Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along) (6 page)

Ava and Bailey skipped the rest of the way down the hill and jogged onto the beach. Brennan, Madeline, and Zach were standing onshore beside two enormous aluminum canoes.

“What are the teams?” Bailey blurted out, strapping a life jacket on.

Brennan looked at me suspiciously. “The most important question is, who gets the new girl?”

“I assume you're talking about me? My name is Izzy.” I tried to act like it didn't matter that I was going to be the last person picked for their little teams. “How long have you all known each other, anyway?”

“Six years?” Ava said quietly, answering my question with a question instead of a confident statement. It was no wonder she was always getting teased and tortured at school. It was
almost like she wanted people to think she was a total doormat. “At least, that's when I first met everyone . . . I guess? But Bailey's mom has been doing this summer retreat thing with the firm since before Bailey was even born.”

“My mom's maternity leave—the summer she had me—was at the lake, actually,” Bailey said quickly. “So I've been coming here my whole life. Brennan and Zach's mom just started working at the agency a year or two ago, so this is their second summer. Levi, who you met at the bonfire, comes every other year—he spent last summer at his mom's house in Chicago, but this year his dad and stepmom got August, so he's here again, which is super-fun. But he's in town with his stepmom this afternoon, which is why we're short one person for Canoe Wars.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to digest Bailey's information dump. The girl really liked to talk. “O-
kay
.”

“So let's do this!” Brennan said. “I call Zach and Madeline!”

“That's so not fair,” Ava whined. “They're the strongest. And, uh . . .” She glanced at me.

Bailey piped up, “But we're the smartest. You're going down, Bren.” She narrowed her eyes at him, and put her hands on her hips. She began to growl, which made everyone start laughing, and once again, I found myself sort of
intrigued by Bailey. I seriously hoped she wasn't trying to flirt with Brennan, though. Because if she was, she was going about it all wrong.

And also, if anyone was going to flirt with Brennan, it ought to be me.

“Get in,” Bailey instructed. “Sit in the middle.” She pointed, and I climbed into the center of one of the canoes while it was still pulled up onshore. Bailey and Ava pushed it out into the swimming area. When they were standing about waist-deep in the water, they got on either side of the canoe, lifted one leg into the boat, and climbed in.

“How did you do that without the canoe tipping?” I asked. It was pretty impressive. “I thought canoes were supposed to be super tippy?”

“They are tippy,” Bailey said. “That's the whole point of Canoe Wars. But Ava and I have had a lot of practice doing this—as long as we climb in at the same time from opposite sides, our bodies cancel each other out and the canoe doesn't tip. Teamwork.”

“Where are the oars?” I asked, looking back toward shore.

“Oars?” Ava snorted. “You mean paddles?”

“Does it matter?” I snapped.

“Kind of,” Ava said. She was still snickering. Apparently
I needed to read up on whittling and canoe paddles. “Oars are for a rowboat. Paddles are for a canoe. But we don't use either for this game. It's all about sneakery.” While she'd been talking, the canoe had floated out to the far edge of the swimming area, near the buoys. I shifted, trying to get comfortable on the bottom of the boat. But every time I moved, the canoe swayed, so I felt like I couldn't even wiggle my foot.

Suddenly, I felt something thump the bottom of the canoe. I screamed and jumped up, moving as fast as I would if piranhas were attacking.
Were
piranhas attacking? Did lakes
have
piranhas? I knew that lakes sometimes had creepy-looking brown fish with whiskers, and that was bad enough. I saw some at the zoo once, and honestly, they were spookier than sharks. I leapt up, eager to escape whatever it was that had knocked against me through the canoe. As I stood up, the boat rocked wildly to the side, thrown off balance by my sudden movement. I flung my hands out to the side, trying to regain my balance, but it was no use. My arms circled in the air, and I felt my body tipping until—

Splash!

The canoe and I both went over. As soon as I resurfaced, I gasped and screamed. “What
was
that?” My feet kicked at
the surface of the water, and I flapped my arms to stay afloat. I was drowning, I was just sure of it.

That's when I realized Bailey and Ava were both standing in water chest-deep beside me, smirking as they watched me freak out. “Brennan,” Bailey explained. “
That
was Brennan. And we just lost the first round of Canoe Wars.”

I was so confused. “No, I mean, something thumped the bottom of the canoe. Like, a catfish or a huge turtle or something. I felt it!” I kicked my legs wildly under the water, trying to make sure nothing would sneak up and bite me in the thigh. Suddenly, something did. “Aah! There it is again.”

I panicked, fear making me weak and wobbly and near tears (for the second time that day). But moments later, Brennan popped out of the murky water less than a foot away from us. He held up one of Levi's whittled sticks in his hand, and poked it in our direction.

“That was
you
?” I spluttered, as embarrassment washed over me. It was then that I finally understood that Brennan was the thing that knocked on the bottom of the canoe. Not a turtle. Not a piranha. Lobster Boy.

“I don't think anyone's ever lost Canoe Wars that fast,” Brennan said, shaking his head. “Like, ever in the history of Canoe Wars. That was the saddest thing I've ever seen.”

I folded my arms tightly across my chest.

“Give us another chance,” Ava said, as she and Bailey worked to right our canoe again. I stood shivering in waist-deep water. After a few tugs, Bailey and Ava were able to turn the canoe upright again. But now it was almost completely full of water. Somehow, the thing continued to float even though it was still partially underwater. “You're up one. Let's do best of three.”

“This is a stupid game,” I announced, because it was the truth. “Brennan tipped our canoe. How is that fair?”

Brennan held his hands in the air, like he was a criminal under arrest. “I did not tip your canoe,” he said firmly. “
You
tipped your canoe.”

“But . . .,” I argued. “But you were under our canoe, right? You were thunking us, and trying to freak me out, and you totally tipped our boat.”

Bailey laughed, and I shot her a look. It obviously didn't do the trick, since Bailey kept laughing. She covered her mouth, but we could all still hear her gasping laugh. Finally, she said, “Brennan would have to be seriously strong to lift our boat up in the air and tip us. Honestly, we went over because you got spooked and stood up. Don't you know you're
never
supposed to stand up in a canoe?” She scolded me like I was a child.
“See, the point of Canoe Wars is to try to get the other team to dump without actually touching their boat with any kind of force.”

“Those are really vague rules,” I said, shivering even more. The sky had been filled with big cotton-ball clouds all day, but now they were getting darker, and one was parked right in front of the sun. Suddenly, it felt sort of chilly in the water. “So you're just supposed to try to scare the other team enough that they just—
whoop!
—fall out of their boat on their own? Isn't that sort of simple?”

“Well,” Ava said politely, “it's not really supposed to be that simple. . . . No one's ever actually just knocked on the bottom of someone else's canoe and gotten them to fall into the lake. Normally, it takes a little more than that. Usually, we have to push people with paddles and make big waves and stuff. But even
that
usually isn't enough to make a team tip.” Ava shrugged. She reminded me of a teacher, the way she was acting all preachy. “Most of the time, Canoe Wars doesn't end until someone adds an extra challenge that makes it harder to stay in your own boat. Like, we all have to stand up and dance in our canoes or something.”

“This is a seriously stupid game,” I said, rolling my eyes.
I could feel myself pouting, so I pulled my lower lip between my teeth and chewed.

“Then don't play,” Brennan said with a shrug. “Obviously, Ava and Bailey are a lot better off with an unbalanced team than they are with you in their boat.”

Brennan stared at me, and I crossed my arms and stared back. I couldn't believe I'd ever thought he was cute. What a jerk! He didn't have to be so rude about everything. Eventually, I blinked and looked around at the others. Ava and Bailey were both back in our canoe—even though it was still half-underwater. They both looked at me, their faces filled with pity. Pity I didn't need. Madeline and Zach were just sitting patiently in the other canoe, watching to see what might happen. Bailey tipped her head, as if to say,
In or out?

“Fine,” I said sullenly. I was cold and embarrassed, but I wasn't a quitter. “Best two out of three.”

“We're so glad you'll stoop to join us, Your Highness,” Brennan said with an arrogant smile. He gestured to the sunken canoe and bowed. “May I help you into your chariot?”

W
hat an arrogant jerk!

I really wanted to show Brennan that I wasn't a total princess, and that I could play their stupid canoe game. But even though I sat as still as possible and tried really, really hard to
not
rock the boat, our team still lost the next round of Canoe Wars in less than two minutes. Apparently, Bailey and Ava made a critical error when they left me alone to protect the half-submerged canoe while they swam underwater to try to make a move on Brennan, Madeline, and Zach.

“Just sit as still as you can,” Bailey instructed as they swam away. Choppy waves lapped at the side of the canoe, making it rock back and forth. But I sat still, my hands wrapped
tightly around the sides of the boat. I worked on conjuring up my Zen focus. I had to prove myself.

“We'll be back in two seconds,” Ava promised, looking back. “Just don't move while we're gone.”

But as soon as she and Bailey were positioned on either side of Brennan's canoe, Zach popped up out of the water, right by my seat. “Boo!” He screamed into my ear and threw a live crayfish into the boat. The creepy thing zipped around in the water, its little pincers opening and closing. I screamed too, and flailed around in the watery canoe, trying to keep as far as possible from the creepy crayfish. I swished my body back and forth in the water inside the canoe, but the crayfish acted like it was hunting me for dinner. Finally, unable to escape the snapping little beast, I jumped up and hopped around, trying to keep my toes out of its claws. But once the boat started rocking, I couldn't figure out how to keep it from going over. Within seconds, I'd rolled out into neck-deep water, and the canoe floated upside down in the lake once again.

I watched the crayfish roll out of the canoe beside me, then swim lazily to the bottom of the lake. I was totally skeeved out, since marine life was freaky. But more than anything, I felt picked on.

“Best three of five?” Ava suggested hopefully. When no one said anything, she muttered, “Maybe later.”

I'm not dim. I knew that “maybe later” meant “maybe later when Izzy's not around.” I felt the sting of rejection, though no one had actually said they didn't want me there outright. It was almost worse that no one just came out and told me to leave. I felt like one of the cling-on girls that always tried to hang out with Heidi and Sylvie and me—there were a few of them in our grade that just didn't get that they weren't welcome, no matter how many times we'd made it clear.

I knew I was like one of those girls now. No one needed or wanted me there, but no one had the guts to just come out and say it.

Even though I wanted to go back to my cabin and hide, I decided to help Ava and Bailey dump the water out of our canoe and drag it back to shore. But every time I tried to help, I just kept tipping the thing again. So finally, Bailey told me to wait onshore while they did it themselves. “It's easier with just two,” she lied, smiling at me like I was some sort of idiot.

I tried to think of an excuse to get out of there, but found it impossible to come up with anything that wouldn't make me look like I was a sore loser. I considered saying I had to go back to my cabin to put on sunscreen, but the giant clouds
had completely obstructed the sun, and I knew it would sound like a hollow excuse. So I unhooked my life jacket and hung it over the fence that ran along the tree line. I leaned against a fence post and watched the clouds rolling in over the lake, wondering if this is how it felt when Heidi and Sylvie and I wouldn't let people sit at our lunch table. I felt like an outsider, like I couldn't do or say anything right, and it made me nauseous.

Just as Bailey and Ava pulled the empty canoe up onto shore, a low rumble of thunder growled in the sky. The clouds, which had seemed relatively puffy and unthreatening while we were playing the game, suddenly turned dark and ominous. Green and orange swirled together in the sky, and lightning lit up the horizon across the lake. The adults who were working and chatting on the dock nearby quickly gathered up their papers. I saw my dad glance over at me as he hustled away to safety with the other adults.
Thanks for the concern about me being in the lake during a storm, Dad,
I thought bitterly. I remembered one time when I was little, my dad and I had been caught out in the backyard as a storm rolled in. He and I had stared up at the sky together until the first drops of rain hit our cheeks, then he'd wrapped me up inside his sweatshirt and we'd watched movies on the couch all
afternoon. He knew how much I hated storms, so he'd turned the sound up extra loud so I couldn't hear the thunder.