by Dyan Sheldon
“Yeah, but—”
But Savanna was on a roll.
“And what was the ‘It’s not like a real party or anything’ routine? I mean, give me a break, huh? Like there was ever a chance she’d have a real party! Marilouise doesn’t know enough people to fill an SUV, yet alone enough to make a party.”
“Let alone.”
“Don’t try to distract me, Gracie. The point is that she’s lucky she knows us or she’d be eating her stupid eggplant with only that witch Jemima for company. I mean, ohmigod… How depressing would that be? I’d rather be put on a chain gang.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen Cool Hand Luke.” Savanna had a thing about old movies: she wouldn’t watch them.
Savanna didn’t let that stop her flow. “And anyway, I don’t know why she’s obsessing about it now,” she went on. “I mean, her birthday’s not for, like, ages.”
“Two weeks.”
“Exactly. I mean, like, really, Gracie, who decides what they’re going to eat two weeks ahead?”
In my relationship with Savanna, she was the one who was passionate, spontaneous, unpredictable and as emotional as a character in a disaster movie. Four more of the things I loved about her. I was the thoughtful, plodding, reliable one. I was the voice of reason.
“For Pete’s sake, Savanna, she’s nervous about going out for her birthday, that’s all. I don’t really think that’s a crime. And anyway, she was just keeping me company.” I poked her with my elbow. “You know, while I was waiting for you.”
“Oh, that’s right!” wailed Savanna. “Blame me! Everybody else does. But you’ll have to get to the back of the line, Gracie. There are at least three million people ahead of you.”
“Stop exaggerating,” I ordered. “It can’t be more than two and a half million.”
By the time we stopped laughing, we were at the Old Road. I disengaged my arm so I could get on my bike.
Savanna looked at me. Askance. “Where are you going, Gracie?”
I said that I was going home. “You know, that place where I live? Where I keep my clothes and stuff?”
Savanna said she thought I was going with her. “Didn’t I tell you at lunch that the mother dragonned me into doing the shopping this afternoon?”
“Dragooned.”
She flicked a hand. “Whatever. The point is that you said you’d come with me.”
I didn’t remember saying that. All I remembered was Savanna grousing about the Zindle elders, their other daughter and their toaster, and me agreeing it was a miracle she didn’t have chronic indigestion since she never had a meal without a fight.
“Well, I can’t go alone,” said Savanna. With conviction.
“Why not? It’s not as if you have to strap on your snowshoes and go shoot a moose, Savanna. You’re just going to Food First to get some groceries.”
Savanna shook her head. “Not by myself, Gracie. You know how much I hate shopping for food. I mean, how mind-drainingly boring can you get? I’d rather be trapped in a coalmine with Marilouise. I need moral support. You have to come with me.”
“But I can’t. I have a translation to do for Spanish. That alone’ll take me hours.”
Savanna wanted to know why I always had to make things so hard. In case I hadn’t noticed, this was the twenty-first century.
“It won’t take twenty minutes to do it. You can have it translated online.”
No, I couldn’t.
“But that’s—”
“No, it isn’t,” argued Savanna. “Cheating’s when you copy off someone else. This is using the resources available. Which everyone says is, like, a major sign of intelligence and ability.” Her smile was like a cloudless sky. “Anyway, it’s no worse than using a calculator. It’s what you’re supposed to do.”
I figured my Spanish teacher Señor Pérez would disagree with that. Señor Pérez was pretty much firmly embedded in the twentieth century.
“I wasn’t going to say that it’s cheating, Savanna. I was going to say those sites are—” I was going to say those sites were for morons, but I stomped on the brakes just in time. I was pretty sure she used them herself. “Those sites really don’t work. Not for something like this. They’re mega-literal and they get stuff really wrong.” I was in the Advanced Placement class. Literal didn’t cut much ice with Señor Pérez. “Besides, the whole idea is to learn the language, not learn how to find a site that’ll do your homework for you.”
Savanna made a face she usually reserved for a lecture from her mother. “Oh, pardon me, Pope Gracie. I wasn’t trying to get you to betray your holy vows here. I just think you should give yourself a break. It’s not, like, going to kill you to ease up on the drudge-till-you-drop routine just this once.”
“But not today.” I gripped the handlebars. Determinedly. “Anyway, it’s my night to cook.” My dad and I took turns.
Savanna’s face darkened with disappointment. “Oh, Gracie, please…” She clutched my arm. At least I was wearing a jacket so she couldn’t draw blood with her stiletto nails. “You and your psychotic work ethic. I mean, I, like, hardly saw you all summer because you were planting butterflies all the time.”
She really did crack me up. “I wasn’t planting butterflies, Sav.” I worked on a project with the National Park over the summer doing stuff like teaching little kids about the environment and reinstating wildlife habitats. But not all of us thought that was better than sitting on the beach, self-basting. “I was planting a butterfly garden.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” Savanna didn’t share my worries about the environment – you know, that pretty soon we won’t have one that actually supports life. Savanna had an optimistic nature. Savanna said that things couldn’t be as bad as I thought, because if they were someone would do something about it. She figured that if things did get really bad, then science would come up with a solution. Since this is the twenty-first century. Whereas I figured that was like expecting a murderer to bring his victim back to life. “The point is that I didn’t get to talk to you at all last night.”
I pretended to choke. “Because you were busy.”
“And I haven’t had more than, like, half a second alone with you today…”
As if it was my friends who always ate lunch with us.
She gave me the Mr-Bunny’s-gone-for-good look again. “Please, I’m begging. I really need some quality Gracie time. Reallyreallyreally. Just a few measly minutes. You can’t let me down.”
“I want to come…” I was torn. My psychotic work ethic was pulling one way and not wanting to let Savanna down was pulling the other. “But I really should—”
“Pleasepleaseplease…” Savanna clasped her hands. If you’d thrown a shawl over her head she would’ve looked as if she was praying. “You can’t abandon me now, Gracie. You can’t let me go by myself. I have a very sensitive nature. You know how the supermarket stresses me out.”
And I had a very pliable nature. “I don’t know…”
“Don’t be unreasonable, Gracie. This is not like a really big deal. It’s like a drop of ant pee in the ocean. I mean, the shopping’s not going to take any time at all with the two of us doing it, is it?”
In my heart, I knew this wasn’t true. Experience suggested that anything one of us could do by herself in an hour – like baking cookies or mowing the lawn – would take the two of us together at least half a day. Probably much longer. But all I said was, “Um…”
“Oh, come on.” She squeezed my arm. Affectionately. “I’ll be, like, a gazillion times happier, and you’ll be maybe ten minutes later getting home than you would’ve been.”
This last part wasn’t true either. I rolled my eyes. “Ten minutes?”
“OK, twenty. Thirty tops.” If I’d been taller, she would have leaned her head on my shoulder. She leaned her head on my head. “Pleasepleasepleaseplease, Gracie. Who can I count on in this cold, cruel world if I can’t count on you?”
“All right, but we’re not sto
pping for a drink or anything—”
“Of course not.” Savanna threw her arms around me. “Only first we have to drop by the drugstore. It won’t take long.”
Chapter Two
One of Those Girls
“Ohmigod, will you look at this?” Savanna flapped Zelda’s shopping list over the fruit section. “All it says on this is oranges. Oranges! What’s that supposed to mean? There are, like, dozens of kinds of oranges.”
Choice does have its downside. You could see why it took Savanna hours to get dressed every morning.
“Temple … navel … blood …” recited Savanna. “Valencia … satsuma … mandarin.” The shopping list fluttered in the air. “It’s like the UN of citrus fruit. And they all have the same last name, Gray. They’re all called oranges. Exactly what kind am I supposed to get?”
I leaned against the cart. After several delays, we’d finally made it into Food First, but it didn’t look as if we were going to get any further than Fruits and Vegetables for a while. I didn’t bother checking the time. “Well, what kind do you usually get?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Gracie.” Savanna tossed her hair and sighed. “Nobody, like, told me they have names.”
“Well, is the kind you usually have big? Small? Dark? Light? Does it have pips? Does it—”
“They’re orange, Gray. That’s, like, the big clue.” She turned to look at me. “I don’t kn—” Her eyes locked somewhere behind my right ear.
“What’s the matter?”
Savanna gazed into the cart. “Don’t turn around,” she ordered. “But there’s a guy over by the salad stuff who’s, like, staring at us.”
I didn’t turn around. I knew he wasn’t staring at me. Not unless I’d started growing antlers.
“He is, like, seriously cute,” Savanna reported. “Tall and lean, but really well-built. Dark.” She reached down and moved the bag of potatoes from one side of the cart to the other. “I mean, like, really seriously cute.”
“Is he from our school?”
“No way.” Savanna shook her head. Slowly. “You know what? Why don’t you pick out the oranges, Gracie? I’m just going to get some tomatoes.”
Sure she was. And right after that she was going to save the world.
I sighed. “You mean you’re going to go over and flirt with that guy.”
“No, I’m going to get some tomatoes.” Savanna smiled. “But I can’t help it if he flirts with me.”
Needless to say, nobody ever flirted with me. Savanna said it was because I dressed like a boy. I said it was more like a natural law: Whatever goes up has to come down; two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time; and no one flirts with Gracie Mooney. But everybody flirted with Savanna. And Savanna flirted right back. She was a natural.
“Oh, come on, Savanna. Tomatoes aren’t even on the list.” We’d already spent half an hour more in the drugstore than we had to while she tested lipsticks on the back of her hand. Experience suggested that flirting could take even longer. “I have to get home today, remember?”
She made a face. It was long-suffering. “As if I could forget. You’ve been reminding me, like, every five minutes.”
I pushed the cart forward a couple of inches to encourage her to move. “Savanna—”
She patted my arm. “Relax, Gracie. I’ll be right back.”
So if you weren’t completely clear about what it means to be one of Those Girls, here’s an example. A classic. In a situation where someone like me would turn red, knock thirty or forty oranges to the ground and roll the shopping cart over her toes, Savanna merely raised her head and smiled — and sailed towards the tomatoes like a man-of-war overtaking a dinghy. She was already flirting before she’d passed the root vegetables. There was a part of me that couldn’t have been more in awe of her if she could bend steel with her bare hands.
Mr Seriously Cute was studying the tomatoes as if he was searching for fingerprints. But only with one eye. He looked up when Savanna docked beside him. She hugged herself and swayed. He smiled. Savanna smiled back. She had a smile that could sell ice to an Inuit. And then she turned to pull a plastic bag from the roll. Her hair moved like a curtain blown by a soft sea breeze. Mr Seriously Cute said something. Savanna gazed back at him. She said something. He said something else. He was bobbing his head and grinning like one of those dogs people put in the back windows of their cars. I’d never actually seen a guy blush before. Savanna picked up a tomato and held it out to him. He gave it a squeeze. She said something. He said something. She hit him playfully on the arm. Besides the what-you-need-in-that-igloo-is-a-big-chunk-of-ice smile, Savannah had a laugh that made people look around to see what was happening – in case she was being attacked or someone was strangling a goose. Mr Seriously Cute joined in. Everybody else looked at them.
It was obvious that Savanna was having fun – which made one of us. Watching someone flirt is even less interesting than watching someone test lipstick on her hand. I turned my attention back to the oranges. I picked out some navel oranges, and then I took one of the free recipe cards from the dispenser. I was reading how to make lemon sauce (recommended for chicken, fish and green vegetables) when Savanna got back with the tomatoes her mother hadn’t asked for.
“There.” She dropped the bag into the cart. “Happy? That didn’t take long, did it?”
I had to laugh. “You’re too much, you know that? You really are too much.”
“And you sound like my mother.” She smiled, but she wasn’t laughing along. “You’re way too young to be such a pole in the mud.”
“Stick.”
“Anyway, Gracie, I was only being friendly.”
“Really? And what about Archie?”
Savanna’s eyes widened. The only way she could have looked more innocent was if she’d had wings and a halo. “What about him?”
“You and Archie are practically going steady.”
“Practically isn’t the same as are, Gray. I mean, practically inheriting a million dollars isn’t anything like having a million dollars, is it?”
“Well, no…” Besides selling ice to an Inuit, she could probably argue him out of his last blanket.
“And anyway, I didn’t do anything. All I did was talk to some other guy. Talking to some other guy is not, like, a criminal offence.” She looked down at the list again and squidged up her nose as though the next item was something gross like the still-warm heart of a newborn lamb. “Cereal. Where’s the cereal, Gracie?”
I could only hope that she knew what kind the Zindles ate for breakfast. There were a lot more cereals than oranges. I looked up at the signs that hung over the end of each aisle. “Aisle four.” I pointed left. “Over there.”
Savanna led the way. Grumbling. “I’d rather eat McDonald’s every single day, no matter how fat it makes you, than have to do this. This is like totally my idea of hell.”
“It can’t be hell,” I said as I followed her to the back of the store. “Hell has fire and brimstone, not lights fuelled by mercury and energy-guzzling chill cabinets. This has to be purgatory.”
Savanna honked with laughter. “You see? That’s why I wanted you with me. You make even this bearable.” She waved her arms. “But I’ll tell you one thing – when we have our own place we’re getting takeouts on the nights we’re not being wined and dined by gorgeous men with serious incomes. I’m not doing this every week.”
Having our own place together was our big dream. When we got out of college, we were going to share an apartment in some major city – preferably one with easy access to The Great Outbores (as Savanna called it) for those of us who liked tramping through mud. We had it all planned. We’d talked about it so much that we knew what colour we were painting each room. We were going to be sophisticated and cool and leave the dishes in the sink for as long as we liked. Savanna was going to get a job in TV and work her way up to being a news anchorman, and I was going to be a wildlife biologist and work for some organization trying to save what’s left
of the planet. But, besides the hard work and professional dedication, there would be boyfriends. That’s where the gorgeous men with serious incomes came in. Savanna was going to have tons of boyfriends and they were all going to be disgustingly attractive and wealthy. I wasn’t really into money. I was more of a realist; having more to be realistic about, all I wanted was one guy who was breathing, nice, smart, had a good sense of humour and loved lizards.
“No takeouts,” I said. “We’re going to be poor working girls on a budget, remember?”
“Only to begin with.” Savanna said this with her usual certainty. Self-doubt wasn’t in her make-up. Which was yet another thing I loved about her. Self-doubt was practically my middle name: Gracie Self-doubt Mooney. “Then we’re going to be fantastically successful and we’ll move from our tiny little cramped but cosy apartment to a penthouse with a roof garden and a cleaning lady who comes in twice a week.”
She edged between two carts coming from the other direction, knocking a box of cookies and a roll of paper towels to the floor.
I couldn’t follow her until the women pushing the carts picked up the cookies and the paper towels.
By the time I caught up with Savanna, some guy with a baby hanging off his back was handing her a box from the top shelf of aisle four, grinning as if she was the one who was doing him the favour.
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” she gushed. There were curls and flashes all over the place. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
She would’ve got it herself. Mrs Pontiac pretty much begged her to join the girls’ basketball team.