Zoe is on the Air

by Clare Hutton

  Walking home through the dusk, Zoe felt buoyant with pride at how great Emma’s room had looked. She was still worried, though, about the kid who had written in about their parents’ divorce. They hadn’t been able to help with that question, but Zoe thought what she’d told Emma had been right: With some problems, there just wasn’t anything they could do to make a situation better.

  Nevertheless, though, this had been a good afternoon. The warm, light sensation in her chest now was the same as the feeling she got when she came up with a really good solution to someone’s problem. She’d used her creativity to help Emma, and Emma had loved it.

  It was even colder out now than it had been when they went to Seaview House, and Zoe balled her gloved hands up in her coat pockets to keep her fingers warm. She walked faster as she came in sight of her own house. The windows were glowing from the lights inside, golden and welcoming, and her stomach growled as she wondered what they’d be having for dinner. She was coming home later than she’d planned, and dinner must be almost ready.

  Just as Zoe reached the steps up to the front door, the door opened and then slammed behind a hurrying figure.

  “Caitlin?” Zoe asked, as the other girl rushed down the steps. “Aren’t you staying for dinner?”

  Close up, she saw that Caitlin’s eyes were shiny with suppressed tears and her mouth was in a thin, angry line. “Are you okay?” Zoe asked.

  “No,” Caitlin said bitterly. “I never should have taken your advice, Zoe.”

  “Huh?” Zoe asked, puzzled. “What do you mean?” She took hold of Caitlin’s arm to make the other girl look at her, but Caitlin pulled away as a car came slowly down the street toward them.

  “That’s my dad,” she said. “I’ve got to go.” Her shoulders were stiff and defensive-looking, even from behind, as she hurried to her dad’s car and got in, shutting the door behind her.

  What was that about? Zoe suddenly felt anxious and apprehensive: When had Caitlin taken her advice? Was she almost crying because of Natalia? What had happened? Her stomach hollow with dread, she ran up the front steps and into the house, then straight upstairs to the bedroom she and Natalia shared.

  Natalia was curled up on the bed. When she looked up at Zoe, tears were running down her face.

  “Oh no,” Zoe said, rushing over to her sister and sitting on the bed beside her. “What’s wrong?”

  Natalia sniffed and sat up, wiping her face on her arm. “Caitlin was being really mean to me,” she muttered. “She’s so harsh sometimes.”

  “What happened?” Zoe asked. Caitlin could be insensitive sometimes, sure—she had been pretty unfriendly to Emma when Emma first moved to Waverly, for instance—but she and Natalia were solid best friends. Zoe couldn’t imagine Caitlin being mean to Natalia on purpose.

  Natalia huffed a sigh. “I guess I might as well tell you,” she said. “I’ve been working on an entry for the school T-shirt contest.”

  “Okay,” Zoe said, remembering how Natalia had hurriedly hidden papers when Zoe came into the room. “Great. But why were you keeping that a secret?” She tried not to sound hurt; Natalia was upset enough.

  Natalia dropped her head onto her knees. “It’s just that you’re better at art than I am,” she said, her voice muffled. “I was kind of embarrassed to show you, because I know my art isn’t that good, but I was excited about my idea. So, I kept asking Caitlin what she thought of it, and she was always like, ‘Why do you want to know what I think? It’s what you think that matters.’” She raised her head and looked at Zoe through a curtain of hair. “But I just wanted her opinion. So, today, when I asked again, she told me exactly what she thought of my entry for the T-shirt contest, and she was mean about it. She was like, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s any good. I think you might be embarrassed if you enter it.’”

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “That is pretty harsh.” An uneasy tendril of guilt was creeping through her. Caitlin had said she never should have taken Zoe’s advice. It must have been Caitlin who had written in to the show, and Zoe had told her to be honest and bold, to tell the truth instead of worrying about her friend’s feelings.

  Zoe twisted her hands in her lap. “I’m sure Caitlin was just trying to be honest and it came out wrong.”

  “There’s a difference between honest and mean,” she said. Dropping her head back, she stared up at the ceiling. “So, then I told her she was totally insensitive, and she got all upset and said I shouldn’t have nagged her for her opinion if I didn’t want to hear it, and we were both furious. Now I’m just really embarrassed. I don’t even want to see Caitlin for a while.”

  Caitlin’s a pretty blunt person. She probably didn’t mean to hurt Natalia’s feelings. Zoe still wasn’t convinced that the trouble between Natalia and Caitlin wasn’t mostly her own fault but decided to focus on the immediate problem. “Will you show me the T-shirt design now? Maybe I can help you.”

  “I might be too embarrassed to even be able to show you. You’re really arty, and Caitlin made it clear just how bad it was,” Natalia said reluctantly, turning her face away.

  “Oh, come on.” Zoe nudged her sister. “I’m your twin. We dressed as peanut butter and jelly for a joint Halloween costume when we were eight. You read the poetry I wrote to the boy I was in love with in fourth grade. If you can’t show me embarrassing stuff, who can you show it to?”

  “I guess.” Natalia’s cheeks were faintly pink, but she got up and pulled a paper out of her desk drawer. “See?” she said. “I thought the pearl thing would be nice, because we’re the Waverly Oysters.”

  Zoe looked at the paper her sister had handed her. Drawn on it in black marker was a pair of ovals that she guessed were supposed to be an open oyster. Inside stood a couple of smiling stick figures, a large circle between them. Above, it read: Waverly Middle School: A Pearl of a School.

  “Caitlin’s right, isn’t she?” Natalia said miserably. “It’s awful.”

  “I don’t think it’s awful,” Zoe said. It really wasn’t. There was definitely potential in her sister’s idea—maybe it was because they were twins, but Zoe felt like she could see past the roughness of the drawing to the way Natalia had seen the design in her head, and that design was pretty cool looking. “Okay, your drawing isn’t great, but I think the pearl slogan is really cute for the Oysters. And the composition is nice and clean. You didn’t put too much stuff in the picture, and the eye is drawn right to the pearl. Does it have to be in black and white?”

  Natalia nodded. “The rules said the T-shirts were going to be black print on white shirts.”

  “Okay.” Zoe could picture the shirts in shades of ocean blue and sunset pink, which would look much cooler than black and white, but the rules were the rules. She looked at Natalia’s drawing again. If it was a little clearer that the ovals were an oyster shell … If the two stick figures were a little more elaborate and it was clear that one was a girl and one a boy … A little shading might make it more obvious that the circle was a pearl.

  “I really like your idea,” she said hesitantly, unsure how Natalia would take her suggestion. “But the art is kind of messy. What if I helped with the art, just adapting the images and using the slogan you came up with? We could enter together.”

  Natalia bit her lip. “I knew my art wasn’t good enough,” she said.

  “But your ideas are good,” Zoe said. “And if you actually want to get better at drawing, you can take a class. Drawing’s just like anything else: You get better with practice.”

  Natalia wrinkled her nose, then suddenly grinned. “I don’t actually want to put any work into being a good artist,” she admitted. “It’s not that important to me. You can be the family artist. But I really like my idea for the T-shirt and I want it to turn out the way I pictured it.”

  Zoe smiled back and picked up a pencil from Natalia’s desk. “So,” she said, twirling the pencil between her fingers, “we’re sisters. Let me help.”

  The next morning, Zoe pushed open the fr
ont door of the school and held it open so that Natalia and Emma could carefully carry in the tomb of Hatshepsut they were presenting as part of their history project. Zoe and Natalia’s dad had given them a ride to school so they wouldn’t have to wrestle their project on and off the bus. They ended up being a little earlier than usual this morning, because he had to get over to the high school before his own classes began.

  Zoe looked proudly at the tomb as Emma and Natalia carried it past her through the door. She thought it looked pretty impressive. Natalia had done the base building, cleverly fitting bits of different cardboard boxes together to make an almost waist-high room with one open side to see into and a curving ceiling like that of the real Hatshepsut’s tomb. She’d given everything a smooth background coat of creamy paint.

  Zoe had precisely and elaborately painted all the sides and even the ceiling with hieroglyphics and frescoes of stiffly posed, white-clad Egyptian deities, copied from the pictures they’d found online of the female pharaoh’s real tomb. In the center of the room was a topless box, made of cardboard painted to look like stone, and inside that was the mummy case. Zoe had painted that very carefully, trying to replicate the knowing, secretive smile on the real outer mummy case of the female pharaoh.

  Emma and Caitlin had, after some discussion with the twins, written up the oral reports they’d be giving together. Emma was going to talk about government in ancient Egypt, and Caitlin was going to talk about the female pharaoh Hatshepsut and the role women in general played in ancient Egypt. Natalia would talk about pyramids and how they were built, and Zoe would talk about the art inside the pyramids, what the different conventions were and what they symbolized to the ancient Egyptians.

  As her sister and cousin carried the tomb into the history classroom, Zoe suddenly remembered she’d left the script for her part of the presentation in her locker. “I’ll be right back, you guys,” she called as she headed down the hall.

  She was standing at her locker, reading through the presentation, when she heard a throat being cleared behind her.

  “Hey,” Caitlin said, when Zoe turned around.

  “Hey,” Zoe answered. “We brought the tomb in.”

  Caitlin nodded. “Is Natalia still mad at me?” she asked. Her voice sounded slightly hoarse, as if she was coming down with a cold. She was looking tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, and Zoe thought she looked like she probably hadn’t slept well.

  “Yeah, kind of,” Zoe said. There was no point in lying, but she felt bad when she saw Caitlin’s shoulders get tight and defensively high. “I think she’s mostly just embarrassed,” Zoe added apologetically.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Caitlin insisted, her chin beginning to jut out. “She kept asking me what I thought. And you told me to tell her the truth.”

  “Well, yeah,” Zoe admitted. “And I still think it was a good thing that you did. She and I worked on revising the T-shirt design, and it’s way better now. And we wouldn’t have worked together on it if you hadn’t given her some criticism.”

  Caitlin’s shoulders slumped. “Well, then, why is she still mad at me?” she said plaintively.

  “You hurt her feelings,” Zoe explained. “Maybe if you apologized?”

  Caitlin sniffed. “I don’t really think I have anything to apologize about. But fine, if it’ll make her happy.”

  Zoe closed her locker, and they headed back to the classroom together. Caitlin was stomping along, her boots clomping angrily on the hall floor

  “Um,” Zoe said. “You don’t have to apologize.”

  Caitlin huffed in a breath, then sighed. “No, if Natalia feels bad, I don’t want her to be upset.”

  Zoe followed Caitlin into the classroom, where Natalia and Emma were bending over the tomb, doing a couple last-minute adjustments. Natalia was frowning a little as she fiddled with the edge of the sarcophagus. A few other kids had trickled into the room now, too, and were talking or flipping through books or resting their heads on their desks sleepily. Mr. Thomas’s chair was empty, though. He was probably just in the teacher’s lounge, getting coffee.

  “The roof got bent a little bit,” Emma explained, looking up at Zoe and Caitlin. “But we fixed it.”

  “Great,” Zoe said. Her stomach twisted. Natalia looked kind of mad. Zoe just wanted them all to be friends again.

  Caitlin walked straight up to Natalia, her head held high. “I want to apologize,” she said quietly.

  “Okay,” Natalia said. There was a hopeful tilt to her face. Zoe could tell her sister didn’t want to be mad at Caitlin; she was sure they both just wanted to go back to things being normal.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Caitlin said. “I didn’t know you were going to be so sensitive about the T-shirt drawing.” Behind Natalia and Caitlin, Zoe saw Emma silently facepalm.

  Natalia stiffened. “I wasn’t being too sensitive,” she snapped. “You were being mean.”

  “That’s not true,” Caitlin said sharply. “You asked me what I thought. Over and over again. I even said I liked the idea, but you kept pestering me about the drawing.”

  Their voices were rising, and Zoe realized that the rest of the kids in the class were listening with interest. “Guys …” she said.

  “I asked Zoe what she thought, too,” Natalia said. “And she didn’t tell me how horrible it was. She helped me.”

  “Yeah, well, Zoe helped me, too, when I wrote in asking what to do about you. She was the one who told me to be honest. Apparently, it wasn’t actually all that helpful advice.” Natalia and Caitlin were glaring at each other now, their hands on their hips.

  “Hey,” Zoe objected, beginning to get angry herself. “I told you to be honest, but I didn’t tell you to be totally tactless. Don’t drag me into your fight.”

  “You guys, calm down,” Emma said, anxiously twisting her hands together.

  “Wait, you wrote to Zoe and Emma’s advice show about how bad my project was?” Natalia asked, taken aback. “That was about me?”

  Caitlin bit her lip, looking guilty. “It wasn’t about how bad—”

  “Thanks a lot, Caitlin,” Natalia said bitterly. “That’s just really embarrassing.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Caitlin snapped. “It’s just a T-shirt. Stop being such a baby.”

  There was a ripple of laughter from some of the boys in the class.

  Natalia gasped. She looked furious. Suddenly, her mouth dropped open farther, and she glared at Caitlin.

  “I just figured something out,” she said in a low voice. “I was thinking that the sarcophagus didn’t look quite the way it did when I put it together. Did you go back and change it?”

  Caitlin’s eyes widened. “I just neatened it up a little,” she said. “You left some of the corners kind of raggedy. I always touch stuff up, you know that.”

  Natalia looked ready to scream in anger and frustration. Before she could speak, though, Mr. Thomas walked through the door, holding a full cup of coffee, and seemed to take in the tension between them in a glance. “Settle down, kids,” he said firmly. “Girls, are you all set to start your presentation?”

  Caitlin and Natalia were still glaring silently at each other. After a moment, Zoe said, “Sure,” and Emma nodded.

  Mr. Thomas sat down at his desk and gestured to them to begin.

  “Um, okay,” Emma said, looking down at her notes. Zoe felt a wave of relief that Emma’s part was first, instead of one of the others’. Beside her, Caitlin’s jaw was clenched tightly, and Natalia was looking like she might cry, or throw something at Caitlin. And Zoe certainly didn’t want to go first.

  “Ancient Egypt was governed by the pharaohs,” Emma read. “The pharaohs were the heads of the religion, as well as the heads of the government. Officially, people believed that they were half human and half god.”

  As Emma went on, Zoe looked around the classroom. Some of the kids were smirking at Natalia and Caitlin—there were always kids who loved drama—and other
s looked kind of worried. Natalia and Caitlin had been best friends for years.

  Emma finished her part of the speech, and there was a short, awkward pause. Zoe looked over at Caitlin, who was supposed to go next, but Caitlin was staring off into space, frowning.

  Zoe nudged her, and Caitlin jumped. “Women in ancient Egypt had the same rights under the law as men did,” she said in a rushed, angry-sounding voice, and then she looked down at her paper for another silent minute, clearly finding her place, before she continued in a more level voice.

  When Caitlin finished, it was Natalia’s turn.

  She began right away. “The oldest known pyramid in Egypt,” she said, her voice wobbling a little, “was built around the year 2630 BC …” Her voice trailed off, and the paper shook slightly in her hand.

  Suddenly, Zoe realized her sister was struggling not to cry. Slipping closer to her, Zoe looked over Natalia’s shoulder at the paper. “The last major pyramid was built around 664 BC,” Zoe read aloud. She pressed her arm gently against Natalia’s, trying to reassure her.

  Zoe could hear Natalia sniffing a little, but her hands had steadied, and she didn’t seem like she was about to cry anymore. After a deep breath, she spoke up again, her voice more confident than before. Zoe and Emma exchanged a relieved glance.

  “What a horrible morning,” Zoe muttered quietly to Emma as they came into the cafeteria together.

  Caitlin and Natalia were sitting at opposite ends of the lunch table. Both girls looked up at them expectantly as they approached. Zoe realized she and Emma were going to have to make a choice about who to sit with.

  Well, Natalia’s my sister, she thought. I have to be loyal to her. It’s a no-brainer. She plopped down next to Natalia, and Emma sat down beside her and began to open her lunch bag. “Brie and pear sandwiches today,” she said with false brightness. “And some of those lemon curd cookies from the B and B, yum.”