by Mindy Raf
“Yeah.” Meredith nods.
Cara nods back. “Totally.”
Okay, so Jenna wants to boycott the dance, the 101 class is ruining my portfolio chances, and now apparently Meredith actually wants to be friends with me again.
“And I was thinking,” Meredith continues, “if you wanted to, we could, you know, maybe hang out, like beforehand?”
“What?” I say, half turning.
“Yeah, I was thinking,” Meredith goes on, “that I could come to your house before and then maybe like … sleep over that night? Like old times?”
I shake my lone earbud out and drop my brush to my side, turning to face her fully.
“You want to sleep over at my house Saturday night?”
“Oooh, Izzy, gruesooooome,” Miss S. says, catching my eye and nodding approvingly at my canvas as she makes her rounds.
Meredith sighs. “Okay, sorry, so here’s the deal. Cara told her mom she’s staying at Kim’s, and Kim told her mom she’s staying at Sari’s, and Sari told her mom she’s staying at Cara’s, but my mom has basically banned me from sleeping over at any of my friends’ houses ever since Jacob—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, no need for details,” I say, cutting her off before she mentions her famous bathroom-stall feat.
She gives me a funny look, and then continues. “So see … my mom loves you. She thinks you’re über trustworthy. She’s always like, why don’t you hang out with Izzy anymore, and—”
“You want to use my house as a cover while you go to a party at U of M,” I finish for her.
She looks at me sort of embarrassed, but not really. “If I tell my mom I’m with you, she won’t even check up, and I promise it’ll be a no-brainer.”
“Hey, can you do me a favor and get my bio book out of my backpack?” I ask through clenched teeth. Not that I should be aggravated right now at all. I should be laughing. Laughing at the fact that I actually thought Meredith was trying to rekindle our lost friendship. Of course she’s just using me; of course she just needs a favor from me.
Meredith fishes out the book from my backpack and places it on the table. “So I’ll come over for dinner …” She runs her fingers slowly down the spiral binding of her sketchbook as she lays out the plan. “I’ll sneak out after, and I’ll be back the next morning. And see, you don’t even have to go to the party. We figured you wouldn’t want to go anyway, so …”
“Oh. Well … yeah, of course. But … but what if you’re not back in time? What do I tell my mom when you’re not there? And why would you figure that … Can you just flip to chapter seven, please?”
Meredith looks deep in thought as she riffles through the pages of my bio book. “You can just tell your mom I left early in the morning for … Oh, I’m assisting Cara with the choreography for the musical, so you can say I had an early-morning dance rehearsal.”
“Oh. Right … but—” I dejectedly hunch over the bio book, reminded of my newly assigned musical duties after school.
“Come on, Izzy. I’d do it for you if you asked. I’ll so get you back, I will. I’ll owe you.”
“Meredith, there’s no way that my mom—oooh, stay on that page,” I tell her, studying the way those ridges look like little mountains.
“Wow, that’s kind of nauseating.” Meredith eyes my canvas, her shiny lips going horizontal.
“Yeah,” I say with a small smile.
“So hey, remember in, like, fifth grade when we used to play ‘college party’ and walk around my bedroom carrying plastic cups of apple juice, pretending we were drinking beer and dancing with boys?” she asks. I can practically hear her eyes sparkling.
“Yeah …” I say, still studying the bio image, fully realizing now that Meredith never expected me to say yes to going to that party. It wasn’t even a real invitation.
“We were such dorks,” she giggles.
“Yup, we were.”
“And what’s so great,” she goes on excitedly, “is that I already told my mom I was sleeping over, that we were working on our Spanish project together, so it’s not a total lie.”
“Right,” I sigh.
“So …” She holds out the word, looking at me like I hold her entire life in my paint-covered hands. “Are you cool with it all?”
“Well … maybe. I don’t know. I guess …” I give in slightly, turning back to my canvas.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Izzy!” Meredith bursts out and then jets across the back of the room to Cara, who’s now aimlessly fishing through a stack of particle boards.
I step back to study my canvas, comparing what I’ve just added to the shapes in the text book.
“Soooo, this is neeeeew …” Miss S. is leaning in over my shoulder eyeing my work.
“Yeah,” I confirm, glad Miss S. has wandered over, feeling for a second like it’s my studio again.
“So you’re noooot … continuing with your animal theme?” She points to a page in my portfolio and fingers for her glasses, which rest on top of her head and are connected to a long beaded chain that, today, is actually woven into her hair.
“I don’t … I don’t know if I want to have an animal theme,” I admit, making circles with my fingers along the bumpy table, caked with layers of paint and dried clay.
“Okay, well, that’s okaaaay. I don’t want to put the pressure on, but I have to submit everything to the DIA by the end of the moooooonth”—another one of her braids comes loose and hits me in the face—“so now would be the time to think about tying all your amazing stuff together, you knoooooow … ?”
“I know, I know.” I nod, and then I feel my stomach drop—in a good-bad way—thinking about my non-date DIA outing with Blake on Saturday.
“Maybe you just need to mix it up with some new materiaaaaaals … ? Have you rummaged through the junk trunk?” she asks. I shake my head. “Weeeeeell … that might be fun.” She’s pointing to a tall broken mirror beside a giant pile of stuff that’s slowing taking over her hallway office and the back wall of the studio. The mirror is one of those skinny ones, the kind that’s stuck with putty to the wall of Allissa’s dorm room. Great, a broken mirror. Isn’t that like twenty-five years of bad luck?
Miss Swenson’s fallen braids dangle in my peripheral vision. I look over to find her studying me, her hazel eyes clear. “Don’t think so hard, Izzy,” she says, squeezing my shoulder, “you’ll scare your inspiration away.” Then she blinks at me once, and heads back to her hallway junk drawer office.
Don’t think so hard? Okay, fine. I won’t think so hard about not really being invited to that party by Meredith, and about not really wanting to direct Jacob Ullman and the rest of the basketball guys in a musical while they potentially humiliate me in Spanglish, and how Pam’s convinced my mom has a nausea problem, and about how the only thing I really have to look forward to right now is a date with Blake on Saturday that I’m pretty sure is not even a date at all.
I circle around my unfinished painting and focus on diminishing the outlines of my new shapes, blurring all the details together. I float my brush across the canvas, wishing I could blur together all the details of this day too.
CHAPTER 6
I’m a pushover.
I’m sitting in the first row of our auditorium, staring down at a clipboard with nothing clipped on it, hoping it looks like I’m doing something important. Jenna’s in full-on director mode, running around, trying to get people seated onstage. “Okay everyone—hello?!” she shouts, tapping her faux animal-print boot on the stage floor.
It’s after school and everyone’s huddled in noisy groups—Meredith is sitting with a bunch of dancer girls stage left who are being entertained by Ryan Paulson duct-taping himself to his seat. The basketball dancing-tree boys are sitting in the back row of the auditorium, as if to let everyone know they don’t belong at a rehearsal for a Rogers and Hammerstein musical. And there’s Cara on the floor near the music pit, thumbing through her dance binder, in the splits.
“Izzy, are yo
u in the play?” Emily Belfry is holding a pink highlighter and staring up at me with her magazine-ad face. Well, except for its expression, which unfortunately always looks pained, like the air she’s breathing tastes bitter.
“No, I’m not in the play,” I tell her. “Just helping Jenna with directing. Are you … performing?”
She looks at me as if I’ve just asked her if she pees sitting down.
“I’m a lead.” She shifts in her seat to pull the pant leg of her khakis down over the ankle of her shiny brown boots.
Of course. Emily’s captain of Broomington’s all female a cappella handbell choir, The Bellerinas. She sings first soprano. I only know that because in health class last year during a warning lecture on the effects of cigarette smoke, she kept raising her hand to mention that she would never engage in an activity that would sully the tone of her expansive first soprano range.
I have lots of reasons for not smoking too, but I’m not about to start brag-sharing them in health class.
“I really like your jeans,” she adds.
“Thanks,” I say, even though I sense she means the opposite. Mom got me these jeans and they have embroidered flowers on the pockets and up the side of one leg. I didn’t put up a fight when she brought them home because she looked so happy when I tried them on, like she was a stylist to the stars who just found a hot new look. Or at least that’s the mental snapshot I remember.
“Can I borrow those and wear them in the show?” Emily asks. “They’re very … western.”
“Sure you can, Em. If you supply the extra denim we’ll need to cover your ass, you can most certainly wear them in the show.” Jenna swoops in to my rescue and then, without missing a beat, goes right back to trying to corral everyone onto the stage.
Emily makes a bitter-air face and then buries her head in her binder. Still on the floor, Cara’s laughing so hard, she falls into an unintentional forward bend stretch.
“Thanks.” I climb up with Jenna onstage to help her sort the rest of the dress rehearsal calendars while she furiously staples packets together.
“I love those jeans,” Jenna says without looking up from her work, which makes us both burst out laughing.
“So by the way”—she hands me a finished packet to add to the pile—“I need you to rescue me and let me hang at your house Saturday night. It’s Cathy’s turn to host her ‘Ladies Who Read Aren’t Ladies in Need’ book club.”
“Oh no. What are they reading this week?”
“I think some memoir about these women who found God after knitting the same scarf in six different countries.”
“Nice. Is she making her famous book-shaped brownies?”
“I really hope not.”
“Yeah, those ones she made last month tasted …”
“Like we were literally eating paperbacks?”
“Yes,” I say, laughing. “So on Saturday actually—”
“Oh, last time when the group was over, oh my God, did I tell you? Mrs. Hendricks was wearing one of her famous ‘I bought this twenty years ago’ jumpsuits, and her camel toe was a work of art. It should have been in a museum. Even Marcus couldn’t take his eyes off it.”
“Gross!”
“Yeah. I tried to sneak a picture of it on my phone, but there was no way I could hold my cell at a non-obvious angle, and I would get in major trouble if Cathy caught me paparazzi-ing Mrs. Hendricks’s crotch.”
“What? Whose crotch?” Meredith asks, walking up the stage-left stairs.
“Nothing, nobody’s.” Jenna stares at Meredith like she just started talking really loud during the serious part of a movie, and then makes a silly face at me.
“Um … okay,” Meredith relents. “Cara wants to know if you have copies of the calendars, and she also changed the can-can choreography, so we need at least an hour to go over it sometime before we do a full run-through.”
“Putting the calendars together now,” Jenna informs her, and then turns around and continues to staple.
Meredith looks like she’s about to say something else to Jenna, but instead turns to me with a big smile.
“So Izzy, I was just thinking, your sister’s in town this weekend, right? Is she going to be there Saturday? I mean, she’ll probably be up late and see me leave. Do you think she’d be cool?”
Jenna’s hands freeze mid-staple.
“How did you know that Allissa’s in for the weekend?” I ask, feeling Jenna’s eyes burning a hole through the back of my neck.
“My mom,” Meredith says, as if that explains everything. Which it doesn’t at all. Why would Meredith’s mom know about Allissa coming in this weekend? It’s not like Meredith’s mom and my mom talk or anything. They used to be friendly, but only because their daughters were best friends. Stacy Brightwell owns Brightwell Interior Energy Designs. She’ll be the first to tell you that she’s an expert who studied feng shui in China. And my mom will be the first to tell you, “Eh, so what?”
“What do you mean Allissa will see you leave, from where?” Jenna asks Meredith.
“Izzy’s. I’m sleeping over,” Meredith says breezily, using air quotes and all. Then she explains to me that her mom is meeting up with Allissa this weekend.
“Meredith, what are you talking about?” I say.
“What are you talking about?” Jenna asks, looking at me.
“She’s going to a party at U of M. She needs to tell her mom she’s at my house,” I explain, and then turn back to Meredith. “Why would Allissa be meeting with your mom?”
“What? Come again, what? I think my ears just shriveled up and fell off my head,” Jenna says.
“For your mom’s birthday coming up. My mom’s giving you guys a bunch of overstocked furniture for your mom’s new office. In your attic? Oh, no. I’m sorry. I just assumed you guys were doing it together.”
“No. Wait. Wow, what kind of furniture?”
“I think a desk, a couch, an armoire … My mom has lots of extra stuff. I guess she knew your mom was leaving her office and that the expensive trendy stuff in there was rented or something ’cause I guess they have the same landlord? And then she ran into Allissa at the mall and—”
“Seriously? You’re going to let her sleep over at your house just so she can leave and go to some party?” Jenna asks, all big-eyed and stifling a laugh. “Izzy, such a pushover,” she adds, now full-out laughing and shaking her head at me.
“Well, you’re both invited to the party …” Meredith adds softly.
“Yeah, like Izzy would even go”—Jenna makes another silly face at me, her brows half raised—“but thanks for the invite.”
“Okay, I get it, Jenna,” Meredith says a little louder now. “I get why you have no interest in going with me to a party at U of M, but—”
“Izzy, will you hand me the rest of that pile.” Jenna bolts up fast, turning to me, and accidentally kicks over her full cup of tea. “Crap!” she says as it spills across the stage and all over the newly stapled schedules. “Crap crap crap crap crap!”
I kneel down and start mopping up some of the spill with—oops—I think somebody’s scarf, while Jenna runs offstage to grab some napkins.
“I’m sorry.” Meredith cringes at me, attempting to shake dry some of the ruined pages. “I really shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, no, it’s okay. Allissa and I sometimes get separate gifts for my mom, so that’s why I didn’t know anything about the furniture and—”
“Here.” Jenna runs back in and hands me some napkins.
“You okay?” I ask her now, because Jenna looks like she’s seriously about to bite a hole through her lower lip.
“Yeah, yeah fine,” she says, mopping up the tea and then grabbing some papers from her bag. “Do me a huge favor and make more copies for me?” she asks. She hands me the pages and then zaps back into director mode, putting both her hands on her hips, and looking frustrated as she scans the crowd.
“Okay everybody, listen up! Listen up, everybody! SHUT UP! SHUT UP
!”
There is a split second of silence and Jenna takes this as her cue.
“Okay, we’re heading into the final stretch here, people, and—okay, will everyone come up front so I don’t have to yell!”
I weave awkwardly through the oncoming crowd, trying to get to the back of the auditorium.
“Hey,” I hear, and feel a tug at the bottom of my shirt just as I’m about to push through the doors.
I turn. Oh. “Hey,” I say to Blake, “what’s up?”
“Not much, how goes the art?” he asks.
“Um … it goes … okay, I guess.” And then I realize he’s still holding on to my sweater. And then he realizes he’s still holding on, and realizes that I realize, and then abruptly drops his hands. I see now that he must have just come from practice, because he’s got his basketball shorts on, but with a … button-down shirt? And wait, why is he wearing boots? He catches me staring at his ridiculous ensemble.
“I know, I know, don’t ask.” He shakes his head.
“Well, now I kind of have to,” I say, laughing.
“Seniors. Hazing.”
“Hazing?”
“Yeah, they haze us during workouts. Well, during everything, actually. And more like torture us because that’s what it is basically. Anyway, they took my T-shirt, and my jeans, and my sneakers while I was in the shower and they rubbed them all over their …” He grimaces and shakes his head remembering.
“You know what? I don’t want to know anymore.”
“Sorry. Yeah, so anyway …” He trails off, gesturing to his shorts, shirt, and boots in a fashion model way that makes me laugh.
Then we hear Jenna shouting, “Does everyone understand? Are you all with me?” and Blake makes a silly face like I got him in trouble or something and heads up front to join the rest of the guys.
I feel a huge smile spread across my face as I head to the computer lab, thinking out my non-date DIA date with Blake. Maybe it’s not a mom setup after all. Then I realize Blake is probably going to that U of M party too … though I’m the last person he’d expect to see there since apparently I’m a non-party-going pushover. Not that Jenna meant to be mean or anything. Even Meredith assumed I wouldn’t want to go. Still, it’s annoying that Jenna’s blowing off a party invite now, after all those times she’s pressured me to go up with her to U of M.