“What?” she said to me and Cinnamon when we finally marched over and reclaimed her. “She was vertically challenged! And plus her fingers were like gnarled twigs. She couldn’t push down the perfume thingies. And anyway, we’re going to be old one day. Don’t we want people to help us?”
We did. And if we were helped by someone as kind as Dinah, we’d be the luckiest old ladies in the world.
Sandra took a draw of her smoothie. “You shouldn’t let yourself outgrow someone unless you absolutely can’t help it.”
In theory, I agreed with her. But to not “let” yourself outgrow someone, wasn’t that like ... like muzzling a dog so it couldn’t bark, or binding a Chinese girl’s feet to make them stay small forever?
Sandra trained her blue eyes on me. “Okay, Win?” she said. “I mean it. Don’t let your friends slip away.”
At that, a great hole of longing opened inside me, because I didn’t want Cinnamon and Dinah to slip away. I would miss them so much. I wouldn’t know who I was without them!
I flopped my forearms on the table and bonked my head on the wood. Bonk bonk bonk. The last bonk was harder than I intended. “Ouch.”
Sandra snort-laughed.
“Don’t laugh at me,” I told her.
“Don’t bonk your head on the table,” she said. “Self-bonking will get you nowhere.”
I giggled, because “self-bonking” sounded funny. It sounded dirty. Sandra giggled, too. We noticed a woman frowning from a nearby table, and our giggling got worse.
“Self-bonker,” Sandra whispered.
I threw my balled-up straw wrapper at her, and in an amazing, never-to-be-repeated show of skill, she leaped for it and caught it—in her mouth.
“Holy pickles,” I marveled.
She smiled. She swallowed.
“Yummy,” she said.
She was amazing, my sister. And even though she’d made me feel worse—taking back the advice she’d given me three years ago, suggesting that my friends could slip away if I wasn’t careful—she somehow made me feel better, too. Such was the mystery of Sandra.
When we left, I gave a small smile and even smaller wave to the frowning woman. Just a hand-raise, really. We are silly, I know. You might have been silly once. Were you?
She pursed her lips. Then her scowl loosened, and she smiled back, revealing a smudge of bright red lipstick on her teeth.
On the ride home, we talked some more. Only this time, we didn’t look at each other. Sandra kept her eyes on the road, while I leaned back against the headrest, closed my eyes, and let my hair whip around my face. I loved the sensation of wind blowing over me all crazy. Mom hated it, and when she drove, she insisted on having the windows up. But Sandra was a windows-down girl, all the way.
It wasn’t a long drive from Smoothie King to our house. Still, we covered a fair amount of territory:
Was Sandra excited to be graduating?
Yup.
Was she scared to be graduating?
Yup again.
Did she ever secretly think about going to Georgia Tech so she could stay in Atlanta and live at home?
“Hell no” was her answer to that one. She thwapped my shoulder, making my eyes fly open.
“And don’t you, either,” she told me. “I know you’re only in eighth grade, but next year, you’ll be a freshman. And after that, pfff” She sliced her hand through the air. “It goes quick, Winnie. Enjoy it, gobble it up—but when it’s time for you to go? Go.”
“I will, I will,” I said.
She looked at me hard. “I mean it. Atlanta isn’t the whole world. And Dinah and Cinnamon—and Lars—they aren’t the only people in the world.”
“Ag! You are so annoying! First you tell me, ‘Don’t let your friends slip away,’ and now you’re saying, ‘Go! Go! Your friends aren’t the only friends in the world! ”’
Sandra opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Ha,” I said.
“But here is the way you need to put those two ideas together,” she said, rallying. She glanced at me. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Okay ... well ... they’re both true. Don’t give away what you have, but don’t let what you have be all you ever have. Make sense?”
“Like in that Girl Scout song? Make new friends, but keep the old?”
She knew she was being teased. But she went with it.
“Yes,” she replied. “One is silver”—she paused, lifted a finger from the steering wheel—“the other, gold.”
“You should use that for your senior quote,” I said, referring to Westminster’s tradition of having all the seniors choose a special quote to go under their name in the yearbook. Sandra made fun of people who picked cheesy quotes, like “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.” I made fun of those people, too, mainly to be like her. But sometimes I secretly liked those cheesy quotes.
“Maybe I will,” she said.
“Excellent.”
We drove up the steep, curvy hill that led to our house.
“I was never planning on letting Dinah and Cinnamon slip away,” I said.
“I know,” Sandra said.
“I just want to make things better,” I went on, my words barely audible over the rush of the wind. Maybe Sandra didn’t even hear. “And then they wouldn’t be sad. And then I wouldn’t be sad.”
“You can’t fix other people’s problems,” Sandra said.
I faced her. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t work that way, that’s all.”
I turned away. I watched the trees go by, and the big, stately homes, none of them all that different from ours. Except ours was ours ... and yet in just a few months, Sandra would be moving out. In just a few years, I’d move out, too.
No, I thought fiercely. I wasn’t going to dwell on the future when the present was right here in front of me—and when without even meaning to I was having a deep moment with my sister, whom I loved so much. That was one of the things on my To-Do list, and here I was doing it.
“Hey, Sandra,” I said. “Can I tell you something?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the last hour and a half?”
I made a face.
“Kidding.” She turned into our driveway, parked, and killed the motor. “You can tell me anything. What?”
All of a sudden, I felt embarrassed. I wanted to break our eye contact, but I didn’t let myself.
“I like it when you’re nice to me,” I said.
She blushed. I did, too.
“You’re my little sister,” she said.
“I know. But sometimes ...” I paused. “Well. You know.”
Sandra looked away. Not me. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “As soon as September rolls around, I won’t be here anymore.”
A lump formed in my throat, because there was so much I was feeling. Like how nothing would be the same without her. Like how, when she was gone, I’d be the big sister. I’d be the one Ty, and one day Maggie, would come to for advice. The one who would supposedly have all the answers.
Look at me, I willed her with my mind.
She did. And she said, simply, “I’ll miss you.”
Oh God, I was going to cry. I might cry, and crying was so not Sandra, and her expression would grow wary, and—
Oh, who cared.
“Me too,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “But I’ll come visit you. Tons and tons, wherever you end up going to college. And every weekend, there I’ll be! Sleeping in your dorm room, eating everything in your mini-fridge, wearing your clothes.” I sniffled. “Won’t that be so great?”
“Fat chance,” said Sandra, her glance so withering that it could turn a plum into an instant prune.
I grinned wobbily. I liked the oddly nice graduating-senior Sandra, but the truth was, I liked sour Sandra, too.
Do Something Scary
ON THE FIRST MONDAY OF APRIL, I found Dinah in the library with weird Mary. I??
?d gone looking for Dinah specifically, I needed to talk to her, and yet there she was deep in conversation with Mary again. Mary was speaking urgently, just like the other time, while Dinah gnawed on her lip, also like that other time.
“Dinah?” I said.
She jumped and looked guilty.
Mary glared at me—no complimenting my outfit this time—then shoved up from the table and scuttled away like a rat.
“What is going on with you two?” I asked Dinah.
Dinah didn’t answer. She pulled a piece of her hair to her mouth, and I looked at her, like, Really? You haven’t chewed on your hair since elementary school, and now you’re starting back up?
I reached out to bat her hand away. She twisted to avoid me.
“Quit it,” Dinah said. “You don’t own me.”
“Who said I wanted to own you?” I said. “You just shouldn’t chew on your hair. It’s gross.”
Her eyes flashed. She deliberately brought her hair back to her mouth, and when she drew it out, the individual strands formed a single wet point.
“Gross,” I said again.
“You have bad habits, too, you know,” she pointed out.
I cocked my head. What was going on here? Was Dinah mad at me?
“Why won’t you tell me what Mary’s deal is?” I asked.
“Because Mary doesn’t have a ‘deal.’”
“Um, obviously she does.”
“Winnie? Drop it.”
Her tone was sharp, and heat rose in my cheeks.
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine,” she said.
I started to say it again—Fine!—then shut my mouth, spun on my heel, and walked away.
Normally in a situation like this, I’d hunt down Cinnamon, who would listen as I vented and then say something funny that would make me feel better, and make me realize I was maybe, possibly overreacting, too.
But hunting down Cinnamon wasn’t an option, because Cinnamon was on my bad list—which, ironically, was why I’d come searching for Dinah.
There were many things I loved about Cinnamon. For one, she was extremely amusing. Forks in the hair, deadpan comments to my nemesis, Gail, about Gail’s favorite perfume being made from fish oil, that sort of thing. Also, Cinnamon took crap from no one. As she and I headed to choir today, for example, we happened to cross paths with a guy named Chris. Chris was a jock, and arrogant, and today was wearing a camouflage shirt that said, LICENSE TO HUNT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.
I wanted to say something about how obnoxious it was, but Chris has a buzz cut, and he intimidated me, so I kept my mouth shut. Cinnamon, however, marched up, flicked his chest, and said, “That shirt is racist, dude.”
Did Chris care? Unlikely, but at least she had the guts to tell him.
Cinnamon wasn’t perfect by any stretch, however. Like the “boy hater” phase she simply couldn’t let go of, and which I was totally, completely, one hundred percent over.
I did not need Cinnamon dragging me away every time we spotted Lars with Bryce.
I did not need to hear her revenge fantasies, which she’d stolen from Black Widow and involved malice-filled utterances like, “She mates, then she kills.”
Honestly? It was creating tension between me and Lars, because it made him not want to be around me when I was with her. And with Bryce out of the picture, she was with me A LOT.
That’s what I wanted to vent about to Dinah, only I couldn’t, as Dinah was off being WEIRD with weird Mary.
Grrrrrrr.
So basically, both of my BFFs were being B-Ps-in-the-B (big pains in the bottom), and, as Sandra so eloquently pointed out at Smoothie King, I couldn’t “fix” either one of them.
And my love life was tanking, and today was fish sticks day, and I hadn’t finished my French homework, and I just knew Ms. Beauchard was going to call me on it.
And my love life was tanking. Did I mention that? I hadn’t spent real time—yes-we-really-do-like-each-other time—with Lars in ages, it seemed. And as easy as it was to blame it on Cinnamon, I secretly knew I was looking for excuses. I also secretly knew—so secretly that I tried not to let my mind go there—that my foul mood might possibly have had more to do with Lars than with Dinah or Cinnamon.
Stomping around in a sulk wasn’t going to solve anything, however, and I had an icky suspicion that if I wanted things to get better with Lars, I was going to have to take a good, hard look at myself. Unfortunately.
On Thursday night, I decided it was time to take action regarding the sorry state of my love life. It might be scary, but so what? Do something scary, that was one of the things on my list, right?
To give myself a jump start, I marched downstairs and asked Dad what he thought about wimpy girls who sat in their rooms all weekend and just, like, read books.
“Good books or bad books?” he said, twisting to see me from his lazy-bum sprawl on the couch.
I perched on the back of the couch. Mom hated when I did this; she thought it smushed the pillows into deformed lumps that could never be replumped. But Dad didn’t care.
“Good books,” I said. “But still. Is that any life for a fourteen-year-old girl?”
“If the girl’s as gorgeous as you are? Definitely.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then let’s say bad books. Bad books with bad grammar. You don’t want me reading books like that all weekend, do you?”
Dad lifted the remote and muted Phineas and Ferb, which he claimed only to watch for Ty’s sake. He claimed it was for daddy-son bonding time. But this wasn’t the first time I’d caught him watching it on his own.
He put the remote on his chest. “Hmmm. So you’re saying you could lock yourself in your room and read grammatically incorrect books”—he squinted one eye—“or you could go out into the big bad world like Little Red Riding Hood, who got eaten by a wolf?”
“She did not!”
“I like the locking-yourself-in-your-room option. Till you’re twenty-one.” He reached up and shook my knee. “I’m proud of you, Winnie. I think you’re making an excellent choice.”
“Ha ha.”
He pointed the remote at the TV. “Want to watch Phineas and Ferb with me?”
“No. And Dad.” I slid down the back of the sofa, squishing the cushion to get to him. I pushed the remote back down so that he had to look at me. “Do you really want me being a dried-up spinster who has zero fun and lives a life of misery?”
He made his funny-Dad hopeful expression, much like the one he used when Mom said, “Joel, you’re not planning on eating that entire can of Pringles, are you?”
“Da-a-ad,” I said.
“Princess, what I want is for you to be happy,” he said. He hardly ever called me “princess,” thank goodness, as it was horribly embarrassing. But secretly, I liked it when he did.
“Okay, good,” I told him. “But you should know: It’s going to mean leaving my room.”
His sigh was loud and long.
“But c‘mon. You don’t really want a wimpy daughter.”
“I do, however, want a safe daughter,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He put his arm around me, and I soaked in the comfort of his hug for a few seconds. Then I pushed myself up and kissed his forehead. “Thanks for the chat, Dad. You’re the best.”
Upstairs, before I lost my I-am-confident-and-strong feeling, I called Lars.
Ring, ring, went my phone. Ring ring ring.
“Hey, Win,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Not much. What’s up with you?”
“Ah, you know. Thinking about homework. Not doing homework. Considering chucking homework out of window.”
“Blech,” I said, giggling. “Hate homework.” I tried to stay easygoing. “So are we going to do something this weekend? I feel like we haven’t done anything in forever.”
“Um, sure,” Lars said.
Okay, good start, I thought. “So, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
/> I felt my easygoing-ness start to slip away. I’d been proactive, and now it was his turn. Only he didn’t say anything. Just sat there like a lump, waiting for me to do all the work.
I sighed. “Well, tomorrow night I’m hanging with the girls, so we can’t do anything then.”
“More movies about how guys suck?” he said. He’d heard all about Black Widow from Cinnamon. First he thought it was funny. Later, not so much.
“Possibly,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I sat on my bed and drew my knees to my chest. I did not want this conversation to go bad.
“How about Saturday?” I suggested.
“Sorry, told Bryce I’d watch the Hawks game with him. They’ve got a shot at first in the division. Hey—wanna join?”
Um ... sure, only Cinnamon would kill me. “Nah. But thanks.”
From downstairs, Mom called up a request. “Winnie? Would you margle-gargle Ty?”
I pressed my phone to my chest. “What? I can’t hear you!”
“Mlarfle mflarfle bath!” she called. “Please?”
I groaned. “Mom needs me to go make Ty take his bath.”
“Okay,” Lars said. “I should go anyway. I should finish my lab report.”
Depression kicked in, intensified by how little he seemed to care. “But ... are we ... ?”
“I want to,” Lars said. He exhaled, and I realized he was frustrated, too. Which made me feel slightly better, but at the same time more stuck in the mire. How pathetic was it that neither one of us could solve such a seemingly simple problem of wanting to spend time together? “You come up with something, and we’ll do it. All right?”
Why me? I thought. Why do I have to come up with something?
“Winnie!” Mom called. “Are you flarfle glargle?!”
“I hear your mom,” Lars said. “I’ll let you go.”
But I don’t want to be “let go,” I thought. What I said, flatly, was “Okay, bye.” I tapped the END CALL bubble and watched his profile picture be sucked—whoosh—back into the phone.