by Meg Haston
Secondly, the attic was practically custom-designed for me. Mom used to produce her own news segments up here, so there was a flatscreen on the wall across from my bed, right above my pink Lucite desk. The floating aluminum shelves that used to hold Mom’s demo DVDs now showcased my legendary sneaker collection. We even converted the sound booth in the corner to a photo booth with a teal velvet curtain. One wall and the floor were painted in light green chalkboard paint. Liv had sketched her entire fall line over my bed. The rest of the walls were covered in bulletin board material.
But the most perfect thing about having the third floor to myself? Mom and Ella might not hear my tortured moans as my contacts seared violet-colored craters into my corneas.
“Kacey?” Mom’s bare feet sounded on the polished wood stairs.
I flopped on my unmade bed and buried my face in the cool satin pillowcase, wishing my pink-and-black-plaid duvet would swallow me whole.
“Your breakfast is getting—” The footsteps stopped in the doorway. “Kacey? Are you sick?”
The mattress dipped as my mom sat on the edge of the bed. She placed the back of her hand on my forehead. It had to be her left hand, since it was ringless. On her right she wore two thin silver bands: one with my name and birthday engraved on the inside, and one with Ella’s.
“Just resting my eyes,” I lied into my pillow. I couldn’t admit defeat now, since Mom hadn’t wanted me to get the contacts in the first place. I’d have to wait until it seemed like my idea. Then I could calmly, casually inform her that I WAS GOING TO GO BLIND IF I DIDN’T REMOVE THESE FIRE-SOAKED EYE COASTERS OF DEATH RIGHT. NOW.
A clattering sound erupted from the kitchen two floors below, followed by a loud crash.
“Moooooooooooooooom!” Ella screeched. “ ’Scuuuuuuuuuuze meeeeee!”
I snorted into my pillow. Ever since Ella figured out that if she said “please,” “excuse me,” and “thank you,” she didn’t get into trouble, she’d used them as get-out-of-jail-free cards. Interchangeably.
“What am I going to do with you girls?” The bed creaked as Mom stood. “You coming?”
“In a sec.” I rolled onto my side and stared at the wall. Tacked next to Molly’s birthday wish list was an 8-by-11 black-and-white candid of the girls and me huddled around a campfire, the first night of the orientation weekend before the start of sixth grade. We were wearing Marquette hoodies and holding s’mores skewers with flaming marshmallows on the ends. We’d been assigned to the same scavenger hunt team. When we won, Liv had said that was The Universe’s way of telling us we were meant to be best friends. Nessa didn’t believe in The Universe, but told us we were way smarter and cooler than her elementary school friends, which was enough of a sign for her.
I slipped out of bed and unpinned the photo, running my fingers over its slightly curled edges. I gasped when I saw the picture underneath.
It was an old shot of me and Dad, the last picture we’d taken together before he moved to L.A. We were on the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier; my eyes were screwed shut and I was gripping a giant fluff of pink cotton candy. He’d bought it for me right before he told me he was leaving. The smell of cotton candy still made my stomach turn.
I stabbed the pin back into the board, obscuring Dad’s face. Then I gathered my hair into a tousled chignon, secured it with one of Liv’s antique brooch clips, and ducked in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door.
I squinted at my reflection, then backed up a few steps so I could actually see. I may have been going blind, but that didn’t mean everybody else was. I wore ripped skinny jeans, a fitted black cap-sleeve top, and a silk emerald slip dress that used to hit at the knee and belong to Liv’s oldest sister. Until Liv ran it through the dryer. Now it fell to mid-thigh. And belonged to me.
“KACEY!” Mom shouted.
“Coming!” I tightened the laces on my black Converse and hurried downstairs.
“Hey, you.” Standing behind the island in the center of the kitchen, Mom was spooning something out of takeout Chinese containers. Salty traces of egg drop soup and Tater Tots hovered over the threshold.
“Dinner for breakfast!” I grinned, the pain in my eyes instantly dulling.
Last year when I mentioned that Nessa’s family sometimes had breakfast for dinner as a treat, Mom decided that we could do the Simon family version: dinner for breakfast, since Mom’s job as Channel 5’s solo evening anchor meant she wasn’t usually around for dinner.
Humming my part of the duet with Quinn, I dumped my Channel 5 messenger bag on the floor by the stainless steel dishwasher and sat down at the table in the breakfast nook. I ran my fingers over the fuzzy etchings in the dark wood. I’d carved everybody’s name at their place when I was a kid, in case anybody forgot where to sit.
Across from me, a pair of glittery white fairy wings peeked out above the table, rising and falling in slow rhythm.
I turned around in my seat and rolled my burning eyes at Mom. “WHERE’S ELLA, MOM?”
Loud breathing sounded from the window seat. The fairy wings shook with silent laughter, snowing silver glitter over the Tater Tots on Ella’s plastic Disney princesses plate.
“Don’t know, baby.” Mom’s auburn curls danced around her shoulders as she hurried around the counter and deposited a plate of Chinese takeout next to the fruit bowl in front of me. “Guess we’d better start looking.”
“READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!” Ella yelled, jumping up on the window seat and laughing hysterically. Her red corkscrew curls bounced around her flushed cheeks.
I gasped, pretending to be scared. The terror wasn’t exactly an act when I saw her outfit. Ella had strapped the fairy wings over the giant Channel 5 T-shirt I used to sleep in, which she’d tucked into a hot-pink tutu. Her red-and-white-striped tights were faded and had an unidentifiable purple stain on the left knee. All of this would have been semi-acceptable for a girl her age—if my old purple training bra hadn’t been doubling as her headband.
“Mom!” I shrieked.
“Down, please.” Mom took Ella’s hand and gently tugged her to seated. “Eat your Tots.”
Ella shoved a Tater Tot in her mouth and reached for her spoon, holding it like a microphone. “Kacey. What are you having for breakfast?” She waved the spoon-mic in my face.
“Sesame chicken,” I said over a cold mouthful.
“Yuck,” Ella decided, snatching back the mic. “Back to you, Mom.”
“Thanks, Ella.” Mom turned toward me.
I tried to squint her black warm-up suit into focus. Useless.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Mom’s voice was laced with worry. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“They’re red,” Ella reported into her spoon.
“Everything okay with your contacts?” Mom asked.
“Yup.” I dumped sugar into my hot chocolate and took a gulp.
Oops.
“Salt.” I coughed, doubling over my plate as my eyes teared up. I grabbed Ella’s orange juice and swished to get rid of the taste.
“Kacey.” Mom said firmly. “What’s. Going on. With your contacts?”
“Nothing, Mom.” I swiped a banana from the fruit bowl and shoved back my chair. “I have to get to school.”
“That’s a wax banana.”
“Fine! They buuuurn!” I moaned, clamping my eyes shut. Oh, sweet relief. I wondered how long I could go without opening my eyes. Maybe I could get one of those cute Seeing Eye dogs. I’d always wanted a black Lab, but Mom said the townhouse was too small. She could hardly refuse if a puppy was a medical necessity.
“That’s it.” I heard the click of Mom’s nails on her BlackBerry. “I’m making an emergency appointment with Dr. Marco after school.”
“But I have rehearsal!” I protested.
“Not today, you don’t.” She hadn’t used that tone since her hard-hitting interview with the city commissioner. And all of Chicago had seen what happened when he tried to argue.
“Kisses!”
Ella disappeared under the table and reappeared on my side.
I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “Bye, Mom.” I grabbed my messenger bag and ducked out of the kitchen and into the foyer before Mom could force me to take out my contacts on the spot.
“Dr. Marco! Don’t forget!” Mom yelled after me.
I yanked my coat and scarf off the brass rack by the door and hurried outside.
The front steps were icy, so I gripped the wrought-iron railing and took each step slowly, squinting into the sunlight. I probably looked like Mrs. Weitzman, our next-door neighbor, who had cataracts and smelled like tuna fish and Vaseline.
Heading down Clark Street, I wondered how to play it with Mols once I got to the Armitage stop. She hadn’t texted at all last night, which probably meant she was still mad from rehearsal. But I wasn’t going to fake being sorry for giving her good advice. She should be the one apologizing to me, for making a scene in front of my future first boyfriend.
“Ow!” With zero warning, a tall, bony lamppost rammed into me and squealed. Only we didn’t have any lampposts on my block, bony, squealing, or otherwise. “Kacey?”
I backed up a few steps. “Paige?” The lamppost was Paige Greene, my other next-door neighbor, seventh-grade class president, and my ex-BFF from Joliet Elementary. “Or should I say, Grim Reaper?”
“I’m in mourning,” she said, looking down at her black coat, leggings, and boots. She smoothed her dark jaw-length bob importantly. I fought the urge to ask her if she’d cut her bangs herself.
“For your political career?” Everyone knew Paige was going to lose the eighth-grade election to Imran Bhatt, since Imran’s dad managed a Six Flags and offered to get the entire grade free passes. When Paige lost, it would be like the fifth-grade election all over again. Only this time, it would only be embarrassing for one of us.
“I’m in mourning for the environment.” Paige adjusted her Tina Fey glasses on her long nose.
Until two years ago, Paige and I had been best friends. We’d planned to go to college together and pinky-swore we’d live together when we graduated. We’d even picked the perfect place: an amazing condo with a balcony directly across from the Millennium Park skating rink, where my dad used to take us every Tuesday in the winter.
When I was a kid, I’d always thought we’d be friends forever, but then I grew up and realized that people move on. People leave, and you can’t get worked up about it. Nothing lasts forever. That’s just life.
I hurried blindly in the direction of the El, and Paige matched my stride. “I have a student council meeting,” she informed me as if I’d asked. “We’re voting on replacing all the candy vending machines with organic snacks.”
Silently, I groaned. Did Paige not get that we weren’t friends? If the friendship obituary I wrote in fifth grade hadn’t done it, she could have gotten the message from the past two and a half years of silent treatment.
“It’s just that my platforms this year are so important. And I think I have a good shot at getting reelected, since I ran last year on a commitment to make a change, and I’ve done that, right? Remember my slogan? Time to Turn a New Paige?”
“Paige!” I yelled over the roar of a bus churning by. It sprayed a fine mist of dirty snow over the sidewalk, drenching my Converse. “Hate to break it to you, but presidents have no real power. Especially in middle school. Do you seriously think anybody’s voting yes on whole wheat crackers for the vending machines?”
Paige’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her crooked bangs. “Honestly? Yes. Fifty-six percent of girls aged ten to eleven have a moderate to strong interest in cutting trans fats from their diet.”
In other news, one hundred percent of Kacey Simons, aged thirteen, had no idea why they’d been friends with Paige Greene in the first place.
A DATE WITH DOCTOR EVIL
Friday, 3:37 P.M.
“Kacey Simon. Didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.” When Dr. Marco leaned over the exam chair with his mini flashlight, his spicy cologne burrowed up my nostrils into my brain, making my stress migraine a million times worse. I forgave him because he rolled his r’s, which would be cute if he weren’t solely responsible for making me miss rehearsal.
“Mom forced me.”
“I see. And have you been using the drops I gave you twice a day?”
Drops? I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the tiny light daggers screwing into my pupils. “Weren’t those optional?”
“More like mandatory.” And then he did it. The tsk.
The tsk was the universal sound all doctors made when you were in serious trouble. My dentist, Marvin Haussmann, D.D.S., was a major tsker. Specifically when I swore I’d been flossing and then his assistant, Darleen, whose claim to fame was an honorable mention in a Jessica Simpson lookalike contest, snitched that she just excavated half a chocolate cupcake from my upper molars.
“I’m concerned she’s having an allergic reaction,” Mom butted in from her seat by the door. “Her eyes have gotten worse since she left for school this morning.”
“Waaay worse.” Ella snapped the elastic on the black eye patch she’d found in the waiting room. “Ow.”
Tsk. “Looks like you have a minor infection, Miss Kacey.”
“But this pair is probably just defective, right?” I hooked my nails into the leather chair. I’d already chosen my outfit for Molly’s party: a gray off-the-shoulder sweater dress with over-the-knee boots and one of Liv’s birdcage veil hairpins. AND VIOLET CONTACT LENSES, for a pop of color. “You just have to give me another pair? And then I’ll be fine?”
With every second Dr. Marco didn’t answer, my heart rate was tripling, thrumming to the beat of Quinn’s voice. Cool contacts. Cool contacts. Cool contacts. What if Molly kissed Skinny Jeans from Seattle before I offstage-kissed Quinn? Was there no end to the lengths she’d go just to beat me at something?
“RIGHT?” My throat was starting to feel tight. I was probably having an allergic reaction to the idea of Molly beating me at anything. It wouldn’t be natural.
Dr. Marco pushed back his rolling stool and headed for the door. Once he came into focus, I noticed that his curly black hair was still over-gelled, even though I’d told him last time: When they said dime-sized amount, they were serious. “Take your contacts out for me. I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Kacey Elisabeth,” Mom said as the door clicked closed. The dreaded double name. And in the dark, which made it even freakier than usual. “What was our agreement?”
“Hold on.” I hunched over in my chair and pretended that taking out my contacts required live coverage–level focus. The second they landed on my fingertip, the wildfires in my eyes smoldered to contained brush fires.
“Kacey! Did you know crickets hear through their knees?” For once I was glad Ella had no concept of when to be quiet.
“Liar,” I said, crossing my fingers for a tantrum.
“Miss Deirdre said!” Ella stomped her foot right on cue. “Their ears are in their kneeees!”
But Mom didn’t skip a beat. “Kacey? Our agreement?”
“ThatIcouldgetthemaslongasItookcareofthem.” It was the same agreement we’d had when I got a ferret in fifth grade. That agreement didn’t last long, either. But only because Ella made the ferret a mini theme park complete with a Gravitron, which was just a fancy name for a run through the spin cycle. Rest in peace, Oprah Winfurry.
“That’s right. And do you think you’ve shown that you can be responsible enough to take care of them?”
I don’t answer leading questions so I kept my mouth shut.
Dr. Marco reappeared in the doorway and flipped the overhead light on.
“Ahhhh!” I pressed the heels of my palms over my eyes. “Dr. Maaaarco!”
“POLO!” Ella shrieked gleefully.
“Sorry.” Dr. Marco chuckled, adjusting the dimmer to the candlelight setting. “So here’s the deal. It’s going to take a couple weeks for that infection to heal.”
“I�
��ll do the drops every day this time. Twice. Swear,” I promised.
“Twice a day,” Mom repeated.
Dr. Marco opened his fake lab coat and fished around in one of the inside pockets, probably looking for a pamphlet on juvenile glaucoma.
I cracked my neck on both sides and closed my eyes. “You should make these into massage chairs. Then people probably wouldn’t hate coming to see you so much.”
“Kacey.” Even without looking, I could tell Mom was massaging her temples.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Dr. Marco’s voice came close to my ear, and I felt something cold and weighty settling onto my nose. “Try these for me.”
“What?” My eyes snapped open. Those crunchy black curls were six inches closer and about six zillion times more defined than they had been a minute ago. It was suddenly painfully obvious that someone was in desperate need of a pore strip.
My hands flew to my face and collided with chunky plastic. “What’s going on?” I gulped, bolting upright. “What are these?” My toes curled in my Converse.
Dr. Marco lifted a handheld mirror in front of me, revealing a pair of thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses that took up at least seventy-five percent of my face. Then he threw his head back and let out an evil cackle, the overhead light illuminating his every wrinkle as he hissed, “Any last words?”
Okay, fine. What he actually said was: “Your new glasses.”
I ripped off the frames. “Is this your idea of a joke?” My voice cracked, making me sound uncertain. But I’d never been more sure of anything in my life. Glasses meant immediate social death. And now was not my time. I would not be one of those girls who peaked in middle school.
Dr. Marco’s lips were moving, but no sound was coming out of them. All I could hear was this loud static buzzing in my ears. It was like dead air—the same sound I’d be hearing once all my friends ditched me, Quinn Wilder moved to Canada to get away from me, and Simon Says was cancelled on account of an unacceptably ugly host. If the show went down the drain, then my entire broadcast career was finished. And if my career was finished, what did I have?