Fortunately, I liked being known as the smart one.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to quit while I was ahead.
“Bridget says she’s a real brainiac,” Burke said.
The sneakers were joined by a third set of feet, in pink sheepskin boots.
“Who’s a real brainiac?” Dori asked.
SERIOUSLY. WAS EVERYONE AT OCEAN COUNTY MALL THIS MORNING?
“Your boyfriend’s square-dance partner,” Burke replied. “She’s freakishly smart.”
“Well,” Dori struck back, “she may be abnormally ahead in the brain, but she’s abnormally behind in the bra.”
Both boys grunt-laughed like huhuhuhuhuhuh.
“She’s built like a first grader,” Burke joked.
“It’s true!” Dori added. “And I should know because I’ve known her since elementary school!”
This is what I got for eavesdropping. It’s one thing to have a negative opinion about yourself when you’re having a bad day or whatever. But it’s an entirely different thing when you hear your worst thoughts spoken aloud by someone else.
“Dori, I can’t believe you ever thought Scotty had a thing for that girl,” Burke said.
“I know, right?”
And then I heard gross kissy-kissy sounds.
“Know why Jessica’s called the Woodchick?” Scotty asked.
The Woodchick? Who calls me the Woodchick?
“Why is she called the Woodchick?” Dori replied.
Hmm… because I’m the only girl in Woodshop?
“Because she’s the only girl in Woodshop,” he said. “And…”
Aaaaaand?
“She’s flat as a board!”
Scotty, Dori, and Burke laughed like my humiliation was the most hilarious thing that had ever happened in the history of Ocean County Mall.
I know I should have been relieved to hear that Scotty didn’t think of me as girlfriend material anymore. Ha! I’d proven I’m not crushable after all! But that didn’t mean I had to stand there with my back pressed up against the wall and listen to the three of them mock me because I’m not pubertizing yet. I leaped out from behind the soda machine to confront them.
“YOU!” I thrust my finger at Scotty. “And YOU.” At Burke. “And YOU.” At Dori.
The three of them jumped backward like I was a hobgoblin about to steal their souls. It’s a good thing I had the element of surprise going for me, because as smart as I am, I didn’t have anything clever to say.
“YOU ARE MEAN.”
It wasn’t my finest moment. Definitely not my best comeback. But it was far better than not saying anything at all.
I’d retreated halfway through the food court before I realized I didn’t have anywhere safe to go. I hadn’t looked back to see if Scotty, Burke, and Dori were following me, but I wasn’t about to slow down to find out. Hope was still at the table where I’d left her, but Heath was nowhere to be seen. I shot her a look that said “Come with me,” and she raised her eyebrow to say “Why?” and when I sped past her without slowing down to answer or wipe away my tears, she got up and followed. She didn’t know where I was going or why I was in such a hurry to get there. My silent request was clear: I needed her.
And that was all Hope needed to know.
Chapter Twenty
I estimated the ten-minute car ride would take me about ninety minutes on foot. If I were by myself, that is. I appreciated Hope’s company, but she was wearing these clogs that were apparently very comfortable but not built for speed. She slowed our pace considerably, which would’ve been okay, I guess, if the weather had been cooperating.
“So what happened?” Hope asked, looking up at the clouds glooming in the sky.
I opened my mouth to tell her what Scotty and Dori and Burke had said about me, but I got choked up all over again before I could get the words out. Ugh. It made no sense. I don’t even like any of them. Why did their opinions matter so much to me, anyway? I almost prayed for a downpour so I could blame my tears on the rain. Hope must have realized that I was in no condition to talk just yet. So she told me what happened with Heath.
“I sent him home,” she said, “and I promised I wouldn’t tell our parents that he’d taken their car, which puts me in an awkward position because they should know what he did, but I don’t want Heath to get in trouble, because his heart is always in the right place even if his brain is stuck somewhere else.”
We’d just gotten to the on/off ramp that connects the parking lot to the main road. A long, wet trudge was still ahead of us.
“Oh, and another thing,” Hope said. “I got a message from Sara while you were in the bathroom. We’re dismissed from her square.”
That was the best news I’d heard this whole rotten day. No square = no square dancing = no Down-Home Harvest Dance = no Hoedown Showdown. I’d rather lose a limb in Woodshop than hold Scotty’s jerky hand ever again.
“And Manda’s agreed to take your spot, so I guess we got what we wished for, huh? The Worst Best Friends Forever Ever together ag—”
Hope stopped midsentence and suddenly picked up the pace.
“Don’t look back,” she said nervously, “but I think we’re being followed.”
As soon as she said it, I got the “uh-oh” feeling. Hope and I were about to become the cautionary tale for a bazillion STRANGER-DANGER assemblies. Our school photos would serve as sad reminders of what happens when defenseless youngsters go around unsupervised.…
A car horn honked, and Hope and I almost leaped into each other’s arms.
“Jessie!”
I made a move to look, and Hope tried to stop me.
“Keep walking!” she urged.
“Jessie!”
I’ve known that voice my entire life.
“Jessie! Where are you going?”
Sure enough, I turned around to see my sister leaning out of the driver’s side of her latest boyfriend’s borrowed car.
“What are you doing here?” Bethany asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said.
My sister does not waste her time or money at Ocean County Mall. Not when there are numerous superior shopportunities between here and school.
“I was called in as a Chic Boutique crisis counselor.” She said it straight-faced and as serious as could be. “There was a major incident at the store.”
Hope and I exchanged looks: Manda and Sara!
“And the useless assistant manager called me for backup.”
Hope and I exchanged more looks: Kirsten!
“As much as Chic Boutique needs me right now, I’d be bailing on my big-sisterly duties if I let you and your friend…”
“Hope,” she helpfully replied. “We met once before.”
“I remember the hair,” my sister said, “just not the name.”
Hope’s lips puckered slightly, but she didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, I’m not letting you and Hope walk home in the rain,” my sister said, unlocking the car doors. “Get in.”
It was really coming down now, so we got in the backseat without an argument. I’d barely gotten my seat belt on before the grilling began.
“So what happened?” Hope asked.
“Something happened?” Bethany asked.
“Nothing,” I said, trying not to get all worked up again. “Nothing happened.”
Bethany and Hope released disappointed sighs.
“Seriously,” I insisted. “Everything’s fine.”
No one spoke. The windshield wipers filled the silence with a wish-wish-wishing sound. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I wish I weren’t such a freak!” I blurted.
“You are not a freak,” Bethany replied quickly. “Darlings aren’t freaks.”
It was clear Bethany refused to acknowledge any possible freakishness in our shared bloodline.
“Fine, I’m not a freak,” I said. “But I’m not normal, either.”
“Who’s normal?” Hope asked.
/>
“Manda and Sara are normal.”
Hope shuddered. “You want to be like Manda and Sara?”
“No!” I said. “But I think it would be easier if I were.”
“Why do you think that?” my sister asked.
“You’re normal,” I said. “And junior high was a breeze for you.”
To my sister’s credit, Most Popular, Prettiest, Miss Perfect didn’t try to argue.
“I don’t want to be normal,” Hope said. “Normal is boring.” Then to my sister, “Um, no offense!”
“None taken,” Bethany said. “Where is this all coming from? This isn’t about the IT List, is it? Or the Crushability Quiz?”
“No!” I insisted. “And no!”
“The what list?” asked Hope. “The what quiz?”
“Nothing,” I said, shooting my sister a look in the rearview mirror. “And nothing.”
Hope slumped in her seat and sucked disapprovingly on her teeth.
“Nothing,” I repeated lamely.
Hope bolted upright and flashed hand signs in front of my face.
“Did you just ‘zero’ me?” I asked.
“I did,” Hope said, as if she were challenging me. “Because there’s a whole lot of nothing going on with you today.”
My sister gave an “Aha!” of approval from the front seat.
I deserved the zeroes. Hope deserved better. And I guess my sister did, too.
So I told them what I’d heard when I was hiding behind the soda machine. And they got appropriately offended on my behalf.
“SHE DID NOT SAY THAT.”
“She did.”
“HE DID NOT SAY THAT.”
“He did.”
“THEY DID NOT SAY THAT.”
“They did.”
By the time we got to my house, I was feeling better, but not okay, about what had happened at the mall. It was good to get it all out, I guess, even if talking didn’t change anything. I’m still the Woodchick. Flat as a board. Or a first grader.
It had stopped raining, and as we got out of the car, the reemerging sunlight hit Hope’s hair just so.
“Your hair is the most amazing shade,” my sister marveled.
Hope looked around with legit “Who, me?” cluelessness.
“I must know,” my sister pressed. “Is it your natural color?”
“Of course it is!” Hope replied. “Why would anyone willingly dye their hair the same color as Cheetos?”
My sister shook her head and sighed.
“Hope, your hair is the color of a tropical bird-of-paradise flower.”
Hope doesn’t fluster easily, but my sister’s compliment caught her totally off guard.
“Um. Gee. Thanks. Um.”
“And while we’re at it, Jessie, your flat-as-a-boardness, those long limbs, and that narrow waist is, like, the ideal body type in South Korea.”
“So you’re saying I should move to South Korea…?”
My sister hushed me up with a finger snap.
“I’m saying you both see yourselves all wrong,” she said. “You’re in transition! You’ll never be who you once were, but you’re still turning into who you will be. It’s an exciting time! Embrace it!”
Aha! So that’s what Bethany meant by IT List #3: Be a middle bloomer!
A flash of insight must have crossed my face because Bethany paused just long enough to smile at me. It wasn’t one of her attention-getting dazzlers, but a quiet upturn of the lips that’s rarer and more prized.
“And another thing,” my sister continued. “Hope is right about normal. It’s boring.”
She beckoned us to come closer, as if she were letting us in on something even more confidential than the Top Secret Pineville Junior High Crushability Quiz.
“That’s why I’m going to teach you how to fly the coop!”
“What the what?” Hope and I asked.
“Fly the coop,” she repeated. “You don’t know how to fly the coop?”
Unless she was referring to one of my infamous Mighty the Seagull dance moves, I had no idea what she was talking about.
“I shouldn’t be surprised you’ve never heard of it,” she said. “It’s a top secret square-dance strategy.”
Hope and I burst out laughing.
“Top secret square-dance strategy?” I asked. “There’s no strategy in square dancing. You just do what the caller tells you to do.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Jessie,” Bethany said knowingly. “My sorority flew the coop and won the Greek Week Do-Si-Do Rodeo when I was a sophomore. You said the dance is Friday, right?”
We nodded.
“If you can master this maneuver, your square is guaranteed to win the Hoedown Showdown.”
“But we don’t have a square anymore,” I said. “We’ve been dismissed.”
“You’ve got me and Mike,” Hope said. “And I know we can get the Scouts on board, too, because they don’t respect Sara’s leadership style.”
Even if the Scouts, Hope, and Basketball Mike joined me, that still left us one couple short of a square. Not to mention the fact that I kind of hated my partner at the moment. Neither of these details seemed to trouble my sister one bit.
“Technically, only two out of the eight in your square are allowed to know you’re flying the coop,” my sister explained. “Usually it’s a dancer and a partner, but it doesn’t have to be. You two will do just fine. So. Do you want me to teach it to you or not?”
I usually don’t like agreeing to things before I know what it is I’m agreeing to. But Hope looked pretty enthusiastic about flying the coop, so I decided to follow her open-minded example.
“Just promise not to yell at us like you do to the girls on your sorority dance team,” I said. “I’m tired of all the yelling.”
My sister promised. And I chose to believe her.
“All right. Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s fly the coop.”
Whatever that meant.
Unfortunately, I was no closer to getting it even after my sister’s half-hour lecture/lesson on the topic.
“If your square is truly working together,” Bethany said after she had shown us sample choreography, “you can do your own thing but, like, as a team.”
Hope nodded, so I did, too.
“That’s flying the coop.”
I’d started to wonder whether all my sister’s wisdom was lost without the yelling. Apparently not, because Hope, free spirit that she is, caught on to the concept much faster than I did.
“Spontaneous synchronization!”
Bethany beamed at her star student. “Exactly!”
They both looked eagerly at me. I felt compelled to prove I also understood.
“Um,” I said. “Synchronized spontaneity!”
This must have been the right answer because the next thing I knew all three of us were tangled up in a group hug.
“You can’t lose!” Bethany insisted as she waved good-bye to us.
“We can’t lose!” Hope said excitedly as we waved good-bye to Bethany.
They were confident we could pull it off. I agreed only in an attempt to match their level of enthusiasm.
“We can’t lose?”
I wasn’t very convincing.
“We can do this,” Hope said encouragingly. “Think about everything we manage to say to each other without saying a word.”
“But that’s between you and me,” I said. “What if no one else in our square catches on and we just look like two crazy people?”
Hope was thoroughly untroubled by this possibility.
“The hardest part,” Hope continued, “will be keeping quiet about it until Friday night!”
Um, not so hard for me, because I had no idea how to explain what it was we had supposedly just learned.
Hope swung her leg over my dad’s old bike she’d borrowed for the ride home. Even after adjusting the seat to its maximum height, my ten-speed had been too small for her. She’d looked like she was squeezing herself behin
d the handlebars of a toddler’s tricycle. Hope was, after all, the height of a full-grown man. And yet she carried herself without any of the gangliness usually associated with girls who are tall beyond their years.
I guess I was looking at her in a funny way she couldn’t translate.
“What?” she asked.
“I was just thinking how cool it would be to be so tall and graceful like you.”
Hope nearly fell off the bike. This would’ve been okay because she’d already strapped on a helmet.
“Are you kidding?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m not kidding.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what it was like to look at the tops of heads all day long! And my neck hurts! I’m twelve years old, and I need a chiropractor because I’m constantly looking down at everyone!”
I didn’t know this.
“I bet you envy Manda’s boobs, don’t you? Well, she’s got back pain even worse than I do! No wonder she’s so cranky. And you know why Sara is such a shopaholic? It’s because she keeps outgrowing her clothes!”
I thought about Manda’s mood swings and the broken zipper on Sara’s Chic Boutique dress. Hope’s observations made sense. I’d just never bothered to pay attention.
“And who cares if Scotty thinks you’re flat as a board! You wouldn’t be the awesome runner you are if you were built like anyone else.”
It’s true. I haven’t come across too many top-heavy distance runners.
Hope was shaking her head at me disappointedly. She and I were really getting somewhere friendshipwise. I couldn’t handle the thought that I’d blown it all with one stupid comment I’d meant as a compliment.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
“Of course not!” she said, laughing. “I’m just tired of everyone complaining about their appearance. It’s the Salvador Dalí in me, maybe. Normal is boring. I see beauty in oddity.”
She pushed the kickstand with her foot.
“We need to be more realistic about everyone else’s so-called advantages and more forgiving about our so-called shortcomings.”
“Or, tallcomings,” I said, “in your case.”
Thankfully, Hope laughed at my joke, so I laughed, too.
“You should listen to your sister,” Hope said as she pedaled down the driveway. “We’re in midbloom. Let’s embrace it!”