Why Can't I Be You

by Melissa Walker

  When we get outside, Ronan squeezes my hand before he drops it, but he doesn’t say a word. Best friends don’t have to talk about things that feel bad.

  Chapter 3

  The dressing room at Belding’s Department Store echoes when we laugh. That’s one of the best parts of trying on clothes here.

  “Wait till you see this next one,” says Brianna. “I have two words: orange ruffles.”

  I giggle in anticipation.

  The mall is empty today, and the salespeople don’t seem to mind me and Brianna bringing six fancy dresses at a time from the juniors’ section and pulling them on and off while we trade back and forth. We’re the only ones here, so we come out into the middle area with the three-way mirrors and show each other what we’re wearing with spins and silly dances.

  There are some truly ugly formal dresses out there, and that’s what Brianna and I go for first—the oddest colors and fabrics and shapes to make us look like rainbow cartoon characters.

  I’m really into colors, and as soon as I learned to read I memorized all the names in Mom’s makeup kit—they have better names than crayons. Who would choose boring old beige over Ocean Sands or Metallic Mocha, two sparkly browns I’ve seen in her eye shadow palette? Brianna says there are people whose job it is to figure out what to call makeup colors. Now that’s a dream. I practice by trying to name our dress shades as we try them on. Teal for Real for a blue so bright it made my eyes hurt, Scarlett Fever for a deep-red one, and Cream Dream for a mostly white dress with weird gold swirls.

  When we have on our fourth dresses—me in teal ruffles and Brianna in scarlet sequins—we flop down on the love seat next to the mirrors for a break.

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you . . . Guess who’s my new neighbor?” Brianna is smiling like it’s going to be someone amazing. But there aren’t any famous people in our town. That I know of.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Emily Wu!”

  “Oh,” I say. Is that all? Emily Wu is a girl in our grade. She’s popular, I guess you could say.

  Brianna stands up and does a happy spin with her arms in the air. Is she really excited about Emily Wu? Then she bumps my arm. “You don’t remember ballet class?” she asks.

  I smile. I forgot. We all took ballet classes at the YMCA when we were, like, three.

  “The spins!” Brianna and I laugh-shout at the same time.

  Emily used to sit on the sidelines in ballet because she always said she had “the spins.” And when our teacher forced her to dance she’d spin and spin, like she was one of those toy tops.

  “You better watch out or she’ll spin over to your house and knock over all your stuff,” I say.

  I stand up too, and we both start pirouetting around the room in our poufy dresses, our bright skirts flying out from our legs in streams of color, until we fall into the soft chairs, giggling loudly.

  “I’m pretty sure she can walk straight these days,” says Brianna.

  “Well, just tell her to be careful around your pool.”

  We grin at each other.

  “Hey, let’s do something different now,” Brianna says.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Let’s try to find actual pretty dresses for each other.”

  “Why?” That doesn’t sound like much fun.

  “Just to see,” says Brianna.

  I’m about to ask, “To see what?” but she’s already rushing out of the dressing room and back to the racks.

  I hang up the blue pouf I tried on—it looks more like an ice-skating costume than a party dress. I always make sure to put back the clothes neatly and in the same place where I got them. I grab a couple of things from Brianna’s dressing room to return too—she’s a little messier than I am.

  And then I think, What the heck? And I look through the racks in a new way, actually trying to find something pretty. It makes me feel both excited and nervous, like I’m pretending to be older.

  There’s a whole row of black dresses that are more plain, and I usually pass right by that section when we’re after showy looks, but now I slow down and move the hangers around so I can see the shape of each one. Brianna is shorter than I am, with pale skin and dark-brown hair. She always looks pretty in strappy dresses, so I find one for her with a simple top and a full skirt.

  When I get into the dressing room, she’s holding out a light-blue gown for me. It has two layers, a silky one underneath and a soft see-through one on top. The skirt is swishy and pleated, and the top is fitted.

  “That’s not going to look good,” I say.

  “I think it will,” she says.

  “Here.” I hand her the black dress, and she raises her eyebrows skeptically.

  “We’re trusting each other, right?”

  She nods, and we go into our own curtained rooms.

  Before I even get my dress fully zipped in the back, I can tell Brianna was right. It’s pretty. The color makes my skin look glowing instead of pale, and my brown eyes pick up the lightness of the blue somehow—they shine. Even my hair, which I always think of more in terms of what color it’s not (not brown, not blond, but somewhere in between), seems to take on a richer tone that I’d call Cinnamon. The skirt swishes down to just above my knees and the middle part makes it look like I have a waist. My arms even look good because of the sleeve style—it can be worn on top of my shoulders or off the sides, which Mom wouldn’t allow.

  But that doesn’t matter because this is all imaginary anyway, so when I walk out, I pull the sleeves down and it’s officially off-the-shoulder.

  Brianna comes out at the same time, and her dress, with thin spaghetti straps and a tulip-shaped skirt that’s long and a little bit flared, fits her just like I thought it would. She looks mysterious and magical in that dress, like Snow White with a personality.

  When I see myself in the triple mirror, I feel like I’m looking at an older me, one with more . . . everything. It’s not that it makes my body look curvier, though it does. And it’s not that the light-blue color of the dress looks like something a princess or a movie star would wear, but that’s true too. It’s that I look like me, but not. Like future me, or a person I could be if I were just a little bit different.

  We stand together in front of the triple mirror and look at ourselves and then each other. We’re both quiet at first, until we start talking at the same time.

  “You look amazing!” says Brianna.

  “That dress is perfect!” I say.

  We laugh and look back at the mirror, both flushed with feeling pretty at the same time.

  “There’s a seventh-grade dance in the spring,” says Brianna.

  I nod and try to see the tag under my arm. I haven’t looked at the price of anything because we always try on dresses and it’s just a joke, but when I get a glimpse and read eighty-eight dollars, I realize that I couldn’t ever have this blue dress. I feel my heart thump an ouch.

  “Let’s take a picture,” I say, trying to sound upbeat.

  “Good idea!” Brianna runs back into her dressing room for her phone, and we both pose a few different ways and then we take solo pics.

  “I seriously might ask my mom for this dress,” she says to me.

  And I smile and nod again, before I head into the dressing room to take mine off. I don’t look in the mirror as I leave it hanging alone in the tiny curtained room. I shake off the thought of how the dress looked on me, making me feel like someone else for a minute.

  We head to the food court to get lunch, and we both order combo meals.

  “What do you think seventh grade is going to be like?” asks Brianna as we slurp our Cokes. We both think it tastes better with sound, even though our moms say it’s rude.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and in my head I’m thinking about how I liked having my shoulders bare and I wish that someone from school, besides Brianna, had seen me in that Bora-Bora blue dress, by accident or something.

  “Eden says everything changes in seventh grade,” says Br
ianna.

  Eden again. “Like what?” I ask.

  “Like everything.”

  “That’s dumb,” I say.

  Brianna laughs and bumps my arm softly. “Don’t say that about my cousin.”

  “I didn’t say Eden was dumb, I said her idea was.” I drink the last of my soda with a big straw-slurp finish. “What does that even mean, everything changes?”

  Brianna shrugs. “She’s coming tomorrow,” she says, “so you can ask her yourself.”

  Chapter 4

  My dad calls Friday “Claireday” because it’s our once-a-week date. He lives in an apartment complex that’s half an hour away, but every Friday, right at 5:45 p.m., he comes over to pick me up and take me out. Sometimes I sleep at his place for the weekend, it’s part of the custody agreement, but not tonight. Often Dad has to work long days on Saturdays, and I like my room better at Mom’s, so we’re all flexible.

  “Have fun!” Mom calls out the door as we pull away in Dad’s old El Camino. It’s bright blue, a color I call Aqua Dream, and it’s got the front of a car and the back of a truck, which sort of reminds me of one of those dogs with big heads and small bodies, but in reverse. He loves this car, and he calls it Charlie. Tonight it’s warm and the windows are rolled all the way down.

  Dad beeps Charlie’s horn in response to Mom. They’re friendly, my parents, but they don’t do anything together unless it’s for me, like a birthday or holiday or something. They were married for two years after I was born, but they were pretty young then and they say they “grew apart.” They both use those exact words, so I guess they agree on it. I don’t remember us ever living all together, and we’ve had Claireday since I was in preschool, so even though sometimes someone will hear my parents are divorced and then look at me with an “oh that must be hard” face, I don’t really feel like it is.

  “Where to, Clairebear?” asks Dad, working the toothpick that’s always in the side of his mouth. He’s wearing his cool-guy sunglasses and a baseball cap that says “Bass Master.” He looks like he hasn’t shaved in a while, but that works for him. He’s handsome, especially when he showers off the dirt from his construction jobs—he’s a contractor, so he’s mostly in charge now and not doing the labor, but he still sweats a lot. When I don’t answer, he says, “It’s a beautiful night. Corn dogs and mini golf?”

  “Sure.” I press in the big button that turns Dad’s old-timey radio tuner to my station—K101 Hits.

  Dad puts his hands over his ears and mouths a silent scream, even though he programmed that station especially for me.

  “Stop,” I tell him with a laugh.

  He grins at me and says, “Okay, a few songs. But then I’m putting on Bruce!”

  My dad loves Bruce Springsteen. Like, a lot.

  “Can I just have K101 for the ride there?” I ask. “Bruce is better for the ride home.”

  “Energy wise?” asks Dad.

  I nod.

  “Okay, I hear you,” he says. And then he bobs his head crazy fast to a new single, and when we stop at a red light the lady in the car next to us laughs at him. Her window’s down and everything, so we hear her.

  “You’re so embarrassed,” I say to Dad.

  “Never!” he says, raising his hand in a wave and headbanging harder, even though this is a hip-hop song and that’s not really the right move.

  The lady laughs again, and so do I.

  When we pull away from the light the lady waves to us. I think we made her night better.

  Dad’s phone rings from the center of the seat, and he and I both look down at it. K calling. . . .

  “Who’s K?” I ask.

  “Someone from work,” Dad says as he silences the ring. But he said it really quickly. I open my mouth to ask more about “K,” but Dad rushes in. “Hey, how was your week? First days of summer, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I shrug as I think about how even though summer has barely started, things have felt kind of weird. But I don’t know how to talk about that, so I just say, “I found a missing puzzle piece for Mom.”

  Dad laughs. “I’m sure that made her truly happy.” He says it sincerely, like he’s appreciating the way Mom is. “So what, besides playing puzzle detective, have you been up to this week?”

  “Nothing really,” I say. “The brook, the mall, the seventh-grade reading list . . . oh, and Brianna moved! Her new pool will be ready to swim in soon!”

  “Well now, that’s cool,” says Dad.

  “Yeah, she’s having a pool party for her birthday, and even Ronan is invited,” I tell him.

  “They’re friends, aren’t they, Brianna and Ronan?”

  Dad tries to keep up with things, and he does pretty well, but he doesn’t get some parts, like how when you’re eleven girls and boys aren’t friends anymore. Ronan and I are sort of an exception. And even with us we’re more at-home friends than anything because when people are around, my being close to him means they say “ooh.” It doesn’t bother me, but I’ve seen his face get red.

  “Yeah, they’re friends,” I say. It’s easier not to get into these details.

  We pull up to Minnie’s Golf, and Dad leans out of Charlie’s window. He whistles loudly. “Melinda!” he yells to Minnie, the owner. He knows her from high school.

  Up at the counter, Minnie gives us a big wave. Her bright-pink lips are pressed into a heart-shaped smile.

  “Hi, Rick, Claire,” says Minnie. “Date night?”

  “Claireday,” says my dad. “And we just couldn’t stay away from your lovely establishment.”

  “Right.” Minnie smirks at him, but I can tell she’s glad to see us.

  Dad winks at me before he comes around to open my door. It’s a thing he does, and I see Minnie smile at his gentlemanly move. People like my dad. They find him charming, but it’s not the fake sort of charming. He’s kind too. Like, deep down. People see that.

  We go up to the window, and Dad pays for a round of mini golf. Then Minnie comes out from behind the half door at the counter to hand us our clubs.

  “You’re pregnant!” I say.

  Minnie laughs. “I am,” she says. “I’m about to turn thirty, so Joe and I figured it was time.”

  Dad leans over to me and whispers, “That’s the right way to do it. When you’re thirty!”

  He says stuff like that a lot, about how he and Mom were too young to have a baby—me. It used to bother me, and one day when I was seven I told him so. Dad said, “Claire, I wouldn’t trade you for a palace full of money or a world filled with Funyuns. You are my bear, and I love you as deep as the woods go. So maybe I say things like that, but it’s not about you. I’m just talking about my foolish self.”

  Then he hugged me and I felt better. My dad really loves Funyuns.

  Dad lets me take an extra shot on the second hole when my ball falls into the moat, and I let him have a do-over when the windmill blocks his ball and sends it right back to the starting green. We’ve been laughing and having a good time, but on the sixth hole, when Dad asks how Ronan is doing with his father being home, I feel funny and I wonder if he’s been waiting to ask this question all night. I pretend to focus on lining up my ball, and I don’t say anything for a minute. But Dad knows that, with me, quiet means there are words to dig for.

  “Claire?” he pushes.

  “Ronan’s okay,” I say. And then I decide to put the quiet on him. “He doesn’t talk much about it. Or anything. You know how he is.”

  “I guess I do,” he says. “Or at least I know how twelve-year-old boys are.”

  “We’re not twelve yet,” I say to Dad as I take one final second to line up my shot.

  “August is coming fast,” says Dad, and then he does this low sigh just like Mom did the other day.

  Seriously? Why does everyone act like turning twelve is a zombie apocalypse? Is there something I don’t know? Like I’m going to turn into a raging monster maniac werewolf? Gah!

  I get so worked up that I miss my shot.

  Chapter 5<
br />
  Early the next morning, Rocky starts barking and the noise wakes me up. I hear Ronan’s mom’s car pull out, and I yawn and run a hand through my hair, which I can tell is messy and all over the place. It’s stringy and thin, and I wear it up so much that Mom says I should cut it, but I like the options of longer hair even if I don’t use them. I grab the ponytail holder on the crate next to my bed.

  After a stretch and a roll over to the other side for a minute, I’m fully awake. I have a plan today: ice cream.

  When I get to the kitchen I decide to make breakfast for Mom as a surprise, so I get out butter, sugar, and cinnamon and put two pieces of bread in the toaster.

  The microwave clock reads 7:14 a.m. when Rocky starts to bark again. He’s been doing that a lot this morning, and I wonder if Mr. Michaels is outside. I haven’t seen him leave their trailer at all. I peek out the kitchen window, and I see Ronan’s dad walking around the raised plot next to their front porch. He’s in a bathrobe and he’s kind of shuffling, like someone in a zombie movie. A zombie, I guess. I close the half curtain so I can’t see him anymore.

  By the time the toaster pops up, the barking has quieted. I arrange the toast on two plates, the fancy china ones we got at the thrift shop last summer. They have a cherry blossom pattern, and I like to imagine that a royal family used them once. We got four of the plates but one broke last fall when I accidentally dropped it carrying dishes to the sink.

  These two look pretty though, and when I put the toast on them I immediately pat each piece with butter so it’ll melt a little before I try to spread it. That’s key.

  I shake the cinnamon and sugar into a small bowl, and once the butter is warmed and spread, I pinch the cinnamon sugar between two fingers and carefully sprinkle the mixture over the toast. The butter makes it stick.

  I place the plates on top of our small round table and go to find the white cloth napkins Mom keeps in a drawer under the potholders. I know it’ll add to the laundry load, which is one of my jobs around here, but I’m already using the china plates and it seems right to add nice napkins too.