PG03. Pink & Green is the New Black

by Lisa Greenwald

  “So, before we start,” Zoe says, “Erica tells me you have a boyfriend in high school?”

  It’s a good thing Sunny’s in the bathroom, because she always gets grossed out when people talk about her brother that way. And also because she knows the truth. It’s hard to keep up a lie when people all around you know the truth.

  “Yeah, I do. His name is Yamir.” I smile so they don’t think I’m full of myself.

  “He’s super cute,” Erica adds. “He was definitely the cutest eighth grader last year.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I think so too.”

  “Of course you do.” Erica rolls her eyes, and I guess a little bit of her old self is coming back. Despite what I told my dad, Erica Crane can’t change completely.

  “So, maybe we can all hang out, and then he can introduce me to some of his high school friends?” Zoe asks, all sweet.

  “Maybe,” I say, and then quickly change my tone. “I mean, sure, yeah.”

  “Great!” Zoe ties her hair back into a low ponytail. “I really don’t know many people here yet, you know. It’s January, and I still feel like the new girl.”

  Thankfully, Sunny gets back from the bathroom, so I don’t have to say anything in response to that. Zoe probably doesn’t know many people because she only hangs out with Erica. You either love Erica or you hate Erica, and there really isn’t much in-between.

  “So, should we start?” Sunny asks. “We only have an hour, right?”

  “Right.” I’m glad Sunny reminded everyone of that. Hours and hours with these two with no end in sight is too much for me to handle.

  “By the way,” I tell them, “there are people getting treatments right now, so we do have to keep it quiet. But I know that treatment room A is open, so we can go in there, and I can show you the makeup and everything. Sound good?”

  “Sounds amazing,” Zoe says. “Your family owns this spa?”

  I nod.

  “Erica, why are you not BFFs with Lucy?” Zoe asks her. “You could be getting free makeovers and massages, like, every day!”

  Erica doesn’t say anything to that. I bet she wishes her assistant would keep quiet for once.

  Mariah, one of the aestheticians, pops her head out of a treatment room. “Let me know if you need anything, okay, Lucy?”

  “I can’t believe you, like, made this spa,” Zoe says, looking at everything as we walk to the treatment room. “Erica was telling me all about it. It’s pretty awesome. You have your college essay written already.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “My college essay? I haven’t even finished eighth grade yet!”

  “I know, I know. My sister just started working on her essay, so my whole family is kind of obsessed with it.”

  Zoe is still talking about college essays, even though none of us have seriously started thinking about college yet. What I hear Zoe saying is that Erica was actually talking about me, telling Zoe about the spa, and sounding kind of impressed. Sometimes you jump to conclusions about people, assuming what they’re thinking, when you really have no idea at all.

  “So, what are you guys thinking for the dance?” I sit down and motion for everyone else to do the same.

  “You want to talk first or should I?” Zoe asks Erica.

  Erica doesn’t answer the question but jumps right in. “We want everyone to get their makeup done here, and we’d like you to do it, and we’d like you to offer a discount. Eighth-Grade Masquerade is special because of the awesome costumes and makeup, and you guys are the makeup experts. What you did for Yamir’s grade was incredible.”

  “Lucy can’t do everyone’s makeup!” Sunny says, way too loud, and I shush her. “She’d have to start, like, tomorrow! The staff has to be able to help her.”

  Erica glares at me. “Is that true, Lucy? Aren’t you the expert?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I know what I’m doing.” I shift in my seat. I wonder if there will ever come a time when Erica Crane doesn’t make me nervous. “Listen, I like to give each client the time and attention they deserve. I can’t rush through it. People can make appointments with me on a first-come, first-served basis.”

  “She really is a professional!” Zoe laughs, and I think I’m starting to like her a little bit more. Sure, she’s obsessed with Erica, but she’s not afraid of her. That’s impressive for someone who’s met her so recently.

  We’re discussing when we should post the sign-up sheet and who else in the spa should do the makeup, so I go out into the reception area and get a pen and a pad to take notes. And who do I see walking right by the spa window?

  Yamir. And he’s not alone. He’s with Clint and Anthony and two girls I don’t know.

  At first I pretend I don’t see them, trying to look like I’m scavenging through the desk for materials. But then I can feel that they’ve seen me, and how long can a person possibly look through a desk drawer? So I pick my head up and we make eye contact.

  Me in the spa reception area at eight on a Friday night, and Yamir on Ocean Street with his friends and two mystery girls.

  I waffle between going out there or just waving from in here and hoping that they leave, but eventually the decision is made for me. Yamir and his people are coming in. Right now.

  “Working the late shift, Luce-Juice?” Yamir asks.

  “Um, kind of.” I fold my arms across my chest, because I don’t know what else to do with them. “Erica, Zoe, and Sunny are in back. We’re discussing plans for the dance.”

  “Ah, Eighth-Grade Masquerade. What memories.” Clint’s being sarcastic, so I ignore him. He’s pretty much sarcastic about everything. I’m used to it by now.

  “What’s that?” one of the girls asks.

  “Oh, right. You’re new. It’s basically just this big dance where people wear costumes. It’s kind of like an eighth-grade prom, but better,” Yamir says, and I’m surprised he’s actually saying that something from eighth grade is cool. He seems so into the high school thing now.

  “Fun,” she says, but it doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s fun. She’s wearing black leggings and an oversize sweatshirt, and even though that sounds like a sloppy combination, she looks like a model.

  “Where are you from?” I ask her. “I’m Lucy, by the way.”

  “Oh, so you’re Lucy?” she asks, like she’s been hearing about me for years. “I moved from Westport. I’m Sienna.”

  I make a mental note to ask Sunny about this girl later, but before I realize what’s happening, Yamir and his crew are traipsing through the spa, looking into the treatment rooms. They find our group in treatment room A, and soon it feels like there are a thousand people in the spa.

  “Is this what they use to clean your pores?” Anthony asks, holding the pumice stone for pedicures.

  “No. Don’t touch that.” I take it away from him.

  The longer they stay in here, the more stressed I get. They shouldn’t be in here, they definitely shouldn’t be touching everything, and I can’t be in the same room as Yamir with all these other people. It feels like we’re all in a balloon that’s about to pop at any second.

  “Oh, Yamir—Lucy’s boyfriend,” I hear Zoe whisper to Erica, and I ignore her, hoping that Yamir doesn’t hear her. But it’s clear he does—suddenly he starts fiddling with the string on his hooded sweatshirt and making some dumb joke about how he’d like a spa treatment.

  Then he’s standing in the corner, looking at the wall and admiring the abstract painting of a tree like he’s at some kind of fancy art museum. He looks as stressed as I feel.

  “Yamir, don’t you want to sit next to your girlfriend?” Erica sings. I look down at my feet, but I can feel Sienna staring at me.

  “It’s okay, guys, I think it’s time to go anyway,” I announce. “The staff needs to close up.”

  “Do you want to come with us to Scotty’s?” Anthony asks the group, and I have a suspicious feeling that he may have an instant crush on Zoe. It’s just a hunch, but my hunches are usually ri
ght.

  I look at Sunny and Sunny looks at me, and we try to speak with our eyes. I don’t want to go to Scotty’s. Not with them, anyway. Everyone thinks Yamir is my boyfriend and that everything is great between us, and I just need them to think that for a little while longer. But if we go to Scotty’s and he acts weird, or hangs out with Sienna more than he hangs out with me, everyone will know. And by everyone I mean Erica and Zoe.

  “Oh, we can’t,” Sunny says. Thank God. “Lucy’s coming back to my house and sleeping over, and we have Evan and some of the other guys meeting us there around nine.”

  Genius. Sunny Ramal: Girl Genius.

  “Ooh, Evan and some of the other guys,” Clint says. “Well, okay, we’re out. Come on, peeps.”

  And just like that, Yamir and the others walk out of the treatment room and leave the spa.

  “It’s cool that you and Yamir are together but, like, you can do things apart,” Erica says. At first I can’t tell if she’s being sincere, but then I decide that she is. She’s not smirking—that’s how I know.

  Zoe and Erica totally believe us about the sleepover, and fortunately they don’t ask to be invited. Zoe’s mom picks them up, and Charise offers to drive Sunny and me home.

  “Should I really sleep over?” I ask Sunny.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  I get to Sunny’s and call my mom to tell her I’m sleeping over.

  “Lucy, I get worried about this,” she says.

  “Worried? Why?”

  She pauses for a second. “You sleeping over there. While you and Yamir are, I don’t know, an item.”

  I laugh. “Mom, it’s fine. I’m hanging out with Sunny.”

  “Okay,” she says, reluctantly. “Please behave.”

  I don’t ask her to elaborate on what she means by that. I don’t really want to know. Maybe if I told her what was really going on, she’d realize she doesn’t have much to worry about.

  I know I’ll be up all night thinking about how Yamir is sleeping right there in the next room. I’ll be wondering about that girl Sienna, and what exactly she knows about me.

  But I’d rather be here than at home, thinking about all of this from five blocks away.

  Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth grade:

  Keep a journal and write down all the wonderful moments.

  There’s one moment that I replay over and over in my head. It happened in October, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed it in my mind, if I remember it differently from the way it actually happened.

  I’m not sure.

  Yamir and I were sitting at my kitchen table eating grapes. Green ones. My favorite. Well, eating may not be the right word. We were throwing them, trying to get them into each other’s mouth. It might seem pretty gross to anyone else, but to us it was the best way to eat them.

  His hair was longer than it normally was; I guess he needed a haircut. One strand on the right side of his face was hanging into his eye. I remember his eyes vividly. Golden brown, the color of slightly burnt French toast.

  He was the Yamir I’d always known. But he was different. He was mine now.

  It was an unseasonably warm October day, so we went outside to lie down on the lounge chairs and pretend it was still summer. The pool was closed up but we didn’t mind. We soaked up the last remnants of the summer sun. I stayed sideways on my lounge chair and looked at him, and he stayed the same way on his lounge chair and faced me.

  And we just stared at each other.

  I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing: how perfectly we happy we were.

  Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth grade:

  Spend time with your friends. You need it.

  It’s hard to know when things changed with Yamir. I look around Sunny’s room, trying to figure it out. Sunny has been sleeping for hours while I’ve been staring at the clock, wondering if Yamir is asleep in his room next door.

  It makes me think of souring milk or bread going stale. You don’t know exactly when it happens—you just know it happened. But maybe this is different from stale bread or sour milk. Maybe it can be fixed. The bad can be made good. The wrong can be made right. What’s done can be undone.

  If I just accept that this is how things are, they will never get better. And the next few months will be nowhere close to the perfect I want and need them to be.

  I have to keep trying. I have to figure it out.

  I roll over and sigh and wish that Sunny would wake up so we could talk. I hate when she falls asleep before me, because then I know I won’t be able to fall asleep for hours and hours. It’s the way it’s always been at our sleepovers.

  I guess I finally fall asleep, because an hour or so later I hear a knock on Sunny’s door, and it feels like I’ve been zapped out of a sound sleep.

  I wonder if I’m dreaming it. But then I hear another knock, and I hear a whisper through the door. “Luce-Juice.”

  Yamir.

  He’s waking me up. But my hair is all disheveled and I probably have morning breath, even though it’s not morning. Well, I guess it is. I look at the clock. It’s exactly 3:00 A.M.

  I get out of bed as silently as possible, trying to make sure the bed frame doesn’t creak, and tiptoe to the door.

  “Were you awake?” Yamir whispers.

  I nod, even though I wasn’t. I’m too scared to talk. I don’t want my breath to make him pass out.

  He takes my hand and leads me down the stairs. It’s a good thing everyone in the Ramal family is a heavy sleeper, or they’d probably wake up from all the creaks the stairs make. I swear they have the loudest stairs in the whole world.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Yamir whispers when we get downstairs. We sit on the couch, and he turns on the lamp on the end table. His hair is sticking up in weird places and his eyelids are droopy. I wonder if he’s been up all night too.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. I’m still half-asleep, but I keep telling myself that I need to pay attention. Yamir woke me up. He knew I was sleeping here and he wants to talk to me. If I didn’t look and feel so discombobulated, this could be really romantic.

  “I think you’re mad at me,” he says, soft and concerned. I’m not sure if he’s rubbing his eyes because he’s tired or because he can’t look at me. Either way, it’s adorable. Everything he does is adorable.

  I’ve gone from finding him completely annoying when I first knew him, to finding him moderately cute but still annoying, to finding everything he does perfectly cute. Except for the ignoring me part.

  “I’m a little bit mad at you.” I don’t look at him.

  “Well, a little bit is better than a lot.”

  “Okay, I’m a lot mad at you.” I finally look at him, and he’s still rubbing his eyes. I wonder again if he was up all night deciding whether he should come knock on Sunny’s door. I wish I could read his mind. Just for a second. “You’ve been ignoring me for weeks. Since winter break.”

  “I haven’t been ignoring you. I’ve just been, I don’t know, busy. I guess.”

  “That’s not a good excuse.”

  “I guess not,” he says. As exciting as this conversation is, I want to go back to sleep. It feels like we’re not getting anywhere. I could do this whole thing better if I was more awake. Maybe it’s not a good idea to discuss important things in the middle of the night.

  “Remember that day with the grapes?” I ask, after a few moments of quiet.

  “Grapes?”

  “We were at my house and we were throwing them into each other’s mouth. It was warm for October.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I think so.”

  “That day felt perfect. Everything seemed like it was exactly the way it was supposed to be.” I crinkle up my face, afraid that I may start to cry. That will only make me look worse than I’m sure I already do.

  All Yamir says is, “I remember that day,” and I know that we’re not stale bread. Things can go back to being right again.

  “Let’s go back to that day.”

  �
��Luce-Juice, how many times do I have to tell you that I don’t have a time machine?”

  I laugh. Even in the middle of this awkward conversation at three in the morning, Yamir is still able to make me laugh. Then he starts laughing too, and soon we’re just sitting on his couch completely cracking up.

  This is why I like him so much. No one can make me laugh like Yamir makes me laugh.

  I throw a pillow at his face. “You know what I mean,” I say finally.

  “I think I do.”

  We stare at each other for a few more seconds, and I pray that he doesn’t try to kiss me. I’d need to brush my teeth or at least use mouthwash before a kiss. Thankfully, he grabs my hand and leads me back to the stairs.

  “So, do you think you can stop ignoring me? Or what?” I ask.

  “I think so,” he says. “It seems easy enough.”

  “Um, okay.” I can’t tell what he means by that, but it seems like he understands what I’m saying and that he’ll try to do better.

  “Let’s go back to sleep,” he says.

  I nod because my eyelids weigh a million pounds, and I don’t think I have anything else to add. We walk upstairs and he drops me off at the door to Sunny’s room.

  I know I’ll never fall back to sleep now. I replay the conversation over and over like a favorite song on repeat. I’m still not sure where we stand, but talking made me feel better.

  He has to know that he can’t ignore me—that things can’t go on the way they were going.

  Sometimes all it takes is talking to someone, hearing their voice, listening to what they say, to make everything seem better.

  Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth grade:

  Talk to people you’ve never talked to before.

  Mrs. Ramal makes her famous banana pancakes in the morning. She’s using her restaurant-sized griddle. She always makes way more pancakes than we could ever eat, but something about that feels fun—an overflowing platter of pancakes in the middle of the table and maple syrup in a little glass pitcher. It’s decadent.