Amigas and School Scandals

by Diana Rodriguez Wallach

  When I had originally told Emily I was his lab partner, she had acted completely disinterested. When I had asked about their date this summer, she’d brushed me off. And when I would drop tidbits from our chemistry conversations, she’d glance away and look bored. I couldn’t tell if she liked him, if she hated him, or if she was just genuinely over him. But he definitely touched a nerve. She had never had a problem talking about guys to me before. Of course, I had never had a problem asking her either.

  “I don’t think a lot of people know. About your party,” Bobby whispered. “Emily mentioned it to me this morning.”

  My eyes whizzed up from my notebook, and I caught Mr. Berk staring at our table. We were supposed to be determining the number of neutrons and electrons in a series of elements using the atomic mass and proton numbers provided on the periodic table. All it required was a basic algebraic equation, but my mind wiped clean the minute Bobby mentioned Emily’s name.

  “I didn’t realize you and Emily still talked,” I mumbled.

  “We don’t. Not really. She just came up to me this morning.”

  “Oh, that’s cool. I mean, she’s my best friend... .”

  “I know,” Bobby whispered, cutting me off. “I know.”

  He dropped his head, throwing his dark blond hair into his eyes as he focused on his work. I wanted to say something, but I felt like the conversation was over. I turned my focus back to chemistry and finished my problems.

  After class ended, I sped into the hallway and collided with a jock. His shoulder crashed against mine, sending me stumbling back. I quickly tightened my grip on my books and found my balance. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of dropping everything I had into a heaping mess on the ground. By now I had the defense down pat. It was the third time it had happened today.

  Evan and his totally unoriginal friends had been “accidentally” bumping me as retribution for the showdown at the bonfire. They didn’t body slam me, just strategically nudged me with their massive physiques when I crossed their paths. None of them said anything, and it probably wasn’t obvious to the classmates around that I was an intentional target, but I was well aware of the intimidation technique. Vince used to pull it on me at home. Every time he and my dad had a blowout and I didn’t take his side, Vince would spend the next week smashing into me on the way to the bathroom. Thankfully I knew Evan and his friends would eventually tire and back off. Vince always did.

  I glimpsed back to see who hit me. It was Evan. He locked eyes with me and smirked like his actions were so clever. I smiled wide in return. At least I could annoy him by refusing to offer the reaction he so desperately desired.

  He looked away first.

  I turned and walked to Madison’s locker. She was digging through her jumbled books and binders. School had been in session for less than a month, and already her space was a disaster zone. In contrast, my books were lined by height and color-coded by subject. My locker was always tidy.

  “Hey, girls,” I said as I approached.

  “Was that Evan Casey who just slammed into you?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah, he’s such a dick.”

  “Well, you did kinda start it,” Madison grumbled as she tossed a book in her bag. “Does Bobby know you’re taking physical abuse for him?”

  “Oh, please.” I rolled my eyes. “If I could handle Vince, I can handle Evan. He barely grazes me. And speaking of Bobby, I hear you told him about my party.” I shifted my gaze to Emily.

  “Oh, uh, yeah. Why? Was I not supposed to?”

  “Well, I’m not sending the e-vite until this weekend. But aside from that, I didn’t think you guys were talking. I thought things were weird since this summer.”

  Madison and Emily briefly caught eyes.

  “No, we’re okay. I’m mean, we’re not weird. Not because of that. Why? What did he say?” Emily’s voice turned squeaky.

  “Nothing, relax. He just said that he spoke to you. Why? Is there, like, something going on? Because I could talk to him if you want?”

  “No!” Emily shouted. “It’s nothing. I figured you already told him about the party since you guys are friends and all.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. I couldn’t tell if she was actually checking her messages or if she just wanted to look busy so she didn’t have to face me.

  “We are friends in the lab-partner sense of the word.”

  “Do all lab partners defend each other’s honor?” Madison asked.

  “’Cause if so, Shelly Jaffe is seriously not pulling her weight. I’ve been sitting next to that girl for more than a month, and she’s barely let me borrow a pencil.”

  “Very funny.” I scrunched my nose at her.

  Just then Lilly popped up at the end of the hallway. Usually she was at tennis practice by now.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as she walked over.

  “Nothing, it’s just I heard you invited Betsy’s friends to your party.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, she told me she heard about it. She knew the date, the theme, everything.”

  I swiveled my head toward Madison. Her face was buried in her backpack.

  “Uh, you got something you want to tell me?”

  “I plead the fifth,” she mumbled, still staring into her bag.

  “Madison! This is a small thing. Why the heck are you blabbing about it?”

  “Because it’s a party! Spic, you’ve got to start inviting people.”

  Lilly’s brown eyes bulged as her jaw collapsed toward the tile floor.

  “What did you just call her?” she shouted, her forehead crumpled.

  The muscles in my shoulders clamped down as I held my breath.

  “What?” Madison asked with a breezy shrug.

  “I can’t believe you just said that. Man, and you’re supposed to be her friend?”

  Madison stepped back, looking Lilly up and down.

  “I am her friend.”

  “Wow, I’d hate to hear what you call your enemies.”

  “Oh, please. You don’t know me. You barely know her.” Madison waved her wrist at me.

  “Yeah, keep tellin’ yourself that. At least, I’m not the one throwing around racial slurs. I have more respect for my friends.”

  All the saliva dried in my mouth, and my heart shifted to warp speed. I didn’t know what to say. I had let Madison and Emily call me that for years. It was my fault as much as it was theirs. Of course, Lilly had every right to take offense. Unlike me, she had probably been on the receiving end of attacks like that before. She knew what that word meant.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Madison snapped, rustling her shiny blond hair. “Stop making it into something bigger than it is.”

  “Oh, really? Well, try dropping the ‘n’ word in a room full of black people and passing it off as ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ I’m sure that’d go over big.” Lilly mocked Madison in the same “Back in Spring Mills ...” voice she used to ridicule me this summer.

  Madison’s blue eyes immediately hardened. She stepped toward my cousin.

  “It is not the same thing!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “No, it’s not! You’re acting like I’m racist.”

  “No, you’re acting like you’re racist.”

  “Stop it!” I yelled, diving between the two of them. I thrust my hands in both directions. Emily silently watched.

  “Look, this is my fault.” I peered at Lilly. “Madison didn’t mean it like that. I know how it sounds, but it’s just a stupid nickname that got started years ago. I was too dumb to stop it.”

  I glared at Madison. “But I did ask you not to call me that anymore.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Chica, why in the world would you let them call you that?” Lilly’s eyelids fell as confusion gripped her face.

  I blinked back. I didn’t have an answer.

  Chapter 15

  Lilly made p
lans for the weekend without me—not that I was surprised. She and Madison needed some time apart. Plus, Madison’s dad had followed through on his promise to score us Saturday night tickets to Firebird. We were seated on the floor, fifth row center, which is a blessing and a curse. From the close vantage point we’d observe every movement, every step of choreography, every intricate detail, but we’d also lose the magic. Ballet is an athletic dance (something Madison, Emily, and I knew very well). From up close, you can see the males strain to lift the ballerinas; you can hear the dancer’s thud following every jump; you can see the company waiting in the wings behind the curtains. The fantasy was spoiled.

  “Now, you girls have never performed Firebird have you?” Mr. Fox asked from the driver’s seat.

  “No, Dad.”

  Madison and I were seated side by side in the bucket seats of her family’s SUV. Emily was perched on the bench seat behind us. It was the first time I hadn’t sat in the back since school started, and it was only because I physically jumped in the car before they did. When Emily realized she had to climb to the back, she actually shot me a snarky look like I had broken an unspoken rule. I energetically ignored it.

  “Well, the performance has gotten great reviews,” Madison’s mom added, twisting from the passenger seat. “Maybe you’ll pick up some pointers.”

  Asking us to pick up “pointers” from a prima ballerina was about as realistic as asking a high school football player to “learn a thing or two” from Peyton Manning. We can either lift our legs that high, or we can’t. You can’t teach talent—not talent like that.

  “So what’s Lilly doing tonight?” Madison whispered, her tone biting.

  “She’s going to the football game.”

  “Figures.”

  The ethnic rumble on Thursday made yesterday’s carpool quite interesting. I tried to convince Lilly that Madison did not mean offense, and that while it was a loaded term in Lilly’s world, in my world the nickname was more ironic. Spring Mills wasn’t exactly the Great American Melting Pot. With Vince gone, she and I accounted for the school’s entire Hispanic population. She was well aware of my limited exposure to Puerto Rican culture. And since I had never taken my heritage seriously, I couldn’t blame Madison and Emily for not treating it that way either.

  Lilly, however, felt very differently.

  “What up bitches?” Lilly hollered as we got into the car yesterday. (She had watched a “Real World” marathon and had clearly picked up a few things.)

  Madison and Emily’s heads immediately swung around.

  “What, you think you’re funny?” Madison barked.

  “Don’t take offense, hoe. I don’t mean anything by it.” She smiled.

  “Oh, you’re so clever.” Madison crinkled her nose and squeezed her lips tight.

  “What? It’s just a word.”

  I tried to break it up, but they shot spiky comebacks at each other the rest of the day. Emily sat silently on the sidelines, acting like the entire dispute had nothing to do with her, when she was just as guilty as Madison of tossing around the insult. I wasn’t sure if she was playing innocent or just not paying attention. Half the times I saw her lately, she seemed to have only one ear in the conversation while her mind was somewhere else.

  “Now, do you girls know the story behind Firebird?” Mrs. Fox asked, jolting me back to the present.

  “Oh, um, I think so,” I answered. “It’s a Russian fable about good versus evil, love conquering all. The usual. Except there’s also a magic bird.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, that sums it up.” Her father chuckled.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty standard. Bird dances, people turn into stone, they all come back to life at the end. Yadda yadda.”

  “You can see Mariana has a bright future as a dance critic,” Madison quipped.

  “Well, we all need something to fall back on.”

  We both giggled. It was the first time things had felt normal between us in days.

  We pulled up to the Academy. From the outside, the building looked more like a Quaker Meeting House than a theater worthy of ballets, operas, and musicals. It was old and historic, constructed with brick walls so thick that even with the multiple lanes of traffic on Broad and Locust streets, not the slightest hint of street noise squeaked inside.

  We hustled into the horseshoe-shaped theater trimmed with gold and red accents. A poetic mural covered the ceiling. The room was accented by Greek columns and a massive crystal chandelier. I nestled into my seat between Madison and her dad and tore open my package of Junior Mints. There was something about the theater that sparked a mint-chocolate craving in me. I never ate a Junior Mint outside of a cultural performance.

  “So how long is this thing?” Madison’s dad mumbled to her mom as I popped a mint into my mouth.

  I knew he wasn’t much of a ballet fan. I doubted he’d ever been to a performance aside from our recitals. It was nice of him to go out of his way to score the tickets. My dad would rather eat shards of shattered lightbulbs than sit through a ballet—my recitals included. He slept through half my solos. (Vince always relayed the exact time allotted before Dad started snoring.)

  Vince’s ball games were a different story. He’d travel to the ends of the earth to watch my brother play second base, and he was heartbroken when I refused to take up softball. My mother, however, was secretly thrilled. She bought my first pair of ballet slippers when I was three years old, certain I’d fulfill the dance fantasies she had never realized. (There was limited time for expensive extracurriculars while growing up in the projects.) I was her little ballerina.

  “When does the curtain go up?” I whispered to Madison.

  She glanced at her diamond-studded watch.

  “Not for another fifteen minutes.”

  I stood up and stretched my legs. My last ballet practice left every muscle in my body sore. I rubbed the back of my neck as I stared into the balcony; almost every seat was filled. There was an elementary school class in the upper rows, tossing candy at one another, while a lonely adult flailed his arms wildly. I smiled and started to turn back around when my eyes clapped on a familiar face. My hand shot to my mouth as a snicker escaped my lips.

  “Oh. My. God.” I mumbled through my palm, swatting at Madison with my other hand.

  “What?”

  “You are not going to believe who’s here.”

  Madison immediately shot to her feet. “Who? Where?”

  I couldn’t stop from grinning as my eyes locked on my target. He slowly raised his hand to his brow as if to conceal his identity, but it was way too late for that.

  “Over there,” I pointed, freeing my hand from my lips.

  Emily was now out of her seat beside us. “What? Who are we looking at?”

  “Evan Casey.”

  They followed my pointing finger until they spotted Evan and his white-haired grandmother seated about ten rows back.

  “Omigod!” Madison chirped. “This is classic!”

  “Guess he’s not so tough now,” I muttered.

  Eventually he dropped his hand and raised his lip in a crooked sneer. It was a good attempt to cover his embarrassment; too bad his face was a brighter shade of red than the seat he was planted in.

  The first act was amazing. Every time I attended a ballet, I itched to start practicing. I knew I’d never have a career as a professional dancer, but I thought it was amazing that there were people who did. They were paid to dance every day, while my father had to sit at a computer. I swore I would never sit behind a desk for a living. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I couldn’t possibly do that—especially when there were women who got to put on their ballet shoes for a paycheck.

  “Why can’t Madame Colbert put together choreography like that?” Emily asked, as she walked down our aisle toward the women’s bathroom.

  It was intermission.

  “Because if she could, then she wouldn’t be our instructor,” Madison stated.

  “Ver
y true,” I added. “And it’s not like any of us can dance like them. Did you see her jumps?”

  “Omigod. She looks like she’s doing completely different moves than us,” said Emily.

  “I don’t even want to think about what I look like compared to them,” Madison muttered.

  We worked our way into the lobby. A pale marble floor sat below dozens of sweeping archways framed with gold-trimmed glass panels. Sparkling chandeliers swung from molded ceilings lighting the timeless corridor. I felt like an adult dressed in my black pencil skirt surrounded by such sophistication.

  We strutted toward the bathroom and, no sooner did we see the sign, than we crashed face-to-face with Evan.

  “Well, look who it is!” I cheered, staring at Evan who was carrying a plastic cup of ice water. “Is that for your date?”

  “Very funny,” he snapped, staring off in the opposite direction.

  I saw his grandmother in line for the ladies room. The line was about twenty women deep.

  “Might as well get comfortable. Your date might be a while.” I grinned.

  “Evan Casey’s a ballet enthusiast. If I had only known! We would have invited you to our performances,” Madison glowed.

  “Wait, maybe he’s a dancer?” I teased.

  “Or is this just a kickin’ Saturday night for you?” Emily added.

  “It could be the men in tights.”

  “Ah, Evan, is there something you want to tell us?” Madison beamed.

  “Oh, shut up!” he cried. “So I’m at the ballet? Big deal.”

  A rash of pink swept over his face, and we all flooded with laughter.

  “You like ballet!” I giggled.

  “I do not! I’m here with my nanna.”

  “Your nanna!” Madison squeaked, still laughing.

  “Stop it! It’s her birthday! It’s what she likes to do.” His hands were waving frantically as he spoke, and I could barely look at his face, it was so burnt red.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, calming down with deep breaths. “But your macho act is officially shattered. No more body slams in the hallways.”

  He flicked his eyes toward me. “Then no more embarrassing stories in front of crowds.”