“Ready?” her mother asked, holding up her key ring.
Nora had never been less ready for anything in her whole life. With her luck, Cassidy was on the brink of coming out for a first tentative cuddle, and with Nora gone, he’d stalk back into hiding. Amy had told her how easy it is to hurt a cat’s feelings, another way in which cats were different from ants.
“I guess so,” she said, straining her ears upstairs for any faint meow and hearing none.
Once they reached Emma’s house, Emma flung open the door before Nora even had time to ring the bell.
“Bienvenue!” Emma greeted her. “That’s French for welcome! I’m learning a few words in French so I can talk in French when we go to write poetry at le café.”
Nora hardly heard what Emma was saying. For Emma was cradling her cat, Precious Cupcake, in the crook of her arm, and both Emma and Precious were wearing matching pink fluffy bathrobes.
Nora wanted to ask Emma how long it had taken Precious to get used to being Emma’s cat, now a video star and bathrobe wearer, but she felt too jealous to admit how unsatisfactory her own cat was turning out to be.
“Don’t worry,” Emma said as Nora’s eyes fastened on the embroidered letters on each robe that read EMMA’S SPA. “I have one for you, too!”
Five minutes later, Nora’s duffel was stowed next to one of Emma’s twin beds, which had a ruffled pink canopy stretched across the top of it. Over her pj’s, Nora was wearing her own pink fluffy spa bathrobe.
“That’s the theme of the sleepover!” Emma announced. “A night at the spa!”
Did sleepovers have themes? When Nora and Amy had sleepovers, they just talked, watched movies, and ate pizza.
“We’re going to give ourselves facials!” Emma explained. “And try out new hairdos! And play that nail polish game I told you about! And wait until you see the snacks!”
At least there was pizza first, eaten on normal plates at Emma’s normal kitchen table, with her mother and older sister, to keep things from feeling too strange.
“I didn’t do make-your-own pizzas,” Emma said, “because I wanted to have lots and lots of time for the spa activities.”
“I hope you’re going to enjoy the spa experience,” Mrs. Averill said as Nora nibbled on a piece of pepperoni pizza. “I told Emma I wasn’t sure you were the spa type.”
Well, Nora wasn’t the spa type. But until this week, she hadn’t been the cat-owning type, either.
If only Cassidy would decide he was the owned-by-Nora type. And decide it soon.
“I’m sure it will be lots of fun,” Nora said. She was going to keep an open mind. A good scientist would keep an open mind in any new situation.
Emma fed Precious Cupcake some cheese from her slice of pizza. Nora would never feed Cassidy human food; it wasn’t good for pets to have food meant for other species. But maybe Nora would never even have a chance to give Cassidy any treats at all.
“Okay!” Emma jumped up from the table as soon as Nora had swallowed the final bite of pizza. “To the spa!”
“Facials first!” Emma chirped.
Nora didn’t know what a facial was, but she didn’t ask. She’d find out soon enough.
“Step one, we wash our faces.”
Emma led the way to the spacious bathroom that opened up off her bedroom. Nora had never known a kid who had a bathroom of her own.
“Where’s the soap?” Nora asked, looking down at the sink.
Emma recoiled in horror. “We don’t wash our faces with soap! Soap dries your skin out completely!”
Instead, Emma produced a bottle of cleansing lotion. Nora followed Emma’s lead in applying it to her face and then wiping it off with the cloth provided.
“Now we open our pores!” Emma told her.
A few minutes later, Nora found herself sitting next to Emma, back at the kitchen table, a towel forming a tent over her head, leaning over a bowl of near-boiling water (Emma’s mother helped with that part). The point was to let the steam rush up to her perspiring cheeks.
“Open our pores” apparently meant “sweat like a pig.” Except that pigs had hardly any sweat glands, Nora remembered. Their inability to cool themselves off through perspiration was the chief reason they enjoyed wallowing in nice chilly mud.
“And now—the best part!”
From the fridge, Emma produced a bowl of some whitish, lumpy substance.
“Do we eat that?” Nora asked nervously.
Emma stared at her in disbelief. “No, silly! We put it on our faces!”
But—we just washed them!
Shaking her head in amusement, Emma led the way back to her bedroom, bowl in hand.
“Here,” Emma instructed. “I’ll show you how to do yours.”
As Nora sat motionless on the edge of the guest bed, her hair tied back from her face, Emma rubbed the refrigerated mixture—“It’s yogurt, Greek yogurt because that’s the healthiest kind! And oatmeal, and honey”—onto Nora’s forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin. It felt strange to have Emma’s quick, deft fingers touching her face.
“Now you let it dry. Go ahead, lie down while I do mine.”
Nora awkwardly laid herself flat on the bed.
“Oh, wait! I forgot the most important part!”
Emma darted downstairs and returned with another bowl of something Nora couldn’t see.
“Close your eyes,” Emma told Nora, as she had when fastening on the friendship bracelet, still on Nora’s wrist.
Nora obeyed. Emma placed something cool and moist on Nora’s shut eyelids.
“Cucumber slices!” Emma crowed.
“Um—why?”
“To reduce the puffiness around our eyes!”
Neither girl had any puffiness around her eyes whatsoever, as far as Nora could tell. But it was restful lying there, her head comfortable on Emma’s pillow, the mask drying not unpleasantly onto her face, the cucumbers soothing against her eyes. She could hear Emma humming happily as she applied the mask to her own face.
Then Emma screamed.
As only Emma could scream.
“Precious Cupcake, no! No! No!”
Nora jerked to an upright position, cucumber slices scattering onto the bedspread.
The cat had discovered the tempting bowl of yogurt, oatmeal, and honey. Her head was buried in it as she tried to lap up as much as she could.
“Oh, Precious, look at yourself! It’s all over your face!”
Emma had snatched the cat away from the bowl and was holding her up, shaking her in despair. Now the cat and the girl had not only matching bathrobes but matching white masks on their faces as well.
“She wanted to get a facial, too,” Nora said.
Emma started laughing first. Nora joined in. Both girls shrieked so loudly with giggles that Emma’s older sister stuck her head in the room to see what was going on.
It was Emma’s sister who handed Emma her phone to take the video.
It was Nora who held Precious Cupcake up in front of the phone as Emma filmed the video.
After the mask was scrubbed off Precious’s face, all three girls watched the video of Precious Cupcake’s first facial a dozen times, laughing as hard at the dozenth time as they had at the first.
So Nora had finally done a new thing she could tell Coach Joe. Adopting Cassidy didn’t count and would never count unless Cassidy finally came out from under the bed, which might be never.
But Nora had co-starred in a cat video.
“This is the best sleepover ever!” Emma said.
But as the evening wore on, Nora started to feel more and more homesick. Maybe Cassidy, at this very moment, was looking around Nora’s bedroom, wondering where that girl was who was going to be his new guardian and protector, the girl who right now was having her hair French-braided by Emma.
“You’re lucky your hair is so long,” Emma gushed. “Mine is too short for French braids, and it takes forever to grow. So, don’t tell anyone, because it’s supposed to be a surprise, but I’m g
oing to get a completely new haircut!”
Instead of French-braiding her own hair, Emma fastened it with half a dozen butterfly barrettes, as if a flock of migrating butterflies had flown off course and landed on her head.
“Your hair is a great length,” Emma said, cocking her head to one side as she studied Nora’s new French-braided self. “But when it’s not braided, it’s soooo straight. Why don’t I unbraid it and get my curling iron and give it a little wave?”
“Don’t we need to play the nail polish game?” Nora asked.
If Nora had curls, she’d look like Emma’s twin, except that her hair was longer and dark while Emma’s was shorter and fair. Why would Emma want both of them to have curls? Wasn’t the whole point of the sleepover for Emma to spend time with someone as different from herself as possible?
“The nail polish game!” Emma’s face lit up. “Thanks for reminding me!”
Half an hour later, Nora had ten fingernails and ten toenails painted, each a different color, even though the game had turned out to be a failure; you needed more than two people to play Spin the Nail Polish Bottle.
Emma had been shocked that Nora didn’t know how to put on nail polish.
“But—but—but—” Emma had sputtered. “You can do all kinds of things with batteries, but you don’t know how to put on nail polish?”
Now Nora did.
“We have to let it dry,” Emma told her, “or it’ll smudge. So let’s play a sleepover game while we wait. I know! Let’s play Truth or Dare!”
The name of the game made Nora nervous. She didn’t want to have to tell Emma the truth about how bad she felt about being Emma’s project. And she couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of dares Emma had in mind.
“We ask each other questions,” Emma explained, waving her hands around with outstretched fingers to create a drying breeze. “And we have to give a true answer. No lies! And if we don’t want to tell the truth because it’s too embarrassing, then we have to do whatever dare the other person says. Only it can’t be anything dangerous, of course. So who should go first?”
Nora didn’t want to go first.
She didn’t want to go second, either.
What she really wanted was to go home and see if Cassidy had finally decided to lie on her bed and do the things a cat was supposed to do. It was too sad to be giggling over somebody else’s cat videos when her own cat was such a sad disappointment.
“Okay, I’ll start,” Emma said. “Here’s my first question for you. Who do you have a crush on?”
Nora felt a sweet surge of relief. That one wasn’t embarrassing or scary.
“Nobody.”
“Come on, Nora. Is it Mason? Is it Brody? Everybody has a crush on somebody.”
“I don’t.”
Emma sighed, but she seemed to accept, grudgingly, that what Nora had said was true. After all, wasn’t Emma expecting Nora to give answers completely opposite from what Emma would have given? Wasn’t that the whole point of the newness-challenge sleepover?
“Okay, you ask me a question,” Emma instructed.
All Nora could think of was to turn Emma’s same question back at her. She hoped that copying other people’s questions was allowed.
“Who do you have a crush on?” Nora asked.
Emma blushed. “Promise you won’t tell anyone. Even Amy. Promise!”
Nora promised.
“I sort of have a crush on…Dunk.”
As if that hadn’t been totally obvious to the entire fourth grade for months, given that Emma giggled whenever Dunk burped, belched, or made rude noises with his hand under his armpit.
“Okay,” Emma said, “here’s another one for you. What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you at the mall?”
Was the most embarrassing thing having to say she never went to the mall?
“Nothing,” Nora admitted. “I mean, I never go to the mall.”
Emma’s eyes widened. Even though it should have been Nora’s turn to ask a question, Emma kept on going. “What’s the dumbest TV show you secretly like to watch?”
“My family doesn’t have a TV,” Nora confessed.
Emma paused, as if trying to come up with a question for which Nora could finally give a satisfying answer. “What do you like best about me, and what do you like least?”
Until this moment, Nora could have come up with a lot of things she liked about Emma. Right now, tired, nervous, and worried about Cassidy, she couldn’t think of anything. She certainly didn’t like that Emma was making her play this awful game at a sleepover that was happening only because Emma had decided to use her for a prize-winning project for school.
“Give me a dare instead,” Nora said miserably.
Emma tossed her butterfly-studded curls. “Okay then. I dare you to do a funny dance to my favorite song, ‘Kitten Love.’ ”
Emma grabbed her phone and touched the screen, and the song began to play: peppy, bouncy music about someone who was in love with her cat. A cat, presumably, that came out from under the bed occasionally and purred on the person’s lap.
Nora was good at playing basketball and softball. She was terrible at dancing.
Feeling the heat rise to her face, Nora struggled to her feet and tried out a couple of awkward steps with her feet, clawing the air with her hands as if they were paws.
Emma burst out laughing.
This was too much. It was all too much. Nora hadn’t come to Emma’s house to be laughed at. Maybe Emma would call Bethy in California tomorrow and tell her how ridiculous Nora had looked doing the dance, and they’d both laugh at Nora together.
Nora stopped dancing. “Oh, hey, I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“I have to go home. Now. I forgot to feed my ants. The song reminded me. Cats—pets—ants—hungry—feed—go home.”
Maybe Emma would understand her homesickness more if Nora told her about Cassidy: how much she wanted to have her own cat to cuddle, and how heartbroken she was that Cassidy had turned out to be the least cuddly cat in the universe.
“I’m sorry,” Nora added. “It’s been a very nice party.” Well, some parts of it had been nice, and lots more fun than Nora had expected. “But I really do have to go.”
Nora expected Emma to fly into a rage, but instead Emma’s lips trembled and her eyes glistened, as if she might cry.
What on earth was going on here?
“We didn’t even have the snacks,” Emma whispered.
Was that why Emma was about to burst into tears? Or was she just sad that her newness project was spoiled?
“We can still have them,” Nora said. Even though Emma had made fun of her humiliating dance, Nora could still be polite to Emma. “It will take my mom a few minutes to come and get me. Can I use your phone to call her?”
Silently, Emma handed her phone to Nora. It was awful to make the call with Emma standing right there, as Nora told her mother she needed to come home right now to feed her ants. All her mother said was, “Oh, honey. Okay, I’ll be there soon.”
Emma led the way downstairs to the dining room table, where the snacks were laid out in their full splendor.
Colored marshmallows, with an unwrapped Tootsie Roll stuck in the top of each one.
“Like nail polish bottles. See?” Emma said flatly.
Tiny sandwiches made of bread cut in the shape of flip-flops, with the straps made of strips of green onion fastened with itty-bitty cherry tomatoes.
“Like you’d put on your feet after a pedicure,” Emma explained, “so the nail polish doesn’t smudge.”
Pink-frosted, heart-shaped cookies.
“Those aren’t a spa thing,” Emma said. “They’re more of a friendship thing….” Her voice trailed off.
Nora heard her mother’s car pulling into the driveway. She remembered to take off the embroidered spa bathrobe and drape it over a dining room chair, but she’d have to dash outside in her pajamas.
“Thanks, Emma,” Nora
managed to say, over the sudden lump in her throat. “I’m…sorry.”
And she was. Even though Emma was the one who should be even sorrier.
Nora fled to the car, grateful that her mother would know the answer without having to ask the question.
How could Nora have failed at every single new thing she had thought of trying?
She wasn’t being a young Mendel for the twenty-first century, or proving anything new about dumb radishes.
She wasn’t tackling a new sport, or even a new position in the same sport.
Anybody with ears would be grateful she wasn’t playing a new instrument.
She wasn’t going up in a hot-air balloon.
She didn’t have a new pet, not really. Having Cassidy under her bed was no different from having no cat, except that her heart hadn’t ached before, and it did now.
She had tried so hard to have fun doing the new things at the sleepover, from getting the facial to polishing her nails to making the cat video. But then Emma had acted disappointed in her for not having the right answers to the Truth or Dare questions, and had laughed at her—laughed right to her face—when Nora had done her best to do the crazy dance.
So in the end she had nothing new to show for herself. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Amy’s small green snake lay curled on soft grass in the bottom of its glass terrarium, beneath a makeshift lid weighted down with two rocks.
“I couldn’t find the real lid,” Amy explained to Nora on Sunday afternoon. “The terrarium was in the garage, but the lid wasn’t with it, so I used this piece of glass instead.”
“Your mother still doesn’t know about him—or her?”
“My mom hates coming in my room,” Amy said.
Nora didn’t like Amy’s room much herself, but she was used to it now. Dirty clothes covered Amy’s bed. “They’re not that dirty,” Amy had told her. “I might wear them again. You can wear pants or sweaters several times, you know.” Leashes, water bowls, and books on pet care were everywhere underfoot. Amy’s desk was heaped high with school announcements crumpled from her backpack, interesting rocks she had picked up on walks, and seashells from a family vacation to Florida.
The Trouble with Friends Page 6