A Tale of Two Besties

by Sophia Rossi

  “Ha. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just becoming a Spiral.”

  “Naw. Impossible. Of the two of us, I’m the queen of Spiral Mountain. Hey, so what happened last weekend? What did this girl do to you?”

  I took a deep breath. I’d been dying to tell Lily about the video and what happened at the ranch, but now that she was right in front of me, I didn’t know where to begin. As I was trying to come up with the words, a loud chirping noise interrupted my thoughts. Lily frowned and sneaked a look down at her phone.

  “Agh, hold on, I have to answer this . . .” Lily trailed off and turned her back to me, but I could see the corner of her mouth curl up in a smile as she whispered excitedly on the phone. The worst part was hearing her corny little gasps and giggles, like she was trying to contain herself but absolutely couldn’t because whatever was going on in her phone was just that fascinating. Finally she hung up.

  “Okay,” Lily said as she turned back around. “My friend Jane is in the park, taking photos for her website and says I should go over to the Kusama Gardens ASAP. I’m sure it’s fine if you come too!”

  The Kusama sculptures were really cool: giant fiberglass flowers in trippy Alice in Wonderland colors (the original Disney, not the scary Johnny Depp one). But right then I didn’t feel much like meeting any of Lily’s new friends.

  “I’m going to pass,” I said. “But you should totally go, if that’s what you want to do.” I was making it pretty clear, I thought, that it would be totally unacceptable for Lily to leave the conversation as-is. But Lily, being the Spiral Queen, wasn’t very good at reading body language for social cues (or words for social cues, actually. Any cues at all: not Lily’s strong suit).

  For a moment, Lily looked torn. “Okay,” she said, “but . . . I really do want to hear what’s going on with you, Harper!” She seemed to consider me then, scrunching up the side of her mouth and giving me a long look. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We should really talk about . . . you know, your actual birthday plans at some point. I’m really sorry about the PuppyBash. Maybe you could do it with Stephanie? Or even . . . Tim?”

  “No, that’s okay. I think I’ll skip it this year,” I said. I wasn’t even planning on really skipping it, I just couldn’t give this one to her. I couldn’t let her get away with thinking this was at all okay. The Lily I used to know would have never ignored me, would never have canceled our annual pre-birthday ritual, and would never spend more time looking at her phone than at the beautiful world around her. This person in front of me was becoming a total stranger. I didn’t know what her deal was anymore.

  And then, with no bestie to confide in and nowhere to direct my anxiety, I really started to spiral—about everything. My feelings about Derek were just totally jumbled up. Before school started, Derek barely existed in my world. And now not only was he my first kiss, but the entire reason my life had become such hell. I had let a rando upset me!

  But on the other hand, I had liked kissing him. And I still couldn’t help but think of him as just like one of these rescued puppies that needs a good home. A really cute puppy that I could take home and bathe and teach some manners to and . . . no! This was the type of obsessive thinking that, combined with my Internet stalking tendencies, would get me in big trouble. I stopped myself from spiraling and turned an icy glare back to Lily.

  “Aw, Harper. Don’t do that. I’ll help you figure out another solution. PuppyBash will happen this year! But . . . you promise you’re not mad at me?”

  I was weighing my response when a familiar voice called my name.

  Lily and I turned around to see a lanky figure jogging toward us.

  “Hey, Stephanie.”

  “Hey, Harper,” she said as she trotted up to join us. I backed up a step without thinking about it, until I was standing between her and Lily. Though Stephanie hadn’t been avoiding me like the rest of the kids from Murphy’s Ranch were, she also hadn’t gone out of her way to sit next to me in the cafeteria or anything. And I didn’t want her bring it up in front of Lily, who still didn’t know what I pariah I am.

  “I thought I saw you with . . . with . . .” Stephanie was out of breath, craning her neck to get a look at Lily’s fairy costume. “Oh, it IS you. Hi Lily.”

  “Namaste, Stephanie,” Lily said, grabbing my hand and guiding me back to face her and turn away from Steph. “We were just catching up,” she said to Steph. Was it just my imagination, or was Lily giving one of the most popular girls in the 90210 zip code a brush-off? Another sign that this was zombie-Lily: the real version always got along with Steph, the nicer half of the hair-scream twins, and though we’d never been close-close, the three of us definitely had a pretty rich history of sleepovers and day trips between us. But apparently Lily had forgotten all about Steph, as well.

  “Sure, oh sure.” Stephanie bit her bottom lip, still staring at Lily as if she were an exotic, slightly deranged animal—just like she had in gym class on Lily’s first day of school. Lily glared right back with a level of snootiness that seemed totally foreign on a girl in gossamer wings and a poodle skirt. Unlike the costumed Lily, Stephanie’s faded denim shorts and mint green peasant blouse made her look like the spokesmodel for Casual Normality. The fact that she had on pink knee pads and was carrying her longboard just contributed to her effortless-chic vibe. She was even wearing a helmet—black and chrome and sleek. Leave it to Stephanie Adler to make safety gear look cool.

  Stephanie looked at us and smiled, but didn’t leave. Surprisingly, the Gawkward Fairy’s powers of social awkwardness didn’t seem to be working, because Stephanie refused to take the hint. She kept staring at the two of us . . . well, mainly at Lily, who had dropped my hand and retreated even farther behind me.

  “Um?” Lily said, and I felt a surge of embarrassment.

  “Yeah,” Stephanie said, “it’s just that . . . I hadn’t seen you guys in a while. Both of you, together, I mean.” Stephanie’s eyes seemed to laser right through me and cut straight into Lily. “Do you want to hang out? I’ll just be sitting with Matt. . . . Lily, you remember Matt Musher from school, right? Anyway, we’re sitting by the fountain, if you wanted to, like, come by. Okay.” Stephanie turned and started walking away, stopping after a couple feet to set her longboard on the ground. But instead of leaving, she just rolled it back and forth with one of her shoes, as if she were deliberating. Finally, she made up her mind and called over her shoulder: “Harper? Me and Matt are just friends, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Lily looked at me and shrugged. “Okay,” I called back, confused by so many things. “That’s good to know.”

  “Bye, Harper. Bye, Lily.” Stephanie pushed off without turning around again.

  “What was that about?” Lily was already deep into the world of her phone again, probably texting Jane, but at least she looked up to direct her question at me. And though I was still mad at her, and I still didn’t have answers—about where she’d been both emotionally and physically, about what was going on with her, about the status of my birthday plans—in that moment I knew the perfect thing to say.

  “Stephanie has actually been a really great friend to me lately. I’m probably going to go over there in a minute.”

  I expected Lily to look hurt, but instead she just smiled, oblivious. “That’s great, Harper! Things have been moving so fast, haven’t they? Let’s GChat soon, okay? And I promise, I’m going to plan something extra special for your birthday to make up for the PuppyBash.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  The trick about cell phones, I thought while waiting for Jane in the flower garden, is to constantly be doing something with them, even if it’s something like typing a list that you’d usually write longhand. People will just assume you’re talking to your friends, and while it’s still rude, it doesn’t generate the weird looks that, say, reading a book at the dinner table will.

  I sat
there typing nonsense into my phone, not really knowing how I came up with that tactic, and similarly not knowing why I had walked away from seeing Harper feeling so upset. It’s like, here is the thing that Harper really doesn’t get about me right now: It’s not all good vibes and sprinkles and rainbows in my world. People constantly expected things from me now, needed me to live up to their ideas of what wacky, peculiar girls should act like at all times. It’s actually exhausting.

  I felt like I was going to pass out and had to buy myself one of those butter-smeared sticks of roasted corn from Golden Maize, a nearby food cart.

  I’d spent my entire life not fitting in, which was just fine with me. I’d never needed a lot of friends or a group of kids to sit at a lunch table with me. All of that looked kind of boring, frankly, and I had always told myself that I would never change who I was just to lose my self-identity to a group mentality. The irony was that now I’m at a new school, where I made all these friends pretty much on accident, all because of the exact same things that made people look at me sideways before: mumble-talking, my obsession with folklore and old-timey stuff, being an over-achieving creative type in general.

  So now I’m finally in a place where I can say with some authority that I was wrong. Having a bunch of friends isn’t boring. It’s exhausting. All these demands: “Lily, show us your wings!” “Lily, play us some music!” “Lily, be the freshman face of NAMASTE!” “Lily, be the Gawkward Fairy at all times, and don’t for one second relax or wear an outfit from this decade or say anything less than totally precious!” “Lily, be our toy!” “Lily, be our pet!” “Lily, be our mascot!” “Lily!” Why couldn’t anyone just let me “do me,” like that emo rapper Drake who Harper is always quoting says. But I guess everyone else “doing” me was the problem here.

  Still shaky from the Harper run-in, and wiping greasy crumbs of salt and cayenne pepper off my fingers, I fished out Nicole’s quartz from my bag and held it to my chest. I needed to think.

  I did feel really bad for bailing on PuppyBash this year. And, okay, I felt bad about a lot of other things I’d done lately that I’m pretty sure Harper would hate me for. But I had to focus. I was in a band now that people actually wanted to hear play, and the blog party was really important to Jane, and these were all responsibilities I couldn’t shirk—no matter what the reason.

  “Lily?” It was Jane, making me jump at the sound of a voice outside my head. She waved her polka dot manicure in front of my face. “Hello in there, anybody home?’

  “Sure.” I forced myself to laugh. “Just zoned out.”

  “What would our LilyFairy be if she didn’t have her head in the clouds?” Jane playfully pinched my side. “Well, wake up girl! We’ve got a photo shoot to do! The FancyFashionFeminist waits for no woman, even the ones with wings.”

  The pictures of me that Jane had taken on the first day of school had started to get some major buzz, not just on her website, but on other fashion blogs around the Internet. Readers were submitting their own interpretations of my style—as well as their own version of the “Fairy Look”—so many that Jane had to hire a “curatorial intern” from the freshman class to go through all the pictures people sent in and pick the best ones. A new set of photos ran each week on the recently dubbed FancyFashionFeminist’s Fairy Fridays. The whole thing was kind of weird, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t psyched when Lucky ran my photo online to go along with a feature in a style section called “Be DIY Fairy Chic (for fairly cheap).”

  What was less awesome was when people posted their own pictures of me on other random websites or social networks; candid photos of me walking around school while I obliviously went about my day. One time I saw one of me exiting a Godard retrospective at an indie theater, and I have no idea who even took the photo—so creepy! On Twitter and Instagram and SchoolGrams, #LilyFairy was actually a trending topic, and there were entire ask.fm threads about #lilyfairy—and people weren’t even being totally awful in the comments section.

  As Jane walked me around the park ordering me into different poses for her fashion shoot, I thought about how all of this was kind of overwhelming in a scary way, the feeling that someone might be watching me at any moment. Especially since Nicole demanded such high standards of excellence from members of NAMASTE. Not only were we supposed to be vegan and not wear leather or any other animal products, but we routinely had to “patrol” other kids in our class for non-NAMASTE behavior. Since I was the freshman delegate, I was in charge of kids in my own year. If I saw another freshman wearing leather sandals or eating an almond butter (Pathways has been peanut-free since 1998) and honey sandwich, my job was to call them out in front of everyone, Beth-Lynne style, because bees are apparently the original repressed workers, slaving away in their artificial hives and apiaries just so we can feel good about using a natural sweetener instead of refined sugar or chemicals. Who knew? Nicole had recently suggested using even more “guerilla” techniques for enlightening students, like throwing red paint on anyone we see wearing faux fur, or replacing someone’s animal-tested lip liner with a blue ink pen.

  Most of the time, things only got as bad as they did that day with Beth-Lynne. (I still have to compartmentalize that whole thing happening. I have idiot shivers just thinking of that moment and myself.) But I was worried that soon Nicole would ask me to take a really revolutionary step to prove myself to NAMASTE, and to someone as nonconfrontational as me, the idea was really cringe-worthy.

  “Good!” said Jane, finishing up a round of photos of me sitting down and smiling on a bench. “Now go pick some of those flowers over there.”

  I couldn’t talk about these things with other kids at school, especially Jane and Drew, and I was so tempted to just break down and tell Harper everything when I’d run into her in the park. But when it really came down to it, I couldn’t. I wanted to tell her everything and anything, like always, but today it felt like we were two BFF’s on two total different time zones . . . and we were in full jetlag mode!

  All I could do was tell her that I couldn’t make it to PuppyBash (at least I’d been honest about something) and watch her walk away from me, super disappointed. But she had to know I was acting weird and totally unlike myself—so why didn’t she ask what was going on with me? If anyone had the power to pry secrets out of me, it was Harper, but she hadn’t even tried. Thinking about our failed catch-up session now, I realized I was even more upset than I’d thought. Upset because I needed her, and sad and confused because she made me feel like I had let her down, without trying to understand what I was going through.

  “Huh? What did you say?” Jane put down her camera and gave me a weird look.

  “Oh, nothing. Sorry,” I said, not realizing that I’d been muttering my spiraling thoughts aloud.

  I guess my mind was really wandering while going through the various poses Jane was having me try (blowing kisses to people on the street! Swinging from one of the big flower sculptures! Being generally boho-chic!), because after about twenty minutes she was shaking her head and angrily punching buttons as she scrolled through our takes.

  “I can’t use any of the ones where you’re just frowning and muttering to yourself,” she sighed. I shuddered inwardly; my conversation with Harper was affecting my real-life work.

  Jane looked up from her camera and cocked her head at something behind me. “Hey, Lily, I think someone’s waving at you.” I turned and squinted between the man-made petals of a sculpture, and for a second was sure that it was Harper, having changed her mind about not wanting to meet Jane. But, no, it wasn’t Harper, it was Mrs. Carina, swooping her arms at me like those people at airports who direct planes with light sticks. She must have been there to pick up Harper from PuppyTales, though in her Prada dress and Louboutins, she looked like Victoria Beckham at one of her son’s soccer games

  I jogged over. “Hey, Karen,” I said, putting on a smile that didn’t feel quite right. “Sorry, I don’t kn
ow where Harper is. I saw her earlier though, with Stephanie.”

  “Oh?” Mrs. Carina’s dazzlingly serene facade drooped for a second, and she looked almost confused. If that level of emotion was manifesting on Mrs. Carina’s immobile face . . . well, who knows how worried she really was. “Well, it’s just as well,” she said, matching my forced smile with an overly cheerful one of her own. “I’ve actually been hoping to get a chance to talk to you alone, anyway.”

  Now it was my turn to look confused. Despite what Harper always said, I never thought Karen had really shown much of an interest in me, other than in what she called my “unique” sense of fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Harper’s mom and we got along, but while I couldn’t imagine not telling my mother everything about my life, Harper’s mom seemed more like a distracted, bubbly aunt than someone to give you advice about life.

  “Darling, I know you like your little surprises,” Mrs. Carina simpered, putting one red fingernail against my cheek. “But I simply have to know what you plan on doing for Harper’s big Saturday birthday event! Last year I ended up having to distract her with a Cold Stone run so you could put the finishing touches on your little funhouse, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” I said, trying to keep my voice at a normal tone. Creating a human-sized doghouse, complete with tunnels to neighboring “kennels” had taken the good part of three months. With a sudden jolt of anxiety I realized that I had less than a week to plan something new.

  “So, Lily,” said Mrs. Carina, scratching at her thumbnail, “what can I expect from you this year? Please tell me you haven’t booked that horrible singer from those rescue commercials I keep seeing on TV.” Harper’s mom had a bad habit of peeling off her gel manicures in public, like a nervous tic, which was something I could relate to.

  “Ha,” I said, trying to force a laugh. “Not quite.” Translation: I’ve been so busy figuring out how to cope with being popular and with the fact that I was maybe a terrible friend and I hadn’t even begun to think about what I was going to do for Harper’s birthday.