“Are you sure you can’t talk to her and just … explain?” Milla says. “She wants you to have fun, doesn’t she?”
“Maybe the bigger question is do you want to have fun?” Katie-Rose says. “Because I feel like you’re not fighting very hard for this.”
Violet’s temper flares. “Thanks. Thanks for making me feel better, y’all.” She turns and flounces across the playground, and she doesn’t come back.
Katie-Rose, Yaz, and Milla regard each other.
“I don’t get it,” Milla says.
“Yeah, something’s not right,” Yaz says.
Katie-Rose is put out. All this hard work, and now Violet isn’t even going to be there? She flops back on the metal bench they’re sitting on. “She needs to just … make it happen,” she says.
Milla furrows her brow. Of the three girls, she is the most pensive. “I think … well, I don’t know what I think. But what if she’s lying? Or, not lying, but not exactly telling the truth?”
Katie-Rose lifts her eyebrows. “Meaning …?”
“Maybe she’s scared. Maybe it wasn’t her mom who said she couldn’t go.”
“You think it’s her dad?” Katie-Rose says incredulously. “Uh, no. I don’t think so.”
Milla shakes her head. “No, that’s not what I mean.”
“What, then?” Katie-Rose demands.
“Maybe she’s still worried about leaving her mom alone,” Yaz says. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
Milla pauses, then nods.
“Well, that’s just stupid!” Katie-Rose cries.
Yaz puts her hand on Katie-Rose’s shoulder. “True,” she says softly. “But sometimes people are.”
wear to the Lock-In. Time to fix her hair, brush her teeth, and put on the teeniest bit of lip gloss. But first, time to turn on some really good music and turn it up LOUD, so she can flail about spastically and do jumping jacks and jog in place to get some, if not all, of her nervousness out. Dance therapy, this is called. Mom Abigail made it up. Usually it’s for in the car, like back in the days when Milla hung out with Modessa and Quin and she never knew what cruel trick they might do, or tell her to do, and so she’d get a nervous tummy on the drive to school. Mom Abigail would sense Milla’s anxiety and crank the volume on the iPod dock.
“Let it out, baby,” Mom Abigail would say. “Just let it out.” And Mom Abigail would dance with her, to the extent that you can dance in a minivan. They’d bounce and shake wildly, and Milla would thrash her head so that her long blond hair whipped about, and it made things better. It did. Other drivers would give them the strangest looks, and Mom Abigail and Milla would fall into laughing fits, imagining how they must appear. The laughing, the frantic thrashing, the music … it let out some of the pressure which had built up inside of Milla, just as squeezing the plastic valve on a beach ball lets the air out.
Milla dances. She swishes her hair back and forth so that it hits her face. She does jog in place, super fast until she can hardly breathe, and then she throws herself flat on her back on her bed.
She pants, flinging her arms wide. She’s happy under her layer of jitters, and she feels so lucky, so blessed, that she closes her eyes and tells God so with her heart. Thank you, she says silently. For my friends, for my parents, for Max. For my body that can dance and my hair that can swish and my mouth that can smile.
Mom Abigail tells Milla that praying is important because praying lets you connect with God, and also with yourself. She also says that Milla can pray whenever and wherever she wants. Mom Abigail isn’t obsessed with God, or with praying, but she does talk to Milla about stuff like that every so often. Also, Mom Abigail is the parent who takes Milla to church, while Mom Joyce has her own time with God by going for a bike ride or something like that. Mom Abigail doesn’t mind that Mom Joyce doesn’t come with them, because she says God is everywhere and everything.
“I just want church to be part of your life while you’re young, so that you can decide for yourself if you want to go to church when you’re a grown-up,” she says. “More than that, I just want you to know how much God loves you.”
“How much does God love me?” Milla says when they fall into these conversations. She knows what her mom will say. She just likes hearing it.
“Well, you know how much Mom Joyce and I love you, right, pumpkin?” Mom Abigail will say, tilting up Milla’s chin with her finger. “That’s how much God loves you, and that is a lot. More than all the oceans in the world poured together. And for the record, God isn’t some distant scowling old guy in the sky, either. God is just … love, that’s how I see it.”
Then Mom Abigail will go off on a tangent about how she doesn’t want Milla thinking of God as someone who’s watching her with hawk eyes to see if she does something wrong. She wants Milla to think of God as someone or something who knows Milla deeply and will always always love her, no matter what.
“Like Grandmommy?” Milla once asked, way back when she was little. Mom Abigail had laughed. “Yeah. Like Grandmommy.”
That’s why, when Milla prays, she tries to feel each word and thought that she sends out of herself. She wants God-Who-Is-Like-Grandmommy to know she means it.
When she’s done with her thank-yous, she asks for God’s guidance about an idea she has for helping Violet. Because she wasn’t able to help Elena, and her failure makes her heart hurt. Her heart hurts for Elena and for herself, her old Elena-like self. She wonders if Elena feels sad, too—and that makes her feel even sadder.
But. Even though she failed to help Elena, that doesn’t mean she should stop trying to help other people, does it? No way.
Um, so please help me help Violet, she prays. Then she opens her eyes. It’s time to get ready.
Her nervousness feels more like a giddy, thrumming hum now. As she puts on her pink pj’s, she thinks about Violet, because praying about something doesn’t mean it’s a done deal. Praying about something is a start, but Milla has to keep things going from here.
So, what does Milla know? She knows that Violet wants to come to the Lock-In, or did at one point. Violet was as excited as the others when the teachers first announced it. She also knows, or is pretty sure she knows, that Violet wasn’t telling the truth when she told the flower friends that her mom had a sudden change of heart and said, “NO, Violet, you may not go. You have to stay home while all your other friends are out having fun.”
It was Violet’s body language when she told the girls she wouldn’t be there tonight that makes Milla feel this way. Violet, in her normal state, is confident. She looks people in the eye. She doesn’t hunch her shoulders and twist one foot behind the other.
Milla puts her hair in a high ponytail, wanting to look casual, but cute, too. She feels good about herself tonight … which is another blessing, as that’s not always the case. Again she wishes that Violet felt good about herself, or good about life or her mom or whatever. When people feel good about themselves, they don’t make up excuses for staying home on a party night.
She remembers a fragment of last week’s Sunday school lesson, the day she drew a picture of her friends and her, only she made herself way shorter than the others. Today—this whole week, maybe—Violet has been feeling shorter than usual, Milla senses. Maybe that’s a silly way to put it, and Milla knows Violet well enough to know that she’ll sort things out eventually, but having her mom come home has to have been hard, no matter how positive Violet has made the situation out to be.
If plain old life can make Milla feel small and unsure of herself, doesn’t it stand to reason that an event like having your mom come home from the hospital could make anybody feel small and uncertain? Even a girl as tall and strong and amazing as Violet? Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Milla thinks, and having everything go topsyturvy. Growing huge, then small. Huge, then small.
Her Sunday school teacher’s advice was to love yourself, and then pass that love on to someone else, and with a burst of resolve, that’s what Milla decides to do
.
“Milla?” her Mom Joyce calls. “Ready to roll?”
“One sec!” Milla calls back.
“’Kay, I’ll be in the car!”
Milla doesn’t have a phone in her own room, so she sticks her feet in her adorable bunny slippers and pads downstairs. Mom Abigail is off with friends, so Milla is able to use the kitchen phone in privacy.
She dials Violet’s number, hoping that anyone other than Violet picks up. If Violet does answer, she’ll go from there, but the person Milla really wants to talk to—eek!—is Violet’s mom.
Her wish is granted. After two rings, a female voice—old, not kid-age—says, “Hello?”
“Um, is this Mrs. Truitt?” Milla asks.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“My name’s Camilla. I’m one of Violet’s friends.”
“Oh, how lovely!” Mrs. Truitt says warmly. “Hold on and I’ll get her for you.”
“No, wait!” Milla says. Her palms are sweaty, but too bad. “I was actually, um, hoping to talk to you? If you have a minute?”
“To me?” Mrs. Truitt says. She sounds surprised, but not … weird or anything. “Ah … certainly. I don’t see why not. What can I help you with?”
are hyper, everyone’s bouncing off the walls, and Mr. Emerson and Ms. Perez don’t even seem to care. They’re standing together in the commons, chatting and laughing and curbing the kids’ enthusiasm only when they have to, like when Preston—yes, Preston—tries to climb a bookshelf in order to retrieve a marble Chance inexplicably threw at the ceiling.
“Whoa there, buddy,” Mr. Emerson calls to Preston. “Off the bookshelf. No climbing on the furniture, all right?”
“Yeah, Preston,” Katie-Rose taunts, grinning. Yaz knows that Katie-Rose didn’t expect to see Preston here. She mentioned something to Yaz about how he thought The Lock-In was babyish, and how he would never waste his Friday night at a school activity.
Obviously, she was wrong.
Sitting side by side in the corner of the commons are Milla and Max. Yasaman’s heart melts at the sight of them, they are just that adorable. Milla’s pink pj’s say “Peace, Love, and Turtles” across the front, and her bunny slippers have long ears that droop almost to the floor. Max is wearing the strangest pajamas Yaz has ever seen. They’re pale blue and decorated with a variety of bizarre creatures: a brown octupus-slash-bat saying, “Hugs!”; a red robot with claw hands saying, “Boom! Beep!”; a piece of bacon saying, “I’m bacon!”; a sickly green zombie wearing a tie, lurching forward and saying, “Mmm! Brains!”
They’re very geeky, but then, so is Max. He’s showing Milla something on his iPhone, and since it’s not technically school, Mr. Emerson and Ms. Perez don’t seem to care. Max and Milla’s heads are together, and they’re both smiling, and that makes Yaz smile. Mr. Emerson leans closer to Ms. Perez and says something that makes her laugh out loud and then clap her hand over her mouth, and that makes Yaz’s smile grow broader. She tries to edge up near enough to eavesdrop on her two adorable teachers, but there’s too much wildness going on, with kids running amok and tackling each other—and tickling each other—and just all sorts of stuff.
But there is a spark between Mr. Emerson and Ms. Perez, and it’s as bright as the spark between Max and Milla. Yasaman feels really, really proud of the flower friends for managing to get them some alone time, even if they’re “alone” with a whole bunch of screaming kids.
Katie-Rose sneakily steals Preston’s pizza from his paper plate, which he abandoned when he went to climb the bookshelf. She takes an impressively big bite and ambles over to Yasaman, her eyes bright. She’s wearing her oversized CHICKS DON’T DIG STINKS shirt again (as a nightshirt, Yasaman supposes), and underneath it, a pair of girl-style purple boxers. They’re “girl-style” because the front part, which is meant to open up, is sewed shut. Katie-Rose pointed that out to Yaz right off the bat.
“No penis hole!” she proclaimed, and not in a whisper.
“Katie-Rose! Hush!” Yasaman said, scandalized.
“Oh pooey on youey,” Katie-Rose said. “You did that ankle drop move on the trapeze. I think you can handle the word penis.”
Yasaman started to protest, then stopped. Katie-Rose did have a point.
With her big shirt, purple boxers, and her hair up in its usual high pigtails, Katie-Rose could almost be one of the strange creatures on Max’s pajamas, if she were a cartoon instead of a girl.
“So what’s cookin’, good lookin’?” Katie-Rose says through a mouthful of cheese and pepperoni.
“Nothing much,” Yasaman says.
“Well, that’s because you’re just standing there. Why are you just standing there?”
There was a time when Yasaman would have felt bad about herself for being the “just standing there” girl. That was before she grew wings. Now that she knows she doesn’t have to just stand here, she realizes that she can just stand here, and that’s fine.
Yasaman can be a watcher and a doer. Yasaman can be a well-behaved, modest Muslim girl and hang upside-down from a trapeze. Next week, Josie wants Yaz to work on doing more with the ropes. She thinks Yaz can master an intermediate level skill where she starts on the bar, grabs the ropes with her hands, and tucks into a ball, leaning backward and pulling her knees to her chest and her bottom off the bar. Then, with control, she’ll straighten her body so that her feet are pointing up and her head is hanging below the bar, all the while keeping herself from falling just by holding on tight to the ropes.
“It requires a lot of core strength,” Josie told Yasaman, pulling her to the side as the others chatted and gathered their stuff. “You’re strong, though, and you’re flexible. You’re pretty much a natural, which is, like, awesome. As long as you’re up for trying some moves that might feel freaky at first, I bet we can have you performing some advanced tricks by the end of the class. Wouldn’t that rock?”
Yasaman felt the familiar flutterings of fear, but she didn’t let that stop her. Instead, she told herself she simply had butterflies in her stomach, and what of it? She liked butterflies. She related to butterflies.
“So what do you say?” Josie asked. “You up for taking a leap of faith?”
Yasaman envisioned the yellow and orange butterflies that flocked around her butterfly bush. She threw back her shoulders and told Josie, “Yes.”
But Katie-Rose knows nothing of Yasaman’s inner butterfly, because Yasaman didn’t tell her. Some things she chooses to keep to herself. So as Katie-Rose elaborates on what a lump Yasaman is, Yasaman smiles and nods. She spots someone coming up behind them, someone of the boy persuasion, and grins slyly.
“Well, if you say I’m a lump, I guess I’m a lump,” Yaz says. “What about you, Katie-Rose? Looks like you’re having fun with Preston, hmm?”
“What?!” Katie-Rose exclaims. “No!” She takes another big bite of his pizza, and she is not ladylike about it at all. “Preston is annoying and obnoxious and should be put in the zoo.”
Preston puts his mouth next to her ear. “In the Cool People area, or the monkey cage, with you?”
Katie-Rose squeals. She whips around and cries, “Preston!”
“Hey, hold on,” Preston says, eyeing her pizza. He looks over his shoulder at his empty paper plate, then back at the half-eaten slice in her hand. “Is that my pizza?!”
“No?”
“You stole my pizza!” Preston says.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law!” she cries, dashing off. Preston chases her, Katie-Rose squeals some more, and Yasaman shakes her head.
Chicks do dig stinks, it seems. Or at least the stink-makers. And lumps transform into butterflies, and butterflies transform into girls named Yasaman.
No, wait, butterflies don’t transform into Yasaman. Yasaman is a ten-year-old girl, and will stay a ten-year-old girl until she grows up. Yaz started off as a baby, not a caterpillar. But if someone was to suggest that Yasaman was transformed by butterflies, Yasaman wouldn’t be afraid to examine the notion. r />
Yasaman is all about taking leaps of faith.
from her past. Why?
• Because Violet and her parents used to drive home in the evenings from big family gatherings in Georgia. Dusk would have fallen, and the moon would be creeping up, and Violet would gaze out of her backseat window into the dark.
• Because Violet felt cozy in the back of the car, knowing her parents were up front. Listening to them talk softly about Granny Truitt’s ham, which she soaked in Coca-Cola, and Aunt Joycie’s corn casserole, which Violet’s daddy could never get enough of, and poor Mary and Charles with Lucas, that no-good son of theirs, who might end up homeless and on the streets at the rate he was going.
• Because they were a family on those dark-outside drives. They were a unit, separated from the rest of the world by glass and metal and gentle conversation, and every so often, Violet’s dad would laugh, and it would be a laugh of surprise and delight, because Violet’s mom could do that. She could make him laugh like that, as few others ever did.
• Because Violet wasn’t expected to participate in their discussions as her father navigated the windy Georgia hills. She wasn’t forbidden to participate, or even discouraged from participating, but nothing was expected of her, because she was the kid and they were the parents.
As her parents drive her to Rivendell, those long-ago memories add a sense of déjà vu to this car ride, which is happening not in the past but in the present. As in right now. Yes, Violet is older, and the SUV is new since their trips to visit their Southern relatives. But her parents chat easily in the front of the car while Violet listens from the back, her forehead pressed to the cool window as she gazes into the dark.
It’s a pocket of grace, because for the first time since her mom got home, Violet doesn’t overanalyze things. She doesn’t think, If I do this, will Mom be sad? If I don’t do this, will Mom be sad? If I’m careful and diligent and don’t “upset the apple cart,” to use a Granny Truitt expression, will Mom keep smiling like she did yesterday? If I keep my eyes open and stay vigilant, can I make sure she never feels that bad way again?