Best Friend Next Door (10 page)

Hannah nods like she hadn’t thought about that before. “My, uh, birth mom never wanted kids,” she says quietly. “She gave me up to my dad when I was born. I’ve never talked about that to anyone before. Not even Sophie.”

Mom C says I always have a comment or question about everything. But at this moment, I can’t think of a single thing to say.

“They’ve been working on the adoption for a while,” Hannah says. “It’s going to be finalized soon. We’re waiting for a court date any day now.”

“Wow,” I say. “Congratulations.”

“I guess.” Hannah sits on her hands and rocks side to side. “I’m scared, though.”

“Me too,” I say.

“I’m glad we’re Og Twins,” Hannah says. “I feel like this is what it means to be best friends. To tell each other things we wouldn’t tell anyone else.”

Best friends. I’ve been thinking it. She said it.
Best friends.

“Me too,” I say.

Hannah stretches out her foot and kicks the barf basin under the cot.

“I couldn’t look at that for one more second,” she says, laughing.

The next day is Saturday and we practice hard. Coach Missy has us do the usual warm-ups of freestyle, backstroke, and freestyle again. Then we get into kicking with the board while she’s timing us, which is brutal for me because my legs are short (I’m much better when it’s all about the arms). Then Coach Missy has us do breast and free sprints with descends, which means our times have to be faster with each lap.

By the end of practice, my upper arms are sore and my neck is stiff. I stand under the shower for several minutes, trying to decide what I want to do when I get home. Eat (I’m so hungry) or sleep (I’m so tired). Or can I eat and sleep at the same time?

“Too hot to hoot!”
Hannah sings when I finally wrap myself in a towel and meet her at the lockers. She’s dressed and packing her wet bag.

“Huh?” I ask.

Hannah snaps her goggles at me, but they hit a locker instead. “You’re
too hot to hoot
. A palindrome.”

“Ah.” I grab my heap of clothes, sit on a bench, and start getting dressed. It’s not easy to tug on clothes under a towel but that’s how we do it. “I’m just glad I got through those sprints.”

“And I’m glad practice is over,” Hannah says. She looks in the mirror and attempts to gather her hair into a ponytail. I’ve noticed that it’s started to get longer. “I didn’t want to come today.”

“Why not?” I ask. As much as it can be exhausting, I still love swim practice.

“Volleyball is so much more fun,” Hannah says. She shakes her hair around her shoulders again. “So is basketball. So is eating. Did I tell you I heard about a restaurant in New York City that specializes in peanut butter? Cinnamon peanut butter … maple peanut butter … spicy peanut—”

“I’m so hungry!” I say. “Don’t talk about peanut butter right now.”

We both laugh and then hurry into the lobby of the YMCA to meet her dad.

After lunch, I’m in my room when Hannah knocks on the door and then walks right in. That’s typical for us these days. We’re always running back and forth between each other’s houses.

“What’s up?” I say. I finally unpacked my ribbons from my swim meets in Captiva and I’m hanging them above my bed. I was going to use nails, but Mom C suggested thumbtacks instead.

“Cool ribbons,” Hannah says. “That’s a lot of firsts.”

“Mostly breaststroke. Some medleys, too.” It’s true that I’ve placed first a lot. People say that if you want to be a serious swimmer you have to be tall with long arms and legs, but being short hasn’t hurt me so far.

“So,” Hannah says, handing me a thumbtack. “I’ve been thinking about it and we have to tell your moms.”

I turn to her. Is she saying what I think she’s saying? “Tell them what?”

“About what’s going on at school.” Hannah gestures toward the door. “Like … now.”

I shake my head quickly. I seriously don’t want to do this.

“You can do it, Emme.” She points to my neat row of ribbons. “You’re a winner.”

I feel like the opposite of a winner. But I also get what Hannah is saying and so I set a second-place ribbon (breaststroke, twenty-five meters) back in the shoe box, run into the bathroom to pee, and then follow her downstairs.

Mom J and Mom C are in the backyard, digging holes to plant bulbs. They’ve become obsessed with daffodil bulbs and tulip bulbs and how you have to plant them in the ideal location on the ideal day in the fall with the ideal low-nitrogen fertilizer.

As Hannah pushes open the back door, I drag slowly behind her. I think I have to pee again.

“Claire? Julia?” Hannah says.

Mom J wipes her hands on her jeans and looks over at Mom C, who leans her shovel against the tree. “What’s up?”

“Maybe we can all sit down,” Hannah says, steering me toward the picnic table. “Something’s going on at school. With Emme.”

As we slide into the table, I keep telling myself
you’re a winner, you’re a winner
. But I’m definitely feeling more like a loser, just like they wrote on the collage.

“The thing is,” Hannah says, “Ms. Linhart is terrible. And some girls in Emme’s class are being awful to her. Gina and Alexa and Haley. I know them and they’re all really mean. They’re making fun of Emme. They even ruined her collage. They wrote something bad on it.”

“Oh, Emme,” Mom J says. “Have you told anyone? Why didn’t you tell us?”

I glance at Hannah and she nods encouragingly. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” I say quietly. “I told Hannah. And I told Leesa a little.”

“What did Leesa say?” Mom J asks.

“To be true to myself,” I say. “And to keep up the good vibes.”

This time Mom C gives Mom J a look. Leesa is Mom C’s older sister’s daughter. I think she drives both my moms a little crazy.

“Does Ms. Linhart know?” Mom C asks. “Have you talked about it with her?”

“No,” I say. “But she has to see it.”

“What did they do to the collage?” Mom C asks.

I shake my head. I don’t want to say it out loud. “It’s over. I already threw it away.”

Mom J clears her throat and then sits up straight. “First of all,” she says in her no-nonsense lawyer voice, “thank you, Hannah, for looping us in. There’s a lot we can do. You’re talking to a journalist and a litigator, as well as two moms who would do anything to fight for their kid.”

I bite the insides of my cheeks. “But I don’t want to fight,” I say. “It’ll just make it worse.”

“When Mom C says
fight
,” Mom J explains, “she doesn’t mean we’re going to actually
fight
. She means we’ll stand up for you. It can be a quiet kind of fighting. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

We all look over at Butterball, scratching his claws against a wooden fence at the edge of the yard.

“Don’t say that!” Hannah shouts. “What if Butterball understands people language?”

“He’ll be traumatized for life,” I say, attempting to smile.

By Sunday night, everything is different.

I can’t believe it. I really can’t.

After dinner, Mom J and Mom C invite Hannah over for homemade crumble-top apple pie. As Mom J passes out forks and Mom C scoops vanilla ice cream onto our plates, Hannah hands me a blue ribbon that she’s made from construction paper. It says
First Place
in silver marker.

“For your wall,” Hannah says. “It’s the most artistic thing I’ve done all year.”

“First-place
what
?” I ask.

Hannah tugs her hair into a ponytail. This time she gets most of it into the rubber band. “Whatever kind of winner you want,” she says.

I grin at Hannah. Because right now I
do
feel like a winner.

After our talk yesterday, Mom C emailed the principal and the guidance counselor at Greeley Elementary and arranged an emergency phone meeting. They even had Ms. Linhart on the call at some point. When I heard that, it made me so nervous my hands were shaking. At first, the guidance counselor said she could have a talk with Gina and the others on Monday, which my moms said definitely needed to happen. Even so, my moms didn’t want me in a classroom with them anymore.

This morning, the principal called to say I’m being switched to Ms. Chung’s fifth-grade class. Effective
tomorrow
! Mr. Bryce’s class doesn’t have room but there’s a girl from swim team, Jillian, who has Ms. Chung and says she’s really nice.

“This pie is so good,” Hannah says, balancing an enormous bite on her fork. “I can’t believe we picked these apples ourselves.”

Mom J smiles at Hannah. “Thank you again for watching out for Emme. I’m so glad you both came to us.”

“Of course,” Hannah says, her mouth full of pie. “The thing is, Emme is …”

As Hannah chews and swallows, I know she’s going to say it.

“Too hot to hoot?” I ask, grinning.

Hannah laughs so hard she starts coughing and has to chug her entire glass of milk. “That’s exactly what I was going to say!”

Mom C shakes her head. “Sometimes I feel like you girls speak your own language.”

Hannah and I look at each other and shrug. I guess we sort of do.

Later, as I’m walking Hannah across the yard, we make a plan for tomorrow morning. Mom J is coming along to meet with the principal, and Hannah says she’ll go into Ms. Chung’s class with me. I’m nervous about starting in a new class in November, but anything is better than facing Ms. Linhart’s room again.

We reach Hannah’s side porch. “Remember what you told me?” I ask, hugging my arms around my chest. It’s getting wintery cold out, and I’m just wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. “About how Margo is adopting you?

Hannah nods. She’s got a jacket on, but she squeezes her arms around her chest, too.

“I realized something,” I say. “We’re both going to have one birth parent and one adoptive parent.”

It’s dark out, but I can see by the porch light that Hannah is staring at me.

“My mom Julia had me and my mom Claire adopted me,” I explain.

When Hannah breathes, a puff of cold air comes out of her mouth. “Og Twins,” she says quietly.

“Forever,” I say.

Then we both dash into our houses.

I
aim, leap, and shoot the basketball from the end of the driveway. Of course I miss.

“R!”
Uncle Peter shouts, scooping up the ball and dribbling it around in triumphant circles.

“No fair!” I shriek, but I’m totally smiling.

It’s Thursday after school and Uncle Peter and I are playing H-O-R-S-E in the driveway. It’s not that cold for early December, maybe high forties, and we’re running around so much that I’m getting warm in my hoodie.

Uncle Peter shoots again, but he misses.

“Your turn, Hannah Banana,” he says, grinning as he passes the ball to me. I love spending time with my uncle. He’s my dad’s younger brother. He’s a blonder, goofier version of my dad. He doesn’t have kids of his own, so I’m the closest he’s got. Usually he watches me on Mondays, but Margo has an appointment with her obstetrician, which is a doctor that takes care of pregnant women, so she switched him to Thursday.

I dribble the ball over to my sweet spot. It’s right under the hoop, a little to the left. When I shoot from here I get a basket almost every time. Because of this, my uncle already has an
H
. The way H-O-R-S-E works is that you shoot from a certain location. If you get a basket, your opponent has to shoot and make it from that exact same spot. If they don’t make it, they get a letter from the word
horse
. Whoever gets
H-O-R-S-E
first loses. The problem is, Uncle Peter is over six feet tall and he shows no mercy. Whenever it’s his turn, he’ll shoot from way far away. That’s how I have my
H
and
O
and now this latest
R
. This time, though, I’m determined to beat him.