“I hope she thinks so,” I said. “Do you—oh, wait, hang on. I’m getting another call.” I looked at the caller ID: REESER, EDWARD. “Sorry,” I told Lucy. “I should probably take this.”
“That’s okay. See you at my house at three?”
“Yup. See you.” I clicked over. “Hello? Monroe?”
“Chloe?”
“It’s me.” Quick, think of a compliment to give her. “Your voice sounds so professional over the phone.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said. “So, listen, do you want to go the mall today?”
“Oh, yeah, I’d love to.”
“Cool. My dad told me he’d take me, but now he has some kind of stupid business meeting.”
“On a weekend?”
“Uh-huh. And my mom’s rehearsing. So if your mom can drive us—”
“I’m sure she could.”
“Great.”
“The only thing is, I have somewhere to be at three.”
“Where?”
“Lucy’s house,” I said. “For our science project.”
“Ugh,” Monroe said. “Will Theo be there, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s even worse! Poor you!”
“I don’t mind,” I told her.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” she said. “You really need a trip to the mall. We could go now, have lunch, and you’ll be back in time.”
“I’ll ask my mom,” I told her. “And I’ll call you right back.”
A half hour later, Mom and I were in the car on our way to Monroe’s house. Actually, house was the wrong word. It was a mansion stretching three stories high, and at least three times as wide. The driveway in front was a circle, and Mom pulled around. There were trees cut in fancy twisty shapes on either side of a double-front door.
Monroe ran out and climbed into our car. “I like your house,” I told her. “It definitely looks like an actress lives here.”
“I know, right,” she said. “I’d take you in to meet her, but she can’t be disturbed when she’s in character. She doesn’t even like me to disturb her. Because if I call her ‘Mom,’ or ask her something, then she’s pulled right back out to real life.”
“I never thought about it that way. But I understand.”
“It’s cool that you do.” Mom had steered out of the driveway, and Monroe called up to her. “If you need me to tell you the way, let me know. I’ve gone to the mall about a bazillion times.”
“That’s all right,” Mom said. “Chloe and I have been there before and I’ve got it.”
But when we got to the parking lot, Monroe directed Mom to the right entrance, the one closest to all the best stores. Mom had given me twenty dollars because she thought I needed a few more pairs of underwear—thank goodness we’d had that discussion before we’d picked up Monroe. I’d also brought along twenty dollars of my own money from Grandma. Mom said she’d meet us at the same entrance in exactly two hours. Monroe had a cell phone, and Mom made her program her number in.
“You’re much more protective than my mom,” Monroe told her.
An overprotective mom was clearly not cool, and my cheeks warmed. “She doesn’t have to, Mom,” I said. “I know your number.”
“What if you get separated?” Mom said. She rattled off her number, and Monroe put it in her phone. Then Mom had Monroe send a text, so she’d also have her number, too.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“I get the hint,” Mom said. “See you in a couple hours.”
She drove off, and Monroe led the way to Look Now. I knew from when I’d visited the store with Mom the Friday before school started that it was pretty expensive. But maybe there would be something on sale. Stores always have sale racks in the back.
Monroe, meanwhile, went straight for the mannequin at the front of the store. “Oh. My. God,” she exclaimed. “Chloe! Look at these!”
The mannequin was wearing ripped stretchy pants with paint splotches all over them. A saleswoman had rushed over to us. “They’re great, aren’t they? They just came in yesterday, and they’re selling like hotcakes. But we have a few left—in each of your sizes, if you want to try them on.”
“Oh, yes!” Monroe said.
“How much are they?” I asked.
“Oh, let’s see,” the saleswoman asked, fiddling with the price tag in the back of the mannequin’s jeans. “Ninety-nine dollars. Plus tax.”
I sucked in my breath. “Wow,” I said.
“They’re hand-painted,” the woman explained.
“They’re really nice,” I said, so as not to hurt her feelings. “I just don’t have that much money.”
“Sure you do,” Monroe said. “I saw. The day we ordered pizza, remember?”
I nodded. “But I only brought twenty dollars of it with me, plus twenty from my mom.”
“If you like the way they look, I’ll loan you the money for the rest,” Monroe said. “Unless you think your mom will be mad.”
“No,” I said. “My mom says my money is mine to spend. She just won’t replace it if I make a bad choice.”
“This won’t be a bad choice,” Monroe said.
“Besides, it doesn’t hurt anything to try them on, does it?” the saleswoman said.
“No, it doesn’t,” I admitted.
“All right, come on then.” She ushered us toward the dressing rooms. Monroe picked a few other items off the racks as we went. The saleswoman, whose name turned out to be Judith, brought us the pants in our sizes, and said to let her know if we needed anything. We pulled the curtains to our dressing rooms closed.
“I’m going to count to three and we’ll both come out at the same time, okay?” Monroe asked.
“Okay.”
“One. Two. Three. Come out!”
I whipped my dressing room curtain open, and stood next to Monroe, in front of the big mirror. Her reflection was a little bit taller than mine, and her pants had a couple more paint splotches on them. But you could tell they were the same, of course. It was like being in a uniform—a really cool uniform.
“Do you love them?” she asked. “I love them.”
“I do,” I said. “But you saw them first, and I can’t get the same thing as you.”
“Rachael just said that because she knows I don’t like random people to dress the same as me. But I don’t mind if you do. You’re not random.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course not. I think I was right about you. I think you’re legit It Girls’ material.”
When she said it. I felt all lit up inside, like I’d swallowed the sun and it was glowing from the inside out. “Thanks,” I said.
“How’s everything going, girls?” Judith called from behind us.
“Great,” Monroe said. “I’m going to take them.”
“Me too,” I said.
Monroe tried on a few more things, and ended up getting the pants, plus two shirts, a scarf, and a headband. After Judith rang our stuff up, she said we should both wear our clothes out of the store, so we could be twins for the day. Not that we really looked at all like twins, but it was fun to walk through the mall dressed the same. Monroe wouldn’t want just anyone to look like her.
We had some time left before Mom was coming to pick us up, and we were both hungry, so we went to the food court for chicken fingers and french fries. There were a couple of people ahead of us in line, and a few behind us. I wondered if they noticed that we matched. If they did, that meant they were also noticing that Monroe Reeser and I were friends. I’d been chosen by Monroe, the way Lia had been by the A-Team. This time I wasn’t left out. This time I was a part of something. This time it was me.
Behind us, there was a thump, and then a woman’s voice: “Amy Lauren, stop stomping.”
“But I’m hungryyyy,” replied a little girl. Her hair was in pigtails, but they were messed up, like it was the end of a long, hard day. She drew the last word out like it had four syllables instead of just two.
Her mother’s face reddened when she saw me watching. “Sorry,” she said. “See, Amy, you need to be patient. You are irritating everyone on this line.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “If you want to, you can go ahead of us.”
“Next!” the guy behind the counter said.
“Go on,” I told Amy Lauren’s mother.
“Thank you, you’re a lifesaver,” she said, stepping in front of Monroe and me. She placed her order—two chicken sandwiches and an order of fries.
Then it was our turn. “A large order of chicken fingers, large fries, and two small sodas,” Monroe said.
The guy behind the counter punched something into the register. “We’re just out of fries,” he said. “I can ring you up now, and you can come up to the counter in five. Okay?”
“What would happen if I said it’s not?” Monroe asked him.
“Uh,” the guy stuttered, seeming flustered. “Then I guess you wouldn’t get any fries.”
It was weird that he was older than us, and he seemed a little scared of us. It made me feel a teeny bit powerful, standing next to Monroe. But then she turned to me. “You shouldn’t have let them cut in line,” she said.
It was my turn to be flustered. “Sorry . . . it was just . . . I was trying to be nice. That kid looked like she was about to cry. I’m really sorry.”
“Psych!” Monroe said. She put her arm around me. “Just kidding, twinsie. It’s no big thing.”
“So do you want the fries or not?” the guy behind the counter asked.
“Yes,” Monroe said. She paid for our meal, since I didn’t have any money left. We picked a table near the food stand and waited for our fries to be ready. When they came, they were extra good. Fresh-from-the-fryer warm, with the perfect crispy outside, and soft middle. Even Monroe thought they were worth the wait. “Can we call your mom and see if she’ll pick us up a little bit later. There’s a new movie I want to see. The one Erin Lindstrom is in. Have you seen it?”
I shook my head. “But I have to meet Lucy at three.”
“Tell her something came up.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I promised.”
“I know you love being nice to everyone,” Monroe said. “But what about being nice to me? I loaned you money for clothes, and I bought you food. And besides, you owe me, since we had to wait so long for the fries.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
“It’ll be a white lie to Lucy,” she said. “You can just tell her you have a stomachache or something.”
The truth was, right then I sort of did. I wanted to be kind to Lucy. Not just because of the Kindness Club, but also because that’s how I was. It was how I liked to be. But I also wanted to do the thing Monroe wanted me to do.
Monroe had her phone out. “I don’t even have her number,” I said.
“We can Google it. I’m sure she’s listed.”
“What if she’s not home?”
“Just leave a message. Come on. Please? For me—your clothing-twin?”
I hesitated for a second, and then nodded. “Okay.”
CHAPTER 13
Lucy was waiting for me outside Ms. Danos’s classroom. “Hey!” she called when she spotted me at the end of the corridor. She was dressed head-to-toe in different floral patterns. And by head-to-toe, I mean literal head, to literal toe: there was a homemade flower wreath on her head, and little flower buds stuck in her penny loafers, in the slots where the pennies were supposed to go. The only thing that wasn’t flowered was the fanny pack belted around her waist. It was sky blue. “I worried you wouldn’t be here today,” she said.
“Why?”
“You weren’t feeling well, you said.”
Unconsciously I placed a hand on my stomach. My cheeks warmed, and I felt like the lie was written across my face. Like instead of just ordinary blushing, the words I lied to you, Lucy had popped up in bright red.
“I’m okay now,” I said quickly.
“Great!” she said. “Because I have so much to tell you, and Theo said—” At that moment, Anjali came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, Chloe,” she said. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Our science project,” I said.
“How’s it going?”
“Fine,” I said.
“That’s good. How was the movie yesterday?”
“Um,” I said, feeling like the worst person in the world for lying to Lucy, feeling like I couldn’t even look at her. “It was okay.”
“Yeah, that’s what Monroe said.”
I could feel Lucy looking at me. I looked back, but not at her face. “We should probably go inside,” I said to her feet. “We don’t want to be late.” There were at least five more minutes before the official start of class, but I was too uncomfortable to stand there any longer.
“Yeah, okay.” The three of us headed in—Lucy to her seat in front, and Anjali and me to the back, where Monroe was waiting. “Theo wants to have a meeting at lunch today, okay?” Lucy called.
I turned, briefly meeting her eye.
“Come on,” Anjali told me.
“So, lunch?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said quickly.
At lunchtime I walked down to the cafeteria with Monroe and Anjali. We passed by the hot-lunch line—chili that day, fine with me to miss out on—and made our way to the sandwich counter. I put together the usual. Afterward, I walked Monroe and Anjali to the table in the back to say hi to Rachael, and then said good-bye to all three It Girls. Monroe insisted on teaching me a signal, in case I needed to be rescued. The signal was scratching the back of my head with two fingers. I knew it was silly. Lucy and Theo were just kids, and I wouldn’t need rescuing from them.
Unless Lucy got mad at me about the movie thing and started yelling, then I would want to be rescued. I practiced the signal and headed over.
Lucy patted the seat next to hers. If she was mad about the movie, you couldn’t tell, which made me feel a little bit better, and a little bit worse. “Okay, good, you’re here,” she said. “I have surprises for everyone.”
“Surprises, really?” I asked. “Like presents?”
Lucy grinned. “Yup.”
“Work first,” Theo said. He pulled a notebook out of his backpack. “After the epic experiment failure at Mrs. Gallagher’s house, I went back to the drawing board.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You didn’t tell me it was a failure.”
“I didn’t get a chance,” Lucy said. “Though I was planning to spare you the gory details.”
“Something gory happened?” I asked, incredulous. I hadn’t really believed that Mrs. Gallagher could possibly be a witch, but for a second I reconsidered it.
“There wasn’t any gore,” Theo said. “There wasn’t much of anything. I met Lucy at her house, and we spent about twenty minutes in her grandmother’s backyard shed, deciding what supplies to pile into the wheelbarrow and wheel over.”
“Mostly rakes and garbage bags,” Lucy said.
“And then we spent about twenty seconds conducting the experiment,” Theo said. “Before we’d even touched a thing, Mrs. Gallagher came running out of her house screaming about trespassing being a criminal offense.”
“Oh, no,” I said, shuddering. I felt bad for not being there with them, but I also felt relieved that I’d missed being yelled at.
“I don’t know how she heard us there,” Theo went on. “She wasn’t watching by the windows, because we checked. The doors were closed, and we’d barely made a sound. Maybe she eats a lot of bananas.”
“I’m sorry, I think I just heard you wrong,” Lucy said. “Did you just say bananas?”
“Yes, they’re rich in potassium,” Theo said. “Our internal potassium levels decrease as we age, and that’s linked to hearing loss. If Mrs. Gallagher has a special affinity for bananas, it’s possible her hearing didn’t decrease. Maybe it was even enhanced. But that’s a hypothesis for another time. The point is, w
e didn’t get to test things out yesterday.”
“You didn’t get in trouble with the police or anything, though,” I said. “Did you?”
“We ran back to my house too fast,” Lucy said. “I accidentally dropped one of my grandmother’s gardening gloves. I didn’t tell her yet.”
“So our hypothesis is disproved already,” I said.
“Not at all,” Theo told me.
“Huh?” Lucy asked.
“Think about it,” he said. “We hypothesized that if we were kind to Mrs. Gallagher, it would make her happy, and even make her kind back. All we proved is that if we walk onto her property with a wheelbarrow, she’ll scream at us. We didn’t get a chance to be kind to her.”
“It’s her own fault,” Lucy said. “If she’d just stopped yelling and looked around, she could’ve seen we were going to surprise her with a clean yard.”
“Maybe she doesn’t like surprises,” Theo said. “Not every kindness is right for every person. Like if you baked a cherry pie for Anabelle, it’d definitely make her happy, and maybe she’d even be kind back to you. But if you baked one for me, I wouldn’t be able to eat it because I’m allergic.”
“You’d probably still be kind and say thank you,” Lucy said.
“Of course I would,” Theo said. “But Mrs. Gallagher is a harder subject. For that matter, so is my sister. So I conducted some supplemental work.” He was leaning forward and talking in a voice that was not unlike the way Mr. Dibble sounded when he was in front of the classroom. He sounded excited.
“What’s supplemental?” I asked.
“Extra,” Theo said. “Here, I have something to show you.”
He pulled out a sheet of paper and slid it toward us.
A Nonexhaustive List of Ways to Be Kind to Subject #2, Anabelle M. Barnes
By Theodore M. Barnes
1.Smile 0/4
2.Slip her a nice note
3.Give compliments 0/4
4.Ask questions about the other person 0/3
5.Do the dishes (even when it’s not your turn) 1/1
6.Draw a picture as a gift 0/1
The Kindness Club Page 7