The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “If the murderer kills me in my sleep tonight, you can have all my Barbies, okay?”

  “Can I have the Dream House, too?” Courtney asked, sounding excited. Then she must have realized that if Kate got murdered, she wouldn’t live next door anymore. “You know what? I don’t think there really is a murderer,” she called after Kate. “I think Buddy was making that up.”

  Kate slammed the front door behind her. She wondered which was worse—an invisible friend who made up stories about murderers coming to get you, or real friends who stopped talking to you. Not that she cared, really. She was sick and tired of Marylin and Flannery. She didn’t want a thing to do with either of them.

  On Thursday morning Marylin and Flannery had officially been ignoring Kate for three days.

  It all started when Kate went to the bus stop in front of Flannery’s house Monday morning. She said hi, the way she always did, the cold December air turning her breath into a cartoon bubble, but Marylin and Flannery didn’t say anything back. Kate tried a few more times to get Marylin and Flannery to say something, but they wouldn’t. Kate almost turned around and went home. She suddenly felt like she had a temperature.

  Instead she got on the bus and took a seat behind her two so-called friends. She leaned forward and asked, “Did I do something that made you mad? Is that why you’re not talking to me?”

  Marylin and Flannery looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Flannery leaned over and whispered something into Marylin’s ear. Then they both started laughing hysterically.

  “Go ahead and be that way,” Kate said, sitting back in her seat. “It just shows how immature you are.”

  “I’d rather be immature than be a certain unnamed person who smells like they haven’t had a bath in three months,” Flannery said, without turning around.

  Kate put her chin to her chest and sniffed. She couldn’t smell anything bad. All she could smell was the laundry detergent her mom used. She sniffed to her left and sniffed to her right. “There is nothing wrong with the way I smell,” she said.

  This made Marylin and Flannery laugh even harder. Kate felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She looked out the window and worked very hard not to blink. She wasn’t in the mood to cry.

  Marylin and Flannery kept ignoring Kate all day. Kate made the mistake of following them to Marylin’s house after school, thinking there was some way she could make them talk to her. She thought she might be able to reason with them. Kate was a very reasonable person after all, and until recently Marylin had practically been the most reasonable person on the face of the planet. They should be able to talk things out, shouldn’t they? That’s what happened when friends had problems on TV. They communicated with each other. Kate and Flannery and Marylin just needed to communicate.

  As it turned out, Marylin and Flannery were not in the mood to communicate that afternoon. They let Kate follow them into the house and upstairs to Marylin’s room, but whenever Kate tried to talk to them, they acted like she wasn’t even there. Kate sat with her back against Marylin’s purple love seat, which Kate had helped Marylin pick out at the furniture store the year before. Marylin and Flannery sat on Marylin’s bed and talked in especially loud voices, as if they wanted to make sure that Kate wasn’t missing a word, even though she was sitting only five feet away.

  “You don’t have to yell,” Kate said after a few minutes. “It makes you sound ridiculous.”

  Flannery looked around the room. “Did the wind just blow through here?” she asked Marylin.

  Marylin giggled. “I think I felt a little breeze, now that you mention it.”

  Kate stood up. “You are acting like children,” she told them, sounding exactly like her mother when she yelled at Kate and Tracie for fighting. “You think this hurts my feelings, but it doesn’t.”

  “Blow, wind, blow!” Flannery said, falling backward as though she’d been hit by a tornado. Marylin flopped against her pillows, shrieking with laughter.

  Kate shook her head. To think she had been happy when Flannery had moved into their neighborhood. To think she had turned to Marylin and said, “I hope they have a girl our age,” when they saw a family moving into the Savoys’ old house a month before school started.

  “I have no idea why you’re doing this,” Kate said, her last effort at getting some response before she left in defeat. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Marylin rolled over and looked at Kate. For a tiny second Kate thought she saw panic in Marylin’s eyes.

  It occurred to Kate that Marylin had no idea why she was doing this either.

  By Thursday Kate was used to Marylin and Flannery ignoring her, which is why it didn’t bother her at all anymore. After three days she was practically a professional when it came to being ignored. Kate picked up her lunch from the counter, grabbed her backpack, and went out the front door. So what if no one talks to me? she thought as she walked up the street. She’d rather read a book anyway. Talking to people was a complete waste of time, in Kate’s opinion.

  “Max is following you!” Courtney yelled at her, running across her front yard, her Pocahantas lunch box thumping against her leg. “Are you taking Max to school with you, Kate? Because he’s following you!”

  Kate looked over her shoulder. Sure enough, Max was lumbering up the road behind her. Kate sighed. Max was not the sort of dog you could just order to go home. Max never obeyed orders. He’d flunked out of dog school because he never did anything he was told. He was also not the sort of dog you could let follow you to the bus stop. You never knew when Max would decide to lie down in the middle of the road and take a nap.

  Kate turned around and stomped toward Max, grabbing him by the collar when she reached him. She pulled him to her house, muttering under her breath about stupid dogs and the stupid things they did. Max gave her an innocent look.

  By the time Kate had shoved Max into the house and headed back for the road, she could see that the bus had reached the stop in front of Flannery’s house. Now Kate would have to stand at the edge of her own driveway and get on the bus with Courtney, who went to the elementary school next door to Kate’s middle school. They should not put elementary school kids and middle school students on the same bus, in Kate’s opinion, especially since Kate’s getting on the bus with Courtney would give Flannery the opportunity to say loud enough for everyone to hear, “Don’t the first graders look cute today?”

  “Kate, Kate, look at this!” Courtney said, sliding in next to Kate on the sticky bus seat. Courtney held out a piece of paper with a drawing of something Kate didn’t recognize.

  “It’s a horse!” Courtney exclaimed proudly. “I think it looks really good, don’t you?”

  Kate nodded in a way she hoped would suggest to Courtney she was not in the mood for talking. But Courtney never picked up on Kate’s subtle hints.

  “I think I’m going to draw two hundred horses,” Courtney said, “and then hang them up in my bedroom like wallpaper. You could help me, Kate. You draw the best horses.”

  Kate gave up. “Here, give me that,” she told Courtney, grabbing the piece of paper. “If you’re going to draw horses, you have to know how to do their noses right. This looks more like a dog than a horse.”

  “It’s a good horse,” Courtney said, pouting. “My mom said it’s the best horse she’s ever seen in her life.” She grabbed the paper from Kate. “Give me my horse!”

  “Fine,” Kate said. She turned her face to the window. From behind her came Flannery’s squawk of laughter.

  Courtney turned around in her seat. “Don’t laugh, Flannery, you squirrel butt! I bet Kate can draw horses a lot better than you can!”

  My hero, Kate thought.

  When she walked into her homeroom, Kate saw that Ms. Cahill had written her name along with Elinor Pritchard’s and Doug Brezinski’s on the board. Ms. Cahill’s Poetry Students was written above their names in the teacher’s flowery cursive.

  “I’ve chosen you three to do something special,” Ms. Ca
hill told Kate, Elinor, and Doug after she called them into the hallway. “Because you are my very good writers, you’re going to spend two mornings in the library with a visiting poet, along with the other very good writers from the other sixth-grade homerooms.”

  Kate had never met a poet before. She imagined a man with a white beard who wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe, and who would ask them to make a list of words that rhymed with “ocean.” Motion, Kate thought as she walked to the library. Lotion, notion, potion.

  To Kate’s surprise the visiting poet turned out to be a woman with wild red hair that fanned out from her head like a forest fire. Giant purple earrings in the shape of seashells dangled from her ears. They matched her gauzy purple skirt and her purple cowboy boots.

  “Hello. I’m Sara Catherine Toole,” she introduced herself to Kate, Elinor, and Doug. Sara Catherine Toole’s voice didn’t match her outfit at all. Her voice was serious and down-to-earth, as though she thought it was very important that the children knew her full name.

  The other very good writers from the sixth grade trickled into the library. Kate’s stomach jitterbugged when she saw Marylin. It was the first time in three days she and Marylin had been together in a room without Flannery standing by Marylin’s side and jabbing Marylin with her elbow practically every time Kate moved a muscle. Maybe this would be Kate’s opportunity to make Marylin talk to her. Maybe poetry would bring them back together.

  Not that Kate cared.

  As soon as Sara Catherine Toole asked everyone to sit down, Kate grabbed the chair next to Marylin. Marylin looked around quickly, as if to see if there were another seat she could take, but it was too late. There were nine chairs for nine students, and all of them were filled.

  “This is going to be fun, don’t you think?” Kate asked Marylin, trying to sound like everything was normal between them.

  Marylin looked straight ahead. “I can’t talk to you,” she whispered.

  “Why not?” Kate asked. “Other kids are still talking.”

  “I mean I’m not allowed to talk to you. And I have to report everything you say, so just be quiet, okay?”

  Marylin didn’t sound like she was mad at Kate. She sounded like she was trying to protect Kate from something more powerful than the two of them put together.

  “Okay, everyone. We’re going to start out with some free writing to get your creative juices flowing,” Sara Catherine Toole announced from the head of the table. “I’m going to give you a phrase, and you’ll have two minutes to write everything that comes to your mind about that phrase, okay? The first phrase I want you to free write on is ‘Best Friend.’ ” Sara Catherine Toole checked her watch. “Ready? One, two, three, go!”

  After a minute Kate glanced over at Marylin, who had started writing immediately. “Best Friend” was printed across the top of her paper. And right beneath that, in very small letters, Marylin had written “Squirrel Butt.”

  Kate had discovered that lunch was the worst time of the day if your so-called friends were ignoring you. She had tried reading a book while she ate her sandwich, but she got too caught up in the story. Twice that week she hadn’t heard the rest of her class get up and go outside to the playground after everyone was done eating. It had been very embarrassing to look up and realize she was the only person from Ms. Cahill’s class left in the cafeteria.

  On Thursday Kate ate her sandwich as fast as she could and then got permission to go to the library. She had decided to look for books about people who got ignored by their friends. Maybe some famous author had been ignored by her best friend when she was a kid and had some interesting opinions on the subject.

  She found three books on friendship, but they were no help at all. One of them was called A Friend Is . . . , by Margie Majors-Reinholdt. Every page had “A Friend Is . . .” at the top, a picture of two girls picking flowers or baking cookies in the middle, and at the bottom a sentence like “Someone who cheers you up” or “Someone who cares about you.” A Friend Is . . . , by Margie Majors-Reinhold, made Kate want to throw up.

  Kate flipped through the encyclopedia and the dictionary, but neither of them had anything to say about being ignored, so she started roaming at random through the shelves. She found a good book on famous Olympic athletes, and another on rainy-day activities such as making a phone with two cans and a piece of wire that looked pretty interesting, but nothing on friends who suddenly act like you’re the dumbest, smelliest person who ever lived.

  It really was enough to make a person feel tired, Kate thought as she sat down at a long table by the window. For one thing, being ignored was not exactly a private matter. At home it was just Marylin, Flannery, and Kate, but when you brought your life to school, it started to spread out to other people. So now Brittany and Ashley were acting weird around her, and today during P.E., when she and Elyse were waiting in line to take their turns at the broad-jump pit, Elyse had leaned over to her and said in a low voice, “You know, it might help if you got your ears pierced.”

  Kate had pulled at her left earlobe. “What would getting my ears pierced help?”

  Elyse shrugged. “Your image. You’d seem more mature if you wore earrings. And makeup. At least fingernail polish.”

  Elyse sounded as though she represented a committee that had spent hours in meetings deciding on how Kate could improve herself.

  “I’m not allowed to get my ears pierced until I’m twelve,” Kate said. By this time they were at the head of the line, and Elyse had started doing deep knee bends to warm up. “Besides, I’m not really the jewelry type.”

  “That’s too bad,” Elyse said, turning to make her jump. “Because people really respect pierced ears.”

  Kate had a hard time believing Flannery and Marylin were ignoring her just because she didn’t have two minuscule holes poked into her head like they did. What kind of people would stop talking to you over dumb stuff like that? She thought about how she and Marylin had practically spent their whole lives together. How could you be best friends with someone forever and then stop talking to them? Had Marylin forgotten the time last summer when her parents wouldn’t stop fighting and she’d spent three nights in a row over at Kate’s house, no questions asked?

  Kate looked around the library, feeling like a detective in search of clues that would unravel a great mystery. Unfortunately from what Kate could tell, the library did not come equipped to help you find the answers to the really important questions in life. All this library had was one measly computer, a card catalogue, and a bunch of tables where all the kids who didn’t have friends sat after they finished eating lunch. Which would explain what Elinor Pritchard was doing there.

  Kate still remembered how Elinor had carried her lunch to kindergarten in a briefcase instead of a lunch box like everybody else. Kate didn’t understand why kids like Elinor never figured out that there was a certain way to act and talk and dress if you wanted to have lots of friends, and that it was practically a law that you would never have friends if you carried your lunch to school in a briefcase. Why couldn’t kids like Elinor see that?

  Elinor looked up from her table and smiled at Kate. Kate gave her a little wave and was about to leave the library when she was struck by a thought. What if she was turning into Elinor Pritchard? What if that was why Marylin and Flannery were giving her the silent treatment? She looked at what she was wearing to assure herself that she looked like everyone else, which she did. She carried her lunch in a brown paper bag, so that couldn’t be the problem.

  I am not weird, Kate thought. I am just myself. And then Kate wondered if that was what Elinor Pritchard said to herself every morning before coming to school, where most of the kids never said a word to her.

  Kate walked over to Elinor’s table. “Have you written the world’s greatest poem yet?”

  Elinor looked down at her notebook and shook her head no.

  “Come on,” Kate said, nodding toward the library exit. “Let’s go to the cafeteria and get some ice cream. Maybe
it will inspire you.”

  Kate sat at the kitchen table, eating graham crackers and looking over the poems she had written the second day in the library with the visiting poet. She wished she had made a copy of her poem that Sara Catherine Toole had chosen to put on the library bulletin board. It was about friends who sometimes didn’t get along for reasons no one could figure out. Kate had called it “Talk to Me.”

  “Listen to this line,” Sara Catherine Toole had said to the nine very good writers of the sixth grade after they’d handed in their poems. “ ‘A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark.’ That’s beautiful! Can anyone besides Kate tell me what that means?”

  Elinor Pritchard raised her hand. “I think it means that if someone’s really your friend, they’re always with you, no matter if you can see them or if they’re even in the same room with you,” she offered shyly.

  “Wonderful!” Sara Catherine Toole exclaimed. She held up Kate’s poem. “We have a real poet here, folks.”

  A real poet. Kate had tasted those words all the way home on the bus. That’s what Sara Catherine Toole said poets did—they tasted words.

  Someone tapped on the kitchen door. When Kate went to open it, she found Courtney in her green frog jacket holding the same sock she’d found two days before.

  “Buddy told me whose sock this really is,” Courtney said, walking inside and taking a graham cracker from the box. “You want to know whose?”

  “Sure,” Kate said, sitting back down. “Why not?”

  “Santa Claus!” Courtney said, practically falling down from excitement. “Buddy saw him last Christmas Eve! You know what else Buddy told me? He said that Rudolph isn’t really one of Santa’s reindeers. That’s just on TV.”

  “Really?” Kate said. She laughed. “What else does Buddy know about Santa Claus?”

  “Well,” Courtney said, her face scrunched up with the effort of coming up with a good story, “there’s lots of things he knows.”