Perish the thought.
At home, I couldn’t hide my mood any more.
“Just what has gotten into you?” Mom asked. Her candles and incense were spread out on our long kitchen table, along with order forms, the cordless phone, and the computer we kept at the end of the table. She sells this stuff to clients for Sense of Scent, which is kind of like Mary Kay cosmetics, meaning you can’t buy them in a store but only through a sales rep. I know she doesn’t make much money—thank goodness for Dad’s job—but it really makes her happy working so closely with clients and getting to know them and their families. She said the world had become too virtual and she likes interacting with people.
“Madeline and I sort of got into a fight in class.”
“You got in a fight?”
“We only broke a couple of chairs.” The veins in her forehead started to bulge. “Come on, Mom, I’m kidding. I mean, we did get in a fight, but just yelling. It was over something stupid. I don’t know what happened.”
I felt it again. Oh, why hello there, tears. So nice to see you again after three whole hours of your absence.
“I don’t even know what to say anymore,” Mom said, shaking her head. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” I totally and completely lied as I wiped away the tears that raced down my flushed cheeks.
“Young lady,” Mom began, reaching her hand out for mine and tugging me close to her. She stroked my arm and said, “When is this going to end?”
“Sh-sh-she started it!” I said like a big crybaby.
“Oh, Brooke,” Mom said. “Maybe you should end it, make things right with Madeline. You’ve been friends too long not to.”
In my room later that night, I lay on my bed surrounded by all my stuffed animals, the ones I’d had since I was a tiny baby up to the hard, stuffed penguin I won at the state fair last year with Madeline. We named him Mr. Keating. I propped him up on my stomach and looked into his shiny, black plastic eyes. It’d been weeks since Madeline and I had been friends. I couldn’t believe it’d been so long. We used to brag that we’d never gone more than three days without talking to each other. I thought of the summer she called me from vacation with her parents in Fort Lauderdale, telling me that she’d kissed a boy in the hotel swimming pool while her parents were inside getting food and her brother was off on Jet Skis. “He’s not even that cute,” she’d whispered. “But he’s funny and told me I’m pretty. Brooke, no one has ever said that before!”
“I tell you,” I’d said.
“It’s not the same,” she’d said.
She was right. I knew it wasn’t. The truth was, I had been a bit jealous. Madeline had her first kiss. It seemed even more exotic that it was out of state.
“I bet by the end of seventh grade we’ll both have kissed a boy,” she’d said, and I was pretty sure she was just trying to make me feel better.
“I hope it’s not the same boy,” I’d joked, and we both laughed.
Now we couldn’t even look at each other. And even if we did manage to talk again, how could we trust each other enough to share our secrets? Would I ever trust her again? Worse, I thought, was Madeline even worth trying for?
4 BROOKE
IN MY MIND, JUNIOR HIGH BEGAN WITH THE elementary school end-of-the-year dance.
It was the first time we really got dressed up for a school event, and the first time I got to buy a dress that was fancier than anything I’d ever worn before. I only admitted it to Madeline, but I was excited about wearing a dress. It’s not that I was anti—I just preferred clothes that allowed me to spring across our back creek at a moment’s notice.
Madeline and I decided to go together, just us. Some girls were meeting boys there—not exactly a date, but as close as they’d gotten so far. Mads and I didn’t care about that—we just wanted to have fun together.
I carried my new blue flats—the ones that my sister, Abbey, swore complimented my knee-length turquoise dress, which was not ruffled but gathered—in my hands, as my sneaker-clad feet stomped across the rocks and dirt of the field that separates my house from Madeline’s. The field was the place where we started hanging out in third grade when Madeline tried (unsuccessfully) to teach herself how to skip rocks down the long and narrow creek (I showed her how), where we hid from our parents when we got in trouble, where we played Pirates of the Caribbean, had picnics, and told each other all our secrets. It’s the place where we became best friends.
The day I met her, she had just moved to the neighborhood and was hiding from her family, crying. She’d left the back door open and their dog had gotten out and they couldn’t find him. “He doesn’t know this neighborhood,” she’d sniffed. “He’ll never find his way back.”
“Sure he will,” I’d told her. “I once saw this thing on TV about a dog that was on a flight to San Francisco from Florida. He escaped when they unloaded his crate and four months later he showed up back on their doorstep. In Florida!”
She’d looked at me through wet eyes. “Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t lie.”
Then she told me the real part of her problem. A secret. It was the first one we’d shared with each other.
“I told my parents that my brother, Josh, let the dog out. They yelled at him and didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t do it. I didn’t say anything to stand up for him. Now they’re not letting him go to this BMX thing this weekend. He’ll probably never talk to me again. I mean, I feel really bad.”
I didn’t know Madeline then and I didn’t want to judge her for what she’d done. So I swore I’d never tell a soul. And I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t even judge her for doing it. Right then, we became friends and that was all that mattered.
The night of the dance the sun was just dipping behind the sloped roof of Madeline’s two-story house as I walked up the field toward the backdoor. I saw Miss Rachel, Madeline’s mom, through the door’s window, and walked right in.
“I still think the pearls would look better,” she yelled toward the stairs.
“Mom!” Madeline’s voice rang down. “I’m not forty!”
“The black pearls,” Miss Rachel sighed. Then she turned to me, and the scowl on her face relaxed into a smile. “Hi, honey. Well, don’t you look pretty.” She put her hand on her slim hip as she inspected me. I tried to look as grown-up as I felt in my very first fancy dress. I had managed to properly brush my dirty-blonde hair, which I was growing out, and I’d even put a little flower clip in the side like I’d seen in a magazine.
“Very nice,” Miss Rachel said, circling me like a modeling scout. “You girls are going to be heartbreakers.”
I blushed. “Um, thanks.”
I walked toward the staircase and yelled up, “Come on, Mads! If we leave now, we’ll be perfectly, fashionably late!”
“Don’t come up!” she hollered back. “I want to make a grand entrance.”
“Oh, brother,” I said as I slipped on my blue flats, hoping they wouldn’t give me blisters.
We were supposed to get dressed together at her house but she called earlier in the afternoon and said her mom and dad had gotten in a fight so the vibe there was definitely neg. Her mom just got a big promotion and the stress levels were maxing out.
When Madeline finally came down, I wowed at her zebra-print dress with a wide, black patent leather belt and the long, layered black pearls draped around her neck. Her thick, amber hair was done in soft curls that lay on her bare shoulders, a stark contrast from the straggly ponytail she usually sported. Talk about looking grown-up.
“Dang,” I said. “It’s the end of sixth grade, not prom.”
“If only I had some cha-chas to hold it up,” she said, putting her hands on her chest and looking as if she were greatly disappointed in the progress her body was making.
“You look amaze, but think how cute it would be if your hair was short, like you’ve been talking about. You could cut it so it just skimmed your shoulders.”
�
��I know,” she said. “I’m going to do it, if for no other reason than to freak Mom out. She loves my long hair. But when I do it, you have to come with me.”
“Where else would I be?”
Madeline smiled. “Love the dress. The color is perfect for your eyes.”
“We’re so fancy,” I said. “Does this mean we have to do the air kiss thing?”
“Hardly,” she said, and held out her hand for me to slap, tap, then bump. Just like always.
Miss Rachel dropped us off at school in her sleek midnight blue car with tinted windows. My mom was picking us up in our far-less glamorous, older-than-me car. We figured the entrance was more important than the exit. I straightened then fluffed my gathered skirt, hooked my arm in Madeline’s, and walked into the caf for the dance.
Inside, the place was dark with swirling lights that raced around like a cat chasing a laser beam.
“Impressive,” Madeline said.
“Truly,” I agreed.
“Shall we?” she asked.
“Disco,” I replied.
When you’ve been friends as long as we have, you kind of develop your own lingo. We didn’t need a lot of words to communicate. We walked toward where our table would normally be and where our friends now stood, assessing the dismal boy situation.
“Look at that,” Shawna Raymond said, pointing to the sparsely populated dance floor. “He’s doing the worm. That idiot is actually doing the worm.”
We watched as Chris Meyers flopped on his belly across the floor, as if he were alone in his bedroom. No one should have been subjected to seeing that, especially in public.
“Pathetic,” Madeline said.
“Honestly,” I said. But a part of me couldn’t help but kind of smile. Chris Meyers was mildly nerdy, but he was pretty brave for doing the worm—and then bowing, as if he were on a Broadway stage, for the applause his buddies gave him.
“I warned you about him,” Shawna’s best friend, Mindy, said to her. “When he wore his Cub Scout uniform to school pictures in fifth grade, I knew right then. You just . . . no.” Mindy shook her head, the memory of Chris’s uniform too painful to complete the thought.
“I should have listened to you when I had the chance,” Shawna said. “Now who’s going to tell me what boys to stay away from?”
“Oh!” Mindy cried, and her tear-stained cheeks glittered in the disco ball light. “I can’t believe elementary school is ending! An era . . . gone!”
With that, Shawna and Mindy started hugging and crying and squeezing for dear life, as if their tears alone could convince the entire school district to change the zoning laws and filter us all into one junior high instead of two. Three other girls joined the hugfest, prompting Ms. Keller to walk toward us until she realized they were bawling over nothing.
I absently patted Mindy’s back—or maybe it was Shawna’s—until Madeline tugged my wrist and said, “I can’t deal.”
I answered, “Agreed,” and then we walked away.
Chris Meyers and his friends were just clearing off the caf dance floor, and it looked a little like they were making way for me and Madeline. One of those in-between songs—not really fast, not really slow—was playing, so Madeline and I partnered up and began dancing. Like Chris and his worm, we didn’t care what people thought of our grooving together.
“Chris will probably grow up to be some hugely successful comedian on Saturday Night Live or something,” I said.
“Doubtful,” she said as we rocked back and forth. “Probably more like a big top circus performer.”
I looked over Madeline’s shoulder at more of our friends huddled together, sobbing their eyes out. You’d think we were at a wake or something. I watched them and wondered if they’d stay friends, or if they would each have new best friends by winter break.
“So listen,” Madeline said. “Let’s not be stupid.”
“Not.”
“I just want to be honest with you,” she said.
“Shoot,” I said, as I watched brownnoser Stacey Beckerman tell on Chris Meyers, who had now knocked over a bunch of full soda cups because he was break dancing too close to the refreshment table.
“Well,” she began, “the thing is, when we get to junior high I’ll probably immediately start dating a ninth grader, who will tell me I’m more mature than the girls in his grade.”
“And more beautiful,” I added.
“Obvs,” she said. “But I won’t forget you on my meteoric rise to the top.”
“Meteoric?”
“Totally,” she said.
“If you say.”
“I do,” she said.
“I do, too,” I said. “Oh, no! We’re married!”
“Grody,” she said, but laughed.
“Grody?”
“New one.”
“I want to be the boy now,” I said, and we switched hands. I put my left hand on her waist, she put hers on my shoulder, and we rocked to the semi-lame music.
I wondered about junior high and how different it’d be. I supposed we’d be getting boyfriends—even the thought sent a little buzz through my stomach. So far the pickings had been slim, but maybe some of the guys from Robbins, the other elementary school filtering into West, held some promise. I imagined Madeline and me dating best friends, and how perfect that’d be.
I said to Madeline, “Promise me we’ll really be best friends forever.”
“Brooke, darling,” she said, looking at me with the utmost certainty, “till the day we die.”
5 MADELINE
IF I’M TELLING THE TRUTH THEN THE TRUTH IS: I think Brooke was scared of starting junior high. That’s a bizarre thought to me, but there it is.
I didn’t know what she was afraid of. Personally, I wanted to get on with it. To push time along so we could get to high school, college, and real life when Brooke and I would share a stellar apartment in a fab city doing fab things. But that’s me. Brooke is more slow going. She and her family have lived in that same house since she was three and the city started developing, literally, right around them—including the neighborhood I live in. I overheard Mom saying one night that they totally could have sold their house to developers and made a ton of money, but they wanted to stay because, as Brooke’s mom said, “It’s our home. Why would we move?” Which I thought was weird, especially if you could get buckets of money for a new, bigger home.
One afternoon right before junior high started, we raided Brooke’s sister’s makeup stash, then raced out the back door when Abbey unexpectedly came home. We didn’t stop running until we reached the creek, which was mostly dry since it’d been weeks since the last rain. We sat down on the dirt and rocks, facing the trickling water of the creek.
After we each caught our breath, Brooke said, “What’s it going to be like, you think? Junior high?”
“Stupid,” I said.
“Seriously,” she said.
“Beyond.”
“No, seriously,” Brooke said, and she picked up a stick and started making shapes in the dirt. “What do you think it’ll be like?”
The trees threw polka dot–like shadows over her freckled face, and when I didn’t answer right away she squinted at me, even though the sun only shone on one of her eyes. Her self-cut bangs, which she’d trimmed earlier that day, stuck up at awkward angles.
“I don’t know,” I began. “Bigger. More homework and tests. Meaner teachers.”
Brooke pulled her knees up to her chest and I knew this meant she’d been thinking pretty seriously about this. She rested her chin on her knee and inspected the polish on her toenails. We’d painted them mint green the week before and they were now chipped and dull.
“I heard that everything is important in junior high,” she began. “Like, where your locker is, or who you get for history, or what lunch period you have. What if you get A-lunch and I get B? Mads, we can’t not have lunch together. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it.”
I hadn’t realized she was that nervous abo
ut starting a new school. I’d barely thought about it. “Relax, B. Next year is going to be just like last year, only bigger.”
“Exactly,” she said, but she wasn’t agreeing with me. “Junior high is going to be the same, only more. More people, more homework, more responsibility—just like you said. What if the classes are too hard? What if it turns out I’m a total nerd? It’ll stick through high school, you know. What if we don’t have any classes together? What if we stop being friends?”
“Now you’re just talking crazy. Seriously, Brooke, what’s up?” She looked so mopey, with her jagged bangs and Abbey’s purple-tinted lipstick. “It’s going to be fine and we’ll be together every single step of the way. It’s not going to be a big deal. You’re worrying for nothing.”
“I’m just nervous.”
“Well don’t be. It’s kind of dumb.” She furrowed her brow at me. I hadn’t meant to call her dumb but I did think she was being overly dramatic. This was her big problem, going to a new school? She’d still be with half her friends from elementary school so what was the big deal? If she wanted a real problem, she should come hang out at my house for a couple of hours and listen to my parents go at it. That was a real problem. “I just mean we’ll be fine.”
She sighed, resting her head on my shoulder. “I know. You’re right.”
“Naturally,” I said. “Hey, wanna go swimming to wash off this makeup? It feels funny.”
“Gunky,” Brooke agreed, and tossed a rock into the shallow water where it landed with a thwunk.
I stood and held out my hand to pull her up. “Race?” I asked.
Brooke turned toward my house, and then yelled, “Go!” She was off and running before I had a chance to kick off. I caught up to her, though, and soon passed her. She could try as hard as she wanted but I never let her get too far ahead of me.
6 BROOKE
BFF Breakup (mix) Page 2