I hesitated, then stepped forward and hugged her. Cinnamon joined in so that we made a Dinah-sandwich.
“Hey there, troublemaker,” Cinnamon said, giving her a noogie. “Got a smoke for your old bud Cinnamon?”
Dinah smiled wanly. “No. I’ve got Diet Sierra Mist, though.”
Cinnamon gagged. She had Sierra Mist issues, and Diet Sierra Mist in particular. But we followed Dinah into her kitchen, where she served us drinks and Veggie Booty, which was like cheese puffs, only not at all, because it was made from spinach and kale.
“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?” said Cinnamon, who had Veggie Booty issues as well.
“No, not trying to kill you,” Dinah said listlessly. “You don’t have to eat it.”
Cinnamon grabbed the bag. “Fine, fine, I’ll eat it.” She popped a handful into her mouth, leaving the next move to me.
“So, um ... how’re things?” I said.
Dinah’s eyes found mine. Her expression made my heart lurch, and I had the sudden and awful feeling that I had done something wrong. Me, and not Dinah. But why would I think that?
“Do you guys ...” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Do y’all ever ...”
“Do we ever what?” I said, my heart pounding.
Tears welled in Dinah’s eyes, which made tears spring to my eyes. “Do you ever feel lonely inside? Like ... there’s a great big gaping hole where your ribs are?”
I did know that feeling. I knew it well, though I was startled to hear it described so perfectly.
“And it comes out of nowhere?” I said. “Yes. But it makes no sense, because I have y’all ... so why should I feel lonely?” I shifted uncomfortably, but pressed on. “I mean, what do I have to feel sad about?”
“I get that feeling, too,” Cinnamon said. I turned to her in surprise. “But it’s not behind my ribs. It’s more ...” She cleared her throat, as if a piece of Veggie Booty, or something else, was clogging the works. “It’s more inside my heart. And when it comes, it comes. And all I can do is ride it out.”
Dinah reached over to squeeze Cinnamon’s hand, but Cinnamon jerked her hand away. She shoved it back in the Veggie Booty bag and grabbed a fresh handful.
“No, don’t,” Cinnamon said, making a weird laugh sound. “Who said life was easy, right?”
I swallowed. I asked Dinah, “So you’ve been feeling lonely?”
Silence.
I forced myself to look at her, to honestly and openly look at her ... and that was all it took. Her chin trembled, and her story came pouring out. Or rather, her confession. Except instead of I did this and this and this, it was I am this and this and this.
She was weak, she said, for getting sucked into Mary’s lies. She was dumb for not telling anyone what was going on, especially me and Cinnamon. She was ashamed that her dad had to be called in to talk to the counselor. And finally, she was really really really sorry for making such a mess of things. For being so stupid and needy.
“Dinah, no,” I said. “You’re not stupid. Mary’s stupid. It’s her fault, not yours.”
My response seemed to frustrate her, or maybe deepen her despair. She rubbed her forehead. “But do y’all accept my apology?”
“For not telling us about the great makeup scandal?” Cinnamon said. “Dude, we’re all human.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Do you accept my apology for being me?”
“Stop,” I said desperately. It was getting harder to shake the feeling that I needed to be apologizing, too. For something. I didn’t know what. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to go there?
Admit it vvhen you’re wrong. That was one of my goals for myself ... but it was hard. So hard.
“You don’t have to apologize for who you are,” Cinnamon said with rock-solid certainty. “None of us is perfect.”
“But I’m supposed to be the good girl,” Dinah said.
“Oh, Dinah,” I said. I recalled Louise’s analysis of the situation, and I just felt worse. I drove my fingernail repeatedly into the pad of my thumb.
“Only I don’t want to be,” Dinah went on. “Not always.” She trained her eyes on me. “I don’t want to be the girl who does embarrassing things, or wears the wrong pants, or says things that make you say, ‘Oh, Dinah.’”
My stomach cramped.
“I don’t want to be the girl you pat on the head, Winnie.”
This was it. This was why I’d been afraid. And now that it was out in the open, I bore down so hard on the flesh of my thumb that I could feel the bone.
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” Dinah said. “It’s just ... I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
I felt myself turn bright red.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Dinah pleaded.
Cinnamon glanced from Dinah to me. When I failed to respond, she said, “Uh ... I sure don’t. Will one of you please explain?”
Dinah kept her eyes on me. I could feel the weight of her need. But I dropped my gaze, while inside my rib cage, my heart tried to beat its way out. I wanted to flee, or tell Dinah she was full of crap, or burst into tears so that she and Cinnamon would feel sorry for me and worry about me. And if doing so kept them from seeing the real me? That would be fine, especially if the real me was someone who patted her friend on the head and said, so condescendingly, “Oh, Dinah.”
Understanding dawned on Cinnamon’s face. Maybe she absorbed it from the air, or, more likely, she finally put the pieces together.
“Oh my god,” she said to Dinah. “You went to the Dark Side to prove you weren’t Winnie’s pet?!”
I shrunk from the ugliness of it. When I peeked to see Dinah’s reaction, I saw her shrink, too.
“Never mind, of course not,” she said, her resolve crumpling. “I’m so stupid.” She thwacked her head. “So! Stupid!”
It cracked the shell inside of me. I got up and went to her, tears rolling down my cheeks, and made her scooch over so I could share her chair. My pulse was racing, because sometimes I was insanely awkward when it came to showing people I cared about them. Especially when that person was mad at me.
But I looped my arms around her anyway and said, “You goof.”
Her shoulders shook, and shame engulfed me as I realized I’d done it again. She’d shared something big and scary, and I’d patted her on her head again.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, but ...”
Cinnamon stared at us, lost all over again. She actually wasn’t blameless herself; she and I probably egged each other on with the whole “Oh, Dinah” business.
Not probably. Definitely.
I’d been friends with Dinah for longer than I’d been friends with Cinnamon, however. Today, right now, the person who needed to apologize was me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Dinah’s shoulders shook harder. I hated how awful I felt, how sunk in the mire, but I pressed on.
“I’ll work on it, okay?” I said. “I do know what you mean—and I’ll try to do better.”
“You don’t have to,” Dinah said thickly.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I was wrong, and ... and I stand corrected.”
“Okay,” Dinah said. She laughed, only with a gulp added in. “Um, thanks.”
Cinnamon regarded us like we were nuts. “Y’all are nuts,” she said.
This launched a fresh wave of tears for both of us. Happy tears, though.
“No, seriously,” Cinnamon said.
We kept right on being mush pots, sniffling and giggling, until Cinnamon thwonked the table with her palm.
“Moving on,” she said authoritatively. “Can we talk about Mary, please? Now that y’all are all lovey-dovey again?”
I rested my chin on Dinah’s shoulder blade. Her skin was milky white. “I don’t know. Dinah, do you want to talk about Mary?”
“It’s so embarrassing,” Dinah said.
“Excellent,” Cinnamon said. “I love it when people who aren’t me embarrass themselves.”
r />
“Oh, fine,” Dinah said. She exhaled. “Remember yesterday, when I was so upset about turning Mary in?”
“Yeah,” Cinnamon said.
“Well, today Ms. Perkins called and said she wanted to share some stuff. It’s private, which means I’m not supposed to tell. So you guys can’t, either.”
Ms. Perkins was our eighth-grade counselor, which meant that whatever she told Dinah was probably juicy.
“It’s not Mary’s first time,” Dinah said. “To, um, do stuff, and then make someone else take the blame.”
“No way,” Cinnamon said.
“She’s extremely adept at manipulation,” Dinah said in the manner of someone repeating a direct quote.
“Like the Black Widow!” Cinnamon said. “Omigod, Mary is my new hero!”
Dinah shoved her. I shoved her.
“I still have to take responsibility for what I did,” Dinah said. “But Ms. Perkins said to see it as a life lesson.”
“So the times I saw you with Mary,” I said, “and she was all, ‘Don’t tell, don’t tell,’ she was ... what? Asking if she could put the stuff she’d stolen in your locker?”
“The first time it was because she was late for hip-hop club,” Dinah said. “She didn’t say what she was putting in my locker. She just said, ‘Can I?’”
“And of course you said yes,” Cinnamon said. She grabbed the bag of Veggie Booty, tilted her chair onto its back legs, and started munching.
“And then when I saw what it was—”
“Which was what?” Cinnamon asked.
“A bunch of Urban Decay eye shadows, obviously new. But I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Urban Decay,” Cinnamon said. “Nice.”
“So when did, like, the red flags go up?” I asked.
“When she wouldn’t take any of it back. She was like, ‘You keep them. They’re for you.’ ”
“Can anyone say ‘random’?” Cinnamon said.
“And then she kept putting more stuff in my locker. She knew my combination, so—”
“You gave her your combination?” I said. “Dinah!”
“This was before I knew! I told her my combination that very first time, when I thought she just wanted to put her school stuff somewhere until hip-hop was over.”
“Why didn’t you get a new lock?” I asked.
“Well ... because that would have been rude.”
Oh, Dinah, I almost said. I clamped my mouth shut.
“So when this pile of makeup grew,” Cinnamon said. “This mountain of expensive products—was that when you realized something fishy was going on?”
“She pretty much took over my whole locker,” Dinah confessed. “I didn’t have room for my books anymore.”
Cinnamon’s laughter barked out.
“Cinnamon!” I said.
“I did tell Mary that I wasn’t happy about what was going on,” Dinah said. “I thought about gathering all the makeup and putting it in her locker, but—”
“Let me guess,” Cinnamon interrupted. “She wouldn’t give you her combination.”
Dinah looked sheepish.
I groaned.
“So it turned into this awful, weird mess,” she said. “I wanted to tell y’all, but Mary begged me not to. She kept saying it would be the last time, that she would get help, that she’d talk to Ms. Perkins ...”
“But she never did,” I finished.
“And then ... well ...”
Cinnamon raised her eyebrows.
Dinah’s voice grew smaller. “Yesterday she asked if she could copy my humanities homework—”
“Oh, nuh-uh,” I said. Dinah and I had the same teacher for humanities, though at different periods, so we were both doing the same lessons. “The assignment on Kohlberg’s stages of moral development?”
Dinah’s cheeks turned pink.
“Too perfect,” Cinnamon said, cracking up. “Cheating on the old moral development assignment.”
“I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no. So I said, ‘Fine, but I don’t have it with me.’ And she said, ‘Well, will you go get it?’ Because her ankle hurt. She’d twisted it at the mall.”
Cinnamon smirked. “While making her getaway from the MAC counter.”
“She always made it sound so urgent that I help her,” Dinah said. “When I was away from her, I’d tell myself, ‘Dinah, stop. Mary is BAD NEWS.’ But then she’d corner me, and like”—she twirled her hands in the air—“work her magical persuasion skills, and I’d find myself saying yes when what I wanted was to say no.”
“I knew she was evil,” I said. “I swear I did.”
Dinah looked at me askance.
“What?” I said.
“She’s messed up. Yes. But I’m not sure it’s fair to say she’s evil.”
“Sure it is,” Cinnamon said. She stood up and tossed the bag of Veggie Booty on the table. “But what’s over is over. It is over, right? Can we move on?”
“Yeah,” Dinah agreed. “I’d be really happy to move on.”
“Wait,” I said hesitantly. They looked at me, and I had a moment of doubt. Did I really want to dredge up more ickiness, when we’d plowed through so much already?
Then again: If not now, when?
“Do y’all remember that party at the beginning of seventh grade?” I said. “When Amanda supposedly got drunk and fooled around with some eighth grader?”
“Not ‘supposedly,’” Cinnamon corrected. “My next-door neighbor was there. She saw Amanda kiss him with her own two eyes.”
“Well, with her lips, probably,” I said, since the joke was right there in front of me.
“We remember,” Dinah said. “What about it?”
I drummed my fingers on the table, unsure how to articulate what I was thinking. Mainly, it had to do with how we’d be graduating from junior high next month, and though I refused to obsess about high school—I’d forbidden myself to, and I was a girl of my word—that didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to bring it up ever.
It was out there, and huge, and while I was ready for things to change ... I also wasn’t.
“Lars was at that party, too,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” Cinnamon said.
“Yeah. We talked about it afterward, and about Amanda in particular. He was like, ‘If she’s drinking wine coolers in the seventh grade, what’s she going to be like in high school?’”
Cinnamon didn’t understand. Dinah did, and color rose in her face.
“I don’t mean you,” I told her. “I don’t even mean Mary, necessarily.”
“Then who do you mean?” Cinnamon asked.
I spread my hands. “I don’t know. I guess, maybe ... all of us?”
It took her a moment, and then Cinnamon got it. I could read it in her eyes.
All the things we knew about each other. All the things we didn’t. All the changes coming our way, whether we wanted them to or not.
“Can we make a pledge?” Dinah said at last.
“No,” Cinnamon said immediately.
“Yes,” I said. “A pledge that we will be there for each other, through thick and thin.”
Dinah nodded happily. Cinnamon moaned.
I made a fist and held it up. “Let’s do it, ladies.”
“Oh my god,” Cinnamon said to the ether. “She wants us to give her some knuckles.”
Dinah pressed her fist to mine.
“C’mon, Cin-Cin,” I said. I made a kiss-kiss dog-calling sound.
Cinnamon sighed mightily. She thrust her fist against ours.
For several seconds we were connected, our arms stretching from our fists like branches from a single root. Cinnamon pushed inward, then pulled away, splaying her fingers.
“Whoosh,” she said, giving sound to our fist-bump explosion.
“Whoosh,” Dinah repeated.
Looking at them, I felt happy and sad—and maybe that was just the way of it.
“Winnie?” Cinnamon prompted.
I imagined a sh
ooting star, burning and twinkling on its journey through the sky. “Whoosh.”
Practice Being Older
SOMETIMES, when a friend calls up and says get-over-here-my-life-is-over, it turns out to be a missed episode of The Secret Life of an American Teen. Other times it’s a horrible bathing suit purchase, or the realization that the pair of jeans earmarked for a certain party have suddenly turned stupid, or too tight, and a new outfit needs to be whipped up pronto. Or, if it’s Dinah making the frantic call, it maybe has to do with a hair ball. Not hers. One of her cats’. In fact, Dinah’s emergency calls often had to do with hair balls, so that’s the assumption I was working under when I biked to Dinah’s one cloudy afternoon in April.
Cinnamon showed up on her longboard right as I was turning into the driveway. She did a fancy power-slide dismount, flipped her board, and caught it under her arm.
“What do you think’s going on?” she asked as we approached the front door. “I could hardly understand her when she called me. She sounded like she was hyperventilating.”
“Dunno,” I said. “Maybe one of her cats is sick?”
Cinnamon laughed, though I hadn’t meant it as a joke. Then the front door opened, and Dinah pulled the two of us in. She dragged us down the hall and into her bedroom, which was frilly and purple. The decorating style was mid-elementary school, and I found it reassuringly steady, despite Dinah’s apparent inability to speak.
She shoved us toward her computer. She grunted inarticulately.
“What?” Cinnamon said. “Talk, girl.”
I squinted at the screen. “Strugglin‘—” I reared back. “Strugglin’ Teens Boot Camp? What the heck?”
“Boot camp,” Cinnamon said, sounding interested. She squeezed in and read out loud from the web page. She had to go slow because the syntax was crazy. “‘Summer camps are having their own instructors or counselors who can detect—’” She broke off. She tried again. “‘Who can detect your teen problem?’”
“Dinah?” I said. “Do you have a teen problem?”
“My dad’s making me go to leadership camp,” Dinah said miserably.
“‘Our programs are based on old-fashioned morals that teach discipline, and physical training that will change your unruly child into a good citizen,’” Cinnamon read in a deranged, off-kilter lilt. She switched back to her normal voice. “Who are these people?”