Puddin''

  I sit as far away from the action as I can and even wave off Millie when she tries to get me to sit a little closer, with her and Amanda.

  Never in a million years would I have believed you if you said that the school was holding a pep rally for the Shamrocks. This is the kind of recognition we always deserved but never dreamed we could have. In the past, pep rallies were strictly reserved for boys’ football and basketball and sometimes baseball. With all the buzz building about the team being one of the top contenders for State, I guess it’s hard for the school to keep pretending we’re no more than a second-tier pep squad but with more costumes. This weird sense of pride over everything we worked so hard for swells up in my chest, and for a moment I think I could cry.

  The moment is interrupted by the same sports-jam songs they play for the football and basketball rallies. They start up as the athletic director, Coach Culver, announces each of the girls one by one. I’d heard that after the shit list went public, a few were called in to the office for select questionable things, but the most anyone got was a slap on the wrist. With no real proof, the list is only hearsay.

  Today, the girls are in what we call our Lone Star outfits. White skirt with a matching jacket and gold trim. The whole look is topped off with white dance boots. It’s the uniform we use for all the various patriotic holiday parades we march in and for annual pictures. My mom and I both have portraits hanging in the upstairs hallway of us sitting in the splits on the football field, twenty years apart, in the same uniform.

  “Aaaaaaand of course we can’t forget our assistant and future captain for next year, Melissa Gutierrez!”

  Melissa waves to the crowd, focusing in on me.

  I flash her the finger, but she’s unfazed.

  But then I see Bryce walk in with his ever-faithful entourage of assholes, and that is a run-in I am definitely not looking forward to.

  I stand up. Yup. Totally cannot do this. Mama’s goodwill be damned.

  Rather than squeezing my way through the crowd, I jump the few feet off the side of the bleachers. My cowboy boots (if I have to attend this thing, I might as well wear stomping-around shoes) make a loud smacking sound just as Coach Culver announces Sam, but I barely notice because I have sufficiently startled the large, burly guy who was pacing beneath the bleachers and just so happens to be Mitch Lewis.

  “Uh, did you just fall from the sky?” he asks in a bit of a daze.

  “Definitely,” I say, stepping under the bleachers.

  Music—music I’d recognize anywhere—starts up, and I peer between random feet to catch a glimpse of the dance team performing the routine they’re taking to State. The routine I worked tirelessly on all summer with Sam and Melissa.

  “Of course the dance team would have to perform at their own pep rally. Don’t we have cheerleaders for that?” I roll my eyes. The cheerleading team. At least that’s one less thing I have to deal with now.

  “Please tell me there’s beef between the Shamrocks and the cheerleading team,” says Mitch.

  I laugh. “Oh, there is so much beef.”

  “Is it like the Sharks and the Jets? Do y’all have dance-offs in the school parking lot at night?”

  “Mitch Lewis!” I say, poking at his chest. “Did you just make a musical theater reference?”

  He smiles like a cat that’s been caught. “Listen,” he says, taking a step closer to me, because this time there’s no front desk to separate us. “One can have an appreciation for musical theater while also playing defensive tackle for the school football team.”

  “Well, that’s enlightening,” I say.

  “And to be honest,” he adds, “you don’t exactly strike me as a West Side Story kind of girl.”

  “Well, I’m not, but my mama is.”

  “I think our moms might get along,” he says.

  Outside the bleachers, the dance team is finishing up their routine, and now a few guys from a couple of the different boys’ teams have dressed up in some very poorly assembled costumes to do their own take on the Shamrocks’ routine. This is so demeaning.

  “So what are you hiding from down here?” I ask.

  “Who says I’m hiding?”

  I give him a knowing look. “You don’t just chill under the bleachers during a pep rally for no reason. Trust me,” I tell him. “I would know.”

  “So I guess we’re both hiding,” he says.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You could say my friends and I aren’t seeing eye to eye.”

  “Oh yeah?” I ask. “How come?”

  “I guess you could say I took your advice.”

  This pleases me. “Did you now? You found some new friends?”

  “Well, sort of. I don’t know. Patrick did some asshole thing—no different than all the asshole things he’s done every day since the day we met. So I told him it was an asshole thing and that doing it makes him an asshole.”

  I whistle. “I can’t imagine that went over very well.”

  He nods. “Hence the bleachers. Sometimes I feel bad, ya know, that it’s taken me so long to just tell the guy he’s a dick. I’ve known that guy since we were in diapers.”

  “You can’t expect the younger version of you to know who your friends are going to be. People change. Look at Bryce. He wasn’t always a dick.”

  “Uhhh.” Mitch grimaces. “He kinda was.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “Really?” I ask. “You think?”

  Mitch sighs. “Callie Reyes, blinded by love.”

  “Well, I was sort of a dick, too. Still kind of am.”

  Mitch doesn’t say anything. I wasn’t expecting him to completely refute me, but come on, man. “Who knows?” He shrugs. “Maybe Patrick will come around.”

  “Or maybe he won’t,” I say.

  “Well, if that’s the case, don’t forget you’re the one who told me to dump my only friends in this place.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure,” I joke. “I wouldn’t say I’m a shining example of a good friend. I guess I’ll have to step up my friend skills.”

  Mitch shakes his head, his teeth tugging on his bottom lip. “Maybe.” But his voice sounds doubtful.

  “Hey, about hanging out . . .” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop myself. “You want to go out sometime or something?” I try to keep my voice even, but I’m not used to really putting myself out there like this, and it’s got me sweating.

  “Like on a date? I—I thought you were grounded.”

  “I was. I am. Still. Kind of. But then not really.”

  “Uhhh . . .”

  I almost shout, “WHAT’S THERE TO THINK ABOUT?”

  Then he says, “I think, um . . . I don’t think that’d be a good idea right now.”

  I nod, but inside I’m shriveling up. No one has ever just rejected me like that. Why did he even bother asking me out awhile back if he was going to change his mind? “Okay. Well, uh, good luck hiding out?”

  “You too,” he says.

  The pep rally isn’t over yet, but I’m sure as hell not hanging out under these bleachers with him now.

  I turn on my heel and take the exit right outside the bleachers into the hallway.

  Maybe Bryce told him some horrible lie about me. Or even worse, maybe he told Mitch a horrible truth about me. It could be that Mitch just changed his mind all on his own, I guess. He asked me out at the gym in the moment, so maybe he’s had time to come to his senses since then.

  I think I might want something I can’t have, and that’s not a feeling I’m used to.

  After school, while I’m waiting outside for my mom to wrap up a few things, I plop down in the grass with my legs crossed and scroll through my phone to delete old pictures of Bryce and me. Time for some long-overdue housekeeping. Seeing him at school is awful enough.

  “Didn’t see you at the pep rally today.”

  I look up, shielding my eyes, until Melissa comes into focus. She still wears her Shamrock uniform, but her hat is stuffed i
nto her tote bag and she’s ditched the boots for flip-flops.

  “Oh, I think you saw me.” I lift my hand up to give her the middle finger. “This jogging your memory?”

  “Ah,” she says. “That’s more like it. I didn’t recognize you without your shitty attitude.”

  I grin. “Never leave home without it.”

  “You know, I actually feel bad for you.” She shakes her head, an incredulous look on her face.

  “Wow, that’s so generous of you, but I’m good without your misguided pity.”

  She continues, “Whatever moral fiber you have is so flimsy that you would just dump the deepest, darkest secrets of people you once called friends.”

  “Friends?” I ask. “You mean acquaintances who let me take the fall for something we all did?”

  “Maybe keep it down?” she asks, looking around.

  “Nope.” I shake my head. “And besides, no one got in trouble for any of that stuff.”

  “You don’t even get it. Maybe no one got in trouble, but you really humiliated some of those girls. Sam and Jess are both mortified. Natalie, Lara, and Addison are all in serious trouble at home. You really screwed everyone over. I mean, Bethany came to school the next day to a locker full of Q-tips.”

  “How horrific,” I say, voice flat.

  She shakes her head, her voice dropping low. “Just so you know, my sister got wind of that list, too. She’s not even talking to me right now. I’m not allowed to go to my niece’s birthday party.”

  Up until now I was fine, but I have to admit that this one gets me in the gut. But I’m determined not to let it show. I almost blurt an apology, but instead I sit there, unmoving. I’ve never been that great of a sister, but the idea of Kyla or Claudia finding out I’d done something like that to them makes me feel a little bit nauseous.

  “Whatever, Callie. You’re off the team, you lost captain, and you’re a shitty human being. I guess that’s enough to live with.” She walks off to where Sam and the rest of the team are waiting for her at the track.

  The moment she walks off, I push my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose to let them conceal the tears burning at the corners of my eyes. Anger, guilt, shame. They all bubble to the surface at once.

  Millie

  Twenty-Five

  After work one night, I drag Callie to the Crafty Corner to pick up upholstery fabric my mom special-ordered to redo our curtains this summer.

  She shuffles in behind me with her nose glued to her phone. “What are you looking at?” I ask as I pull her just out of the way seconds before meeting a pincushion display head-on.

  She shakes her head and huffs. “Just waiting for the stupid results from the state dance competition.”

  “Oh.” There’s that guilt again, sticking to the inside of my lungs like August humidity. “How are they doing?”

  “I don’t know yet. This website is so damn slow.” Her voice changes as she takes in our surroundings.

  One entire wall at the Crafty Corner is dedicated to yarn, while the main floor is rows and rows of every type of fabric you can imagine, and on the other side of the store is everything from raw wood dollhouse supplies to glitter paint to scrapbooking scissors.

  “This place is a little intense,” she says.

  I can’t hide my giddiness. “You know how in Beauty and the Beast when Belle sees the library for the first time?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s how I feel walking into this place. Like the possibilities are endless.”

  “Really?” she asks. “Because this place just makes me feel like the possibilities are really, really overwhelming.”

  I click my tongue. “I’ll turn you into a crafter if it’s the last thing I do.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Hey, speaking of you aggressively trying to manage my life for me, have you, uh, seen Mitch around? Like at the gym?”

  I raise my eyebrows but keep my mouth shut, because oh my goodness, I think she actually, truly does have a crush on Mitch Lewis, and if that’s the case, my instincts could not have been more right.

  Callie waves her finger in my face. “If you make a thing of this, I swear I’ll never talk to you about boys again. Or do whatever weird craft things you think you can get me to do!”

  “Howdy!” calls Flora from the back of the store, where she cuts scraps of fabric for the clearance bin. Flora is sort of me and my mom’s crafting spiritual leader. She wears her same navy-blue smock every day with her name embroidered over the chest, and she is always armed with her red scissors and the mini ballpoint pen dangling from the long, thin gold chain around her neck. She taught me how to thread my first bobbin and is actually sort of a big deal on the West Texas craft-show circuit.

  “Hiya, Flora!” I call back. “Just here for my mom’s special order.”

  She snaps her fingers. “I’ll be right back!”

  I turn back to Callie. “So Mitch. Okay. Mitch has been coming in early mornings before school starts.” I pause for a minute to wait for her response. “I could, of course, drop a hint that maybe he should come in one afternoon.”

  “No,” she says defiantly. “Definitely not. No meddling. Promise me.”

  I gasp. “What if me, you, Mitch, and Malik all went on a double date?”

  Her eyes narrow. “No meddling.”

  Since that’s a promise I can’t keep, I change the subject. “Any word on the dance competition?”

  She pulls her phone out and waits a moment for it to update. Her whole demeanor changes in an instant as she slumps against the bolts of fabric. “They won,” she says flatly. “They’re going to Nationals.” She shakes her head. “Those lucky-ass bitches. How is it possible for me to be so happy and so disappointed at the same time?”

  “Who’s going to Nationals?” Flora asks, her voice bubbling with anticipation, but by the looks of Callie you’d think she just asked who died.

  “The Shamrocks,” I tell her. “The school dance team.”

  Flora claps her hands together. “Oh, how wonderful! I’ll have to make some signs for the shop window!”

  Callie sighs and slides her phone into her pocket. “Are we done here?”

  “Just as soon as I pay.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside.” Her voice cracks on that last word.

  I feel so bad for her that she couldn’t be there with them.

  After I pay, I spend the rest of the drive with a very silent, brooding Callie, as I try to dream up ways to cheer her up. Just as she’s getting out of the car, it hits me—the perfect remedy. “Your birthday!” I exclaim so loudly that I scare her, and she nearly trips getting out of the car.

  “Yes,” she says. “I do have one of those. Once a year. Just like everyone else.”

  “Let me throw you a party,” I beg.

  She stands outside the open passenger door and shakes her head. “No can do. At my dad’s this weekend.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe we can do something next weekend.”

  She studies me for a moment. “I think I’d rather just keep things simple, if that’s okay, but thanks for the ride, Millie.”

  That night, after Malik and I proofread each other’s AP Psych essays, I open up my notebook to dig into my journalism-camp personal statement again. For background noise, I turn on The Princess Diaries. I never get tired of the way Julie Andrews says Genovia.

  “Genovia.” I let each syllable drag, trying to pronounce it as regally as she does.

  What would Julie Andrews write? Just as I pick up my pen, ready to channel the one and only Ms. Andrews, my phone buzzes.

  CALLIE: I guess y’all could come over to my dad’s.

  CALLIE: It’s far.

  CALLIE: Probably not even worth the drive.

  I laugh to myself. Surely by now Callie has to know that an out-of-town drive is no match for my determination. Especially in the face of an impending birthday.

  MILLIE: You’re talking to the girl who once road tripped hours on a school night for a Dolly Parton
drag show. Your dad’s house is barely an hour away. We’ll be there.

  CALLIE: Wow. Dolly. Parton. Drag. Show. Those are four words I never expected you to say in one sentence.

  MILLIE: Don’t tell my mom, but it was more life-affirming than any sermon I’ve ever heard.

  CALLIE: Millie, Millie, Millie. Always breaking your mama’s rules.

  I drop my phone onto my desk and gasp. “That’s it!” It’s a true eureka moment.

  I take my GIRL BOSS pencil and begin to write.

  Sometimes we have to break the rules to get what we want. But now I think it’s time we change them.

  Callie

  Twenty-Six

  My abuela’s house is a tiny three-bedroom bungalow on acres of land. Soon after my parents divorced, my abuelo died on a Sunday afternoon while taking a nap in front of the TV. I don’t remember him as well as Claudia does. My great-grandmother, who was still alive at the time, said at the funeral that he left this world much more peacefully than he entered it. And I guess if you’re going to die (because we all have to eventually), that’s a good way to go.

  After he died, though, Abuela couldn’t let go of this house she’d spent almost her entire married life in, so rather than forcing her into something she didn’t want to do, my dad moved back home to take care of the house and the property—and Abuela too, even if she swears she doesn’t need it.

  My dad grabs my bag from out of the truck bed, and I follow him inside through the kitchen door on the side of the house.

  “She’s here!” my dad calls as he walks in.

  Abuela pushes past him and proceeds to squeeze my cheeks and then almost every other part of my body that’s squeezable. Sometimes I think my abuela’s memory is all in her hands, and if she can’t touch it, she’ll never truly know it. “Please tell me why the hell you haven’t called to update me on your life. Everything I hear is secondhand information. Callie broke up with her boyfriend. Callie has a new job. Callie has new friends.”

  I look up at her. “Because I’m an awful person? And really with the guilt trip?”