The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  The idea came to Kate forty-five minutes before she was supposed to meet Marylin and Flannery to go trick-or-treating. She had been sitting on her bed in her leotard and tights trying to figure out what someone dressing up as Cupid was supposed to do with her hair. Kate’s hair was brown and straight, and it hung exactly one and a half inches below her ears. It was not Cupid hair—she knew that much. Cupids had short, blond, curly hair like Marcie Grossman’s in Kate’s reading group.

  “I just don’t feel like a Cupid,” she told Max, who was lying at the foot of her bed. She could tell from Max’s expression that he didn’t think she looked like a Cupid either.

  Kate looked around her room. She was searching for inspiration. When she saw her red T-shirt, the original red T-shirt that had given her the idea she and Flannery and Marylin should go trick-or-treating as the Three of Hearts, a brand-new idea came into her head. Kate smiled.

  A huge, grimacing jack-o’-lantern was perched on the steps outside Flannery’s house when Kate got there. She thought it looked a lot like Flannery. Before she rang the doorbell, Kate pulled her coat tighter around herself. The night air was cold, but it smelled good, like leaves and dirt and candles. Wearing the coat had been her dad’s idea. You’ll catch pneumonia without your coat, he had told her. We’ve had enough medical emergencies in our family this week. Then he had hugged her and offered a bite of his low-fat granola bar.

  Flannery answered the door. She was dressed in her heart costume. Only she looked more like a tomato than a heart. Marylin stood behind her. Her heart was better, even if it was a little lopsided. I bet that’s what my dad’s heart looked like after his attack, Kate thought, looking at Marylin.

  “Where’s your bow and arrow?” Flannery asked.

  “I didn’t bring them,” Kate said. “I decided not to be Cupid.”

  “So what are you going as?” Flannery wanted to know. “A coat?”

  Flannery’s mom walked out from the kitchen with a camera. “Let me take a picture of you guys!” she said. “Kate, how’s your dad?”

  “He’s great,” Kate said. “He doesn’t have to go back to work for three weeks, so he’s in a very good mood.”

  “Wonderful!” Flannery’s mom exclaimed. “Okay, Kate, take off your coat so I can get a picture.”

  Before Kate took off her coat, she pulled a diamond tiara from the pocket. She had gotten it from Tracie, who had worn it two years before, trick-or-treating as Glenda the Good Witch of the North. Kate didn’t think the diamonds were real, but she was very careful with the tiara just the same.

  “I don’t think Cupid wears a crown,” Flannery said. “You have pretty strange ideas about how Cupid should look.”

  “I told you, I’m not going as Cupid,” Kate said, putting the tiara on her head. Then she took off her coat. She was wearing red tights and her red T-shirt, which hung down below her knees. She had drawn a heart with a queen in the middle of it.

  “What are you, Kate?” Marylin asked. “A princess?”

  Kate smiled. “I am the Queen of Hearts.”

  “How adorable!” Flannery’s mom said.

  Flannery rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t the plan. You’re supposed to be Cupid.”

  “Sometimes things do not go as planned,” Kate told Flannery.

  “That’s very true,” Flannery’s mom said. “Okay! Picture time!”

  Flannery’s mom ushered Kate, Marylin, and Flannery out to the front steps so she could take their picture by the jack-o’-lantern.

  “You stand in the middle, Kate,” she said. “The queen should always stand in the middle.”

  Kate edged in between Marylin and Flannery. Then she put an arm around each of their shoulders and squeezed everyone together. She was the Queen of Hearts, after all. Sometimes holding everyone together was just her job.

  angels

  On the second Wednesday in November Marylin woke up with a stomachache. She always woke up with a stomachache the week before she had a party. Stomachaches were her body’s way of reminding Marylin that having a party was a good way to ruin her life.

  If it had been up to Marylin, the party would have been at Kate’s house. Unfortunately Kate’s mom had a law against having sleepovers. Last year, when six girls had stayed over, three of them woke up at 4:00 A.M. with the flu and spent the rest of the night throwing up. After that it wasn’t safe to say the word “sleepover” around Mrs. Faber.

  So now Marylin had four hundred things to worry about. Even though Marylin and Kate were planning the party together, Marylin would be the one responsible if Brittany Lamb and Elyse Cassill got in a pillow fight and kept clobbering each other until Elyse got a headache and started to cry. It would be her fault if Ashley Greer spilled juice on the couch and ruined the upholstery. “Why do you let these things happen?” Marylin’s mom would ask her, as if Marylin were boss of the universe and could make everyone behave perfectly all the time.

  Tuesday night, just as Marylin was adding carrots to the shopping list for the party so her mom wouldn’t lecture her about healthy eating habits, Flannery had called with bad news. Marylin knew it was Flannery even though Flannery didn’t bother saying so. Flannery was the sort of person who assumed whomever she called would know it was her.

  “Your party is going to be so boring,” Flannery said first thing. “Everyone’s probably going to fall asleep the minute they get there.”

  “How can you say that?” Marylin protested. “My mom said that maybe we could rent R movies.” That was a lie, but Marylin thought it made her sound like a much older person than she actually was.

  Flannery laughed. “It doesn’t matter what movies you rent, because I’m not going to be there. Therefore, your party is going to be very boring.”

  Flannery, it turned out, was going with her family to visit her stepdad’s brother in Washington, D.C. “We’ll probably go out to eat at a really expensive restaurant,” Flannery said. “Who knows, maybe the president will be there.”

  Marylin doubted it, but she didn’t say anything. It was useless to argue with Flannery. Flannery thought she was an expert on everything in the world, including the dining habits of the president of the United States of America.

  Besides, Marylin had bigger things to worry about now. Suddenly there was a hole in the party where Flannery would have been. Marylin knew that having an odd number of people at a sleepover was a bad idea. If you had only five girls at a party, someone would end up feeling left out. Around 11:00 P.M. the left-out girl would start crying, and then Mary-lin’s mom would come downstairs and say, “There, there,” to the left-out girl and give Marylin a look that said, Why do you let these things happen?

  When Marylin woke up Wednesday morning, she knew the first thing she had to do was find a sixth girl for her party and fast. Otherwise she would probably walk around with this stomachache for the rest of her life.

  “There is no way I’m spending the night in the same room as Mazie Calloway!”

  Marylin steadied herself on her swing. When you were arguing with someone as stubborn as Kate, it was important not to be wobbly.

  “I don’t see what’s so bad about Mazie,” Marylin said. “I think she’s probably a very nice person when you get to know her.”

  Kate gave Marylin a long look. “Mazie Calloway is the most conceited person who’s ever lived. Just look at her!”

  Marylin looked across the playground, where Mazie Calloway was standing with Caitlin Moore and Ruby Santiago, the most popular girls in the sixth grade. They appeared to be examining each other’s fingernail polish. All year Marylin had been studying these girls, trying to figure out what made them stand out from other girls like splashes of bright-pink paint against a gray background. She thought it had to do with the way they looked at each other with raised eyebrows and laughed, as though they knew the best secret in the world.

  “Okay, if you know so much about people, who do you think we should invite?” Marylin said, feeling irritated. Why did Kate have to make l
ife so difficult?

  “Elinor Pritchard,” Kate said, kicking up a cloud of dirt with her left foot. “I think she would make a very nice addition.”

  Elinor Pritchard! Marylin rolled her eyes. Elinor was the sort of person who couldn’t string four words together to make a sentence. If she invited Elinor Pritchard, she might as well make everyone eat vegetable stew for dinner. Elinor Pritchard would make it that kind of party.

  “The thing is,” Marylin said slowly, hoping she could reason with Kate, “we need someone who’s kind of fun. But who won’t get us into trouble.” Marylin’s mom didn’t have much patience with troublemakers.

  Kate swung high into the air. As she flew back, she turned her head toward Marylin and said, “Definitely ‘no’ to Mazie Calloway, and I guess ‘no’ to Elinor Pritchard too, if you’re going to be stuck-up about it. So who else is there?”

  Marylin searched the playground, skimming over a dozen or so unsuitable candidates. Marylin didn’t think she was stuck-up, but she did have standards. What was the use of inviting someone like Lacey Terrell, whose only topic of conversation was her dog, to a sleepover? It would be a wasted invitation, in Marylin’s opinion.

  “How about Kayla Townsend?” Marylin asked, suddenly inspired. Kayla was new that year and seemed a little shy, but she played flute in the band and always wore nice clothes and Mr. Kertzner thumbtacked her papers on the bulletin board in nature studies. Kayla Townsend seemed like a well-rounded sort of person to Marylin. She seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t start crying or throwing up in the middle of the night.

  Kate dragged her feet in the dirt to slow down her swing. “Kayla might be okay,” she agreed when she came to a stop. “At least she’s not Mazie Calloway.”

  “Or Elinor Pritchard,” Marylin replied.

  Marylin and Kate smiled at each other. They had been friends since nursery school, and if there was one thing they were good at, it was making compromises. Marylin stretched out her arms and felt a wave of relief flow through her. Maybe this would be a great party, she thought. Maybe this will be the best party I ever have. Two seconds later she thought of forty new things to worry about, but it had been nice for a second to believe everything would turn out okay.

  Petey McIntosh sat on the top bunk and examined a dollar bill with a magnifying glass. His sister had given him the dollar to stay in his room during her sleepover, but Petey thought the picture of George Washington looked a little fishy, like George’s mom had just told him they were having liver for dinner. On this particular dollar bill George Washington did not appear the least bit presidential, and Petey couldn’t help but wonder if Marylin had given him fake money. Everyone knew what a cheapskate she was. Marylin had allowance money saved up all the way from second grade, but what she was saving it for was a mystery Petey still hadn’t solved.

  The fact was, even though Petey had read every how-to-be-a-detective book he could find in the school and public libraries, he hadn’t had much luck yet cracking a case. His problem was, there just weren’t that many mysteries for nine-year-old boys to solve, at least not in his neighborhood. And with the one or two mysteries he had stumbled upon, like the time Marylin had had her watch stolen from her swim club locker, he hadn’t been able to track down a culprit, even though he’d spent weeks looking for clues.

  But strange things could happen at a sleepover, everybody knew that. Sometimes Petey snuck downstairs after his parents had gone to bed and watched detective shows on TV. On TV people got together all the time for parties at old spooky houses, and someone or something was always disappearing. Petey figured if he was ever going to solve a mystery, tonight was his night, even if his house wasn’t all that old or spooky.

  He shoved the dollar into his pocket and grinned. Oh, he’d stay out of the way, all right. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be around. Someone had to keep an eye out for clues, after all.

  By four thirty-six on Friday afternoon the house was ready. Kate had come home with Marylin right after school, and together they had cleaned up the basement rec room, put extra soap in the bathroom, prepared two bowls of nacho chips and taken the big jar of nacho cheese junk out of the cupboard and put it by the microwave, and paid Petey a dollar to stay in his room, agreeing that he could come out for two bathroom breaks.

  “I think this is going to be a really fun party,” Marylin said to Kate at five o’clock as they waited for the guests to show up. “I think we should take a lot of pictures, so when we’re old we can look back at what a fun party this was.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t run out of nachos,” Kate said.

  “Oh, quit being so negative,” Marylin told her.

  Kayla Townsend was the first person to arrive. “We were supposed to bring sleeping bags?” she asked when she saw Kate’s and Marylin’s bags piled on the couch.

  “It’s a sleepover,” Kate reminded her, grabbing a handful of chips from a bowl on the table. “So at the end of it everyone goes to sleep. It’s sort of like a tradition.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic about it,” Kayla said. “I just thought maybe there’d be cots or something.”

  Kate shot Marylin a look that said, Please remember that inviting this person was your idea.

  “It’s no big deal!” Marylin said, trying to sound cheerful. “Kayla can use Petey’s sleeping bag. I’m pretty sure it’s clean.”

  “I’m not supposed to use other people’s personal stuff,” Kayla said. “It might have germs.”

  The great sleeping-bag debate was interrupted by Brittany Lamb pounding on the front door. “It’s snowing!” she said as she walked in and dropped her bags on the floor. “Maybe we’ll be trapped here for the whole weekend. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  Kayla looked like she might cry. “I have a ballet recital tomorrow at four! I can’t get snowed in! I’m the star!”

  Fortunately Elyse Cassill knocked on the door before Kayla had a chance to get completely hysterical. Her cute older brother stood behind her. Marylin ran her hand through her hair and put on her best I’m-much-older-than-I-look smile. It was one of her goals in life to make a good impression on Elyse Cassill’s older brother.

  “What time is this thing over tomorrow?” he asked, sounding like he was in a big hurry to get going.

  “Um, I don’t know exactly,” Marylin said. She wished she could come up with some snappy remark that would make Elyse’s brother laugh and maybe ask her out to a movie when she was old enough to date. “Twelve, I guess. Is that okay?”

  Elyse’s brother ignored her. He grabbed Elyse’s arm and said, “You better be ready to go as soon as I get here, jerk, or else you’ll have to walk home.” Then he turned around and left.

  “He’s so cute!” Brittany squealed as soon as Marylin closed the door. “You’re so lucky to have such a cute brother, Elyse!”

  “Ben’s a loser,” Elyse said matter-of-factly, throwing her sleeping bag on top of the pile.

  “I think he’s nice,” Marylin said, even though Elyse’s brother had barely looked at her. Maybe he was shy around girls, Marylin thought. Maybe she should have said something about baseball.

  “You think every boy is nice,” Kate told her. “A boy could have seventeen tattoos and a snake wrapped around his neck and you’d think he was nice.”

  “That’s not true!” Marylin exclaimed. Every one knew Marylin was scared to death of snakes.

  “What’s not true?” Ashley Greer, who had just walked in, asked.

  “Everybody’s here!” Brittany yelled. “Let’s order pizza!” She grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper off the table. “What does everyone want?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Kayla was sitting in a chair in the corner of the living room. The rest of the girls turned to look at her.

  “You’re not going to throw up, are you?” Marylin asked. If Kayla threw up, Marylin’s mom would probably make everyone go home.

  Kayla shrugged. “I think if I practiced
my routine for the recital tomorrow, I’d feel a lot better. But everyone has to watch me, okay? You guys can pretend you’re the audience for my recital.”

  Kate groaned. Marylin gave her a look she hoped would say everything she was thinking. She hoped it would say, Okay, it’s obvious inviting Kayla was a big mistake, but she was not my first pick, remember? Anyway, we’re stuck with her, and maybe if we watch her do her dance routine, she’ll stop talking about throwing up and then we can get on with the party. If you could not be a big pain in the butt about this, I would really appreciate it.

  Kate appeared to get the message. “Okay, guys, let’s watch Kayla dance and then we’ll order pizza.”

  All the girls but Kayla crowded together on the couch.

  “You’ll really like this,” Kayla said, beaming, now that everyone’s attention was on her. “Everyone loves to watch me dance.”

  Elyse Cassill had a fishy look around her eyes, Petey decided, and that brother of hers was definitely up to no good. What did they have planned? Some sort of heist, probably. Was there a black market for sleeping bags? Sure, Petey had watched Elyse’s brother drive off in his beat-up old car, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be back later. Petey could just picture Elyse shoving stolen merchandise out the downstairs bathroom window and into her brother’s greedy hands.

  Oh, he’d be keeping an eye on Elyse Cassill tonight, you could count on it.

  Petey could see everything from his spot halfway down the stairs, where he could poke his nose through the railing and nobody would ever notice. He watched that girl Kayla dance. She wasn’t a very good dancer, which made Petey suspicious. Maybe she was trying to distract the other girls while Elyse Cassill’s brother snuck in the back door and grabbed all their stuff.

  Petey eyeballed the rest of the girls. Who else was involved in this scheme? There was that Brittany girl, who had stolen French fries from Petey at McDonald’s once when she thought he wasn’t looking. She was a pretty shady character. And one time Ashley had borrowed some socks with cow spots all over them from Marilyn and never given them back.