Acting Out (5 page)

“See, isn't this better than going to activities?” asked Courtney.

“Definitely,” I said, trying not to flinch. She pushed my cuticles back with this little tool that looked like a shovel for a Barbie doll.

“How'd you learn to do this?” My other hand soaked in a little pan of warm water. We were sitting on Courtney's bottom bunk, and she had all these instruments lined up on a towel. It looked like she was about to perform surgery on me.

“Just from watching people do them and getting them myself. Haven't you ever had a manicure?” she asked.

“Nope. This is my first.” And probably my last. It was a lot more painful than I thought it was going to be. “Now what are you doing?” She picked up a tiny pair of scissors and grabbed my fingertips.

“Hold still. I have to trim your cuticles. Then we're ready for polish.” She looked up at me. “When we're done with your nails, I'll pluck your eyebrows for you.”

“Oh, fun! Then you can pull out my toenails with a pair of pliers. I'm
glad
we didn't go to tennis.”

Courtney laughed. “Thanks for cabin-sitting with me. You aren't worried we'll get caught, are you?” We were supposed to be at activities right now.

“I never worry about breaking rules. Rules were made to be broken,” I bragged.

“That's what I like about you, JD. You're such a rebel.”

When Courtney said we should cabin-sit for the afternoon, she tried to talk Mei and Lauren into hanging out with us, but they
were
worried about getting caught, so they went to riflery. Part of me wanted to go with them, because I hadn't been there yet. There were so many cool activities I hadn't tried yet, like rappelling and kayaking, and I'd only been to tennis once. What did it say about me that I'd rather shoot a gun than get a manicure? That I wasn't very good at being a girl. That was something I needed to work on.

“Besides, it's not like they'd punish us if they did catch us,” Courtney went on. “They'd just send us to an activity.” She buffed my nails with a big pink buffer.

“Exactly. People are always so afraid of getting in trouble. We're brainwashed to follow the rules from the time we're in preschool.” I hoped that if anyone did catch us, it would be Alex. I liked Michelle, and I didn't want to be a troublemaker for her. Alex was a different story.

“Do you get in trouble a lot at school?” asked Courtney.

“Oh, yeah. I'm always causing trouble wherever I go,” I said, trying not to blush. If only she knew.

“I wish I could be more like you.”

“That's ridiculous! Just be yourself,” I blurted out. Easy for me to say.

“I wrote some of my friends and my boyfriend Andrew about you. About how you're the life of the Guard Start class and how your jokes get us all through it.”

“That's cool.” I couldn't believe all the nice things she was saying. I watched her stroke on the red polish she'd picked out. It was a little extreme for me. For Judith. But I figured JD liked extreme colors.

“So do you have a big group of friends you hang out with back home, too?” she asked. It surprised me that she said “too.” I had met a lot of people at camp, but I didn't really think of myself as having a big group of friends.

“Yeah, I guess. There's Chloe, Nick, Haley, Jordan, Seth, and Jenna,” I said, naming all the popular kids in my school. “We go to the mall and hang out at the food court,” I lied. They went to the mall. I once saw them there when I was shopping for new shoes with my grandma.

“Are you going out with any of those guys?” she asked.

“Well, Seth and I were going out, but we broke up. He was way too clingy—texting me about thirty times a day. I couldn't breathe from all that attention.” That was exactly what I'd overheard Justin's girlfriend Sarah say about her old boyfriend. Who knew that line would come in handy sometime? “So now Nick and I are going out. He gives me my space.”

You're lying. You don't have a boyfriend. You're not popular. And your real name is Judith. Quit putting on this act.

I kept waiting for Courtney to say that, but she just nodded. Every day I expected someone to walk up to me and say, “You're not fooling any of us.”

But I was. Apparently. No matter what huge lie I told people, they all seemed to believe me. Why was I even doing this? Courtney already liked me. I didn't have to exaggerate for her.

“That's how Andrew is too,” Courtney was saying. “We go out—but in a group. So there's no pressure. He's only sent me one e-mail this whole week. Which is fine with me, because if he was writing me every day, it'd be too much. You know?”

“Exactly,” I said. Courtney blew on my nails to dry them. I had to admit, the polish made them look so much better. “Nick hasn't even written me yet, but then I haven't written him, either.”

Nick D'Angelo was the cutest guy in my class—dark curly hair, dark brown eyes, and this devilish grin that made him look like he was always up to something. Drool. In my dreams I was getting mail from Nick D'Angelo.

Mail came every day after lunch, and Eda, the camp director, would print out e-mails and stick them in these little wooden boxes on the dining hall porch. Courtney got a stack of e-mails every day from her friends. I'd gotten several e-mails too, but mostly from my family and only a couple from friends.
Girl
friends.

Mom, Dad, and Adam had all sent me e-mails, but Justin hadn't. Mom and Dad both wrote,
Justin sends his love,
and Adam wrote,
Justin told me to say hi,
but I wondered if he really did. I had no idea how he was doing and what was going on back there, because none of them would tell me. They all made it sound like life was great. I knew that wasn't true.

Letting Courtney pluck my eyebrows made my eyes water, but it took my mind off Justin and my family. I felt bad that I could forget about them so easily. All week I'd been having so much fun, I'd barely thought about them. I knew that was one reason my parents had sent me to camp—to give me a break from all the stuff our family was going through. But I still worried about them. I couldn't help it.

“Now let's get some ideas for hairstyles,” said Courtney, grabbing a stack of magazines from her trunk for us to look through. “I've been thinking about cutting my hair. Do you think I should?” She pulled her mass of wavy hair together on the back of her neck to give me an idea of what it would look like short.

“You've got great hair,” I told her. “You should keep it long.”

She sighed. “Maybe so. If I cut it, it would be curlier than ever.”

We flipped through the pages of those magazines for probably an hour, with Courtney stopping on almost every page to comment on makeup and clothes and hair that she liked. It was the most boring hour of my life, but I tried to act interested. I really needed to get better at all this girl stuff. What was wrong with me? Why didn't I find this stuff interesting?

“Oh, I love that look,” said Courtney, pointing to a model in a black miniskirt with lace leggings.

“You'd look good in that,” I told her. I'd look like a gorilla if I tried to dress like that, but Courtney was so petite, she could pull it off. She was probably a size one or zero. Maybe she was even a size minus one, if there was such a thing.

I was a size nine in juniors, and my shoe size was eight and a half. Mom told me she thought my feet wouldn't grow any more, but what if they did? What if I ended up with a size thirteen? Did they even make women's shoes that big?

Courtney sat up and looked out the screen windows. “Omigosh, JD! Look!”

The sky had turned dark gray, and the cabin was all shadowy and dim. We ran to the screen door and looked outside. Rain started pelting down in buckets. Streams of water poured off the roof, and pretty soon a little river had formed in front of the cabin.

“Now I'm really glad we didn't go to activities!” I yelled over the sound of the rain pounding against the cabin roof. Since the cabin had so many screens, it was almost like being outside in the rain—we could smell the wetness and feel it in the air, but with the roof over our heads, we were nice and dry.

Then we saw people running down Middler Line, trying to get to the cabins. One dark figure came crashing through our door as we jumped out of the way.

It was Amber, and she looked like she'd been dunked in the lake. Her hair hung in wet strands like black vines, and her riding boots were covered in mud. She took riding lessons three times a week, and it seemed like she was always wearing those boots.

“It's pouring!” she shouted.

“We noticed!”

Mei and Lauren were the next to show up, both of them completely waterlogged; then Isabel came running in, her eyes wide and her bare legs splashed with mud. Everyone changed out of their wet clothes. I put on my blue hoodie, and Courtney wrapped up in a fuzzy yellow sweater. The whole cabin felt ten degrees cooler from the rain.

Lauren rubbed her blond hair with a towel. “I'm so glad this camp has cabins! Last summer I went to dance camp, and we slept in tents. It rained for three straight days and everything we had got soaked.”

Pretty soon everyone came over to Side A, and we all sat around on Courtney's and Amber's bottom bunks.

Mei saw Courtney's magazines and picked one up. “I know—let's play a guessing game. I'll hold up a picture of a model and you guys guess ‘real' or ‘not real.' ”

Everyone laughed. Amber covered her face with her hands. “Don't show me any of those pictures! Whenever I look at models, I want to run out and get plastic surgery.”

“Oh, Amber! How can you say that?” asked Courtney, hugging her stuffed monkey.

“Uh, hello? Have you seen my nose?” Amber looked around at all of us. “Look, you guys. I know I've got a funny-looking schnoz. You don't have to pretend it's not there.” Now I felt awful that I'd always thought of Amber as the flat-nosed girl.

Mei tossed the magazine away in disgust. “You do not need plastic surgery! We should burn these. All they do is make perfectly normal people feel bad about themselves.”

“Don't blame it on the magazines. Anyway, all I need to do is look in a mirror to see what's wrong with my face,” Courtney said.

“You?” I exclaimed. “You have a cute face, gorgeous hair, and a tiny body. You're perfect from head to toe!” It came out sounding kind of mad, but I'd meant it as a compliment.

“I am not! I hate my cheeks!” Courtney snapped at me. I couldn't tell if she was mad about the “perfect” remark.

I looked at her face and then at her backside. “Which pair of cheeks don't you like?” Everyone burst out laughing, but I wasn't trying to be funny. There was nothing wrong with either set of her cheeks, from what I could tell.

Courtney slapped her face with both hands. “I hate how fat and round my face looks. I wish there were exercises to make my face lose weight.”

“You do not have a fat face,” we all yelled at her, but she sucked in her cheeks to try to make her face look thin.

“Everyone has something they don't like about themselves,” said Lauren. “I can't stand the way my voice sounds.”

“What's wrong with your voice?” asked Amber.

“It always sounds hoarse, and I have to clear my throat all the time, and sometimes it comes out sounding squeaky.”

Amber sniffed the air. “You guys—do I smell like the barn? I just came from my riding lesson. I love horses, but I'm always afraid they make me smell.”

We all told her she smelled fine. I couldn't believe all the weird things people thought were wrong with them. Maybe they were all just making something up—saying they didn't like stuff about themselves so they wouldn't seem conceited. I'd always assumed most girls felt okay about themselves. I thought I was the only one who was so aware of all my flaws.

“When I was about four, I wanted Caucasian eyes,” said Mei. “I didn't like that my eyes looked so different from my parents' eyes. Now I'm fine with my eyes, but I hate my ears.”