by Abby Cooper
She swayed back and forth on her flip-flops. “I’m … I’m doing something that has a lot of steps.”
I should’ve picked something else, said her bubble.
It went away and a second one popped up. No, I can do this project. I’m great. I’m Viv Carlson!
“Like what kind of steps?”
“Just, like, steps, okay? It’s complicated.”
It sure didn’t seem that complicated. It seemed like it was working exactly how she wanted it to.
Before I could say anything more, the pool door opened and Rafael, Kaya, and Viv’s mom came back. Between the three of them, they were carrying a huge ice pack, a few big cushions, and what looked like a ten-thousand-pound roll of ACE bandages.
In less than a second, Viv’s face went back to a normal color. She stopped rocking back and forth. If she had been nervous that I was onto her, she sure wasn’t nervous anymore.
While Viv’s mom hoisted my foot up over the cushions, Viv turned to Kaya and Rafael. “I was thinking of designing a custom T-shirt for the race,” she said. “You know, like something bright, to stand out in the crowd. If you want, I could order some for you, too. We could put a team name on them or something, since we’re basically doing the race together, right?”
“That’d be cool,” Kaya said.
“We could be Team Rafael!” said Rafael.
“Ha. Um, no,” Viv said. “I was thinking we could combine the first letters of our names. So be SKRV. Or VSRK. Or RKSV. Doesn’t matter which one. They’re all super catchy.” She smiled like she was doing us a huge favor, and a bubble appeared over her head.
She’s the luckiest person in the world.
She was obviously thinking about Kaya, but why? Did she know about Kaya and Rafael already? Of course she wanted a boyfriend now that more people were getting them. And wait a second; they told her and not me?
That was the last straw. Swollen ankle and broken armpit or not, I had to get out of there. I pushed my palms down on the chair as hard as I could and tried to get my whole body up at the same time.
“Not so fast!” Viv’s mom stretched out the bandage. “We need to wrap your ankle, at least until you can go get it checked out. Otherwise the injury could become more serious. I think it’s just a sprain, but we don’t want it to get worse. Man, oh man,” she muttered as she took the bottom half of my leg in her arms. “I’ve never seen so many injuries in thirty years!”
Oh, great. First it was twenty years and now it was thirty. At least she probably wasn’t forty years old yet, so she couldn’t make the number that much higher.
“Does anything else hurt?” she asked, handing me the ice pack for my foot.
“My, um, this area.” I pointed to my armpit. I wasn’t going to say “armpit” in front of Viv’s mom. The day had already been embarrassing enough.
“Can you raise your arm?” she asked, and I did. “It’ll be fine,” she said, helping me to put my arm down by my side. “I think you just pulled a muscle. Put some ice on it when you get home and then you should be good to go. I’d take it easy on the ankle, though. You might want to stay off it for a week or so. No biking, no swimming, nothing.”
“And no sitting on stationary bikes,” Viv added.
“And no sitting on lounge chairs,” said Kaya.
“And no sudden standing.” Rafael laughed.
If Mom were here (and acting normal), she’d tell me to laugh everything off, to make fun of myself with them because they were only kidding around, and all the injury business was sorta funny and no one was purposely trying to make me feel like the pool fungus collecting on the bottom of my flip-flops. Well, no one except for Viv, maybe.
But Normal Mom wasn’t here, and even though I knew this stuff, I couldn’t make myself believe it or do it or feel it, and I didn’t want to, either.
When I felt the pulsing pain of my ankle again, I knew for sure: I was done. Done with the triathlon, done with my so-called friends, done with trying to compete with Viv and her tan mom and her fancy team T-shirts. Done with my mom, too.
Done. Just done.
24
WORK
“So, how are you?”
I looked up at the ceiling and tried not to roll my eyes. This question Dr. Llama asked every Saturday was starting to get annoying.
“Fine,” I said. “How are you?”
As usual, he didn’t answer. He just did the same old sitting and staring thing he always did, which was also starting to get annoying. But I could play that game, too.
“You seem upset,” he said, after what felt like a century of silence.
“You think?” I glanced at my crutches and sighed. “I just don’t want to be here right now. I have a lot of homework to do.”
It was true. After Viv’s mom had practically carried me home from swim practice (so embarrassing), Mom took me to the doctor, where my ankle had been wrapped tighter and fancier and I’d been told to use crutches for about a week to make sure it healed. Teachers had let me leave classes a little early to get to my next one, but that meant I missed a few minutes of each class, which was usually get-a-head-start-on-your-assignments time, which meant I ended up with more work than everyone else, which meant this weekend was going to stink even more than it already would have. And since Dr. Peterson’s office was closed over the weekend, I couldn’t get rid of my crutches till Monday even though I technically should have been free today. She didn’t want me to stop using them till she could check on me in person.
My armpit was better now (which was lucky, because the crutches would have probably made it worse if it still hurt), but my ankle sure wasn’t better after a week, and neither were the monstrous purple bruises all over my legs. BFF Britta had joked the other night that I looked like a grape monster. She wanted to paint my nails purple to match, but I didn’t let her. The last thing I needed were ten little reminders of everything that had gone wrong.
“I understand,” Dr. Llama said. “But you are here, so let’s make the most of it. How are your bubbles?”
“Depressing,” I said. I thought about his story from last time about the queen. If I were her, and war was upon me, my castle would’ve been totally destroyed by now. The bubbles weren’t dangerous like an actual war, but it felt like they were kicking my butt. It felt like everything was.
“There are so many sad ones,” I told him. “And they make me sad.” And the happy ones make me mad, I almost added, thinking of Kaya’s news about her and Rafael. Was this how liking someone worked? You act weird, feel weird, and then eventually find out they don’t like you back, or worse, like your friend instead? No wonder Mom was always so bummed about guys. Why was it so hard to find one who liked you back and then didn’t ditch you for a new job or someone with hairless legs?
“You know, Sophie,” Dr. Llama said, “you really care a lot about people. You’re sensitive. You notice what truly goes on in people’s heads, even if they don’t express it on the outside.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Because of the bubbles, remember?”
He sat back in his chair. “Have you ever talked to your mom about how you feel? Or any other adults who you trust?”
I hardly heard the question; instead of listening, I stared at the teeny silver trash can in the corner of the room. There was nothing really special about it, but I couldn’t look away. I’d been doing that a lot the past few days—staring. Mom did it all the time since she and Pratik broke up. She never really looked at anything in particular. She’d look at garbage cans, doors, cups of cocoa, random things. And she’d stare and stare and stare. And I never got why. I still didn’t, really, but I knew that it felt like something I needed to do. The trash can didn’t even look like a trash can anymore. It just looked like a big silvery blob.
That might have been because I was crying, I realized. When had I started crying?
Dr. Llama handed me a tissue. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s always okay to cry. Let it out.” And so I did. I cried and
cried until there were no more tears left in my whole entire body. I cried until Dr. Llama looked at his watch and said, “Our session is over. Great work today,” and then I giggled through my tears because since when was crying considered work? But maybe it was, because when I met Mom in the waiting room I felt absolutely exhausted.
* * *
“Yoo-hoo, you there?”
I didn’t answer Mom; I just nodded and kept looking out the bus window. It was weird how crying took so much out of you. I felt totally empty, like I’d cried out not only every tear in the universe but also all my insides. If the seats on the bus were just a teeny bit comfier, I could have curled up and slept all the way home.
Mom wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gazed out the window with me.
“Hey!” she shouted out of nowhere. “We’re almost at Little J’s. Wanna stop?”
We hadn’t been to Little J’s in forever. It was an awesome ice cream place. They had the typical flavors: chocolate, vanilla, etc., and the normal toppings, but also they’d have a totally crazy Flavor of the Day, something like double chocolate bacon maple pineapple crunch, and we’d always get it no matter what it was. “You never know till you try,” Mom would say. Little J’s was how we discovered that cheese was amazing everywhere except ice cream. It was an important thing to learn.
I noticed some bubbles forming over a few girls across the aisle.
I wish I could fly away.
They just don’t understand me.
I need to pretend everything’s normal.
“Nah,” I whispered to Mom. The Flavor of the Day might not be any good. We might have to wait forever for the next bus. Maybe I’d trip on a chocolate sprinkle and sprain my other ankle or knock Mom over and break one of hers. There were so many things that could go wrong in any place with any person. It was easier to stay put, to close my eyes, to keep the bubbles out.
To keep everything out.
* * *
“Hi, girls!”
Ms. Wolfson was getting home at the same time we got off the bus. I gave her a little wave with one of my crutches, and Mom flashed her a teeny smile.
She gave both of us a look. “Well, aren’t you two bundles of joy. What’s wrong?”
I didn’t say anything. Mom didn’t say anything. Ms. Wolfson sighed.
“Let’s play cribbage,” she said.
Now Mom found her voice. “We … can’t … right now.” She sounded about as convincing as Benedict Arnold probably did when he was all No, you guys are wrong, I’m not a spy. Nobody believed him, and Ms. Wolfson definitely didn’t believe us.
“That wasn’t a question,” she said. “But, Molly, you are excused. I’m sure you have things you need to do.”
And I didn’t?
I groaned as we followed her inside. Mom waved and went up to our place, leaving me with Ms. Wolfson. This was so unfair. Yeah, I liked her, but I didn’t feel like hanging out right now. I bet no one ever made King Edward VI play cribbage if he didn’t want to. (He became king of England and Ireland when he was nine years old, so he had a ton of stuff he had to do. But so did I!)
“I had quite a day today myself,” Ms. Wolfson said as she dealt the cards. “Seems like everybody in the world is upset about something.”
I had to pick two of my cards to put into the crib, the secret stash of cards you got to see at the end of the game, but it was hard to concentrate with her talking.
“The person driving behind me wouldn’t stop honking for miles. Some woman yelled at me for taking the last copy of a book at the library, like she owned it or something. Which she didn’t. Just one of those days, I guess.” She glanced at me. “Eyes on your own cards, Sophie.”
But my cards looked blurry. How could she concentrate on hers when she had all that other stuff going on? And how could I?
I took a breath and made myself look down to see what I had.
“So?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”
I wanted to say, “Nothing.” I wanted to do nothing. But it felt like that wasn’t really a choice. So I focused on my cards, and thought about them, and after a few minutes, I made my move.
And Ms. Wolfson made hers.
And it wasn’t bad at all.
25
TRUTH
The next week was spring break. I didn’t feel like doing much except going to play cribbage with Ms. Wolfson. Between all of Mom’s Pratik stuff and my Rafael and Kaya and Viv stuff and everybody else’s millions of things they were sad about, it was obviously better to keep things simple, to do as little as you could instead of doing things and wishing you hadn’t. If I did that, I wouldn’t end up feeling sad like everybody else.
I tried not to notice that I already did.
The good news was I was off my crutches long before school started up again. The bad news was that once it did, all Kaya, Rafael, and their new BFF Viv wanted to talk about was the triathlon, and all the millions of practices they’d had over break without me (because my ankle still hurt), and all the zillions of inside jokes they had from those practices. Every time I tried to get into the conversation, they’d start talking about their hilarious running and biking adventures. Which, spoiler alert, were actually not hilarious at all. Especially the fact that Kaya and Viv had taught Rafael to ride a real bike, and now he was a pro, and I’d missed the whole thing.
As the week went on, I started walking by them without stopping.
And maybe the only thing worse than that was the fact that no one cared.
Kaya seemed happier than ever. And why wouldn’t she be? She’d crushed it on the bike and in the pool—and had a secret boyfriend, now, too, and had probably done lots of secret boyfriend/girlfriend things over break. She was acting like a whole different person. She skalloped instead of walked. She sat up straighter, talked a lot more in class, and wore her hair down instead of up in a high ponytail or topknot.
She didn’t twirl it around, either. Sometimes, yeah, but really not often at all.
It should’ve made me really, really happy. Every time I saw a bubble over her head, it was a good one. I’m having the best day. I can’t believe how great everything is. My life is so cool.
But it was weird when your best friend was happier and better and less nervous and more adventurous and you didn’t have a single thing to do with it.
At least I had a distraction. There were bubbles everywhere at school lately. (They probably would’ve been everywhere over break, too, but I hadn’t really gone anywhere except Dr. Llama’s and Ms. Wolfson’s.) And while it was pretty exciting knowing everyone’s secrets, it felt stressful, too. Like a lot of responsibility I didn’t ask for. I bet Mr. Clements, the school librarian, wouldn’t even know what to do with all that information, and he knew everything.
Sometimes I heard Ms. Wolfson’s voice in my head. Eyes on your own cards, Sophie.
But what did you do when it felt like you were in charge of holding everyone’s decks?
26
LITTLE WINS
“Want to go shopping?”
I didn’t. I wanted to sit around and mope and feel sorry for myself. I was crankier than Napoleon must’ve been after the Battle of Waterloo, which he lost really bad. So no, Mom, I did not want to go shopping one bit.
But then I looked up from my magazine and really noticed her. There wasn’t a bubble to give me any more detailed information, but she looked better. She’d straightened her hair and made a braid crown across the top. She was wearing a cute outfit and had a teeny bit of makeup on. Her face sparkled more than it had in ages.
“Well?” She put her hands on her hips and made a puppy-dog-begging face. I knew I owed her big-time, but I still didn’t want to.
“Call Britta.”
“I want to go with you. What’s wrong? I never thought I’d have to beg you to shop, especially on a Sunday after you’ve gotten your thirteen hours of sleep. Bubbles got you down?”
I sighed in a pretend-mad way and ignored the bubble question. �
��I actually prefer fifteen hours of sleep.”
“Just one store,” she promised. “Cross my heart. I want to pick up a new workout outfit at ZOOM. If you’re going to sit and be mopey, you can do that while being surrounded by pretty things we can’t afford.”
“You want to go to ZOOM?” I raised my eyebrows. It cost like eighty dollars for a headband at ZOOM. And a hundred bucks per glove, I remembered, thinking of Rafael.
“Yes,” Mom said firmly. “It’s Buy Yourself a Present Day. All the Adventurous Girls do it.”
Then why were we going to do it?
I peeled my legs off the couch and glanced at Mom again. Her braid crown was super cute and she did seem different, but I didn’t know if I really bought it. Sometimes there were false alarms—she’d act all perky and fun and like herself, usually when she went somewhere with Britta, but then she’d be all sniffly again before the night was over. I thought back to Weird Whimper Night and shuddered to myself. I couldn’t deal with that again. Just thinking about her making noises like that made me want to make noises like that, too.
But if I didn’t go to ZOOM with her, would she start doing that sooner?
“Okay,” I finally agreed. “But I’m finding a place to sit and I’m staying there the whole time.”
“Deal.”
* * *
True to her word, Mom helped me find the couch at ZOOM by the dressing rooms and held on to my arm until I got my ankle all elevated and comfortable. I wished couches came with seat belts. It was a nice couch, but it was also the kind of couch I could totally see myself rolling right off, probably at the same moment that Viv or her mom or their spinning friends randomly appeared.
I looked around nervously. I hadn’t thought about the spinning people until now, but this totally seemed like the kind of place where they’d hang out when they weren’t at the gym. After all, those fancy outfits and shoes had to come from somewhere, and this was exactly the type of place where they’d get them.
“Do you like this?” In only ten minutes, Mom had run back and forth about twelve million times with a whole bunch of different shorts-and-T-shirt combinations.