Authors: Carmen Rodrigues
We stop at our lockers. I undo my combination lock and peel off my layers. I keep my scarf wrapped around my neck because it’s so cold in the hallways. Even my long sleeves and thick sweater don’t keep me warm.
“Oh, please, Jess, you’re not wearing that. You look like you have no neck.” Lola snatches my scarf and tosses it into her locker. “There.” She leans against the metal. “That’s better . . .
Oh, look.
” Her eyes narrow. She points across the hall.
It’s Tommy, his arm casually draped across some blond freshman with jagged gray eyeliner and matching skintight jeans. Lola sighs loudly. “What does he see in her?”
“Don’t know,” I say, even though her slightness, pale skin, and light hair instantly remind me of Ellie.
“Isn’t he still seeing your sister?” Lola’s tone is sour.
“No clue.” I haven’t liked Tommy since he called me annoying at Sarah’s twelfth birthday party and continued to be mean to me until I grew boobs. That’s when he started playing nice, and I realized he was one of those guys who is never kind unless he wants something from you.
Lola must realize Tommy’s fascination with boobs; she arches her back against her locker, her breasts protruding like ready-to-launch rockets. “Hey, Tommy.”
“Hey, Lola.” Tommy smiles, whispers something into the blond girl’s ear, and just like that she disappears. She’s barely gone before he turns to stare at Lola’s sweater. “Come on,” he says, then walks away. He doesn’t look back to see if she’s following, but Lola is unfazed. She smiles triumphantly at me, tosses her bag into her locker, and slams the door shut.
“Lola,” I say, “he’s walking in the wrong direction. Mrs. Medina’s class is this way.” But Lola either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care, because she’s half skipping, half running after him.
Now I am alone in the hallway. I undo Lola’s combination lock, grab my scarf, and wrap it protectively around my neck. Then I stand there, feeling slightly paralyzed. This panic is always worse in the morning. It’s something about all these people shoving and pushing, their backpacks full and eyes half open as they rush to first-period classes, that makes me feel like there’s less oxygen here.
Still, I have to get to class, so I start walking slowly, my eyes glued to the linoleum floor.
Somewhere near the classroom, a warm hand touches my arm. At first I think it’s Lola, but the hand is too gentle. I raise my eyes. Clara Lee, our sophomore-class president, is standing beside me. We’re not really friends, but I’ve known her since middle school. She smiles. I try to smile back, but it doesn’t work, so I shrug my shoulders, and say, “Hey . . .”
“Hey!” she says. “Going to Mrs. Medina’s class?”
I nod, and she slips her arm through mine. “If we don’t hustle, we’re going to be late!” she says. And then we’re moving briskly through the halls. The final bell rings as we cross the classroom’s threshold. Clara releases my arm and says, “That was close!”
I sit down at my desk. Behind me, Lola’s seat is empty. Mrs. Medina writes on the dry-erase board. Her fingers are quick and hypnotic. Watching her makes me tired. I put my head
down, twirl my pen, and think about the things that change us. Maybe the divorce and what Tommy did to Lola last summer changed her? Maybe what happened between Ellie and me changed me, too?
The second tardy bell rings. Mrs. Medina takes attendance. When she asks why Lola isn’t in class, I pretend I don’t hear.
T
his emptiness . . .
FIVE YEARS BEFORE.
Our worlds collided on my twelfth birthday. One minute I was running home from middle school, backpack banging furiously against my shoulders, and the next I was lying in a heap on Mr. Lumpnick’s yard, textbooks and papers scattered around me. By the time I looked up, she was already standing above me, pulling leaves out of her blond hair.
“What the fuck?” she said, and kicked me lightly with her shoe. “Seriously? Why the eff don’t you watch where you’re going?”
She was just a scrawny girl with stringy blond hair and orblike blue eyes, and it took a few seconds for me to accept that I had hit her and not something much larger, like a car or a tree.
“I’m s-sorry,” I stuttered, pulling myself to my knees. “I didn’t
see you.” This was true. When I’d cut the corner of our block, I had been too busy thinking about other things—my birthday party’s to-do list, that new outfit I’d wear, my elaborate fantasy of how this party would change my very unpopular life—to notice insignificant details like who was standing in the middle of the normally empty sidewalk.
“Well, you should watch where you’re going,” she repeated.
Well, you should watch where you’re standing,
I thought, but didn’t dare say that out loud. Politeness was a big deal in my family. But obviously not in hers, from the way she stared at me as I gathered my things.
I zipped up my bag, only then realizing my left hand was empty. The birthday balloons my mom had had delivered to the school—the ones that had made the mean-girl patrol stare at me with envy—were gone. I sank back onto the grass, feeling mostly defeated.
“It’s your birthday?” she asked.
I lifted my head. “How’d you know?”
She pointed mysteriously to the sky, where the balloons hovered above us, caught in a bright explosion of golden leaves. She jumped up, catching the tiniest thread of ribbon between her fingers. She gave a firm tug, and the balloons shot downward, popping with a sudden hiss on the tree’s sharp branches.
“Here.” She handed me the deflated corpses. “It’s my birthday too. Well, tomorrow.” She tossed blond hairs out of her eyes.
“Oh,” I said, my eyes moving between her and the dead balloons.
“Yeah, weird, huh?” She kicked me again with her shoe. “Are you just going to sit there all day?”
I stood, pulled my bag onto my shoulders, and tried to brush the mud and grass off my jeans. I began to walk toward home, the dead balloons dragging behind me. She followed.
“So, are you having a party?”
“Yep” was all I said, until she nudged me with her elbow. Then I added, “At six. You?”
“No.” She picked a blade of grass from my hair and handed it to me. “My mom’s going through this thing. This bad divorce thing, so I think she forgot or something.” She shrugged her shoulders like it wasn’t a big deal, but I could tell it was. My mom never forgot birthdays. Right then she was probably in our yellow kitchen, cooking my favorite birthday dinner—pot roast and twice-baked potatoes.
“That sucks, but, listen . . .” I pointed toward my house. “I gotta, you know . . .” I started up my walkway, but it wasn’t long before I heard the sound of crushed leaves behind me. Seconds later, she stood once again in my path.
“Hey, can I come to your party?”
“Huh?” I avoided eye contact, hoping she’d get the hint, but when I finally looked back at her, she was still waiting expectantly. I coughed and said, “I mean, I would, but . . .”
She looked away then, her shoulders rising up and down the way Jessie’s did when she was embarrassed. “Oh, yeah. I totally get it. I’ve just been gone all summer with this thing between my mom and stepdad, but my brother told me about your family moving in and, you know, he said you were cool. . . . And I just thought since we, like, live right there . . .” She pointed across the street toward a green ranch-style home, where a boy with a pitch-black faux hawk sat, smoking a cigarette.
“Wait. That’s where you live? That’s your brother?” Even if Mom called him a punk, he was still the most sought-after boy in the neighborhood. That was probably because he was seriously beautiful, with the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen.
She eyed me warily. “Yeah.”
I placed a hand to my lower belly, where an unfamiliar tingling sensation had begun.
“Why are you smiling?”
I straightened my lips. “I’m—I’m not. I—I was just thinking that you should come.”
“Yeah?” Her blue eyes lit up.
“Yeah, and . . .” I shifted nervously. “Why don’t you bring your brother, too?”
She smiled as if she’d almost expected this. “What about Tommy? He lives in our pool house with his mom. I go to the same private school with him this year. His mom’s a secretary there, you know, but next year I’m going back to public school, just like you.” She sighed, like she hated having to explain herself. “I mean, Tommy and me both, probably.”
“Um, yeah. Okay.” I was too busy thinking about her brother calling me cool to care about any of these details. “Just bring anybody you’d like.”
Her smile grew. “Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Sarah,” I said. “What’s yours?”
She shoved more blond hairs from her eyes. “I’m Ellie, and that,” she said, glancing back at her house, “is Jake.”
* * *
A few hours later, Jess twirled around the basement, her blue-and-yellow skirt blending into one big rainbow that made me feel dizzy and happy at the same time. The party had started thirty minutes earlier, but still there was no sign of Ellie or Jake.
Jess stopped spinning long enough to tighten her pigtails and stare suspiciously at the crowded basement. “Did Mom say you could have this many guests?”
I gave her a look. Popularity at Smith Middle didn’t come with a little sister attached, especially one who acted like a goody-goody. “Jess, come on. It’s totally lame for you to be here. And Mom already told you. Okay?”
The doorbell rang. Jess’s head shot up. Mom had specifically asked her to be the doorman tonight so that she would feel included but be kept occupied upstairs. “But you’ll tell me everything tonight?”
“Promise.” I nudged her forward. “Go.”
Alone again, I counted heads, trying hard to ignore the possibility that Jake was about to walk down my stairs. Twenty-seven kids were present. Some of them popular, like Billy Mancuso, who had the best dimpled smile, and Vanessa Gomez, who was probably the prettiest girl in our class, and Tori Levitts, who was her much taller and not-so-pretty best friend.
It was hard not to wonder why they had come to my party. So far life at Smith Middle had consisted of my randomly walking up to groups of kids and hovering awkwardly, or lurking around campus feeling lonely and embarrassed.
It was that desperation and my mom’s suggestion that I
try harder
that led to my having a birthday party. My father said to aim high with the guest list,
because why not?
So I wrote out seven-teen invitations, inviting the more popular kids, while
never actually believing they’d show up. But here they were—along with ten other kids I hadn’t invited—and many had set down colorfully wrapped boxes on the gift table.
I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. Nobody had really talked to me except, oddly, to ask when Ellie would arrive. Twenty-seven kids in my basement, and I still had zero friends.
Suddenly the basement door opened. The kitchen light crept down the stairs, pooling around my feet. Above, Jess’s ponytails swung with excitement. “You got more guests!” she sang dramatically.
Three bodies pushed passed her, the light like bright halos above their heads. Ellie, dressed in tight blue hip-hugging jeans and a perfectly faded
Mork & Mindy
T-shirt, led the way downstairs. Another kid trailed behind her, a goofy grin on his face. Jake followed, in skinny jeans, a frayed T-shirt that barely fit, and his trademark pout.
Everyone stopped talking. The music seemed to fade. I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, Jess sang out in that soprano voice of hers, “Mom wants to talk to you! Now!”
Behind me, a handful of people snickered.
“Does she always sing everything like that? It’s
annoying
,” the kid with Ellie sang back, and everyone but Jess, who quickly moved away from the doorway, laughed.
“She gets really excited,” I said, halfheartedly defending her.
He handed me a daisy wet with dew. “Happy birthday,
Sar-rah
,” he said, dragging out my name in a squeaky voice that may have belonged to him or some ironic version of a character he was playing.
“That’s Tommy,” Ellie said, shoving him. “And this”—Ellie handed me a simple brown box with my name written across the top in bright purple calligraphy—“is from me and Jake.” She nudged her brother with her elbow.
“Yeah,” Jake muttered. He rubbed the bottom of his eye, smearing some of his kohl eyeliner.
“What is it?” I asked, shaking the box.
Ellie’s face lit up. “It’s a
Happy Days
T-shirt. Jake found it and some other cool stuff”—she pointed to her own T-shirt—“last week on the curb in front of Old Mrs. Sawyer’s house. What a waste. Right?”
“Oh . . . ,” I said, not quite sure how to react to a gift picked out of a garbage can. I glanced around, and realized everyone was staring at us—Tori going so far as to wave at Jake, who simply averted his eyes.
“Do you like
Happy Days
?” Ellie asked.
“I bet she’s never heard of it,” Tommy scoffed.
“Who hasn’t?” I said, although I hadn’t, and walked a few
feet away to place the box and daisy on the gift table.