by Sophia Rossi
“Hey, you’re here!” Tim raced down the aisle pushing an overflowing shopping cart, grinning like a kid in a candy store (that also happened to sell Batman plushies). “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I grumbled. To prevent Rachel from eavesdropping, I grabbed the cart from Tim and began pushing it back the way it came. I could hear Tim as he panted to catch up behind me.
“Hey, what’s up? Harper?”
I didn’t slow down till we reached the novelty gag section, all fake farts and spitting ink pens.
“Are you okay?” Tim stood in front of me with his hands on my shoulders. “What are you so upset about?”
“Nothing,” I muttered. “I just had a bad night.” Tim gave me a sympathetic look, as if he already knew.
“What are you, a psychic? Or am I just always having terrible nights so it’s the go-to explanation?” I suddenly had this image of myself as baby rattlesnake, just snapping and biting and releasing all my bad feelings.
“No, I just figured . . . you usually text me back,” He scratched the back of his neck. “I was worried.” I thought about the millions of texts Lily had sent me since last night, filled with more emotion than all of the ones she’d sent since school started combined. Of course half of them were in all caps and totally shouty, but a couple had made it seem like she was genuinely concerned.
“There’s nothing to be worried about. I’m totally fine. Last night was fine.” I grabbed the first thing I saw off the shelf and pretended to study it. “Yikes. What is this?”
Tim studied the label earnestly. “Cat Butt Gum. Looks legit. Should we get it?”
I immediately dropped it back on the shelf and wiped my hands on my shorts. When I looked up, Tim was staring at me with knowing eyes, practically willing me to tell him the truth about my birthday disaster.
“Okay, fine,” I admitted, no longer able to distract myself with juvenile candy packaging. “Lily’s party was terrible. It wasn’t even for me. She just dragged me along as a plus-one to one of her stuck-up Pathways friend’s parties. And they are all such suck-tacular Vampires and Murderers going around pretending they’re hippies. You should have heard them, Tim, they were so fake and condescending. And then Lily and her new BFF Nicole told me that my FAUX LEATHER shoes were responsible for, like, genocides and the decline in adult literacy or something.”
“Huh.” I waited for Tim to continue his thought. I fully expected him to be outraged on my behalf, but apparently I wasn’t doing a great job describing how terrible it had been. I went on.
“So, I tell Lily it’s fine to leave me alone at this party with the approximately zero people I know, and then she’s gone before you could say ‘traitor’! Oh, and I met this guy who said Lily’s friend Nicole is pure EVIL.”
“Huh.”
“So, wait, the worst part? When I go to talk to Lily, she’s in the bathroom, apologizing to all her new, cool friends for bringing me! She’s totally changed, and I don’t even recognize her. And I tried to tell her how upset I was but she just told me I should leave if I didn’t like it and so I did and she didn’t even try to stop me!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Stop saying that!” I exploded. “I need you to be more sympathetic! You’re my shoulder to cry on!” I meant that last part as a joke, but Tim took his hands off my shoulders and looked embarrassed.
“Sorry,” I said, quickly backtracking. “That was just a bad joke. But I could really use some friendly support right now, is the thing.”
Tim reached behind me and picked up a plastic box. “Do you know what this is, Harper?”
“A dorky toy?” I asked.
“No. This is a vintage edition Antman figurine. They only made one batch of these, in the nineties, when Marvel was merchandizing all their characters up the wazoo. At the time, a lot of stores didn’t think they would sell, because who cares about Antman, right? Except today there’s this total surge of interest in those old characters, and now it’s the totally random heroes with the really ridiculous powers that are worth a fortune.”
“Okay . . . ?” I had no idea where Tim was going with this.
Tim blew his cheeks up with air and then slowly exhaled. “I’m just saying, did it ever occur to you that maybe being at Pathways helps Lily feel like she’s valuable? That she’s not just some novelty product”—he motioned to the junk surrounding us—“but that she’s actually talented? And that it might feel good to have people appreciate her for all those same little quirks that made her an outsider before?”
“But I liked Lily the way she was! I always appreciated her!”
Tim had the ghost of a smile. “Right. And that’s great. But maybe what she’s expressing—albeit terribly and maybe a little misguidedly—is that she finally feels like other people, besides you, finally get what she’s about. That her creativity is being appreciated exactly because it’s not like everyone else’s?”
“But where does that leave me?” I asked. “I feel like I’m being left behind. Everyone else I know can do stuff. You draw, Stephanie skateboards, Lily . . . well, Lily creates these entire worlds to exist in. And what’s my thing? What am I good at? Liking animals? Having friends and losing them? Peaking in middle school? Are those my superpowers?”
Tim looked serious. “What’s your ‘thing,’ Harper? What’s your ‘superpower’? Do you really not know?”
I really didn’t. I did notice, however, that Tim and I were standing really, really close to each other.
“The way you believe in us is what makes you special, Harper,” Tim said. “You bring out the super in everyone.”
I wanted to cry, but I was too busy not breaking eye contact with Tim, who was less than a freckle’s width away from me.
“No, I can’t do anything,” I whispered. “I’m not special.”
“That statement is so far from true I’m not even going to dignify it with an answer.” Instead, Tim bent down and I stretched myself up, and then his arm was around my waist, pulling me closer into him and up against a rack of half-priced Edward Gorey piñatas. His breath smelled like peppermint. Were we going to kiss? Was I about to get my second kiss ever? From Tim Slater? Literally the only person more unfathomable than Derek Wheeler? And Lily’s ex-boyfriend? Would I even be able to tell Lily? Would I ever be able to tell Lily anything again, ever, regardless of this? My brain knotted itself into a confusing jumble of thoughts that were all yapping at each other’s heels like pent-up Pomeranian puppies.
“Ahem.”
Rachel cleared her throat at the end of the aisle, where she stood tapping her toes and smirking. Tim blushed and pretended he was reaching above me to grab some black soap (which I really shouldn’t be imagining him using all over his broad shoulders and sandy hair and—NO! BAD HARPER!).
“Pardon me. I just wanted to see if Tim needed a ride home,” she said.
“Uh,” said Tim, backing away from me even more. “That would be great. Thanks. Just need to pay for this and then I’m ready to go,” he mumbled, then trotted off past me and my sister to the register.
Rachel raised an eyebrow at me and put on a goofy, mocking, lovey-dovey grin.
“Don’t even,” I warned, walking away to meet Rachel and Tim at the exit.
I didn’t so much as glance at Tim as we sheepishly made our way back to the car.
He’s my dorky friend, I kept on having to remind myself as Tim clambered into the back of the truck. Even if he inexplicably looked like a young Brad Pitt these days, Tim would always be a Sponge: the kind of guy who just absorbed all your emotional drama and neuroses, who listened patiently and gave good advice. Sponges were the opposite of Spirals, Murderers and Emotional Vampires. They were nice. Unfortunately, no one has ever talked about the sexiness of a Sponge in the history of humankind.
“So . . . are you going to call Lily now?” Tim asked quietly from the backseat. He wa
s holding on to the back of my seat as he leaned forward, and I couldn’t help but notice how his hands brushed my shoulders every time we hit a bump.
“No,” I shook my head and stared out the window. “Even if everything you said makes sense, I still can’t just pretend like my birthday never happened. Even if she can.”
“Maybe it’s not about forgetting,” Tim said. “Maybe it’s about something else?”
“What?” I turned around to face him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Growing up, maybe?”
I turned back to the passenger side window and let my head rest against the cool glass. “I don’t really feel like doing that right now, either,” I said, but I’m not sure if he could hear.
There is nothing more depressing than an empty Inbox. Which was exactly what was staring me in the face when I logged into my email after getting home from Jane’s, racing upstairs, and throwing my wings haphazardly in the closet. If I could have, I would have ripped those wings apart with my bare hands right there in the recording studio—that’s how angry I was at Nicole and even Jane and Drew. How angry I was at myself, for being so blind to how undermine-y and negative and cliquey they were. When I imagined the Jug Judies now, I didn’t see the image that I used to, of bright, shining stage lights behind us, all three of us playing our hearts out in some honky-tonk Texas town. Instead, I saw a group of evil sprites bearing a faint resemblance to Nicole, Jane, and Drew—and to Maleficent, but without Angelina’s cheekbones—and they were dangling me and Harper above a bubbling vat of acid. And on the side of the vat, it said NAMASTE, in blood red writing. I saw the F³ symbol stamped onto a million vinyl records of the Jug Judies first mass-produced album, bought by a bunch of confused kids all over the country who confused kitsch for originality. I saw my Gawkward wings turning into an empty symbol, instead of what they were: a personal tie to my grandmother and to my friendship with Harper.
But what was really getting to me was the fact that an empty Inbox meant no emails from Harper. She hadn’t texted, and I had even sent an iMessage to myself to make sure my data plan, or cloud, or whatever, was still working. It was.
If Harper messaged me, I’d told myself on the way home from Jane’s in mom’s car, I would apologize for the party. I would make it up to her, a billion-fold. I would claim responsibility for stealing her favorite lemon-scented hand creme in the eighth grade. I’d beg her forgiveness for missing the PuppyBash, and I would throw her an all-new rain-check PuppyBash that would blow all other PuppyBashes out of the water.
But the problem was, as guilty as I felt—for probably breaking our pact by wearing my wings when my heart wasn’t in it, for being so mean to Beth-Lynne just because Nicole told me to—I was still mad at Harper, too. Yes, I was responsible for neglect; I hadn’t been thinking about her birthday. I’d been too busy getting swept up in Pathways and NAMASTE and . . . okay, my own crippling fear that if Harper knew how I’d been acting with my new friends, she’d never want to speak to me again. If Harper would just listen to me, I’d rend my garments and gnash my teeth and pull my hair and swear it had all been a giant mistake. I’d acted so terribly because I had no idea what I was doing, not because I was a terrible friend. I would apologize for everything. But I still wished she could see how happy I’d been—or at least, how happy I’d thought I’d been—at Pathways, extending my wings. (Even if those wings were attached to my body by force.)
Now I never knew if I’d be happy again.
I was spiraling so hard that I was basically a human vortex. I had to tell myself that best friends never really stop being best friends, no matter what. But what if one best friend had recently found herself trapped under the reign of an organic-food-obsessed dictator?
Still no messages from Harper. No emails, no texts, not even a regular voicemail. I checked Instagram, which I’d lately only been using to keep up with Jane’s F³ account, but which also made a convenient Harper stalking tool. She was usually a regular poster, but, hmm . . . she hadn’t posted since before last night. Most of her recent pictures were of her and Tim or Stephanie, sticking out their tongues for the camera or making duck faces and throwing up fake gang signs. They all looked really happy in every shot. I knew I must have been in deep BFF pining mode, because looking at the pictures, I didn’t feel one hint of jealousy—even the irrational kind—over the way Tim was looking at her in some of the photos, which to me looked a little lovey and pine-y . . . I just felt left out.
Once again I checked my phone and frowned at my slew of unreturned texts, all sent within the last few hours.
Lily (2:46 pm): Harper, will u call me back?? plz bb!
Lily (3:45 pm): u r making me feel like a stalker just texting into the ether. i tried your house no response and rachel let her phone go to voicemail plzzzzzzz call me
Lily (4:45 pm): this is crazy!!! ur so frustrating im trying to say sorry!!! very immature harper!
I felt another wave of annoyance at Harper. Sure, she might have been right about Nicole and NAMASTE, and she didn’t even know the worst of it, but Pathways wasn’t all bad, and it was unfair of her to act like this great thing to happen to me only existed to make her life difficult. Harper had been the one to flip out and leave in the middle of the party. She was the one who wasn’t answering my texts or calls now, which, didn’t that make her as bad a friend as I supposedly had been to her? And at least I wasn’t putting someone in friendship exile just because I was angry at them!
I threw my phone on the bed, frustrated. I didn’t mind apologizing, but I didn’t think I could handle the rejection if I called and it went straight to voicemail on the first ring again, because she was pressing the Ignore button on her phone.
I scrolled up through my old texts with Harper leading up to our fight, hoping that maybe just thinking about her hard enough would make a new message appear. As I read, I got a funny, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, like the kind you get when you lean over the side of the pool to hoist yourself out of it and your insides feel all jumbled up.
Harper (4:45 p.m.): SOS! EMERGENCY!
Lily (5:45 p.m.): ?????
Harper (5:47 p.m..): Things have gotten and double plus insane. Can we meet up? Ferris wheel your house my house I don’t care. I NEED YOU ASAP.
Lily (5:47 p.m.): PuppyGirl! What’s going on??
Harper (5:48 p.m.): Ugh I can’t even over text. Can we meet in 15? Near the pier? My sister can drive us if you want to get picked up.
Lily (5:49 p.m.): Oof! Whatever it is sounds awful. I really really want to meet but I can’t bc band practice.
Harper (5:51 p.m.): . . . Band practice?
Lily (5:52 p.m.): Yeah! Well, we’re not like a band, band–yet. I play the ukulele and sing, Jane is on harp and Drew plays the water jug. Guess what we call ourselves?
Harper (5:53 p.m.): Lily can you call me for a second? I really, really messed up, and I could really do with some Gawkward Fairy love right now.
Lily (5:53 p.m.): We’re the Jug Judies!
Lily (5:53 p.m.): Oh Harper I’m so sorry I wish I could.
I clicked my phone shut, but not before the words began to blur on one last text, sent from Harper the day we ran into each other in the park:
Harper (8:00 pm): Did our friendship just run out of minutes?
How had I been so blind that I couldn’t see that Harper had really, really needed my help? Had I really been so scared of her finding out about the wings and Beth-Lynne that I’d transformed myself into a doll who says cheerful phrases when you pull a string? She’d continued to type away at her keypad, trying to access the old me—the actual me—long after I’d stopped responding with anything meaningful or real. She’d been waiting for her BFF Gawkward Fairy godmother to swoop in and save her from that horrible situat
ion at Murphy’s Ranch—god, did I even know what had actually happened there? Had I ever asked?—the same way Harper’s Empathy Charms had saved me, a total stranger, all those years ago.
In fourth grade she’d rescued me from a fate worse than social death and she’d been with me ever since. She had been the one to counsel me about Pathways and listen to all my irrational fears when I was so scared to go to a new school. She was the one who had tried to warn me about the horrors of Nicole and NAMASTE, even when she knew that I was so brainwashed that I wouldn’t be able to hear it. She was the one who made me promise not to compromise who I was just to placate someone else. And how had I repaid her? By forgetting her birthday, by insulting her, and even worse, by not making her a priority in my new, sparkly life. I was a monster. I was an animal. I was a disgrace to the title of Best Friend.
Well, all that was going to change. I mustered up my resolve, picked up my phone, and flew into my Contacts. I was ready to throw myself from the gates of the Capital. It was time for Major Action Taking. I scrolled down and pressed that big red CALL button. If it wasn’t too late, I might not even have to reconcile with my greatest fear: leaving a voicemail.