“It was good and you know it, Chrissa! You’re just jealous!”
“And you’re boasting,” I said.
As I stood up and prepared to do another dive, he glanced toward shore. “Here comes trouble.”
I turned. “Oh, good!” Gwen and Sonali were walking down the dock that jutted out from Nana’s big lawn. When we’d moved here in February to live with Nana, I’d had a tough time starting at a new school in the middle of the year, but now that I’d made new friends, I rarely missed my old school anymore.
Sonali walked to the end, pulled her silky hair back into a ponytail, dived, and swam for the raft. Gwen, however, sat and dangled her feet in the water. Her long blonde hair and bangs were pulled back. Despite Tara’s friendliness earlier today in the dressing room, I couldn’t forget that one of her meanest tricks was when she’d cut off Gwen’s bangs in the girls’ restroom last March.
“C’mon, Gwen!” I called. “Come join us!”
When Gwen finally jumped in, she did the breaststroke toward us. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she’d improved a lot over the summer.
Once we were all sitting on the raft, Tyler showed off with another forward one-and-a-half, this time adding a few inches of air to his rotation.
“Wow!” Gwen exclaimed.
“That was awesome!” Sonali added as he surfaced.
I rolled my eyes.
“Cannonball!” I yelled. Sonali, Gwen, and I jumped off the raft at the same time, arms tucked around our legs, and bombarded Tyler.
When the water calmed down again, he hand-slapped the water and sent droplets flying into my face. “Like I said, you’re just jealous!” yelled Tyler.
When it turned into a splashing war of three against one, Tyler headed for shore and called back, “Mission Outta-Here!”
I was ready for some girl time. Besides, I was bursting to tell Sonali and Gwen my news. As we stretched in the sun, I began, “You won’t believe what happened this morning!”
“What?” Gwen asked, turning to her stomach and rising on her elbows.
“This morning when I was shopping with my mom,” I began, “I stepped out of the changing room and you won’t believe who was there.”
“Who?” Sonali asked.
“Tara,” I said, and added “and she was actually nice to me—and funny, too.”
Sonali said, “Yeah, that’s Tara. She can be funny—and even nice, too—when she wants something.” Her eyebrows scrunched together as if she was doing serious detective thinking. “So, I wonder…what does she want?”
“She said she wants to be friends.”
“Whoa,” Gwen said, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. “You didn’t fall for that, did you?”
“Well, I—um—I think she might have meant it.”
My friends looked at me as if I’d lost all my brain cells. I tried to explain exactly what had happened. Then I added, “And she nearly knocked me over when she admitted things didn’t go so well last year.”
“Huh,” Gwen said, crossing her arms across her swim top. “Now that almost makes me laugh.”
I pressed on. “She sounded really sincere when she said she’d like to be friends.”
Sonali piped up. “I know her. She’s still mad that I’m friends with you two and not her anymore. Don’t trust her.”
I was smart enough to be wary about Tara, but I remembered another of my grandmother’s sayings and repeated it to my friends. “Hey, everyone deserves a second chance.”
Sonali and Gwen just shook their heads. “Everyone except Tara,” Sonali said.
I looked away toward shore. A female mallard and her brood of nine growing ducklings bobbed in and out around the dock. As they dipped their bills underwater, their white rump feathers and webbed feet pointed skyward. Maybe my friends were right. Tara being nice was like turning everything upside down. I probably shouldn’t give her a second thought, let alone a second chance. I shouldn’t trust her, I decided.
I rose, stepped to the edge of the dock, and dove. But I forgot to keep my feet together, and they hit the water with a stinging slap.
Later, Nana called, “Girls! Cookies and lemonade!”
We wasted no time getting out of the water. Wrapped in beach towels and comparing our wrinkled fingertips, we crossed under the willow tree to the screened gazebo, where a plate of Nana’s homemade sugar cookies and a pitcher of lemonade waited atop a floral tablecloth.
“Teatime,” Nana said. “Thought you girls might be ready for something to eat by now.”
“Thank you, Nana,” I said. Sonali and Gwen chimed in their thanks, too.
As we wolfed down cookies, Nana headed out the screen door of the gazebo. “I’m going to leave you young ladies to yourselves. I need to get back to my spinning. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as turning a mound of raw fleece into yarn.” Then she headed back toward the house, where Mom was working in one of the flower beds and tossing weeds into a mound on the lawn.
While we sat there, Dad and Tyler drove up in the pickup and parked near Dad’s pottery studio. Gwen and Sonali looked questioningly at the truck, its box filled with lumber.
“Oh, more stuff for the llama barn,” I said. “We’re still replacing rotten boards and rebuilding the stalls.”
“How long until Cosmos has her baby?” asked Sonali.
“About two weeks,” I said. “About the time school starts, so we’re trying to finish up fast.”
Bling! Bling! Sonali’s cell phone sang from her backpack. She rummaged around, found her phone, and flipped it open.
“Text message,” she said.
“Who from?” I asked.
She showed us and it read, “Private Number.”
Then her eyebrows scrunched up as she scrolled. “Weird,” she said and read the message aloud. “It says, ‘Watch out for Chrissa, the Llama-Faced Girl!’”
“Oh, it does not,” I said with a laugh.
Then, to prove it, she showed us the text.
If the message hadn’t been about me, I might have thought it was funny. “Huh. I’ll bet it’s from Tyler. He’s trying to get back at me.”
“For what?” Gwen asked. “For cannonballs?”
I told them about our rivalry and my teasing. ”It isn’t nice, but he’s been bugging me. I mean, he’s getting better and better at diving—and he knows it.”
“But,” Sonali said, studying her cell phone, “if Tyler did this, wouldn’t it show your family’s name and number? I’d bet this is from Tara.”
Gwen fingered her hair. “Sounds like something she might do,” she said, reaching for another cookie.
I replayed this morning and how Tara had said she’d like to be friends. My insides twisted around like a giant pretzel. What if this was from Tara and it had all been a show? Was it another mean game of hers? When school started, would she mock the clothes that she’d encouraged me to buy? I chewed on my lower lip. “But she seemed so sincere.”
“Tara can act nice when she wants to.” Sonali wound strands of her long hair around her finger. “You don’t know her like I do, Chrissa. I’m not falling for her games, and you shouldn’t either. She just doesn’t want me to be friends with you.”
© 2009 American Girl. All rights reserved. All American Girl marks, Chrissa™, Chrissa Maxwell™, Sonali™, Gwen™, and Girl of the Year™ are trademarks of American Girl. Used under license by Scholastic Inc.
Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental and not intended by American Girl or Scholastic Inc.
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p; Illustrations by Richard Jones
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
First printing 2009
e-ISBN 978-1-338-19735-8
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, 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 the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
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