Amigas and School Scandals (2 page)

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Authors: Diana Rodriguez Wallach

BOOK: Amigas and School Scandals
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“I don't sound like that!”
“Sure you do,” he mocked with a crooked grin.
“I wasn't talking to you anyway.”
“No, but I heard you. You're acting like Madison and Emily will never speak to you again. I thought they were your
best friends
,” he whined, wiggling his fingers.
Then he plugged his earbuds in and turned his attention back to his iPod.
“They'll speak to me again,” I muttered under my breath.
At least I hoped they would.
Chapter 2
I
t was good to be home and even better to witness Lilly's reaction. It was the first time I had ever seen the Main Line from an outsider's perspective. The enormous stone houses, sweeping green lawns, and oak-lined streets were rather impressive, especially compared to the unair-conditioned mountain village where I had spent the summer.
“¡Caray!”
she squeaked, expressing her surprise as she gawked out of the window. One behemoth house after another passed by, each enclosed by thick stone and iron gates. “
One
family lives there?”
I nodded. In fact, I knew exactly which families lived in most of them. Many had kids who went to my school.
“They're bigger than my grandfather's hotel!”
“Well, your uncle's hotel was kinda small... .”
“It had a restaurant.”
“Trust me, your family's restaurant could probably fit into the pantries of their kitchens.”
“What, do they have, like, twenty kids?” she mumbled, shaking her head.
“Actually, I doubt they have more than two. The rest is just ... space.”
“It's a little different from Utuado,” my father offered, glancing at her through his rearview mirror.
“Uh, yeah.”
“But it's home,” he added.
“
Your
home,” I cheered, grabbing her arm.
While my welcome to Utuado had been boisterous—featuring a couple dozen distant relatives, a banquet of food, and a makeshift dance floor in the living room—Lilly was only greeted by a giant poodle and a busy maid. (Josephine was frantically completing a last-minute dust of our crisply-clean, lemon-scented home.)
My mom said she'd order Chinese food, unless Lilly wanted something else; my cousin silently nodded in agreement. I showed her the guest room she'd call home for the foreseeable future and left her alone to adjust. I remembered that all I wanted when I arrived in Puerto Rico was time by myself. So I gave her the luxury that I didn't receive and hurried into my bedroom. Everything looked different.
After two months of sharing a cement shoebox with my brother, in side-by-side twin beds, my shabby chic, four-poster pillowtop queen looked like a cloud-covered paradise. Dozens of decorative pillows were perfectly positioned in front of the headrest. Two fresh gardenia candles sat on the bedside table. The sun beamed through the skylight in twinkling streaks.
I tossed my suitcase on top of my hope chest. My luggage was completely packed with dirty clothes. I should have just deposited it in the laundry room, only I couldn't wait to be alone in my own space. I hadn't realized how much I missed the solitude. Back in Puerto Rico, the house was so small and crammed with relatives that it was hard to get the bathroom to myself. Now I had a private marble bath adjacent to my bedroom, and no one to walk in while I showered.
I could hear Lilly sifting through the drawers in her room next to mine as I slowly plopped onto my bed and sprawled out. I stared at the cordless phone on my nightstand. I knew I should call Emily or Madison, but the thought made my shoulders stiffen. I didn't want to fight, or even worse pretend that everything was fine when we all knew that it wasn't. But I knew the more I avoided the phone call, the more my insides would knot, so I picked up the receiver and dialed the memorized digits.
“Hey Mad. It's Mariana. I'm home.”
 
We sat in my bedroom staring at each other. No one was speaking. I picked at a loose thread in my comforter and tried to act normal (though I had no idea what that looked like anymore). The silence made me nervous—a sensation I tried to hide behind a weak, forced smile. I swallowed a solid lump.
“Look, I'm sorry I missed your party. It sounds like it was awesome,” I choked softly, my finger still pecking at the thread.
“It was. I mean, please, Orlando Bloom was there. It doesn't get any better.” Madison shook her pale blond hair.
“I know. I can't believe I missed the party of the year. That totally sucks.”
“Well, you should have seen Jody Marsh's Sweet Sixteen. It was so lame. Her DJ actually played the Electric Slide, and she served mini hot dogs. How tacky is that?” Madison scoffed.
“They're called ‘pigs in a blanket,' and they weren't that bad,” Emily corrected from her seat at my desk.
“Whatever. They were gross.”
“Still, I wish I could have gone to yours. I can't believe I was stuck in Puerto Rico.”
I had weighed the situation upside down and backwards. I didn't have many options. Madison and Emily were my best friends. I wasn't going to lose them over some forced vacation, and I had a hunch that anything positive I said about my trip would only tick them off more. Madison had made that very clear when I had called earlier. She subtly opened our conversation with, “Oh, great. The
chica's
back from Puerto Rico. Wait, you still speak English, right?”
Not to mention, I had yet to drop the big bombshell: that I was now living with a distant Puerto Rican cousin who would be attending our school. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that I wanted her to be our new best friend. I was sure that would go over like candy in kindergarten (yeah, right). Thankfully, when they got here, Lilly was off on the other side of the house getting the “grand tour” by my mother. My friends were still blissfully unaware of her existence.
I figured that the only way I could prove to Madison and Emily that I hadn't turned into some body-snatched impersonation of the girl they once knew was to pretend that I hated my trip and that I missed them nonstop. That's what they expected when they left me at the Philadelphia International Airport and that's what I was going to give them.
“Well, aside from Madison's party, did I miss anything else?” I asked, glancing at Emily.
She rolled her eyes and ignored my question, flipping the page of the magazine she was scanning—the same one Lilly had read on the plane. I flinched slightly.
I had expected Madison to be annoyed with me, but I had thought that I could count on Emily to be the rational one. Madison was the drama queen, not Emily. Only now she wasn't just sporting a new attitude, she was sporting a whole new look. Her dark brown tresses, which used to fall to her waist, were now chopped to her shoulders. It was the shortest I'd seen her hair since grade school, yet she never even mentioned the new do. I had no idea when she cut it, but from the way she casually tugged at her ends, it looked as if she were long used to the style.
“So, what ever happened with you and Bobby?” I asked, hoping to spin the conversation.
It was the first real date any of us had ever been on—well, if you didn't count me and Alex. And since they barely knew he and I had a relationship, he pretty much didn't count. At least not to them.
“It was nothing. We went to a movie with a bunch of people. Then, he left for Dublin.”
“Is he back yet?” I asked.
“I think so, but it doesn't matter. I'm not his girlfriend.”
“Oh, please! He likes you! You know he does. Why would he have asked you out if he didn't?” Madison's tan legs spread out before her on the carpet. Her freshly polished, “cherries in snow” toes peeked out of her nude sandals. “Stop being all ‘bah humbug.'”
Emily shrugged and shook her head.
“I can talk to him, if you want,” I offered. “We're locker buddies. I'll see him almost every day, once school starts.”
“No, don't! That would be awful. Just drop it.” Emily's green eyes stretched wide.
“Em, if you don't make a move, then nothing's gonna happen,” Madison said.
“Whatever. I'm sure he has plenty of things to think about other than me. Plus, he probably met some hot redhead in Ireland and fell madly in love.”
“Never underestimate the power of a redhead,” I joked.
Just then, a crash erupted from the guest room next to us. It sounded like boxes tumbling onto the floor.
“
Ay, mierda!
” Lilly shouted as Tootsie barked at the commotion from downstairs.
“Your maid speaks Spanish? I didn't know that.” Madison's blue eyes squinted.
“Um, no. That wasn't Josephine,” I stated quickly.
“Mariana! Will you help me? All this crap just fell out of the closet. It looks like a bunch of old photo albums. I think they're yours,” Lilly yelled through the walls, her Spanish accent squeaking through.
“Who the hell is that?” Madison asked.
“Oh, well, um, I was going to tell you. But I was waiting for the right moment. You see, when I was in Puerto Rico ...”
Before I could finish, Lilly popped in the doorway, her auburn hair piled loosely atop her head, her freckled face gleaming with sweat, and her lips curled in a grin almost identical to mine.
“Whoa,” Madison mumbled.
Emily dropped her magazine.
I stood up and rushed toward Lilly, my dark eyes full of warning. The hair from my ponytail was falling into my face, and I realized that we must have looked like carbon copies.
“I didn't realize you had company,” she muttered as she yanked at her too-tight tank top. About three inches of cleavage was showing—our one striking difference.
“Yeah, no biggie,” I said, nodding at her before facing my friends. “Um, guys, this is my cousin, Lilly. Who I told you about, remember? Um, well, she's going to be staying with us for a while . . . to go to school ... at Spring Mills.”
Madison and Emily froze, their eyes almost popping from their skulls.
“What?” Madison screeched.
It wasn't exactly the warmest welcome.
“I've moved in,” Lilly cheered. “I'm gonna see if I can follow in Mr. Ruíz's footsteps.”
Madison blinked at her as if she were a ghostly vision that would eventually go away. When that didn't happen, she slowly grabbed the car keys from her purse. (Her parents bought her an Audi for her sixteenth birthday.)
“Ya know, I gotta get going,” she said softly. “Em, you coming?”
She looked at her friend, who was already standing, shoving her feet back into her sandals. They peeled out within seconds, not uttering another word to Lilly. They barely said goodbye to me.
There wasn't much I could defend about their behavior.
“So, your friends totally hate me,” Lilly said as we trudged towards Vince's room, still reeling in their wake.
I had offered to help him pack for Cornell, and I figured he'd be much friendlier company at the moment. He was obligated by blood to be nice to us.
“That's not true,” I lied as I stuck my head into Vince's room.
His stereo was blaring an indecipherable screaming rock band as he taped a cardboard box closed. He was leaving in less than a week, and he had to find time to shove the entire contents of his room into boxes while still having a “raging send-off” with his high school buds. It didn't help that my mom had inconveniently planned a family barbeque in a few days to welcome Lilly into our home and to wish Vince luck in college. He hadn't stopped complaining about the impending get-together since we had landed.
“Thank God!” he cried when he saw us. “Can you label these boxes?”
“What's in them?” I asked as I sifted through a collection of soap, underwear, CDs, and bedsheets all lumped together in a carton.
“Everything,” he grumbled. “Just label.”
He tossed me a marker. Lilly collapsed onto his bed amidst a heaping pile of towels and sweaters.
“Vince, Mariana's friends hate me,” she whined.
“Don't take it personally,” he grunted, not looking up from his T-shirt-packed suitcase. “They hate everyone but themselves. I've never seen three people so obsessed with each other.”
“Shut up, Vince!” I yelped, chucking a balled sock at him. “We're friends. Maybe some day you'll know what that's like.”
“I have friends. Lots of them. More than two.” He sat on the suitcase and tried to yank the zipper closed. There was about six inches between the seams.
I scrunched my nose at him, then peered at Lilly. “If
I
like you, they'll like you. Trust me. It'll work out.”
Of course I really wasn't so sure. Madison and Emily had gawked at Lilly as if she were a three-headed elephant. They didn't even give me a chance to explain what she was doing here, and how my father had invited her, and how she'd get a better education in Spring Mills. They just bolted out, and at this point, I didn't know if they'd ever warm up to
me
again, let alone my newly imported cousin.
“Can you believe Mom's hosting a stupid barbeque?” Vince choked as he tossed a couple of T-shirts out of the suitcase and tried to force the zipper closed once more.

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