Picture Perfect #3: Best Frenemies

by Cari Simmons

  “So tell us all about it!” Alice’s dad pulled up a chair and grabbed a giant strawberry. Mrs. Kinney expertly slid a plate beneath him to catch any drips.

  “Oh,” said Alice, wanting to be polite but not quite in the mood to be chatty. She was still bummed from not being able to go over to Cassidy’s house, plus she had that stupid homework to do. “You know.”

  “We did know, once,” said Alice’s mom, gazing at Mr. Kinney quizzically. “But we forgot.”

  “We are old,” Mr. Kinney said. “Middle school was a long time ago for us.”

  “Dinosaurs and all, chiseling homework into rock slabs,” Mrs. Kinney said. “So humor us.”

  “There were a few kids in my homeroom class who I knew from Comiskey. Our homeroom teacher, Ms. Garrity, was in a really bad mood,” Alice said, deciding not to mention the part where she got called out for not paying attention.

  “Probably because she had to get off the beach and teach a bunch of lousy kids,” Mr. Kinney joked.

  “She doesn’t seem like someone who spends a lot of time on the beach,” Alice said. “Anyway, I met some of the other kids and most are okay. One is kind of weird, though. Stuck up or something, I don’t know. She gave me some mean looks.”

  “She’s probably just nervous,” Mrs. Kinney suggested, always trying to see the best in people, even those she’d never met before.

  Alice told them about the rest of the day, her parents pausing to ask questions and clarify along the way, like they were going to write a report on her. Sometimes being an only child meant getting a little bit too much attention.

  “Anyway,” Alice said. “The real bummer is that I actually have homework to do tonight. I really wanted to see Cassidy and catch up, but I have to read To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “But you’ve read it before,” Alice’s dad pointed out.

  “Yeah, but it was a while ago,” Alice said. “I’m sure there’s stuff I forgot.”

  Alice’s mom and dad shared a look.

  “You’ll see Cassidy plenty,” Mrs. Kinney reassured her, running her hand through Alice’s hair and twirling a red-gold tendril in her fingers. “I know it feels hard right now, but you’ll figure it out and it’ll get better, I promise.”

  “I hope so,” Alice grumbled. After bringing her plate to the sink, she shouldered her backpack, which somehow felt heavier than when she took it off.

  “Or else what?” her dad teased, and she threw him a foul look as she climbed the navy carpeted stairs to her room.

  “Dinner at six, okay?” Alice’s mom called up to her.

  Alice could only muster an “uh-huh” in response.

  In Alice’s room, which was done up with peach floral wallpaper and turquoise carpeting, the sun shone cheerily through the white-painted shutters. Just because school had started, summer was still not technically over. What a tease, Alice thought. She dumped the contents of her backpack onto the floor and sighed, picking up her paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and her school planner, already filled with a list of tasks.

  She contemplated turning on the radio to lighten her mood but knew she’d never really be able to concentrate on reading without complete silence, so she settled onto her bed with the white fluffy duvet cover and cracked open her book. Outside, she could hear kids running around, screaming happily in their backyards, and in the distance, the sound of motorboats on the lake. One day down: the whole rest of the school year to go.

  CHAPTER 4

  TOGETHER AGAIN

  “Here’s you on the first day,” Cassidy said, gearing up to do one of her impressions of Alice, which were never accurate but always hilarious. She balled her hands up into tiny fists and rubbed them at her eyes like a baby. “Waah! I’m so scared! I’m Alice Kinney and I’m so smart and so cute and because of this I’m going to have a terrible time at school! Boo hoo!”

  “Yeah, well here’s you.” Alice grinned, standing up and tucking her denim skirt between her thighs so that it resembled shorts. “I’m Cassidy! Look at my shorts! I’ve got long, skinny legs, woo woo!” She did a few high kicks for emphasis as she ran her hands over her scalp. “How’s my hair? How would you rate it on a scale of fabulous to extra-fabulous?”

  It was Friday night, and Alice had to laugh about how freaked she had been the first day of school. That Monday, it took her less than an hour to get all her homework done, and she realized that as long as she was disciplined about getting home in time, she could still go over to Cassidy’s house—and had gone twice already in the last week.

  “To our first week,” Cassidy said, raising a glass of the special infused water Mrs. Kinney liked to experiment with. Sometimes it was delicious. Other times she left some jalapeño peppers in the water for too long, and Alice and her dad had the comical yet painful experience of drinking hot but cold water.

  This batch, though, flavored with fresh plums and cinnamon sticks, was a winner. Alice clinked glasses.

  “Hold on, I’ve got a great idea,” Alice said, scrambling to her feet and going to her white drafting table, the organization of which was her pride and joy. Alice loved finding the perfectly sized box, jar, bowl, or odd container to hold her desk supplies. She opened up a drawer on a tiny clear plastic chest and pulled out a sheet of metallic gold stickers, the kind teachers put on good projects and papers. Alice liked to decorate cards and letters with them.

  “I figured we could look back at the notebook and put stickers next to the best entries,” she said. “That way, if we’re ever sad or bored or something like that, we know which ones to look back on so we can laugh.”

  “I like it,” Cassidy said, nodding. “Make sure you put in that one story you told me about that kid who set himself on fire.”

  “Oh my goodness, poor Todd,” Alice said, laughing.

  After all the permission slips had finally been turned in, nobody had been more excited about going into biology lab and “messing stuff up” than Todd Tian, who Alice was sure was either secretly a pyromaniac or a future mad scientist.

  Not ten minutes had passed since the students had filed into the lab when the students heard “Uh, Ms. Crawford?” from the back of the room. The students and the teacher all turned around to see Todd, in his protective apron and glasses (which he had made fun of for being “weak,” because it was required that the students wear them each lab, even if they were just growing mold on Jell-O), looking down with alarm at a small but persistent flame that crept up his apron like a friendly snake.

  Todd was physically fine (once Ms. Crawford, astoundingly cool under pressure, had thrown a fire blanket over him), but he was suspended from participating in labs for two weeks and any time he drew attention to himself in class, he was teased with people saying, “Uh, Ms. Crawford? Do you have a fire extinguisher?” or “Uh, Ms. Crawford? Do you think I’m hot?”

  If he was lucky, people would forget about it by high school, but Alice hoped he wasn’t ruling out the possibility of leaving town and changing his name to completely escape it.

  “You guys got to play with fire in your first week?” Cassidy asked.

  “That’s the hilarious thing,” Alice said, putting a sticker next to the Todd story and illustrating it with a red pen. She drew flames coming out of it. It was rather beautiful, actually. “We weren’t. We’re studying ocean currents this week. We still haven’t figured out where or how he did it.”

  “Well, I’m jealous,” said Cassidy.

  “Jealous that you didn’t set yourself on fire?”

  “No, that you guys even have access to fire,” Cassidy said. “Do you know what we’re doing in our bio lab? Growing bean sprouts! And I don’t think we’re even allowed to touch the sprouts. We just get to look at them and maybe measure them.”

  “Well, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to eat them too,” Alice joked.

  “Dear diary, today I ate a bean sprout. It was the best day of my life,” Cassidy said dreamily. She grabbed the notebook and flipped through it.


  “Ooh,” she said, stabbing a robin’s-egg-blue-painted fingernail at the page where Alice had drawn the seating chart the first day. “Nikki Wilcox. Did I tell you that she’s in my ballet class?”

  “She’s in ballet?” Alice asked in disbelief. After watching Cassidy dance, and seeing the way she lit up the stage with her smiling eyes and graceful dips and jumps, Alice couldn’t even picture Nikki participating in something so fun or pretty as ballet. Alice would love to dance herself, but she had the coordination of a moose, plus she suffered from crippling stage fright, ever since a recital in third grade when she went to play the piano and discovered, to her horror, that the piano hadn’t been tuned.

  She had played the Mozart minuet perfectly, but it sounded like she was playing it with her elbows. She had gone and cried in the bathroom for an hour afterwards.

  “Yes, she is,” Cassidy confirmed. She stuck her legs out and began stretching, the way she did whenever ballet came up in conversation. Alice couldn’t decide which was more impressive, Cassidy’s flexibility or the floral-pattered leggings she was wearing. “She’s not bad either, so far that I can tell, but she always has a stank face on.”

  “Stank face?” Alice laughed.

  “I heard an eighth grader say that,” Cassidy confided. “You know, it’s like when you look like you smell something bad?”

  “Like this?” Alice said, screwing up her face like she had just smelled her mom microwaving fish taco leftovers.

  “Like this!” Cassidy said, pinching up her nose and mouth as close together as she could in the middle of her face. The girls dissolved into laughter again.

  “After class,” Cassidy said, “a bunch of us hang out afterwards and just have a little snack while we get dressed. No big deal, just like orange slices or whatever. But not Nikki—not only does she not spend time with the class, she just busts right out without saying good-bye or even changing. It’s like she can’t stand to be in the same room as us for one second longer than she has to!”

  “I wonder what’s up with her,” Alice said.

  “Who knows?” said Cassidy. “Let’s talk about something fun. Speaking of eighth graders, there’s a boy who’s kind of cute who I think might actually know I exist.”

  “Oooh, tell!” Alice said, flopping on her stomach on her bed.

  “His name is Jesse, and he’s on the baseball team with David,” Cassidy explained, referring to her older brother. “So I see him when my mom picks David up after practice. He’s really skinny, but he has the cutest smile,” she said, looking dreamy.

  “Nice!” said Alice. “And you think he likes you?”

  Something about the phrase “cutest smile” made a picture of Aaron Woolsey pop into Alice’s head. She shook it away. She had decided to keep crushes on hold for now—it was hard enough to deal with middle school and honors classes. Sure, it was fun to talk to Aaron in class and to see him smile, but she was okay with just being friends with him—for now.

  “Well, he always seems to make a point of smiling at me when we pick David up,” Cassidy said, pulling out a pink heart-shaped lip balm from her pocket and applying it—like the guy in question was going to show up and ask for a smooch then and there. “And he said hi twice to me so far this week in the hall at school.”

  “Wow, Cassidy,” teased Alice. “It sounds like you guys are practically engaged already!” In elementary school Cassidy had had a tendency to crush hard and fast on boys—so fast that sometimes she didn’t have a Boy of the Week but a Boy of the Hour.

  “Oh, hush your butt!” Cassidy said, hitting Alice with a pillow. The girls laughed and spent the next half hour playing the catalog game: taking a pile of some of the most random catalogs Alice’s parents received and choosing one thing from each page that they’d have to buy.

  This was a good week for catalogs. Alice’s parents had received one selling strange, seemingly useless gizmos like automatic dog feeders and leg massagers; another that apparently thought Alice’s parents were ninety years old, as it featured gadgets to help old people zip up their clothes and pick things off shelves. The best one, however, displayed high-end Halloween costumes for dogs. Before Cassidy had to go home for dinner, they had picked out some quite elaborate outfits for Bagel, Cassidy’s pug, who was in danger of being dressed as a dinosaur, a Raggedy Ann doll, and possibly a mermaid—or was it mer-dog?

  “Pizza for dinner tonight okay?” Mrs. Kinney said, poking her head into Alice’s room after Cassidy had gone home for the night.

  “Sure!” said Alice.

  “You seem happy,” said Mrs. Kinney, sidling her way inside.

  “Well, you see, I like pizza,” explained Alice. “It tastes good in my mouth.”

  “No, I mean in general. You seem a lot cheerier than you did at the beginning of the week.”

  “I guess I was just nervous about school, and about not seeing Cassidy as much,” said Alice.

  “And it turns out that both are more manageable than you thought, right?”

  “We’ll see,” said Alice. “I don’t want to jinx anything.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t be so bad,” said Mrs. Kinney, grabbing and flipping through the old-people catalog. “Yikes, please tell me that I’m not this ancient yet.”

  “Not for about four more years,” said Alice.

  “Will you promise to rub my poor bunions?” Mrs. Kinney asked in a creaky old voice.

  “Don’t you have a pizza to order, Mom?” Alice smirked.

  “Yeesh! If a mother can’t ask her favorite daughter to perform basic foot care, who can she ask?” joked Mrs. Kinney, and left to rifle through the menu drawer. In a minute, she’d quiz Alice’s dad on what he’d like to order, even though they always agreed on one pepperoni pizza and one spinach stuffed.

  Alice sat on the floor, propped up a pillow at the base of her bed, and picked up the purple notebook again, flipping through it and noting with satisfaction the hilarious stories that she and Cassidy had already begun accumulating. The notebook was one of her best ideas ever! It was going to be so fun to look back on it later, maybe even years from now.

  But the part of her brain that couldn’t help but notice patterns started pinging: the entries in the last week seemed to get shorter and shorter with each day—particularly Cassidy’s. The first day’s entry took up ten lines, then Tuesday’s, eight, while Friday’s was a mere three lines long. What if the notebook ended up withering and dying because Alice wasn’t making it interesting enough?

  Alice jumped up and went back to her desk and pulled out a hot-pink Post-it note from her Post-it note holder (completely unnecessary but she loved the way it always helpfully spat out a single stickie). She began to brainstorm notebook topics that could guarantee a lengthy response from Cassidy.

  Nikki Wilcox

  Cute boy Jesse

  Cafeteria food rankings

  New lotion/perfume/nail polish reviews

  TV show recaps

  Predictions of who will take who to the snowball dance

  Ms. Haynes’s outfits???

  Alice pondered and tapped the metal part of her pencil against her teeth until she got a headache.

  “Alice, pizza!” her dad called, rescuing her from her self-imposed homework assignment. While getting her homework done this school year was going to be a challenge, keeping the notebook—which was basically a symbol of her and Cassidy’s friendship—thriving was also going to take some effort. But Alice knew it would be worth it.

  CHAPTER 5

  FRIENDSHIP VS. HOMEWORK

  “What would you guys most want to take with you if you were stranded on an island?” Mr. Nichols asked the class on Monday, leaning against the board, tossing a tiny nub of chalk up in the air and catching it. The class, still rusty from the weekend, looked blankly at him. “Well, don’t all speak up at once. Come on. Alice, how about you?”

  “Um, a tent?” Alice asked. Pitiful. She could be more creative than that.

  “Okay,” Mr. Nichols said. “
Christy, how about you?”

  “My dog!” she chirped. “He could keep me warm and provide company and maybe catch some food.”

  “All right,” he said. “Companionship. Aaron, go.”

  “Um, my TV and the NFL package?” Aaron said.

  “The joke answer—finally, somebody got it out of the way,” Mr. Nichols said, tossing the piece of chalk gently at Aaron’s forehead. Aaron caught the chalk and grinned. A few other kids burst forth with similarly goofy answers, realizing that it was safe to do so, with answers like “A smartphone!” or “A microwave!” or “A helicopter!”

  “Okay, good. Let’s keep this discussion in mind as we read our next book,” Mr. Nichols said. “Because it may make you contemplate what’s really important when you’re on your own. I bring you . . . Island of the Blue Dolphins!” He passed out copies of the book, which featured a drawing of a small figure of a girl, standing alone on top of a cliff with her long dark hair blowing in the wind, dolphins swimming in the sea beneath her.

  “This looks like a girls’ book,” Todd Tian complained. A couple of the guys around him snorted.

  “And why do you say that, Mr. Tian?” Mr. Nichols inquired.

  “It has a girl on the cover, is all,” said Todd.

  “That’s it?” said Mr. Nichols.

  “And, I don’t know. Dolphins,” said Todd, shrugging. “It just seems girly.”

  “Okay,” said Mr. Nichols. “Did anybody else in here have the same reaction as Todd?” A few reluctant hands went up around the room.

  “I want you all to put your books on the floor,” Mr. Nichols said. “Quickly.” An echo of thwaps went around the room as students dropped the paperbacks on the linoleum tile.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Nichols, writing two headings on the blackboard, one titled GIRLS and the other BOYS. “Quick, don’t overthink it. What are some words you’d expect to read in the description of a girls’ book?”