by Robin Palmer
Usually when I came up with something that people thought was a great idea, it made me feel good about myself.
This time I couldn’t have felt more awful.
* * *
Until I found out that I could.
I didn’t check my phone until I got home that night, and when I did, there were a bunch of texts from Lexi asking me where I was. It was only then that I realized I had totally spaced on our plans to meet at Painting Pals that night. I immediately texted her, but she ignored it. Just like she ignored the nine other ones I sent after that, as well as my five phone calls before I finally gave up and went to bed.
The next morning I tried again and received a response that said, THIS IS A TEXT LETTING YOU KNOW THAT I’M NOT SPEAKING TO YOU AT THE MOMENT.
Knowing she probably wouldn’t answer the phone if I tried to call again, I hopped on my bike and rode two blocks over to her house.
“Lexi, I feel so awful,” I panted when she answered the door. It had been a long time since I had ridden my bike.
“Well, you should,” she replied with a glare.
“It’s just that I was so focused on the charm bracelet thing, and then my dad called and invited me to dinner, and then when I was there, this spa night idea came up, and then—”
“I get it. You’re super busy with your new family,” she snapped.
“It’s just that—”
“It’s just that ever since the BBs showed up, you spend all your time trying to impress them, without remembering the people who have stuck by you before you even knew they existed!” she cried.
I shrank back. I had never seen Lexi so mad. But the thing was—she was right. I had been spending all my time focused on the BBs and trying to get them to like me.
“You’re right,” I said quietly. “I have been. Which is totally stupid, because even if they never do like me, it doesn’t matter because I already have a sister—you.”
“Yeah, well, you sure haven’t been treating me like one lately,” she grumbled.
“I know that. And I’m really, really sorry. But I promise from now on things are going to be different. Do you think you can forgive me?”
She thought about it. “I guess,” she finally said.
I smiled, and after a second she smiled back.
“Thank you,” I said as I hugged her hard.
“You’re welcome,” she replied. “Now, what’s all this about a spa night?” she asked as we let go.
I shook my head. “Oh, it’s nothing,” I lied.
“Um, hello? Yes, it is. Tell me,” she ordered.
“No. I don’t want to talk about them. I want to hear about last night. Who was there?”
She waved her hand. “It was fine. Kind of boring, actually. Now tell me.”
“But you just said I spend too much time talking about them!”
“Well, it’s not like you have to stop talking about them completely. All I’m saying is that you can’t forget the people who have been there for you since the beginning.”
I nodded. “I know. And I haven’t. And I won’t.”
“Good.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. “Now tell me everything!”
* * *
“Look at it this way—things could be worse,” Lexi said the next afternoon as she lay on my bed with her head almost touching the floor, while I halfheartedly surfed the web for DIY home spa recipes. After I got home from Lexi’s yesterday, I texted Cassie to ask if there was anything special she wanted me to look for recipewise—like, say, a salt scrub or a sugar scrub, but she didn’t reply. And then I sent her another text asking if she had dry hair or oily hair, because there were different masks for specific types of hair, and I wanted to find one she liked, but she didn’t respond to that, either. And then I sent her another text asking her what color nail polish she thought we should all wear, because I could ride my bike into town and go to the pharmacy there and take some photos and send them to her and she could choose. No answer to that, either. The whole thing made me look pathetic, but I couldn’t help it. The more I thought about it, the more I could understand why she was so mad. Here she had brought up an idea that everyone loved, and then I had to mess it up by trying to outdo her. If someone did that to me, I’d be mad too. But the thing was, I wasn’t trying to outdo her. I didn’t even want to tell Lana what I was thinking about. I just happened to have what Mom called an “expressive” face, which made it so that I couldn’t hide anything on it. According to her, people with expressive faces were really bad at poker, but I didn’t care about that because I had no idea how to play it.
I looked up from the computer. “Really? How could they be worse?” I asked doubtfully.
Lexi raised herself up into a sitting position. “I don’t know exactly,” she confessed, “but don’t people always say that to make someone feel better?”
I sighed. “I guess so.”
She grabbed her head. “Uh-oh. Head rush.” She grabbed my new Seventeen that had just come in the mail that afternoon. “Hey, do you think I should get my hair cut like her?” she asked, pointing at the model with the very short pixie cut.
I loved Lexi, but she got sidetracked really easily. “No,” I replied.
“You’re probably right,” she agreed. “Because if I did—”
“You’d freak out every single time you got a zit and you’d make it worse with all the ways you’d try and get rid of it.”
She gasped. “That’s exactly what I was going to say! How’d you know that?”
“Um, maybe because I’m your best friend?”
“Right.”
I got up and started organizing my jewelry. When I was nervous, that always made me feel better. Needless to say, it was something I had been doing a lot of since this whole wedding thing.
Lexi started going through my closet. “Remember the shorts incident with Linley Anderson in fifth grade?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Of course. How could I forget that?” Linley was the most popular girl in our grade and literally walked around with her nose stuck up in the air. I bet her neck really hurt. I had hated her ever since she completely embarrassed Lexi by stealing her regular clothes out of her locker during gym class, which meant that she had to walk to the office in her shorts, which she was totally embarrassed to do because they were short-shorts and she hated her thighs. (I personally loved her thighs because, unlike mine, which looked like undercooked pieces of spaghetti, hers were really strong.)
“And remember when I used to cry about how I couldn’t understand why she hated me, and tried to come up with a list of things I could do differently to make her like me, and you told me I was being insane?”
“Yeah. Because you were.” My experience had been that when it came to MPGs (mean popular girls), the idea of logic didn’t apply. Lexi had never done anything but be nice to Linley—a lot nicer than I had been—and while they had never exactly been friends, they got along well enough to say hi to each other in the hall and stuff like that. Until one day Linley completely turned on her. For no reason.
“And remember when we were downstairs in the kitchen, and I was crying as we ate that bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups that your mom had hidden on the top shelf, where she thought we didn’t know about it, but we did because everyone knows that the top shelf of a pantry is always the first place to look for something that someone is trying to hide?”
“Yup.” I didn’t add How could I forget? but the truth was I couldn’t forget, because when she’s super upset, Lexi is an ugly crier.
“And remember your mom came home right then?”
“Uh-huh.” After that the Reese’s hiding place changed. To the top of her closet, which is the second place people look when trying to find something that’s hidden.
“Do you remember what she said to me?”
“Not really,” I admitted. Mostly because I had been too worried about the different punishments I could get for eating the Reese’s.
“She said that not ev
eryone is going to like you, but if you’re lucky, you’ll find a few people who love you all of the time, even if they don’t like you sometimes,” she said. “And she said the reason they’re going to love you is because they love lots of different things about you, even the things you yourself don’t like, so it’s a waste of time to try and change who you are.”
I nodded. It was coming back to me. “Wow. My mom’s really smart,” I said, surprised.
“Totally,” Lexi agreed. “So the good news is—see, there is good news, it just took me a while to find it—the good news is that you already have me in that love category. Which is huge, if I do say so myself. So if that’s the case, why bother trying to change just so Cassie likes you? You didn’t do anything wrong. You came up with a great idea—that’s what you do! You come up with great ideas all the time! That’s a good thing.”
She wasn’t wrong. I did come up with good ideas on a semiregular basis.
“And if Cassie doesn’t like it, that’s her problem,” she went on. “But don’t stop doing it.”
Ten
The next week was crazy busy. On Monday, Lana took us shoe shopping for shoes for our bridesmaid dresses. (Cassie and Kayley got high heels, while Sammi and I got flats. I had trouble walking in heels on a normal day, let alone one when I was going to be super nervous.) And then on Tuesday we had to go back to the scene of the (Frappuccino) crime and make sure our dresses fit okay once they had been altered. (Lana also took us for haircuts (really just trims, because she warned us that right before a wedding was not the time to experiment with a new style, something she knew from experience, having chopped all her hair off into a pixie cut before her sister’s wedding when she was twenty-one).
The more time I spent with them, the more comfortable I felt. Well, with everyone but Cassie. While she wasn’t downright mean to me, she wasn’t warm, either. Still, I took Lexi’s advice (or rather, my mom’s advice) and just kept being myself—even to the point of singing out loud when Beyoncé came on while we were in the car going to the mall to pick up our dresses, which was something I always did because Beyoncé was my complete favorite singer. The thing was, I had a horrible voice. Like, even my mom said I had a horrible voice, and moms were supposed to love everything about you. Everyone tried to keep a straight face, but I could see that it was tough. When the song was over, I looked at them and said, “I’m thinking of trying out for The Voice—what do you think?” I tried to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t, and once they realized that I was kidding, they all burst out laughing. After that I felt much better, not to mention much closer to all of them. It was kind of like the beginning of a private joke.
Cassie wasn’t with us then, though. Which was probably why I felt comfortable enough to sing. When Lana drove up and I came out of the house and got into the car and noticed she wasn’t there and asked about it, I saw Kayley and Sammi exchange a glance. “She’s . . . not feeling all that well today,” said Lana.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I hope she’s better soon.”
“She’ll be fine,” Lana said.
It was hard to miss the way Kayley raised her eyebrows at that.
“She’s not sick,” Kayley whispered to me later as Lana looked for some special slip thing to wear under her wedding dress.
I looked up from a silk nightgown with the feathered neckline I was stroking, wondering how someone could sleep in it without it tickling her nose and making her sneeze all night. “She’s not?”
She shook her head. “No. She’s upset about our dad.”
I let the nightgown fall. I knew that their dad was back in California, but this was the first anyone had ever mentioned him. “Oh. Sorry to hear that.” I tried to make it sound like I wasn’t dying to hear more. Which I totally was. When she didn’t say any more, I couldn’t help myself. “So . . . why is she upset?”
Kayley glanced over to where Lana was now talking to the saleslady. “She’s upset because she called him the other day to ask if she could come live with him, and he said no.”
WHAT?! That was huge! “Why’d she do that?” I asked, shocked.
“She said she wants to live with people who want her,” she replied.
“Why would she say that?” By this point I wasn’t even trying to hide my surprise about the whole thing.
“She’d totally deny it, but I think she’s worried that you’re going to be everyone’s favorite.”
It was a good thing I wasn’t chewing gum, because if I was, it would’ve fallen out because my mouth was stuck in the shape of a big O. “Okay, that’s completely nuts,” I said once I managed to get it closed. “Why would she ever think that?”
She shrugged. “Lots of reasons, I guess. The way that Mom and Matt thought your idea for the spa night at home was so awesome, and the fact that our mom thinks you’re really smart and funny and nice, and she loves how sweet you’ve been to Sammi. And how your dad was bragging about how creative you are.”
I couldn’t believe it. Not just the things that everyone was saying about me, but the fact that I’d want to move too if I were Cassie. “That makes me sound so . . . ,” I said, confused.
“So what?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. So . . . much better than I am.”
She laughed. “What are you talking about? It’s all true.”
I wanted to keep telling her she was wrong, but I was afraid that would make me look like I was just fishing for more compliments. “Wow. That’s too bad about your dad,” I said instead. “That would really hurt to hear something like that.” I couldn’t even imagine. While my dad obviously hadn’t paid all that much attention to me in the past, I had liked to believe that if I had asked him if I could come live with him, he would’ve said yes.
Kayley shrugged. “Yeah, it is too bad, but I don’t know why she acted like it was some big surprise.”
“It wasn’t?”
She shook her head. “No way. Ever since he married our stepmonster and they had the twins, he pretty much acts like we don’t exist.”
Whoa. I had had no idea about any of this. Probably because those are the kinds of things you only tell your close friends. I had known that their dad was remarried and had kids, but not the rest of it.
“How often do you guys see him?”
“It was supposed to be every other weekend, but then he told our mom that he didn’t have time for that, so now it’s two weeks in the summer. But last time he and the stepmonster went away to France for a week and left us with the nanny.”
Wow. That sounded like something out of a movie.
“I’m really sorry, Kayley,” I said. “That just . . . sucks.”
“Yeah. It does,” she agreed. “That’s why we were so psyched when your dad asked our mom to marry him. It’ll be nice to have a dad who actually pays attention to us. You’ve been really lucky to have him.”
After hearing what I just heard, I realized I was. “Yeah. I am,” I said quietly, looking down at the floor.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
I looked up. “Nothing. I mean, all this time I thought you guys had, like, the perfect lives,” I confessed.
She laughed so hard she actually snorted. And not a dainty little snort, which was the kind of snort I thought would come out of her, but a . . . messy snort. Which I loved, because it made her so not perfect. “As if! If anyone’s got the perfect life, it’s you.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Yeah right.”
We shared a smile.
“Can I tell you something?” I blurted out.
“Sure.”
“The first time I had breakfast with you guys? I changed my outfit seven times,” I confessed. Just saying that aloud made my shoulders feel twenty pounds lighter.
“I changed mine twice,” she admitted. “And I probably would’ve a third time, but we were already late.”
We laughed. A real laugh. Like the kind I had with Lexi.
“And just so you know, before this I
barely had a relationship with my dad,” I confessed.
Kayley looked shocked. “Seriously?”
I nodded. “Yeah. It was bad. I only saw him a few times a year, and he barely returned my e-mails.”
“Wow. I never would have guessed that. You guys are so close now,” she said wistfully.
I shrugged. “We’re getting there. Time takes time, though.”
“Huh. I like that. It’s catchy.”
“Isn’t it? I learned it from him.”
We shared another smile.
“I wish there was something I could do to make things better with Cassie,” I sighed.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it,” she replied. “She’ll come around eventually.”
That was good to know.
“And if she doesn’t, two out of three of us isn’t so bad,” she added with a smile.
* * *
Kayley might have told me to leave things alone with Cassie, but I just couldn’t. I was one of those people who couldn’t stand to have people mad at me, or think things about me that weren’t true, and in this case, both of those things were happening.
My mom had once told me that sometimes when you were frustrated, it helped to write things and not send them. That way you blew off some steam, but you didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble with your words. So after dinner, as my mom talked back to the TV while we watched The Bachelorette (she was always telling people that we watched it because I liked it, but really it was because of her), I picked up my phone and I drafted a text:
hey cassie. missed seeing you today. wanted to know if we could hang out this week. just the 2 of us. need to talk to you.
I had to admit, it made me feel better to write it, even if I wasn’t sending it. It made me feel so good, in fact, that as I erased it, I drafted another one.
i’d say hope you’re feeling better, but i heard you’re not really sick. well, i am—of all this stuff between us. can we please get together and talk it out?
That made me feel even better. Especially the “well, i am” sentence, on account of the fact that it was really clever, if I did say so myself. There was something to this stuff, I thought as I erased that one.