Wishing on a Star (4 page)

Attendance is taking a long time, and my mind wanders to Dorinda. We’re meeting her at noon, outside the cafeteria. I wonder what shell be like….

Mr. Drezform blows his nose, causing Chuchie to giggle real loud, and Derek Hambone turns around and grins at me, giving me a big wink. Heavens to Bootsy—Derek has a gold tooth in front!

Chuchie dissolves into giggles, and I give her a hard elbow to the ribs.

“Hey, Derek,” I say, “what’s with the haircut?”

“Oh, you mean the letters?” he asks, giving me his goofy, gold-tooth smile again.

“Yeah.”

“It’s my initials,” he explains proudly. “Derek Ulysses Hambone.”

I bite down hard on my lip to keep from losing it completely. “You know, Derek, it also stands for something else.”

“It does?” he asks, clueless. “What?”

“Figure it out,
scemo
,” I quip, using the Italian word for idiot.

“Okay, I will,” he says. “And
shame
on you back—even though, you know, you are cute.” Another goofy grin, and he turns away again.

Great. Just what I need on my first day in high school: a fashion disaster with a geeky smile and a gold tooth who
likes me
.

I can tell it’s only a matter of time till he asks me out. Someone call 911, please.

”It’s time for
lonchando
,” Chanel says as we wait outside the cafeteria for Dorinda.

“I’ve got an idea for our Kats and Kittys Halloween Bash,” I tell Chuchie. The Kats and Kittys Klub, which we belong to, does all kinds of phat stuff, and me and Chanel had been talking about the Halloween Bash ever since the Fourth of July “We should throw it at the Cheetah-Rama, where Mom goes dancing. What do you think?”

“
Está bien
. I forgot to tell you. I saw those girls from Houston on Sunday down in Soho.”

“What girls?”

“’Member the twins who were at the Kats Fourth of July Bash? What were their names?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re the one who was talking to them,” I say, feeling a twinge of jealousy. She’s talking about those wanna-be singers who showed up and sang when nobody asked them to.

“Aquanette and Anginette Walker,” I mumble. Of course, I do remember, because I remember everything.

Despite my flinching, Chuchie adds, “They can sing. They said they’re coming to the Kats meeting on Friday. They moved here to go to LaGuardia Performing Arts High. That’s where we shoulda went.”

“We didn’t go because you were too scared to audition, ’cause of your mother, remember?” I point out.

If Chanel didn’t go, I wasn’t going to audition by myself, but yeah, I’d wanted to go there, too. I wonder if the twins had to audition to get into LaGuardia. Or maybe they had “connects.” They sure had the nerve to floss by singing at the Fourth of July barbecue grill, with the mosquitoes flying in their hair.

“True. They can sing,” I say.

“And they can eat, too. The one in the red top ate seven hot dogs,” Chanel says with a grimace.

“Which one has the name like the hair spray?”

“I can’t remember, but they both had on a lot of that,” Chanel says, giggling. “I thought maybe the one in the red top and white shorts had a television antenna up in that hairdo, it was so high.”

Dorinda waves as soon as she sees us. I see she has taken my advice and is wearing a black turtleneck top with the khaki boot-leg pants. “Hi!” she exclaims, all excited. “I’m really, really
hungry
.”

She is so tiny and pretty. I mean munchkin tiny. She doesn’t look like a freshman at all. (She looks about twelve years old. For true.) She is also about the same color as Chanel—kinda like mochachino—and her hair is corn-rowed in the front, then the rest is just freestyle curly From what I can see, she doesn’t have a weave, unless it’s an
unbeweavable
one, as Mom would say Mom can “spook a weave” from the other side of the tracks. And I don’t mean the ones in the subway, hello.

“Oh, word, I get to feel even shorter now,” says Dorinda, squeezing between me and Chanel. “And I’m wearing heels!”

“We’re three shorties,” giggles Chanel, trying to make Dorinda feel better. Dorinda is even shorter than us. I feel so much taller with her around. I could get used to this.

“Here comes Derek,” I mumble under my breath. “Don’t look at him,” I plead with Dorinda.

Derek dips down the hallway and smirks in our direction as he passes. “Hey, Cheetah Girl,” he hisses, winking at me. “I’m workin’ on that puzzle you gave me.” Mercifully, he keeps going.

Dorinda doesn’t miss a thing. “Who’s that?” she asks, squinching up her little nosy nose.

“That’s Derek Hambone from our homeroom class.”

“He’s got on enough letters to teach Daffy Duck the alphabet,” Dorinda says, chuckling.

“You are funny.” Chuchie giggles. “You should see the way Galleria was looking at Derek in homeroom.”

“Oh, don’t try it,
señorita
,” I counter. “Duh!”

“
Cheetah Girl—
that’s kinda cool. You two are definitely blowing up the spots.” Dorinda chuckles, fingering my cheetah backpack and reading the metal letters on the straps. ‘Toto in New York’? What’s that?”

“It’s my mom’s boutique—Toto in New York … Fun in Diva Sizes—down in Soho,” I say. I notice that her tapestry backpack with happy faces is fly, too.

“What street is it on?” she asks me.

“West Broadway, off Broome Street,” I tell her. “My mom makes these and sells them in her store.”

“Really?”

“Really. She’s a dope designer. Nobody makes clothes in diva sizes like she does. See how fat his stomach is?” I add, patting my backpack’s paunchy stomach, “and the straps are leather, not pleather, like they put on the cheesy backpacks they sell on Fourteenth Street.”

“How do you know it’s a he?” Dorinda asks, her slanty brown eyes getting even slantier. Definitely Cheetah material.

“’Cause he eats more.” I laugh, stuffing my textile design book into his fat paunch, then zip it up.

Dorinda has intense eyes, which she now focuses on Chuchie’s cheetah. “You got one, too, huh?”

Chuchie nods her head and grins. “Whatever Secret Agent Bubbles gets, I get.”

“You wish, you bumbling bourgeois detective!”

Chuchie hits me with her backpack.

“Oh, that’s the top you said you were gonna wear,” Dorinda says, turning to me. “What’s it say?”

“Powder to the People. Grace is on the case. Will is chill. Sean is a fawn. I’m Fierce, You’re Fierce,” I say, pointing all over my top. “Whatever supa-licious things we come up with. Me and Chanel marked up a lot of tops this summer and sold them at our lemonade stand.”

Dorinda really looks impressed.

“People were loving them. Bubbles’s mom made them in bigger sizes and sold them in her store, too,” Chuchie chimes in, bragging about our designing bite.

“Diva sizes,” I say, correcting Chuchie.

“
Lo siento, mija
. I’m sorry!”

“My mom says there are no large sizes, just sizes that are too small!” I explain.

“I want to do some,” Dorinda says.

“You gotta use black fabric marker so it won’t wash off in the washing machine. But you can’t put it on synthetic fabrics like polyester,” I explain to her. “You could write on that with a blowtorch and it would bounce off.”

Dorinda giggles ferociously. “That’s funny. How long you two been best friends?” she asks.

“Oh, this dish rag? I’ve known her since we took our first baby steps together. Both our mothers were models back in the day,” I explain.

“Were they, like, in
Essence
magazine?” Dorinda asks me.

“My mom was. But the only modeling Juanita ever did was for
Chirpy Cheapies
catalogs, and Chanel has a lifetime supply of those wack-a-doodle-do clothes to prove it.” I giggle.

“Yes, my mother was the diva of the discount catalogs, I confess, but it paid the bills, and now I got skills, okay?” Chanel snaps her fingers in Z formation. “My mom just wrote a book,” she tells Dorinda. “She went all over Europe and Japan to write about the history of Black models since back in the day.”

“Really?” Dorinda is hugging her books to her chest as we walk outside, cross the street, and slip into Mikki D’s.

“Uh-huh. It’s called
They Shoot Models, Don’t They
?” Chanel says. “Get it? Photographers take pictures of models with cameras.”

“Word. I got it.”

“I just wish she would hurry up and get the money for it so she could give me some,” Chanel whines in her best Miss Piggy voice as she orders from the Mikki D’s counter clerk.

Chuchie is a shopaholic waiting to happen. Even I know that. Even worse than me. Getting ready for high school has left us pretty busted, though.

“These twenty-five duckets a week ain’t stretching very far at the S.N.A.P.S. counter,” Chanel says with a sigh.

“They are definitely drizzle duckets.”

“What’s that mean?” Dorinda asks.

“It means, ‘If it rains, we poor!’” I giggle. “Stick with us and you’ll learn a lot of words.”

“I want to be a writer, too,” Dorinda says. “I read a lot. My mom says I should open a library so I won’t have to go there all the time.”

“You go just for fun?” Chuchie asks in disbelief.

“Yeah. I take out books all the time. You should see how many books I got under my bed!”

“Like what kind of books?”

“You know
Sistah’s Rules. Snap Attacks. I’m Fierce, You’re Fierce.
” She giggles, making fun of us.

She is mad funny. I didn’t want to ask Dorinda how much allowance she gets, because that would be rude. Our moms pay the bills for our cell phones, beepers, bedroom phones, Internet service, blah, blah, blah, but there are still so many other things that we want but we just have to “cheese” for it.

Chanel, of course, is much nosier than I am. She will ask anybody, anything, anytime—while she bats her eyelashes and acts all cute. “How much do you get?” she asks Dorinda, biting into her hamburger.

“For what?” Dorinda responds.

“For allowance,
mamacita
.”

“Oh, I don’t really get allowance. But I work at the YMCA Junior Youth Entrepreneur Leadership Program three nights a week, so I make about twenty dollars. If I was sixteen, at least I could get my working papers. That’s how I could make some real bank.”

“What classes you taking?” I ask Dorinda, changing the subject. I don’t want her to feel like she can’t hang with us just because she doesn’t have duckets. Me and Chanel aren’t with that.

“Sketching. English composition. Textile design. Biology. Computers—I love that. I’m gonna learn new technology applications like cyber rerouting and building databases.”

“Computer nerd. You go,” Chuchie smirfs. I have to laugh. Chuchie only uses the computer to get on the Internet and do her homework, otherwise she could care less about it.

“At least I got the dance class I want,” Dorinda continues. “Dunk the funk. That’s the move. I’ve had enough modern for a while.”

“I heard that,
señorita
. We’re taking it, too! What period you got?”

“Seventh.”

“We’re in the same class! That’s dope,” Chuchie exclaims.

Suddenly I remember something. “Check out this song I wrote last night,” I say excitedly. And then I sing it for them:

“I like it, Bubbles!” Chanel says, then starts harmonizing with me. “There’s no place like the G-l-i-t-t-e-r-d-o-m-e.”

She is always down for bringing on the noise. There is nothing we love doing more than singing together—and Chuchie is better at putting music and melody to words than I am.

“Glitter, glitter. Don’t be bitter!” Dorinda suddenly belts out, hitting the notes higher than even Chanel does.

“You
can
sing,
mamacita
,” Chanel coos.

Chanel is like my sister, but I didn’t choose her. We were bound together by lots of Gerber baby food and our diva mothers. Dorinda is different. She is just
like
us, and we only just met her!

“You should come with us to Drinka Champagne’s Conservatory on Saturday,” Chanel says excitedly. “That’s where we take vocal lessons.”

“How much is it?” Dorinda asks nervously.

“No duckets involved, Do’,” Chanel counters. “We’re on special scholarship.”

“Do’. I like that,” I remark, pulling out my Kitty Kat notebook. “Do’ Re Mi. That’s your official nickname now.”

“Okay.” She giggles, then scrunches her munchkin shoulders up to her ears. “I’m Do’ Re Mi. My sister is gonna like that.”

“What’s her name?”

“Twinkie. She’s nine.”

“Like my brother, Pucci. Maybe we can hook them up,” Chanel heckles on the mischief tip.

Then she gets an idea. “Oh, Bubbles, you know what would really be dope? Bringing Do’ Re Mi to the Kats and Kittys Klub!”

“What’s that?” Do’ Re Mi yuks.

“Me and Bubbles belong to this ‘shee, shee, boojie, boojie, oui, oui’ social club—’for empowering African American teens!’ Chanel chimes in, imitating the Kats president. “Before, they let us come for free because our mothers were members. Now we have to pay membership fees, but we can go by ourselves—finally!”

“How much does it cost?” Dorinda asks.

Clearly, Dorinda is all about the
ka-ching, She ching.
She is so smart. I really like her.

“It’s about six hundred dollars, or is it six hundred fifty dollars a year for us till we’re eighteen?”

“I think it’s six hundred fifty dollars now.”

“But don’t worry, Do’ Re Mi. We got you covered. We want you to sing with us, right, Galleria?”

“Uh-huh,” I say. Chuchie doesn’t make a move without asking me first. That’s my girl-ital “We’re getting together a girl group, like The Spice Rack Girls, only better.”