so I guess this is a start.

  Things with Mama have gotten slowly better. Since I’m not sitting with Millie and Amanda at lunch anymore, I’m back to spending lunch period in Mama’s office. She said she wouldn’t kick me out as long as I helped her file and answer phones, which is a fair trade for me. I think she knows something’s up with me and Millie, but she hasn’t pried. (Yet.)

  Today during lunch, I was sitting behind the desk while Mama ran off to the cafeteria to get a refill on her sweet tea.

  The office door swung open and someone said, “I, uh, have that doctor’s note from yesterday, Mrs. Bradley.”

  I stood up to see Bryce approaching the attendance desk. “Oh,” I said. “Hey.” We’d seen each other in the hallways a few times, and I even dumped a box of his sweatshirts, some pictures, and presents he gave me on his doorstep. But this was the first time we’d actually spoken.

  His face turned sheet white. “Um. I was just giving your mom this note.”

  I took the note from him. I wanted to say something sharp or biting, but any hate I had for Bryce is in the past, and it’s just not worth resurrecting. “I’ll pass it on.”

  He nodded. “Cool. Thanks.” He was quiet for a moment. “You look good.”

  “I know,” I said, without skipping a beat. Having those last words satisfied my ego in a very delicious way, but I still had one last thing to add. “I’m sorry about your phone, by the way.”

  He grunted. “Time for an upgrade, anyway.”

  After cooking and shredding the chicken for my mom’s casserole—can we just agree that raw chicken is just about the grossest damn thing ever?—the front doorbell rings. I sort of feel like doorbells are as useless as landline telephones. I mean, if you’re going to come over, wouldn’t you just text me? And if you don’t have my number to text me, do I even want you coming over?

  All of this flawless logic is the exact reason why I let the doorbell ring eight times before I finally shout, “What? No one’s home.”

  Then come three swift, pounding knocks on the door.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter as I check to make sure I’m not leaving the kitchen in a the-house-might-burn-down situation.

  I jog over to the door in my mother’s ruffled red-and-white polka-dot apron and swing the door open.

  “Oh, hell no,” I say the moment I see what’s waiting for me, and I swing the door shut again, locking the deadbolt and the chain.

  “Callie,” says Ellen through the door. “We come in peace.”

  “I don’t know about peace,” says Willowdean. “But could you at least pretend to have an ounce of manners and let us in?”

  “What do you want?” I shout back.

  “Tell her,” I hear Willowdean whisper.

  Ellen says something too quietly for me to hear.

  “We’re here on a mission,” Amanda shouts.

  “Not for you,” Willowdean clarifies.

  “We’re here for Millie,” says Hannah.

  “Millie who?”

  “That’s it,” Willowdean says. “Callie Reyes, I swear to Dolly Parton that if you don’t open this door, I’ll sit my ass here until your mama gets home, and if your mama is anything like mine, I’m sure she’d love to meddle all up in your personal business.”


  I huff through my nose and unlock my door one lock at a time before finally opening it a few inches. “Well,” I say, not making any motions to welcome them inside. “Let’s get this over with.”

  I open the door and find the four of them standing there with stern looks and crossed arms.

  Hannah rolls her eyes. “This is such a waste of time,” she says under her breath.

  “I agree,” I mutter as they all file in.

  In the kitchen, we all sit down at the table, but there aren’t enough chairs. “I’d prefer to stand,” says Amanda.

  I shrug and plop down into the chair I’d held out for her. “Is this some kind of intervention?”

  Willowdean looks at Ellen with big wide eyes, telling her to go first, but Ellen nudges her forward with her chin just like my mom does when she’s trying to communicate with me in a room full of people.

  “Never quite took you for the domestic type,” Willowdean finally says.

  “Are you here to offer cooking tips or for some other God-ordained reason?” I spit back.

  Hannah drums her nails, which have been colored in with black permanent marker. “No, but if you could go ahead and complete my Life Skills final and make me a casserole while you’re at it, I wouldn’t be mad.”

  Amanda sniffs the air. “It does smell pretty good in here.”

  Willowdean crosses her arms and looks to Ellen once more. “We don’t think you’re awful. And that turned out to be a really big surprise.”

  Ellen rolls her eyes. “What my girl is trying to say is that we sort of got to know you over the last few months, thanks to Millie. And, well . . . Amanda filled us in on everything.”

  Amanda leans against the counter, crossing her legs at the ankles. She digs into the fruit basket and takes an apple. “Like, right down to your necklace on the security footage at the gym.” She points at me, her eyes squinted as she bites into the apple, and with her mouth full, she adds, “By the way, I totally knew it was you who wallpapered the main hallway with that Shamrock shit list or whatever.”

  “Okay,” says Hannah, “but that was, like, super obvious.”

  “What do you want?” I ask, my tone exasperated. “I got shit to do.”

  Ellen fidgets in her seat, crossing her legs back and forth. “What we’re getting at is that somehow we started to consider you a friend.”

  “A friendly acquaintance,” says Willowdean.

  Ellen swats at her thigh before continuing. “And friends tell friends when they’re being ridiculous.”

  My eyes ping-pong back and forth between the two of them. “Friends?” I ask. “Ha! Are y’all delusional?” I know I’m playing it tough, but I can feel myself softening just a little bit. Maybe it’s the weeks I’ve spent without Millie, but this sudden, very tiny dash of . . . not kindness . . . but not awfulness . . . well, it’s tugging at my soft bits.

  “I wouldn’t push your luck,” Willowdean tells me. She pauses before adding, “At first, we—”

  Ellen nudges her.

  “I,” Willowdean continues. “At first I didn’t get what Millie saw in you.”

  “Nope,” says Hannah. “That’s definitely a we statement. Cosigned.”

  A deeply satisfied grin spreads across Willowdean’s face. “You’re kind of selfish and rude and, like, really not that funny. But then you started coming around more and . . . well, you ended up being sort of funny.”

  Amanda holds her apple up like a gavel. “For the record, I think you’re pretty damn funny.”

  “And smart,” adds Ellen. “And loyal,” she says.

  “Well, there’s something you don’t have much experience with,” I say.

  Ellen swallows hard. “You’re right. After Willowdean and I mended our fence, I was certainly not loyal.”

  “You ditched me,” I tell her, my voice flat, because I can’t risk letting her know how awful that really made me feel.

  She nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. But gosh, Callie, you also gotta know that you haven’t always been the easiest person to be friends with. Hell, if anyone was gonna crack you, it would be Millie. So I’m sorry that I just ghosted on you after the pageant, but I’m also glad that I got a chance to get to know this new and improved version of you, too.”

  “I get why you’re mad,” Willowdean says. “About Millie not telling you she was the one who recognized you on the security footage. You could say that I have a little bit of a temper, too. But would it have changed anything?”

  “I might not have made that list,” I tell them. “With all the secrets. Or wasted so much time being pissed off at the Shamrocks—girls who were my friends.”

  “Girls who let you carry that blame all alone,” says Ellen in a soft voice. “Listen, I don’t think there’s any use in pointing your anger in one direction or the other. The whole situation sucked, but it happened.”

  My arms fall limp at my sides. I hadn’t realized that this whole time I was crossing them so tight over my chest.

  Willowdean clears her throat. “And you gotta get over it. No use wasting a perfectly good friendship on yesterday’s history.”

  “And Millie needs you.” Amanda tosses the core of her apple into the trash can from across the kitchen. “She didn’t get into camp at UT, and now she’s going back to Daisy Ranch. You get what a big deal that is, right?”

  And that hits me right in the gut. I shake my head. “Oh my God. How could they not accept her? And she swore she wouldn’t go back to Daisy Ranch!”

  Amanda nods. “Exactly. I tried talking some sense into her, but if you really care about Millie, maybe you should try, too.”

  Ellen and Hannah stand up and join Amanda.

  “Listen,” says Ellen, “if you ever want to—”

  “I’m, like, super territorial,” Willowdean interjects, still sitting firmly in her seat. “Like the day we learned to share in elementary school? I was probably absent. But what Ellen is trying to say is that if you ever want to hang out . . .”

  “We don’t mind having a third wheel,” Ellen finishes. “Or a fourth or a fifth or a sixth or whatever.”

  I watch the four of them suspiciously. “Thanks for ringing my doorbell relentlessly.”

  After they leave, I slide down the door and onto the floor, still wearing my mother’s apron. Shipley sniffs me, searching for scraps, before plopping down beside me, and I stroke her soft ears.

  I can’t make my brain shut up. The dance team and whoever’s fault that it was that I was caught. Millie getting rejected by the broadcast journalism camp. Ellen. Willowdean. Hell, even Amanda and Hannah. All of it swirls around in my head and I can barely process any of it, so I do what I would do in any time of Shamrock crisis. I prioritize.

  What is the one thing I can actually fix? I don’t know if there’s anything left to salvage with Sam and Melissa. And Millie . . . well, I know I need to go to her. I gotta make it right somehow. Not just because of me lashing out at her, but I can’t let her go back to Daisy Ranch. Not after the way she talked about all those summers there and how this would be the year everything changed. She was so damn positive and determined. There are a lot of people who could probably stand to be knocked down a few pegs, but Millie is not one of those people.

  I push myself up off the floor and head to the kitchen to finish up dinner. After Keith and I eat, I set aside leftovers for Mama and Kyla.

  As I’m sitting at the desk in my room with a pen in my hand and a pad of paper in front of me, Mama knocks on my already cracked-open door. “Not bad for your first try at my King Ranch casserole.”

  I smile. “Keith said he couldn’t even tell the difference.”

  She rolls her eyes. “His taste buds are about as refined as a hog’s.” She leans against the door and crosses her arms. “I really appreciate you picking up the slack tonight.”

  I nod. “I didn’t mind.”

  “You working on some homework?”

  I slide my arm over the paper and lie. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “
Good girl,” she says. “Night, baby.”

  “Night, Mama,” I whisper as she shuts the door behind her.

  As the house quiets for the evening, I text Mitch and ask for a favor before reading over what I’ve written one last time.

  Mama,

  First, I haven’t run away. Don’t panic. I like your cooking way too much. But I’ve gone to do something important, and I’ll be gone for the next day or two. I know I’ve been all sorts of trouble lately, but I want you to know that this thing I have to do isn’t for my own sake. It’s for Millie. She was there for me when I didn’t even have the sense to know I needed her, so now it’s my turn to be there for her.

  You can be mad at me. You can punish me when I get back. I’ll spend the whole summer cooking dinners to your liking if I have to, but I gotta do this one thing. I promise to text and let you know that I’m safe.

  xo,

  Callie

  Millie

  Thirty-Five

  I lie perfectly still in my bed, holding my breath. The light scratching on the window doesn’t stop. It’s been happening for about five minutes now. Someone is outside my bedroom window.

  I’m going to die. I’m going to die at the hands of a window-scratching killer.

  “Millie,” a voice whisper-shouts.

  Then comes a light knock on the window.

  “Millie!” the voice says again.

  This time I sit up and tiptoe to my window before yanking the curtains to the side and jumping back into a boxing stance in one swift motion. What am I going to do? Box the window-scratching killer from inside my room? Well, at least Uncle Vernon might be proud.

  My eyes adjust to the moonlight as the figure in my backyard melts into focus. “Callie?”

  She motions to the window, and I step forward and slide it up.

  “What are you doing? How did you get here?”

  “Mitch dropped me off,” she says.

  I gasp. “Are you two, like, a thing? Oh my gosh. I’ve missed so much.”