Dedication (2 page)

Mom’s right hand grips the gearshift, her knuckles pulsing above Grandma’s cameo ring. She turtles her head forward to peer through the windshield at the clouds rolling across the lightening sky. “Looks like it might rain.”

“Brolly’s in the trunk,” Dad says from the backseat, his Etonian temperament out of patience with our dawdling.

I stare past her mutton sleeves at the empty lot, beyond the rows of extra-long parking spaces for the buses en route with my new classmates, to the beige brick two-story complex that is Croton Elementary, Middle, and High. A maple leaf flutters onto the windshield, its stem catching in the wipers, momentarily blocking the view of the middle school entrance before blowing on. “It’s just
huge,”
I repeat for the billionth time since she took me on a tour of the carpeted hallways linking room after empty-desked room of a whole new life.

Turning from the hulking structure, she really looks at me for the first time since the alarm clocks set us running in circles, and I feel the fear break in my eyes. Her face mommabirds. “You’re going to love it here, Katie, I promise.”

I shrug, my body tight with the potential waiting yards away.

“Yes. You’re all going to love it. It’s heaven, it’s nirvana, it’s the single greatest public school in the world. I regret not taking the job here already. Now, Claire,
Principal
Claire.” Dad pulls himself forward with our headrests, the tip of his blue tweed blazer coming into view out of the corner of my eye as he squeezes her shoulder, deflating her blouse like a soufflé. “It’s an hour’s drive to Fayville. My interview’s at eight. You
have
to get out of the car. See there, your first charges are arriving.”

A yellow bus emerges through the break in the dense green hedges, making a wide turn into the parking lot, and we watch it weave through its painted maze to the high school.

“Tomorrow I’m taking the bus and getting up at a normal hour, right?” I ask again, hating that I couldn’t have done this First Day thing on my own, knowing that if I was on a bus right now, I’d have seen their faces, maybe already be talking to someone.

The door accordions open and a stream of much older boys tumble off, staggering groggy and dazed. I slump out of view, my nose level with the glove compartment. “That must be a sports team.” Mom reaches to the floor mat for her purse. “I don’t have to worry about that. No early practices in the lower school.”

“They don’t have peewee football or something?” Dad smiles. “Something really violent for the little Visigoths to exhaust themselves with?”

She flips the visor down and takes a swift glance in the mirror, widening her lips to check her teeth. “Ready?” She flips it back up.

“Ready,” I confirm, heart galloping.

Exchanging a kiss, they both open their doors to the thick humidity of summer’s end, making me feel like I should be drifting on a floaty in Megan’s pond. I shake out my new chin-length bob one last time, praying it’s right—that they do chin-length bobs here—and slip my arm under my backpack strap as Mom sets her patent-leather pumps on the asphalt.

“Indian hop!
Indian hop!”
the gym teacher hollers into the chlorinated air. He jumps from one slimy floor tile to the other at the middle school pool’s edge, arm and opposite knee raised to the fluorescents. I stare up at him, still immobile from the shock of being plunged in icy water when an unseasonably early freak snow is covering most of the pool building’s windows.

“You.” He bends down, his red face leaning in.

“Katie,” I offer eagerly, hoping he’s about to acknowledge I’m turning blue and should get out and into a warm towel immediately.

“Katie! Let’s see you MOVE!” He extends his hairy arm over the shallow end like a 700 Club guy, blessing the other sixth graders who are chopping through the water with varying success, depending on where they are in their growth spurts. I smile weakly. “Come
ON!
No one’s leaving this gym class until every single one of you has crossed this pool at least eight times, and I’m not giving late passes! Now HOP!”

“I’d like to strip him naked, stick him in a block of ice, and see him hop.”

I turn to the wry voice coming from my left, where a girl in a purple O.P. swimsuit is gingerly holding her blond French braids above the water.

“This
can’t
be legal,” I agree.

“This
can’t
be liquid,” she matches me. “Laura Heller.”

“Katie Hollis.” Exactly the same height, we wave pruned fingers over the splashing swell.

“You just moved here, right?” she asks, trying to knot the long braids on top of her head.

“Yup.” The drumbeat of longing for the familiarity of Burlington. “In July actually.”

“I DON’T SEE YOU HOPPING!”

“Well, welcome to Croton Falls.” With a grimace, Laura carefully lets her goosebumped elbows drop beneath the surface. “We also have a thirteen-lane bowling alley and a Pizza Hut—
with
salad bar.” Suddenly we’re blinded as two boys slap the water hard in our direction, drenching us both.

“Nice nipples,” they heh-heh.

“You’re so lame!” she shouts, slamming them back.

“Laura!”
the gym teacher barks.
“Less talking, more hopping!”

Eyes narrowed to slits, Laura surrenders her golden plaits to the sloshing current and raises her fist in the air.

I throw mine up in solidarity. “Okay, on two!”

“Gimme.” Moving a stack of magazines aside, Laura takes the snack tray and sets it down on the glass coffee table of the Heller den. Popping an orange curlicue into her mouth, she flops to the chocolate-colored shag and, slipping onto her back, points her bare toe against the TV’s worn power button. I lower myself beside her to sit Indian style, unsure whether or not to sprawl. “So you’ve
never
watched
Santa Barbara?”
she asks again, waving for the bag, which I hand off as tacky strains of violin fill the room.

“My best friend, Megan, in Burlington, has MTV. So we pretty much only watch that—” I stop speaking as the phone rings atop a nearby stereo speaker.

Laura reaches over me to answer it, licking off her cheese-tipped fingers, the corners of her mouth tinged orange. “Hello?”

Taking advantage of the moment to look around unobserved, I finger the purple mane of a plastic pony in an abandoned corral on the board-game-crammed bookcase behind me. Suddenly Laura slams the receiver with a hard
thwack
startling me into knocking over the rainbow row of horses. I right them, watching as she pulls a cushion into her lap, squeezes it, and stares off at the television, not seeming to see the screen. The commercial for Mount Airy Lodge blares, the couple toasting each other in the wineglass bubble bath.

“So,” I begin, unsure what just happened, nodding as if we’re mid-conversation. “Um…so Megan, in Burlington, her aunt watches soaps all day…” I trail off as Laura twists to me. “What?” I ask, my new-girl antennae snapping to attention.

“You talk about Burlington like you’re still there.”

“I do?” My eyes drop to my tumbler, watching the tiny bubbles rise and pop.

“It must be hard to be stuck here in the middle of nowhere,” she says testily.

“Burlington’s not so great,” I rush, aiming to sound like I believe it. “I love to skate, and they just closed the rink down. And my new room here is, like, twice the size of my old one—you should come over,” I finish, lifting my Coke to take a long nervous gulp.

A barrel-bellied Lab moseys in and sniffs the snack tray, its white eyebrows lifting. “Shoo, Cooper.” Disappointed, he hangs his head and lopes out.

The phone rings again, “Want me to get that?” I offer. But she just hugs the pillow to her chest as a man on the TV wearing a turtleneck under his suit screams about lowlowlow prices. The ringing stops. “Laura? Is something wrong?”

She looks at me for a long minute, her finger absently twirling a loose fringe thread. “Jeanine Matheson and I were best friends until she just stopped talking to me at the end of last year.”

“Why?” I put my glass down on the paper-towel-lined tray. “Why’d she just stop talking to you?”

“I don’t know,” she says quietly, taking an Oreo from its package and slowly twisting the top off, separating it smoothly from the white filling. “Her parents got divorced last year. Are your parents still married?”

“Yes,” I say, realizing I’ve never been asked the question, darkly wondering what I would do if, like Jeanine, the answer suddenly changed.

“Mine, too. Anyway, it was really bad and when she found out she was going to be at camp with Kristi she got totally obsessed with being popular and was, like trying to devise some master plan to break into that clique.”

“But you’re popular.”

“Not like Kristi Lehman and those girls.” She licks the creamy middle, looking down at the tracks her tongue leaves. “The boys all like them. No big whup. The whole thing’s stupid.”

“I’m sorry. That must have really—”

She finally meets my eyes. “It did. It really did.” She sinks her chin into the brown cushion, denting its piped border in a deep triangle. “So were you at the top at your old school?”

“What?” I ask, cheeks reddening.

“I don’t know,” she slopes her head to the side and lowers her lids at me. “Michelle Walker said you look like Justine Bateman.”

“Oh my God, thanks. But my school was
so
small. People hate—sorry, hat
ed,
past tense, people and loved people every other day, but it was like one or two were popular, not a whole football team. Here’s a lot more complicated.”

“Unlike Santa Barbara,” she says wistfully, tracing the outline of her lips with the tip of her braid. “I’m moving there as soon as I graduate. I was totally born in the wrong climate. You in?”

“We’ll get a convertible.” I lift my head at the commercial where two smooth legs scissor from the backseat.

“Pink.” She pops a whole cookie in her mouth. “After this we can watch
Dynasty.
My grandma tapes it for me.” It rings again and she freezes. I freeze. “It’s her,” Laura’s voice drops. “Them.”

“What, they just call and hang up?” I drop mine, too, as I instantly feel like they’re standing over us.

“I think Kristi makes her do it as a test. They scream stuff.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shakes her head, looking so scared that I can’t take it anymore. I reach up and grab the receiver. “Hello?”

“Laura’s a bitch!”
I hear giggles. Mean ones.

“I’m sorry.” The wrongness of it raises me to my knees and summons Mom’s most principal-like tone. “Laura can’t come to the phone right now. She’s busy thinking about how little of a crap she could give. Have a pleasant evening.” I hang up.

Laura stares at me, a huge smile spreading across her face as I realize I’m about to pass out.
“Crap,
I like that.”

“
Shit
was overhitting it.”

“I do agree.” She twists apart another cookie.

“Thanks.” I drop back to the base of the couch, sprawling happily beside her.

Laura can’t stop grinning. “Hey, want to be my partner on that Social Studies project?” She hands me my own lap pillow. “I think we have to say who we’re working with by Friday.”

“Sure,” I mellow my answer, despite the cartwheels I feel at finding out that not only might I have found someone to move to California with, but she still wants to be friends with me on October 22, when the Renaissance binders are due.

“Whad’ya mean, you don’t like anybody? Everybody likes somebody,”
the
Kristi Lehman states as if I’ve just challenged the Swatch. “Everybody.” She pulls her headband off, shakes out her dark blond hair, and slides it back and then forward, creating a perfect crest.

“It’s true. That’s how it works,” Laura confirms from where she slumps on the other side of me against the gymnasium bleachers; Laura and I have a pact to get out of whatever sport is being inflicted on us immediately. Not a huge feat when it comes to dodge-ball.

“Didn’t you like somebody at your old school?” Jeanine leans around Kristi. Laura rolls her eyes. “What? I can’t talk to her?”

“Like I care.” Laura re-smooths her new bangs, which were supposed to make her look more glamorous, but so far all they seem to do is annoy her.

“So?” Kristi persists, her heart-shaped face pinching in exasperation.

“Yeah, of course.” I aim for a carefree shrug. “I just, you know, haven’t met that many of the boys here yet, so…who do you like?”

“Benjy Conchlin,” JenniferOne volunteers from where she’s pulling at her stacked rubber bracelets. “And Jeanine likes Jason Mosley.”

“His brother just moved to New York. To be a
dancer,”
Kristi whispers, holding her splayed manicure at the corner of her mouth.

“He’s having a really hard time with it,” Jeanine confirms. “I wrote him a note. He wrote back. We’ve been writing,” she says as if they’ve been sharing a toothbrush.

JenniferOne continues, “So, JenniferTwo likes Todd Rawley, Michelle Walker likes Craig Shapiro…” She goes down the whole line of girls chatting along the bleachers as balls thud loudly off the walls and occasionally off the stomachs and groins of the boys trying to hold out on the court.