Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along) (18 page)

“Dad,” I said, knocking lightly before I walked into his office. “Can you drive me over to Bailey's house?”

He looked up at me, bleary-eyed. “What? Now?”

“Yes, now.” I picked at my fingernail. Then I smiled. “Please?”

He ran his hand through his hair and stood up. “I trust this has something to do with the image makeover we talked about?”

“Unfortunately, yes. That whole ‘make yourself relatable' thing? It's not going quite as well as I might have hoped it would.”

“Well, then,” he said, walking toward me. “I'm happy to help with both setup
and
cleanup—that's my job, after all. Let's hit the road.”

As we ran out the front door, my mom stopped us. “How did it go?”

I cringed. “Not great. Kinda crappy, actually.”

Mom looked at me strangely for a second. I waited for her to scold me for being negative or using bad grammar or
something
. But, instead, she shrugged and smiled. “At least you tried, right? That's better than nothing.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, matching her grin. “At least I tried.”

At Bailey's house, Dad waited in the car while I ran up and rang the doorbell. The house was dark, but I waited a minute, just in case. “Isabella?” My dad called from the open
passenger-door window, right when I was about to give up. “I just remembered that Erica is traveling this week. Bailey is staying with a friend.”

As I ran back to the car, I muttered, “You could have told me that before we drove over here. . . .” But I said nothing when I got back in the car. I figured it wasn't such a great idea to get in a fight with my dad on the very same night two of my most important friends already hated me.

We pulled up at Ava's house a few minutes later. All the lights were on, which gave me hope. I ran up to the door after begging my dad to stay in the car. But I knew if I was gone for long, he'd definitely go inside to chat with Ava's dad. Hopefully, it wouldn't be too hard to pry him away from social hour when the time came to go to phase two of my plan to fix things. I seriously hoped this plan would go over better than all my other plans had, since I was on a real losing streak.

Madeline answered the door. She gave me a look that made me pretty certain she knew what had happened at tryouts earlier, but she led me to Ava's room anyway. She walked ahead of me, with her hands on her hips. The door to Ava's room was open, and I could hear Bailey's voice before I could see either of them inside.

“I'm glad you're both here,” I said, as I stood in the doorway.
I leaned against the door frame to hold me up, since I felt like I was wilting with nerves. “I need to talk to both of you.” I squared my shoulders and tried to convey strength and determination, but instead I felt sick to my stomach. I was reminded of that first day at the resort, when I'd felt like such an outcast with everyone staring at me. But this time, I knew, I had more to lose, and I couldn't just walk away and hide out by myself if they didn't want to take me back.

“We don't want to hear what you have to say,” Bailey said, crossing her arms. She was sitting on Ava's bed, with her back against the wall. Ava was on the floor. Her hair was wet, as though she'd just gotten out of the shower, and she was stretching.

“I want to play a game of Liar and Spy, if you don't mind. I'm going to tell you three things,” I said the exact words I'd rehearsed in my head on the drive over to Ava's house. But as I spoke, I realized I'd sounded a lot more eloquent in my head—out loud, I sounded sort of silly. And my voice was shaking. “You need to figure out if I'm telling you the truth, or if I'm lying.”

Bailey narrowed her eyes and twisted her hair up into a messy pile on top of her head. Without even paying attention to what she was grabbing, she pulled a toothbrush off Ava's
cluttered bedside table and pushed it into her curls to hold the hair in place. I glanced at Ava and knew from the look on her face that we'd both seen what had just happened.

It was impossible not to laugh at the total grodiness of the situation, so I cracked a smile. But when I tried to smile at Ava, to share the humor, she averted her eyes. “Fine,” she said, still refusing to look at me. She looked at Bailey and shrugged. Bailey rolled her eyes. “But you better respect the game.”

I took a deep breath, nodded, then said, “First statement: Ava, you were—without question—the best dancer who tried out today.”

“That's true,” Bailey said, “but—”

“Just wait,” I begged, holding up my hand. I took a step so I was just inside Ava's room. Madeline was still lurking around behind me in the hall, listening to everything. “The second thing I have to say is, today was supposed to be really embarrassing . . . for me. I choreographed a routine of my own, but when I got up in front of everyone, my body just sort of went numb. I didn't mean to use your routine.” I chewed on my lip and waited for Ava to say something. She just stared down at her lap.

I continued on, hoping they'd believe me. “The whole
reason I tried out today was to show some support for my friends—Ava, Heidi, Sylvie, everyone—and to try to prove to both of you that I'm trying to change. You guys
know
that I don't like to do anything that might possibly embarrass me, and you
also
know that I'm a hopeless dancer. I guess what I was hoping would happen today was that you would see that I'm not always so obsessed with my own image and reputation. I wanted to be there to support you, and if I looked stupid, who cares?”

I stopped to take a breath, because I could hear myself yammering. On, and on, and on. I had to get to the point. Suddenly, the point sounded really lame, though. “The bottom line is, I wasn't trying to embarrass Ava, or to make people think she'd stolen my routine. Honestly, my version of your dance was such a mess that I'm surprised anyone even noticed that the choreography was the same. But I know I messed up, and everything got carried away, and I'm sorry!” I sucked in a huge breath, then blew it out, yoga-style.

Bailey lifted her eyebrows. “Was that all one story? Because it sounded like a lot of
blah-blah-blah
. Are we supposed to guess if it's the truth or a lie?”

“Now you guess,” I said, shrugging. “But I'll give you a clue: It's not a lie.”

Ava tucked her legs under her body and looked at me—finally. “I believe you.”

“You do?” Bailey and I said this at the same time.

“I do believe you,” Ava said. “I think you're telling the truth, Izzy. But I think what you did was really badly thought out and you must have had at least some idea that it was going to backfire.” She looked at me and fussed with her bangs. “Or maybe you didn't. But I don't know why you thought trying out for the dance team was going to get us to think you were suddenly this nice person who thinks of others before you think of yourself.”

“And anyway,” Bailey said, cutting in. “It doesn't matter what you
meant
to have happen, since the only thing that
did
happen after your little performance today was that Ava looked like a copycat. She's never going to make the dance team now, since people think she stole her routine from you and not the other way around.” She whipped the toothbrush out of her hair, shook her curls down around her shoulders, and studied the long piece of plastic in her hand. “Ew. Sorry about that, Ava.” She tossed the toothbrush across the room, where it landed in the wastebasket.

I took another step into the room. “The third thing I wanted to say is, I really do think of the two of you as good
friends—some of my best friends, even. And I don't want to lose you, just because we're back at school and I'm known as this ‘mean girl' or whatever.” I cringed, then carried on. “I hate that people think I'm a bad person, and I'm sad that I've done so many things to hurt people's feelings over the past few years. I want to change my reputation, and I know it's going to take some time. But I really need
you
to believe me when I say that I'm trying. I need someone to believe I
can
change.” I shrugged. “Also, I need your help to try to undo the mess I made today.”

Bailey studied me carefully. “Truth?”

“Yep. I promise not to lie to you.” I really, really meant it—even though saying something so earnest made me feel like a major dork.

“So what do you need our help with?” Ava asked quietly.

“Wait,” Bailey said, folding her legs under her body on the bed. “So you're good, Ava? You're just going to forgive Izzy, just like that?”

“Friends forgive,” Ava said, shrugging. “She's telling us the truth, she meant well—what's done is done. We move on.”

Bailey pouched out her lips and squinted. “Okay. We move on. In that case, sorry I smacked you to the ground, Iz. That was sort of a heat-of-the-moment thing. My body went
all crazy on me, and I just needed to hit someone.”

“Classy.” I said, laughing. “I admire your passion.”

“I'll try not to let it happen again. Friends forgive, but friends also ought not to shove friends onto the spit-soaked school atrium floor. That was nasty.”

After a moment, where I let it sink in—that this was happening, they were forgiving me, and they believed me—I whispered, “Thank you. For everything.”

“You bet. So?” Bailey blurted out. “You said you have something planned that you want our help with. What is it?”

“The Spy part of Liar and Spy,” I said. “Who's up for a mission?”

Ava grinned. “Me.”

“Me too,” Bailey said.

“We have a little prep to do first,” I said, flying into high gear. “Bailey, get out your video camera. Ava, prepare to be sneaky and swift. If this is going to work, we need to move fast. . . .”

T
hanks to Ava's dad's humongous
iMac and all of his super-user-friendly design and video editing software, Bailey's prep for our spy mission was complete in less than fifteen minutes. We ran back to the car, pulling my dad (who couldn't resist the opportunity to come in and chat) along behind us like a paid driver. The three of us squeezed into the backseat in our matching jeans and black shirts, then I told my dad where to drive, and we were off.

On the way, Bailey and Ava and I went through all the possible land mines for our operation, but I think we all knew that we had no idea what we were in for until we actually saw what was happening at Skylar's house. I knew we'd have to improvise as the night went along, but it still felt good to talk
through some of the potential challenges. At the very least, it made the drive go faster. Skylar lived on the other side of the lake from me, in one of the
super
-fancy houses that lined the creek. It wasn't all that far, actually, but the streets wound around in these confusing and twisty circles and one-ways, so we kept getting lost.

“What if there's a security gate?” Bailey asked while Dad backed out of a dead-end street.

“We climb over it,” Ava said, as though it was simple as that.

“There isn't a security gate,” I added. “I've seen her house before.”

“What happens if they've already watched the audition videos?” Bailey wondered.

“Auditions have only been over for an hour. I hope they haven't started reviewing the video yet, but if they have, we go to Plan B.”

“Which is?” Ava asked.

“We'll figure it out,” I said. “I can be a sweet-talker when I need to be.”

“What if she has one of those attack dogs?” Ava asked, nervously pushing her hair away from her face. “The kind who get their own sign on the front window of the house—the
signs that basically tell you your arm will be chewed off and turned into doggy hamburger if you go near little poochie poo.”

“Unlikely,” Bailey said, sounding all business. “You only have to look at Skylar to know she doesn't have a killer dog. If anything, she has a yapper. A poofball who probably poops on a pad in the corner of its very own bedroom. And one of those high-maintenance freaks of nature might be even more trouble than a killer.” Bailey pulled a small mirror out of her sweatshirt pocket and began to apply black eyeliner to the skin all around her eyes. “It's going to bark to give up our location.”

“What's with the black eyes?” I asked, watching as she pressed the tip of her mom's obviously expensive eyeliner against the apples of her cheeks.

She looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Spyware. Don't spies usually slather their eye sockets in black so they're less noticeable?” Bailey returned to her coloring project.

“Um, actually, don't they only do that when they're wearing one of those full face masks with the eyeholes? That way, the light skin around the eyes won't be as visible. But black around the eyes
without
the mask just makes you look like a raccoon.”

“Oh well,” Bailey said. She jabbed the cap back on the eye pencil, its end blunt and useless now. “I like the way it looks, and anyway, my part of the plan is done—this way, I'll feel like I'm actually in the action instead of just the ace prep team whose job now is to stay as quiet and out of the way as possible.”

“You were an excellent ace prep team,” I offered, in a British accent. “Top-notch, really.”

“Why thank you, Spiz.”

“Spiz?” I said, giggling.

Bailey snorted. “Spy Iz. It's a name mash-up, like Brenley.”

Ava laughed so hard and loud that my dad actually hit the brakes and sent us all flying forward into locked seat belts. “Is Brenley a mash-up of Bailey and Brennan? Aw . . . it could be your first kid's name. Auntie Spiz, meet baby Brenley.” She giggled. “What can we call me?”

I thought for a sec, then blurted out, “Snava.”