Again his brow furrowed, and I wanted him to say it, to ask what was wrong. Then I could hint that while a Starbucks card was a ducky gift for, say, his aging aunt Frances, if a guy’s been going out with a girl for a whole year, he was supposed to get her something nicer.
But he lifted his hand that way guys do, an awkward good-bye that was annoyingly adorkable.
The edges of my Starbucks card dug into my palm. I ducked my head and left.
At home, Mom said, “Hi, birthday girl. You have a good day?” She was on the sun porch, sprawled on the love seat. Baby Maggie was asleep in her arms. Baby Maggie was perfect and unspoiled, a drowsing daffodil, and I thought, Oh, to be young and innocent.
“Listen, sweetie,” Mom went on. Apparently she hadn’t really wanted an answer about my day. “I hope you’ll forgive me ... but I never found time to bake a cake.”
My mouth fell open. My own mother failed to make me a cake? For real?
“Mom,” I said. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
Mom gestured at baby Maggie. “I forgot to order the model with the ‘sleep’ button, it seems.”
“She’s sleeping now.”
“Because she’s in my arms. The minute I try to put her down, she turns into a red-faced crying machine.”
Well, I could be a red-faced crying machine, I thought. If that’s what it takes. If I weren’t fourteen and too old to throw fits.
“Want me to call your dad and have him pick up a cake from Whole Foods?” Mom asked.
No, I wanted Mom to go back in time and bake me one. I wanted Dinah and Cinnamon to go back in time and bake me one. I wanted Lars to go back in time and haul his lame self to Sugar Sweet Sunshine and pick me out a perfect chocolate cupcake and jab a single pink candle in it. Was that really so much to ask?
But if I wanted a cake at all, it looked like a cake from stupid Whole Foods was the only option left.
“Fine,” I muttered.
She glanced about. She patted the cushions with her free hand. “I don’t have my phone. I must have left it in the kitchen. Will you call him, baby?”
I stomped off. First she forgot my cake, and now she wanted me to call Dad and ask him to go buy one? And if he said no, then what? Was I supposed to trudge the five miles to Whole Foods and do it myself?
Blah, blah, blah, mean-me said. Whine, whine, whine. At least you have a roof over your head. At least you’re not starving, or in a prisoner detention center, or missing an eye.
Note to self (to add to the others I’d racked up) : Stop being so self centered. Your self centeredness would make starving blind people throw up a little in their mouths.
Late afternoon sunlight gave the kitchen a magical glow, not that I was in the mood for magic. I skimmed the table, the counters, the granite island, but Mom’s cell phone wasn’t there. On the funny half-desk by the back door, however, I spotted a slim black box topped with a red bow.
My breath flew out of me, and then I sucked it back in. I felt ashamed, jittery, and buoyant all at once.
Don’t get your hopes up, mean-me said as I hurried over. Don’t get excited over nothing.
I pulled off the bow. Underneath, etched into the top of the box, was an image of an apple.
Omigosh, omigosh.
I lifted the lid to reveal a sleek, white iPhone. An iPhone. I slipped it out of its box and marveled at how smooth it was. How nearly weightless. I turned it over and saw that it had sixteen gigabytes of memory, which was a ton—enough to store all my dreams and more. Could dreams be stored?
I found the ON button and held it down, and—oh, the glory—the screen came to life, complete with a multitude of fabulous application icons. TEXT, CALENDAR, PHOTOS, WEATHER... and that was just the first row. There were four more rows beneath. Holy pickles!
One of the icons was designed to look like a tiny piece of legal-pad paper. Underneath it was the word NOTES. I tapped it, and up came a screen-size piece of legal-pad paper. I tapped it, and a miniature keyboard popped up.
I tapped out, “Hi! I‘mvwriting a nitr on my brand mew iPhone ! ”
Across the piece of paper appeared the sentence, Hi! I’MVWRITING A NITR ON MY BRAND MEW IPHONE!
I hugged my phone to my chest and twirled around. I love you, little iPhone! I told it telepathically. Happy happy happy! Me so happy!
I stopped short, struck by inspiration. This whole day had been a complete roller coaster. I’d gone from joyful one moment to crestfallen the next. I’d been “fun” Winnie, and I’d also—ugh—acted like a spoiled baby. But somehow, I just knew it, all of those ups and downs were part of a bigger picture. I tingled with the awareness of being this close to putting it together.
Sandra’s advice had been to live in the now. She said I should move forward while sneakily not thinking about moving forward ... but I knew myself well enough to realize that, alas, I wasn’t going to become an instant Zen master. Maybe I needed to come up with a more Winnie-friendly plan?
I imagined a calendar with its pages flipping, flipping, flipping, the way they do in movies to show the passage of time. Up till now, maybe that had been my ... whatever Sandra called it. My paradigm.
But! Maybe Sandra was right, and I was ready for a paradigm shift! And hey, I could do it. I was fourteen, after all.
I deleted my “Hi, I‘mvwriting a nitr” note and started typing a new note. It would be like the note I wrote myself as a ten-year-old, the one I later lost. Only, this note I’d keep close.
My fingers felt clumsy as I tapped the tiny keys, but slowly, and with lots of corrections, I made a to-do list. Some of the things I put on it were variations on the goals I’d come up with earlier in the day. Others I came up with on further deliberation.
I gave one final tap to my keyboard and read my list from start to finish:TO DO BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL
SAY OUT LOUD WHAT I WANT OUT OF LIFE
BE SPAZZY
BUT ALSO PRACTICE BEING OLDER SOMEHOW
DO SOMETHING TO HELP THE WORLD, LIKE THAT THREE CUPS OF TEA GUY
FIGURE OUT WHO I AM
BECOME FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE NEW
TALK TO AMANDA ... OR DO *SOMETHING* WITH AMANDA
TAKE CHARGE WITH LARS!
HAVE A DEEP MOMENT WITH SANDRA BEFORE SHE GOES TO COLLEGE
Do SOMETHING SCARY
ADMIT IT WHEN I’M WRONG
MAKE A PREDICTION, AND ...
HAVE IT COME TRUE!
DON’T DIE
PEACE OUT!
My list wasn’t perfect. So? I wasn’t perfect. But I was fourteen, and I had a plan.
Have a Deep Moment with Sandra
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER MY BIRTHDAY, my English teacher and Cinnamon’s English teacher brought both our classes together and had us watch an old movie called Black Widow. I didn’t know why. Nobody knew why. But every so often, Ms. Kozinski and Ms. Adler did this sort of thing, and the two of them would whisper and giggle in the back of the room while we watched the film.
They were good friends, Ms. Kozinski and Ms. Adler. They went shopping together and had margaritas together and gossiped about guys together. How did we know? Because they told us. Cinnamon and I especially loved it when Ms. K and Ms. Adler went on double dates. They always came back with ridiculous, horrible things to say about the guys in question, like that Ms. Adler’s date smelled like cheese or Ms. K’s date brought up NPR every third sentence.
“Well, I heard on NPR ...” Ms. Adler might say in a pompous voice, and the students clustered around her desk would giggle and egg her on.
Ms. Adler wasn’t the greatest teacher in terms of actually teaching us academic, English-y stuff, but I liked the fact that she was a grown-up and still had fun. I liked the fact that she still had a BFF, and that they tried on shoes together instead of playing bridge or doing frozen meal swaps.
I expected Cinnamon and Dinah and me to stay BFFs forever. I imagined the three of us having crazy weekends and then sharing the details with each other during Sunday brunch at some
swanky restaurant. Or maybe not a swanky restaurant. Ms. Adler and Ms. K were swanky-restaurant types, but maybe Cinnamon, Dinah, and I would have brunch at a pub, or a truck stop.
Anyway, the tagline for Black Widow was “She Mates and She Kills. No Man Can Resist Her.” It was about a woman who married one rich man after another, murdering them all and inheriting their money. When class ended, Cinnamon leaned over and said in my ear, “Dude, that black widow lady is my role model.”
“Cinnamon,” I scolded. “She is not your role model. She killed people.”
“Not ‘people.’ Just guys.”
I gathered my books and stood up. “Ha ha.”
“The lady in the movie used guys the way guys use us,” Cinnamon argued. “And that’s what I’m going to do from now on.”
I headed into the hall. “Cinn, you are going to end up a dried-out, wrinkled pill if you don’t get over this I-hate-guys kick.”
“But I do hate guys,” she said.
“No, you hate Bryce.”
“Same diff.”
I twisted sideways to avoid being rammed by a seventh grader. “I think you need to go out with someone else,” I told her. “Someone who’s not a player.”
“Okay, great idea,” Cinnamon said with over-the-top chirpiness. “Make him for me, will ya? Snap your fingers and make him materialize?”
I shot her a look and considered pulling out my hair ... or hers. Today she was wearing it in a topknot, held in place with a fork.
“I can’t ‘make’ you a boy,” I said. “There’s no such thing as the Boy Factory.”
“There should be,” Cinnamon said.
“You just have to ... be nicer. Lose your attitude.” My gaze traveled up. “And maybe not jab weapons of mass destruction in your hair.”
“A fork isn’t a weapon of mass destruction,” Cinnamon informed me. “A fork is a weapon of minor destruction. Like for stabbing the hearts of cheating, lying exes.”
“Uh-huh, doing great,” I told her. “You’ll have a new boyfriend in no time.”
I spotted Dinah by her locker, deep in conversation with a girl named Mary. Mary was doing most of the talking, while Dinah listened intently and gnawed on her bottom lip. I frowned, because what could Mary be saying to make Dinah look so ... involved?
I didn’t mean that in a weird possessive way. Dinah was allowed to have friends other than me and Cinnamon. She was even allowed to have intense conversations with other people. But we hardly knew Mary, and anyway, Mary was ... strange. Sometimes she was overly fawning, complimenting girls’ outfits or teeth or skinniness with an enthusiasm that seemed fake. Other times, she just seemed blank. Checked out.
“Dinah?” I called.
Dinah’s eyes widened with relief, or so it seemed to me. Mary looked displeased.
“Don’t tell,” I heard Mary whisper as Cinnamon and I approached. Then she focused on me and Cinnamon and plugged in her smile.
“Winnie! Cute shirt,” she said. “And Cinnamon. Love your nails.”
Cinnamon glanced at her nails, which she’d painted with her highlighter. They were neon orange.
“Thanks,” she said.
Mary laughed—fakily—and took off, though not before giving Dinah a meaningful glance.
When she was out of earshot, I said, “Don’t tell what?”
“Nothing,” Dinah said, closing her locker. “She ... um ...” She shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Dinah,” I said.
“Should we get out of here?” she said. “Want to walk to 7-Eleven and get Slurpees?”
Cinnamon made a chhh sound with half her mouth. “Not 7-Eleven. Too likely to see Bryce there.”
And Lars, I thought, feeling grumpy. The problem with having Cinnamon date Lars’s best friend, and then get dumped by Lars’s best friend, was that I was now in the position of having to choose between my BFF and my boyfriend, since where Lars was, Bryce so often was.
Wait a sec, I thought. Dinah brought up Slurpees instead of answering my Mary question as a distraction technique—and she almost got away with it.
“Dinah?” I said. “When someone says ‘don’t tell,’ that means you do tell. Maybe not the whole world, but at least your best friends.”
“True dat,” Cinnamon said.
“What does Mary not want you to tell? ” I pressed. “Why was she even talking to you?”
Dinah looked wounded. “Gee, thanks.”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Do you guys even have any classes together?”
“She’s in the hip-hop club with me,” Dinah said. “Could we not talk about it? Seriously, it is so nothing.”
Except it obviously was, or she’d tell us.
“Fine,” I said. Deliberately, I fished my iPhone out of my backpack and tapped the Notes application. I pulled up a fresh piece of pretend-paper and typed, FIND OUT WHAT’S UP WITH MARY WOODS!!!
I turned my phone so Dinah could see. She rolled her eyes.
“We could go to the mall,” Cinnamon said. “I could get my lip pierced.”
“No,” I said. Westminster didn’t allow facial piercings, and anyway, please.
“We could go to a tattoo parlor.”
“And that would be another no.” I exhaled, like a bull. “You guys are being annoying. Both of you.”
My phone buzzed, and I glanced down and saw that I’d received a text from Sandra. It said, “bored!!!! need smoothie!!!! wanna come?”
“why yes,” I typed back, dropping a mask over my delight so that Dinah and Cinnamon wouldn’t ask to tag along.
I dropped my phone into my backpack and said, “Sorry, kids. Sandra needs me.”
“So I’m getting a tattoo by myself?” Cinnamon asked. “That means no heart with Winnie in it, you know.”
“I’ll try to get over it,” I said.
At Smoothie King, I vented about Cinnamon and Dinah. Sandra’s typical MO when I complained about things was to imply that my problems were stupid and tell me to go away. But today, remarkably, she listened.
“Here’s the thing,” Sandra said, keeping her straw in her mouth as she talked. “Remember when you and Amanda quit being friends?”
My cheeks got hot. It was an old wound—the fact of Amanda ditching me to be more popular—and I doubted it would ever fully heal. “She dropped me for Gail Grayson in sixth grade.”
“And do you remember what I told you?”
“That sometimes friends outgrow each other,” I recited. I shuddered, because it sounded as awful now as it had then. A disturbing question burbled up in my brain, one I hadn’t considered back when I was eleven. “Hey ... did you mean me outgrowing Amanda, or Amanda outgrowing me?”
She answered immediately, and with a flip of her hand. “Well, Amanda outgrowing you. Duh.”
I made an indignant noise.
“But not in a bad way,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you rather be you than her?”
“Excuse me?”
“If the two of you could switch identities ... would you?”
My bottom lip had a chapped spot on it, and my teeth found the flaking bit and tugged. Amanda was prettier than I was, and more popular—or used to be. These days, her status went back and forth. Sometimes she showed up all black-eyeliner-y doom-and-gloom and hung out with slouchy, scowly Aubrey. Other days I saw her in the cafeteria with superstars Gail and Malena, and she’d swish her Alice in Wonderland hair and be effortlessly fabulous in her slinky jeans and outfit-y tops that came from an entirely different planet than, say, my ratty-but-beloved Dr Pepper T-shirt.
On those days, she outshone Gail and Malena without even trying, and I felt perversely proud of her.
But did I want to be her?
“She doesn’t really seem happy,” I confessed.
Sandra tipped her cup so that the mangled end of her straw pointed at me. “See?”
“Uh ... no.”
“Well, don’t sweat it. Anyway, I might have been wrong.”
“What?! ”
?
??Shocking, I know. But it’s possible that when I gave you my whole ‘outgrowing’ advice, I might have been in a weird place personally. Or I might have been just plain wrong. So, um ... I take it back.”
“Sandra!” I exclaimed. “You can’t take back advice. Not from three years ago. Not when I already followed it!”
“Well, sorry. But now that I’m a senior, now that I’m about to graduate ... ” She turned up her palms. “I can’t help it, Win. It makes me realize how little time we have with each other.”
“Who? You and me?”
“Everybody,” she said. “Listen. I’m not saying go back and make things work with Amanda. Or do if you want to. Unless it’s impossible. Sometimes people go their own ways, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Gee,” I said. “How ... uplifting.”
“But if you can do something to save a friendship, then you have to. Like with Dinah and Cinnamon, because I know how much y’all love each other.”
“True dat,” I murmured, unthinkingly echoing Cinnamon. Even when they bugged me, I loved them. I loved how Cinnamon was always willing to sacrifice her dignity for me, like Saturday at the mall when I was having pee issues. The ladies room was so crowded that when my turn finally came around, my pee wouldn’t come out. I froze, knowing that so many people were outside waiting ... and worse, listening . Cinnamon knew I was incapable of peeing in front of an audience. So what did she do? Out of nowhere and totally randomly, she belted out “All the Single Ladies” at the top of her voice, all three verses. How could I not love a friend with that kind of nerve?
And Dinah, I loved how she always always always tried to be a good person. It was part of her very core. That same day at the mall? We were in Macy’s juniors department checking out swimsuits—summer was coming, after all—and all of a sudden, Cinnamon and I looked around and couldn’t find Dinah.
“Where’d she go?” Cinnamon had asked, baffled.
Turned out she’d spotted a little old lady in the accessories section, struggling to get down a purse that was out of her reach. So Dinah hurried over to help, of course. After that the little old lady wanted to take a peek at “that darling purple and green sequined clutch, you sweet girl,” and after that, there were multiple perfumes to be spritzed and sniffed, and somehow Dinah ended up serving as the little old lady’s personal shopper for the next half hour.