by Rachel Vail
8
IN ART CLASS, fourth period, the art teacher, Ms. Hirsch, said we’re doing a pottery unit.
“As long as it’s not papier-mâché,” Ava said.
I laughed, encouragingly. Ava hates papier-mâché. It makes her feel like puking. She can’t stand anything gooey on her hands at all. When we had to do papier-mâché last year, I basically did hers for her, after Ms. Hirsch commented, Ava’s papier-mâché is always very . . . delicate. Maybe a few more strips of newspaper, before you quit, Ava?
A few other kids smiled at Ava today—everybody knows she hates papier-mâché—but nobody else laughed.
Ava glanced at me, then away.
I forced my posture to stay stiff, no slumping in my seat.
Ms. Hirsch kept talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore.
I was watching Ava, who sits next to me at our high art table, bend away from me toward Britney. She whispered in Britney’s ear. The two of them snickered.
Ms. Hirsch said something about going up and getting your sketch pad and choosing a pencil or charcoal. She clapped her skinny hands together three times, telling us to begin designing the bowl or vase we’d like to make.
I wandered up to the front of the room when everybody else did, and took my pad and a black barreled pencil.
“You like pencil better than charcoal?” Holly asked me.
“I like being able to erase,” I said. “It’s my main hobby.”
“Interesting,” Holly said, and went back to her seat at the table near the window. I never particularly paid attention to Holly before, not since, like, fourth grade at least. She’s always just, sort of, there. Nothing against her. Like, I didn’t think of her negatively—just didn’t really think about her. One of the weird kids. One of the randoms.
She was sitting across from Robby and Milo, with Beth and Nadine. Nice girls, kind of alt. Good at art. Maybe Holly wasn’t a loser loner in need of my friendship. Maybe she had her whole own life going on, and she was not a lone porcupine unwanted by anyone, but part of a tight group of three, strong enough, and willing, to rescue me.
I watched the three of them, Holly, Beth, and Nadine, easy in their own skin and with each other—not smirking but actually smiling, not sliding their eyes in judgy ways at each other, sharks on the hunt for something to mock. They have looked kind of, well, if I looked at them or thought about them, like, ordinary or uncool, uninteresting, to me. Pencil in hand, I looked again. Trying not to stare, but still, trying to really see them as they are. While pretending I was looking out the window just past them.
Holly has short dark hair and pale skin, those thick glasses, mostly wears flannel shirts and jeans and, like, a hundred rubber bands around her left wrist. Nadine is big, dark-skinned, and tall, with deep dimples and braids, and a laugh you can hear clear across the room. And Beth, the shortest kid in the grade, even shorter than Madeleine but not as elfin, has unfortunate uneven bangs, bright blue eyes, and a mouth full of braces.
They’re not loud enough to have a group name or really be noticed that much. I used to play with all of them when we were little. They were sitting on their art stools, chattering away, oblivious as ducks. Do they not feel left out? Actually, I guess they’re not left out. They’re together; they’re fine. Hmmm.
I got a blast of feeling that almost unbalanced me, made me grab on to the teacher’s desk. It was like a movie playing in my head, a vision of an alternate life where I’m at that table, happily chatting away with Holly, Beth, and Nadine, not trying to be popular or cool, not being snarky, not laughing all extra when boys make a nothing comment, not constantly checking Ava’s expression to make sure I didn’t say something that bothered her.
But no. That was a dead end. You can’t go backward once you’ve moved on.
Sometimes it feels like I’m walking through doors that keep shutting and locking behind me. I closed my eyes against the pressure building up behind my cheekbones.
“Do you need something else?” the art teacher, Ms. Hirsch, asked me.
“I guess not,” I said. I need Ava.
I looked over at Ava, writing something on Britney’s notebook. No way I could go back and sit next to them. But that’s my seat. What to do?
“You sure?” Ms. Hirsch asked me.
I didn’t answer, since the last thing I am is sure, and the truth of me not having what I need had nothing to do with art supplies. I was so good at answering teachers’ questions until this week.
I went to my seat and stared at a blank page, my pencil suspended above it.
“Just sketch anything that pops into your minds,” Ms. Hirsch encouraged. “Today is just about brainstorming. What could your bowl or vase or container be? What could it look like? What will it hold? Will it be painted or raw, decorated with found materials from nature, or plain? Tall, squat, square, fluted? Let your imagination run free!”
My imagination, running free, had nothing in it about containers. Instead it was stuck on me being an abandoned elephant, standing in the rain as Ava and Britney walked onto a boat. Why did Holly have to plant that dumb image in my head?
When I looked over at Holly, she was still chatting with the other kids at her table. Ms. Hirsch lets us chat while we draw, which is why even the non-artsy among us love her class. It’s like a break in the day, so much nicer than gym, which it rotates with.
I watched Holly. Milo was showing her something on his pad, his dark eyes searching her face while she looked at it. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and her back was to me, but I could see her pointing at something he had drawn, and her head tilted to the side, and I watched his face relaxing as she told him something. Something she was seeing in what he’d drawn.
His eyebrows were arching up.
She turned his pad back to him. He nodded. His smile melted slowly, not to a frown but to a softness.
Milo and Robby look almost exactly alike. You have to know them pretty well to know that Milo is slightly softer-looking, where Robby is a little more sharp-edged. But both of them have gotten to be really cute this year, their smooth tan cheeks, their dark eyebrows. They were scrawny, brawling, blotchy kids the past few years but I don’t know, something happened to them during seventh grade and they, like, well, Mom used to say they were going to be such handsome men when they grew up and I was like, Ewww. Watch, they’ll grow into themselves, Mom said. Which, what? What does that even mean? But, now, today, looking at Milo—I guess I get it a little. He grew into himself. So his nose and teeth look just the right size for his face, which looks, well, like a thing you could spend some nice time looking at.
Bradley and Chase are still loud and brawly, falling out of their chairs and tamping down their unruly hair with baseball hats that they get yelled at for wearing in school. They spend a lot of time laughing and being generally loud, knocking each other down literally and figuratively. The Squad flirts with them, and with Milo and Robby now too. Ava and I notice them, of course; it’s impossible not to. But, like, we’re not boy crazy or anything. We actually care about stuff like doing the math homework and being goofballs together and saving the environment (theoretically; I mean, we bug our parents to recycle, we decided to be vegetarians, we hate polluters), and doing what teachers say.
Despite my blank pad.
I started just sketching, letting my pencil do what it wanted. When I looked down, I realized what I’d drawn wasn’t a bowl of any kind anyone would ever imagine, even free-running. It was eyebrows. Just eyebrows. Eyebrows over dark eyes that didn’t look like anyone’s in particular. But the eyebrows were pretty good. Pretty accurate. Like I captured something. The eyebrows were raised in appreciation and surprise, at hearing words I didn’t hear. At being seen, maybe.
I was kinda proud of the left eyebrow, especially.
Ava glanced over at my pad, then across the room.
I shut the pad. Too late.
Ava leaned toward Britney and whispered something to her. Britney glanced at me, then at Milo, then back at Ava. She covered her mouth and leaned close to Ava, whispering.
The bell rang.
I crumpled the sheet of paper with the eyebrows, without fully opening the pad. I didn’t need anyone seeing, commenting, judging.
I threw it in the garbage on my way out.
9
HOLLY CAME OVER to me at my new lunch spot, hunched over my notebook doodling eyebrows in the back corner of the library. I slammed the notebook shut before she could see.
“Why didn’t you want to go to lunch today?” Holly asked.
“I don’t know. Just needed a break, I guess. How about you?”
“I get that,” Holly said. “I volunteer in here most lunch periods. Wanna help me reshelve?”
I shrugged, then shoved my notebook into my backpack. Nobody needed to spy on it.
Holly handed me a stack of books. I stood up and followed her. She pointed at the shelf where she wanted me to reshelve the books. “How’s Danny?” she asked. Her voice was quiet but clear.
“Danny? Good,” I said. “Why?”
“I was just thinking about how we used to do shows with him when he was a baby,” Holly said. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, realizing I was smiling. “I just, I forgot about that.”
“Remember when we were playing with Milo and Robby that day in your yard, and we taught Danny to blow us kisses?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and laughed. “He’d kiss the air and then smack himself so hard on the face, with his full palm, and cry.”
“But he kept doing it anyway!” Holly laughed too, imitating him, smacking herself in the face with her palm. “We all took turns saying goodbye and running into Milo and Robby’s yard so he’d blow us kisses!”
“What a nut,” I said.
“He was the sweetest little kid,” Holly said. “So, he’s okay?”
“He’s . . . you know. He’s . . . Why?”
She shrugged. “I help out in the after-school clubhouse for the younger kids sometimes, and he just, he seems kind of solitary. Which I totally get. But, you know, I was wondering if that’s, like, voluntary.”
“Oh!” I said quickly. “Yeah, totally. He’s an introvert, I think. He’s fine. Thanks.”
“Okay.”
“He’s, I don’t know.” Family business stays in the family. “He’s a little, I don’t know. He’s fine.”
“Does he talk much?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Like, sometimes he’ll follow you from room to room explaining some fact he learned, or every detail of his shows that he likes, and I mean every detail.”
Holly nodded so kindly, without saying anything, it was like a magnet pulling my words out of my mouth.
“Other times he just grunts or sits there silently.” I swallowed hard. I hadn’t meant to tell her all that. She was still looking at me, nodding slightly. “He’s turning nine next Saturday,” I added.
“Wow,” she said. “Nine?”
It’s the eye contact, I realized. She was like this when we were little, too, now I remembered. Holly was staring into my eyes, not glancing around to see who else was there, what else was happening, at her own fingernails. She wasn’t impatient or anticipating or, like, judging what I said. Just listening. Is that weird, someone just listening? It felt super weird.
“He’s having a birthday party,” I told her. “But he doesn’t want one.”
“So why is he having one?” Holly asked.
“My mom wants him to have one.”
She waited. I think she was waiting. I don’t really know.
“He doesn’t really have any friends, as you noticed. Is the truth. So, maybe that’s why he’s uncomfortable.”
“Sure.”
“I shouldn’t say he has no friends.”
“Is it true?”
“He’s friends with Boone Fischer. Sort of.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And probably other kids. I don’t mean to make him sound pathetic.”
“You aren’t.”
“My mom invited the whole class.”
Holly nodded without moving her eyes from mine. Was she hypnotizing me? Or just easy to talk to?
“But other than Boone, his only friends are . . .”
I stopped. Mom and Dad say family business stays in the family. You don’t gossip about family stuff.
Holly waited.
Ava knows who Danny loves, and she thinks it’s funny. Maybe she thinks it’s endearing. She rolls her eyes because, well, that’s just Danny being Danny. That’s what Ava says about him, and it reminds me to be patient with him. And also why Ava is the only one I ever invite over. She’s already used to how it is at my house.
“My brother loves the guys in the garbage truck.”
“He’s friends with them?” Holly asked.
I turned to the shelf and started wedging the books in, hopefully in the right places. “Not really,” I said. “Like, I don’t think he knows their names, even. He just loves to watch them load the trash into the back and grind it up. And how they all wave at him and call him Big Dan the Man.”
Holly smiled. “That’s sweet.”
“What if nobody comes to his party?” I blurted out.
Holly didn’t answer. I immediately regretted saying anything. Did it sound like I was dissing him? Gossiping? Trying to be cooler than he is? And honestly, if I were having a party this weekend, it’s not like anybody would come to that, either.
“I mean, I don’t mean . . .” I forced myself to take a breath. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m babbling like an idiot. Anyway, that’s how Danny is. He’s fine.”
“Maybe I could stop by and say hey to him sometime.”
“Oh,” I said. “Um . . .”
“Or not.”
“It’s not, sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I just, my mom doesn’t love having people over.”
“I thought you said she’s having the whole fourth grade over?”
Caught. “Yeah,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have invited myself over,” Holly said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No,” I quickly said. “It’s not that. It’s not you. Honestly.”
“Sure.”
“No, I just, I don’t . . . I’m not, like, an invite-people-over person.”
The bell rang.
“Anybody?” Holly asked quietly.
I shrugged.
“You used to . . . I remember being at your house all the time, when we were little.”
“I just, I don’t . . .”
“I’m sure you and Ava will work things out,” Holly said, staring right into my eyes. “You’ve been best friends a long time.”
10
AVA’S FRAGILE.
I was almost home when I stopped and sat down on the crabgrassy side of the road next to my scooter to think for a few minutes.
Ava had been ignoring me basically since Monday at gym. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. The idea of going to school again tomorrow, walking around so obviously alone and dumped, sitting in my assigned seats next to a best friend who would barely look at me—I just didn’t think I could possibly manage.
So I texted her: hey, you around this afternoon? Want to hang out for a bit?
I wrote her name with a stick in the dirt next to where I was sitting, then crossed it out and wrote my name. I scratched my name out with my fingernails, getting dirt deep under them.
I wrote Holly’s name. Smudged it over.
Frick and Frack, I wrote. That’s what Mom used to call me and Holly when we were little and best friends. I don’t know what that even means. It was fun, though. Sometimes one of us would say Hi, Frick and the othe
r would say Hi, Frack. It didn’t matter who was who.
I smudged that over too.
Checked my phone.
No texts.
I couldn’t think of anything else to text Ava that would force her to answer. So instead I texted my mom: Okay if I hang with friends for a while this afternoon?
I leaned back and looked up at the sky while I waited for a response. Clear, blue, no clouds. Weird to contemplate how a hurricane is heading toward Florida at this exact moment when the weather here is crisp and fully untroubled, I was thinking, when my phone buzzed.
Mom: of course! Have fun!
I knew she would say that.
I let myself sit there for another minute, thinking about weather, and how hard it is to know what someone is going through when your feet are someplace else.
Then I got up and scooted to Ava’s house. My scooter could practically get there on its own. The Squad had tennis team practice, so unless she was sitting and watching them practice, I was pretty sure Ava would be home, without them—and I was right.
Her mom, Samantha, let me in and told me to go on up to Ava’s room. Her mom used to be in TV commercials and was once on a soap opera, all before she married Ava’s dad and gave up her glam life to give Ava a good, normal life in Maine.
Sam always smiles and then raises one eyebrow when she says that, about a good, normal life in Maine. She still looks like she’s a mom in a TV show. A comedy, where the kids are smart alecks and she is spunky, her hands on her narrow hips, in the midst of their chaos. I’m always a little startled by how pretty she is.
Ava hates that, how everybody reacts to how pretty her mom is. Though in my opinion Ava is just as pretty. I’ve learned not to mention any of that. There are a lot of topics it’s better to steer clear of with Ava.
I thanked Samantha and took the stairs by twos, past the mezzanine level where the living room with its huge windows looked out to the deck and the ocean beyond it. Everything in there looks like a magazine photo. Their house is always perfect.
The fact that a quiet woman named Masha lives in their attic bedroom and cleans up constantly might have something to do with that, but still.