You First
Page 15
“Cassidy just toddled right up to Alice, who was playing in the front yard the day we moved in, and demanded, ‘Let’s be best friends,’” Mrs. Turner continued.
“Here she goes again,” said Cassidy, rolling her eyes. Alice pretended to take a nap on her shoulder.
“And Alice said, ‘Okay!’” Mrs. Kinney filled in. “‘Okay!’ Just like that.”
“And you held hands and ran through the sprinkler together. It was the most beautiful thing. And now look at you: best friends through all these years,” added Mrs. Turner.
“Stop, you’re going to get me going again!” Mrs. Kinney said, flapping her hands in front of her face.
“Mom, can you please just take the picture?” Alice asked. She actually didn’t mind the reminiscing, but she sensed an impatient twitch in the golden-brown shoulders she had her arm slung over. It was time to get a move on and take this plunge, together.
Together—but only sort of, a glum voice in Alice’s voice said.
She couldn’t help wondering whether Cassidy was, maybe, a little bit mad about her leaving the general track for honors. All summer long, Alice had tried to work up the courage to ask if she was okay about it. The last time she’d attempted to address it, she and Cass were picking their way across the beach near their house one late-summer evening. Lake Michigan was calmly lapping at their brightly painted toenails as the sun went down.
“So, with the honors class thing . . . ,” Alice ventured. (Okay, so she was also an honors-level awkward conversationalist.)
Cassidy cut her off. “It’s fine!” she said in the same bright-but-fake voice that Alice’s mom used when she “wasn’t mad” that Alice’s dad hadn’t put the laundry away. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
Alice clammed up, choosing to listen to Cassidy’s words, even if she had a hard time ignoring her tone.
Now Mrs. Kinney snapped the photo and peered at the photo on the screen. “Another keeper!” she pronounced, and Alice smiled, although she wasn’t surprised. She and Cassidy had plotted their first-day-of-school outfits the week before, making sure that they’d complement each other but not clash (or, heaven forbid, match). Alice wore a summery navy-and-white striped dress with a white jean jacket. It was already almost eighty degrees (North Shore summers lasted almost as long as its winters), but the air conditioning in the middle school, she had heard, could reach sub-arctic temperatures.
Cassidy, meanwhile, wore a bright red cardigan over a white T-shirt and black shorts with white polka dots on them. Alice would have looked like a little kid in them, but they showed off Cassidy’s long, lean ballet-toned legs.
They agreed it would be okay if they both wore the gold sandals they had bought together earlier that summer, accented with fresh pedicures. Hey, even if they wouldn’t spend every single second of school together, at least when they did, they’d look awesome together—best friends ready to take on a new adventure.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Alice confessed, once they were on the bus. Cassidy turned towards her, eyes squinting from the sunlight reflecting off the sparkling lake. “But while I was tossing and turning, I came up with a stupendous plan!” Cassidy raised her eyebrows in amusement as Alice rummaged through her new backpack. It was oatmeal colored, with a design on the pocket that looked like a panda’s head, with cute dark brown ears and everything. Alice relished the relative emptiness of the bag, when all she had rolling around in there were her new notebooks and school supplies and lip gloss; she had a feeling by the end of the day it would feel a lot heavier.
“Here it is!” Alice pulled out a purple notebook triumphantly. It was the perfect medium size, not so small that you couldn’t write anything real in it, but just a little smaller than a regular school notebook (so a busy girl could find it just by feeling inside her locker or backpack).
“A notebook? Gee, you shouldn’t have.” Cassidy grinned.
“No, see, this is how we’re going to stay in touch,” Alice said. “Since we can’t be in class together, we can keep each other up-to-date on everything that happens. Mean teachers, cute guys, gym embarrassments—everything!”
“I love it!” said Cassidy. “But do you think we’ll have time for it? I mean, I’ll have ballet and you’ll be busy making Albert Einstein look like a chump.”
“No, it’ll be fun!” Alice said. “We don’t have to write, like, everything down. Just fun little stories and jokes we hear and stuff. I’ll give you my locker combination and you can give me yours and we’ll drop it off to each other between classes. It’ll be like getting mail!”
Cassidy laughed. “Of course I’ll do it. You do love your mail.”
When she was six, Alice had embarked upon a master plan for getting new pen pals. She intended to float helium balloons with her name and address and a request for a postcard attached to the balloon’s string. She had visions of letters from Russia, Ghana, Indonesia—until her mother gently pointed out that the balloons were more likely to get stuck in the neighborhood trees or fall into the lake and strangle a duck. It turned out the only thing Alice loved more than getting mail was not feeling like a duck killer.
Gradually the bus filled up with kids. Cassidy and Alice excitedly greeted the friends they knew from Comiskey Elementary and subtly eyed the students who came from other schools. Some of the girls looked nice; some of the guys looked especially cute; one girl with long, flowing dark curls and a tiny rosebud mouth glared at the floor and stomped down the bus aisle as if she didn’t want to be there. Like it or not, Cassidy and Alice would be in classes with all these new kids. Time would tell who would prove to be friend or foe.
“I feel like we already have a lot of material for the notebook,” Cassidy whispered with a sly grin once the year’s cast of characters had assembled. Alice beamed and scribbled a quick kickoff note to Cassidy.
Maybe this will all be okay despite the fact that I’m being sent to nerd purgatory. Which should actually be called nerdatory. Portmanteau, right? Ugh, this is why I’m such a nerd in the first place! Happy first day of school . . . gulp!
BACK AD
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CARI SIMMONS once wished on her birthday candles that she would write a book—and it came true! She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, and this is her first series.
LOLA DOUGLAS makes a salted caramel cupcake that’s so good it’ll make your mama cry. She’s the author of the young adult novel True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet, which was made into a Lifetime movie, and its sequel, More Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet. This is her first book for tweens.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com
BOOKS IN THE PICTURE PERFECT SERIES
More titles in the Picture Perfect series:
Book #1: Bending Over Backwards
Book #2: You First
CREDITS
Cover art © 2015 by Cathi Mingus
Cover design by Steve Scott
COPYRIGHT
PICTURE PERFECT: YOU FIRST. Copyright © 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Simmons, Cari, author.
You first / Cari Simmons & Lola Douglas.—First edition.
pages cm.— (Picture Perfect ; #2)
Summary: When sixth-grader Gigi worries that her best friend Finn is replacing her with her new friends on the soccer team, she thinks that their friendship
is over—but both girls learn that growing up means staying close despite new interests.
ISBN 978-0-06-231058-3
EPub Edition © November 2014 ISBN 9780062310590
[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Soccer—Fiction. 3. Middle schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Douglas, Lola, author. II. Title.
PZ7.1.S55Yo 2015 2014022029
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
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FIRST EDITION
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