On the Back Burner

by Diane Muldrow

  Now Amanda was glad she hadn’t made cheerleading. Angie Martinez was on the team, and she was Amanda’s least favorite person in the world. Angie was really nasty to Shawn’s other friends, particularly Amanda, and it made Amanda furious. Shawn wished that all of her friends would get along, but it was starting to seem like that would never happen.

  “I already feel like I’m losing a best friend,” Amanda said quietly—so quietly that no one heard her. She got up and moved away from the table.

  “You are also a Gemini,” Sonia said as she turned to Molly, “so you’ve already heard all about that. Let’s see what your future holds.” Molly presented her palm. “Hmmmm,” Sonia murmured. Once again, her face darkened. “I see heartbreak here. Not your heart, though. You will cause someone’s heart to break. Your sister?”

  “No way!” Molly cried. She would never hurt Amanda.

  “Yes, it is your sister,” Sonia insisted.

  “That will never happen,” Natasha told Sonia. “Molly and Amanda are too tight for that.”

  Sonia shrugged. “This is what I see. It is your choice whether or not you believe it.”

  The room fell silent.

  Oh, great, thought Amanda. First I lose my best friend, now my sister’s going to break my heart? This fortune-telling thing was such a bad idea. She turned to the rest of the group. “Well, this is all make-believe, anyway,” she said with a bright smile. “I’m gonna put our pizzas in the oven.” She quickly turned and went to the kitchen. The rest of the girls looked at Sonia, a little embarrassed. But Sonia just smiled.

  “She really is a Gemini—a moody one!” Sonia said lightly. The girls laughed. Then Sonia’s voice turned serious. “None of you should be upset by what I’ve said tonight. Please, tell your sister that,” Sonia said, turning to Molly. “Psychics and prophecies can give you insights to the future, but each individual controls his or her ultimate destiny. Where your future takes you depends on the choices you make. It’s up to you.”

  Well, I’ll just have to make sure that I don’t do anything to break Amanda’s heart, that’s all,” Molly said, getting up from the chair. “No big.” She would never intentionally hurt her twin sister.

  Now she’d have to be extra careful that she didn’t do it unintentionally.

  Chapter 2

  After Sonia left, the girls joined Amanda in the kitchen. She was removing two steaming pizzas from the oven, one with mushrooms, the other smothered in bright green broccoli and spicy pepperoni.

  Wow, I can’t believe I made these, Amanda thought to herself, feeling happier. They look so—professional.

  “That looks so good!” Peichi cried. “I can’t wait to eat that pizza!”

  “Thanks for making these, Amanda,” Shawn said kindly. The girls felt a little bad that Amanda had gotten two bad fortunes, and they wanted to be extra nice to her to make her feel better. “I’ll run downstairs and get the soda!” The girls had borrowed some money from Shawn’s Grandma Ruthie to buy a small fridge, which they kept in the Moores’ basement. They used it to keep their supplies separate from the Moores’ household food—especially from the twins’ seven-year-old brother, Matthew, who always seemed to be eating!

  “This is the best birthday I’ve ever had,” Natasha told them. “Thanks, you guys. No one’s ever done this for me before.”

  “Is it safe to come back down?” Mrs. Moore called from the top of the stairs.

  “I think so,” Amanda shouted in reply. “That crazy fortune-teller left.”

  Mrs. Moore came down, along with Matthew and the family’s tiger cat, Kitty. “What’s for dinner? Matthew asked. “I’m starving.” He grabbed his stomach and pretended to faint from hunger.

  “Hmmm, let’s see...” Molly said playfully. “There are chips and pretzels, caramel popcorn, birthday cake, and these delicious pizzas, fresh out of the oven. Mmmm. Don’t they smell good? Oh, wait!” she exclaimed, acting surprised. “This food is for the birthday girl only! Guess you’ll have to eat that leftover meatloaf, Matthew!”

  Matthew’s jaw dropped. “Aw, no way!” he yelled. “Mom!”

  “Don’t worry, Matthew,” Natasha said, smiling. “I’m the birthday girl, and I say you get some pizza. Cool?”

  “Cool!” he said, giving her a high-five, his freckled face breaking into a huge grin. Natasha smiled back at him. For the first time in a while, she felt truly, really, completely happy. She remembered how absolutely unhappy she’d felt not very long ago. Just two weeks ago, in fact, she’d revealed to her friends that she was adopted. It was something she herself had only learned about a year ago. When her parents had told her, it brought up so many confusing questions. She became filled with envy for other girls who lived with their birth families, whose lives weren’t full of secrets and unanswerable questions, and the envy made her feel sick inside.

  Finally, Natasha decided to tell her friends the truth. Once the secret was out, it was as if a terrible weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Though she was starting to understand that her real parents were the ones who had adopted her, who’d loved and cared for her since she was a baby, Natasha still had questions. But it all seemed less important now that it wasn’t a deep, dark secret she was carrying around inside her.

  “Thanks, Natasha, that’s very sweet,” Mrs. Moore said. “But we’re going to have dinner with the Baders. Otherwise, Matthew would probably eat all of this pizza himself!”

  “You’d better save me some cake!” Matthew said.

  “We’ll save you one piece of cake,” Amanda promised.

  After dinner the girls put together a plate of cookies and brownies, a big bowl of chips, and some sodas, and went upstairs to the large room the twins shared. One at a time, each girl went to the bathroom to change into her nightshirt or pajamas. Shawn, Peichi, and Natasha laid out their sleeping bags.

  Amanda took out her flowered case filled with nail polishes of all different shades. “Help yourselves,” she told her friends. “Here’s the clear polish for you, Molly.” She giggled. “Since your nails are all chewed up, that would probably be the best.”

  “I don’t want nail polish,” Molly protested.

  “Use it,” insisted Amanda. “It’ll help you stop biting your nails, since polish tastes terrible. Here, Molls, I’ll paint your nails for you.”

  For the next hour, the girls painted one another’s fingers and toes. They giggled and talked about people they knew from school. Shawn told them a scary story about a girl who always wore a scarf around her neck—until her head fell off one day when some kids yanked off her scarf!

  “Ew! That’s disgusting!” Peichi cried with a laugh.

  “And it makes no sense,” added Natasha. “There’s no way that a scarf could hold somebody’s head onto their body. Plus, they would be dead if their head wasn’t attached!”

  “It’s not supposed to make sense,” said Shawn, laughing. “It’s just supposed to be scary!”

  “Oooh, I know a good story,” Peichi began.

  “No, no more horror stories,” pleaded Amanda. “I’ll have nightmares. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “I’ll read from my new astrology book,” suggested Natasha. “Let’s see...it says here that a Capricorn—that’s me—gets along best with Scorpio, Leo, Aquarius, and Cancer.” She looked at all of them, trying to remember their signs. “None of you are those signs,” she realized. “Oh, well, I like you all anyway.”

  “Let me see that book,” Peichi requested, taking the book very carefully so she wouldn’t smear any of her sparkly blue polish. “I’m Sagittarius, which means I get along with Aries and Leo. So I should get along best with Shawn.”

  “And we do get along,” Shawn said.

  “True, but I don’t get along better with you than with the rest of the group,” Peichi pointed out.

  “Maybe this stuff just isn’t real,” Natasha said, feeling her sensible side resurfacing. “I mean, it’s fun, but we shouldn’t be taking it all that seriously.” />
  “I know what you mean,” said Molly. “I don’t believe in those predictions, either. I’d never break Amanda’s heart.”

  “You’d better not,” Amanda teased. “How could you possibly break my heart? We share everything. And we definitely tell each other everything.” Still, Amanda couldn’t stop thinking about how Sonia seemed to know exactly how she was feeling about Shawn.

  “What I want to know,” Shawn said, “is how Sonia knew that I’m involved with cooking. And she seemed to know that it’s just me and my dad.”

  “This kind of horoscope isn’t the only horoscope there is, you know,” Peichi said. “The Chinese have a different set of signs based on what year you were born instead of what month.”

  “That’s neat,” Natasha said. “We all have the same sign!”

  “Well, not exactly,” Peichi corrected her. “Amanda, Molly, Shawn, and I have the same sign. But your birthday is January thirteenth—that’s before the Chinese New Year happens, Natasha, so your sign is for the year before.”

  “Oh, that figures.” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. Just when I think I’m finally the same as everyone else, I find out I’m still different! she thought to herself.

  “But Peichi, according to the Chinese horoscopes, almost everybody born in the same year would be sort of similar to one another,” Molly said. “But Amanda and I were born just minutes apart and we’re not that much alike, except for our looks.”

  Peichi shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what they say. Listen, you guys, Chinese New Year is coming up. It’s only two weeks away! I’m so excited! At the end of the holiday, it’s a tradition that friends and relatives come over for a big dinner. My parents said that this year I could invite some of my friends over! Do you all want to come?” Peichi took a deep breath after talking so fast, and all the girls giggled.

  “Absolutely,” Amanda said, blowing on her bright red toes to dry them.

  “That sounds great,” Molly agreed. “But why isn’t Chinese New Year celebrated on January first?”

  “The traditional Chinese calendar is different from the western calendar. We don’t do all that A.D. and B.C. stuff, which means we count the years differently,” Peichi explained.

  “I get it,” Molly said. “It sounds really cool, Peichi. It’s so awesome that last month we went to Natasha’s for Hanukkah, and next month we’ll be at your house for the Chinese New Year”

  “I love Chinese food,” said Shawn. “Who will be doing the New Year’s cooking at your house, Peichi?”

  “My whole family! Everyone contributes to the meal. And here’s the big thing,” Peichi said eagerly. “My parents said that you guys could cook with us, if you want.”

  “Cool!” Amanda said. “Would we cook at your place or at your grandparents’ in Chinatown?”

  “I’d love to go to Chinatown,” said Natasha. “I’ve only been there a few times with my parents. Manhattan is so big! Sometimes I get a little nervous there.”

  “I like it better here in Brooklyn, too,” Molly agreed.

  “Not me,” stated Amanda. “I love Manhattan. That’s where all the excitement is—the theaters, the TV studios. And all the celebrities! The minute I’m finished with college, I’m getting an apartment in the city.”

  “Hey, I thought we planned to live together after school,” Molly reminded her. “I don’t want to live in Manhattan.”

  “You have to,” Amanda said slowly as a sly look came over her face. “If you don’t you’ll break my heart.”

  “Oh, great!” Molly cried, throwing her arms wide. “Now she’s going to hold that over my head for the rest of my life so she can get me to do whatever she wants.”

  Everybody laughed. “No, I won’t,” insisted Amanda. “We’ll flip a coin. Or maybe I’ll find some amazing apartment in Manhattan that will convince you to live there!”

  “Wouldn’t that be so cool?” Shawn asked.

  “You can live with us,” Amanda said. As long as you don’t bring Angie with you, she thought.

  “I want to live with you guys, too,” Peichi said. “And so does Natasha. We could cook gourmet meals and deliver them all over New York City! Amanda could go on auditions in the theater district. Natasha would be at the TV studios in the West Fifties every day since she’s going to be a TV star. And Molly, Shawn, and I would go to Yankee Stadium and watch ball games whenever we weren’t cooking or delivering food!”

  “It sounds great,” Molly said. “Maybe we could even have our own restaurant. That would be awesome. I wonder if it will ever really happen.”

  “We should get Sonia back here to ask her,” suggested Shawn.

  “I wonder if she believes the things she says or just makes them up,” Amanda said. She still couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling she had from Sonia’s predictions.

  “I think it was real.” Shawn said. “She seemed to really be concentrating, and she never changed her story or backed down. It was like she saw what she saw, and that was it. If she were only making it up, wouldn’t she have given everyone a good fortune that they wanted to hear?”

  “I got the only really positive fortune, and I don’t even want to be a TV star,” Natasha said.

  “You don’t?” Amanda asked. “I do. I’ll take your fortune, then. It beats losing your best friend.”

  “She only said you’d feel like you were losing your best friend,” Shawn reminded her. “She didn’t say you’d actually lose your best friend.”

  Amanda wondered if Shawn knew that she was the best friend who would be lost. Shawn didn’t seem to be worried about it, though. But the more Amanda thought about it, the more certain she became that Shawn was the one Sonia had been referring to.

  “Anyway,” Peichi said, changing the subject back to Chinese New Year. “Ah-mah said she’d give us a cooking lesson next weekend, if you guys want.” Ah-mah was Peichi’s grandmother.

  Awesome—another guest chef, just like Grandma Ruthie,” Shawn said. A few months ago, Shawn’s dad had taken a long business trip to Australia. Shawn’s Grandma Ruthie had stayed with her in New York, and she had taught the girls how to cook Southern food, her specialty. The clients loved it!

  “Ohhh! I almost forgot!” squealed Amanda, reaching for her backpack. She pulled out lots of little tubes and jars. “I bought this glimmery lotion at the drugstore. And I got some free samples of these cool masks and moisturizers. We can each try a different one!”

  “Awesome!” Shawn exclaimed. She, Peichi, and Natasha grabbed the brightly colored tubes and rushed off to the twins’ bathroom to try them out. As Shawn left the room, Amanda sighed heavily. She couldn’t stop thinking about Sonia’s prediction—about losing Shawn.

  “Don’t worry, Manda,” Molly said, putting her hand on Amanda’s arm. “You’re right, it’s all make-believe. And no matter what, you’ll never lose me.”

  Chapter 3

  On Sunday afternoon, Peichi walked home from the sleepover. She yawned. The girls had been up really late, talking until four o’clock in the morning, and even though they’d slept in past noon, she still felt tired. As she hiked up the sloping city block, she thought about how much she was looking forward to Chinese New Year. The fact that her parents were treating her like a grown-up—involving her in their plans, letting her invite her friends—made it seem even more special. She couldn’t wait to have her friends experience all the fun of Chinese New Year, too. And she couldn’t wait to receive ly-cee—red envelopes stuffed with money for good luck!

  “I’m home!” she called as she walked in the front door of her house.

  “So am I,” called her slim, stylish mother, coming up the front hall to her. Smiling warmly, she hugged Peichi. “How was the sleepover?”

  “It was great! Natasha was completely surprised. And I told everybody about Chinese New Year. They’re all really excited about it. They’re going to help cook and everything.”

  “I’m glad,” Mrs. Cheng said, putting her arm around Peichi’s shoulders.
“I think the holiday will be extra fun this year. Homework?”

  “A little.”

  “Go upstairs and do it now while you’re still awake,” her mother said. “I’m guessing you’ll conk out early tonight.”

  “I’m not tired,” Peichi said. Then she yawned so wide that she realized she must be more tired than she thought. She and her mother both laughed. “I guess I am a little tired,” she admitted.

  “Get that homework done,” her mother urged.

  Peichi went upstairs to her bedroom. She loved her bedroom, with its ivory chenille rug, sheer ivory drapes, fun pink Lava Lamp, and comfy, aqua leopard-print pillows. Peichi pulled her long, shiny black hair into a ponytail so it wouldn’t fall in her face while she worked. She took her social studies book out of her school backpack.

  Holding it to her chest, she bounced onto her large sleigh bed and opened the book to the assigned chapter: “British Rule in India.” The assignment was to read the chapter and answer some questions.

  Peichi got out her notebook but instead of starting on the questions, she started doodling and drew the dragon dancers that always led the Chinese New Year parades to the sounds of drums. They danced in front of shops to bring the shops good luck for the new year.

  Before I start answering these questions. I’ll just make a list of things I need to do to get ready for Chinese New Year, she decided. She pictured the crowd in Chinatown as people gathered to watch dancers performing a dragon dance. People dressed in the large costume of an Asian dragon would perform inside the suit. Exotic Chinese music would blast from speakers mounted on the buildings.

  Another image formed in her mind. She was with her friends at a market in Chinatown. Peichi saw herself pointing out the foods they wouldn’t be familiar with, like bok choy, litchi nuts, catfish, and dried bean curd. In the picture she was smiling, feeling proud. Her friends were impressed and excited to be there.

  From somewhere, Chinese music filled the street. Peichi imagined herself listening to it, being lulled by its sweet sounds...and soon she was sound asleep.