League of Strays (3 page)

THE NEXT MORNING, I SHUFFLED LIKE A ZOMBIE INTO THE
dining room. I had been up until two in the morning, replaying in my head all the things Kade had said about the League.

I hitched my backpack onto my shoulder and headed for the door. “See you later, Mom,” I said.

She poked her head out of the kitchen pass-through and wagged a wooden spoon at me. “Not without breakfast.”

Turning one’s back on a nutritional opportunity was a major offense in my mother’s manual. God help me if I didn’t finish every last carrot in my lunch, or if I made a snack within an hour of dinner. Some of Mom’s rules were completely unreasonable. Like me not drinking coffee, for example. She thinks it’s dangerous. You know, accelerated heart rates, energy fluctuations, the addictive nature of caffeine, and so on.

She swooped into the dining room with a bowl of oatmeal,
a glass of orange juice, and buttered toast divided into four symmetrical triangles. I devoured it in a record time of one minute and eighteen seconds, then tried to make an escape.

“Charlotte?” she called after me.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Yeah?”

“You forgot to take your vitamin today.”

“Mom, I’m late …”

She rushed from the room. I waited. It wasn’t easy being an only child, scrutinized like a sample on a slide. Mom returned with a massive vitamin displayed on an outstretched palm.

I considered what Kade had said:
Charlotte lives in a bubble, her every move dictated by Mommy and Daddy.
I reached for the vitamin, then chugged it down with a glass of O.J., wondering if maybe he had a point.

“You look nice today,” Mom said. “I like the eye shadow.”

The lure of the League and seeing Kade at school had coaxed its way into what little sleep I’d had. My dreams had been disjointed, but I knew he’d been in them. When I woke up, I’d dug through the cabinet under the sink to search for the Sephora makeup kit I got for Hanukkah two years ago. Safety seal intact.

“You don’t like to wear makeup,” Mom said, fishing for details.

I figured there wasn’t much I could do about my boyish body and frizzy brown ringlets. The face was all I had. I just hoped someone besides my mother would notice.

“Well, there’s a first for everything,” I said, bolting for the door.

On the front steps, I pulled out a compact. The blush “livened
up winter skin,” just like the back of the box had promised. The rose-colored lip gloss did a decent job masking my chapped lips. But my face felt sticky, which is why I never wore the stuff. Still, it was hard to argue with the improvement.

I batted my eyes in the mirror, practicing for who-knows-what. When I stopped flirting with myself long enough to take another look, I groaned. Oh God. Flecks of mascara, everywhere. I tried to erase them with my pinkie and ended up creating two black eyes. So much for the new-and-improved me.

“You forgot something,” Mom called, her head out the window.

I glanced down at my empty hand. How could I forget my viola? I never forgot my viola. It was practically an appendage.

“You’re going to be late, Charlotte!” Mom said as I ran back in, scooped up my instrument, and darted outside again. I hopped over the yellow recycle bin on the sidewalk and kept going.

At the intersection, I checked to make sure Mr. Hanford wasn’t watching before cutting through his backyard. The Kennedy High parking lot was packed, as always. A few kids sprawled on the hoods of secondhand cars they’d bought with summer-job money, talking on cell phones—probably to each other. The warning bell rang but no one moved.

I raced toward the three buildings joined by glass-encased hallways and veered right to Building C, where most of the senior classes were held. Inside the double doors, a mass of bodies sucked me into its fold. I searched through the crowd for a certain spiky hairstyle.

“Keep moving,” a guy said, knocking me into a girl who was checking her lipstick in the reflective side of her sunglasses. She gave me a caustic look.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

No problem, Charlotte,
I wanted her to say. It would be nice if someone actually knew my name.

“Whatever,” she said, shutting her locker door.

By third period, I was officially frustrated. Where the heck was Kade? The League of Strays wasn’t much of a friendship group without him. Hoping for a sighting, I took the long way to class—up the stairs to the second-floor hallway and back down the other end. I got a late mark in calculus for my efforts.

Fifty minutes later, I slipped into the girls’ restroom and scrubbed my face with school-issue brown paper towels. I guess when you try too hard, nothing happens. Now that the no-fuss Charlotte was back, I convinced myself that Kade would be waiting for me when I came out, leaning against the wall, one leg bent behind him. The image in my head was so clear that when I walked out and he wasn’t there, I felt stood up.

In orchestra, the noise, usually off the charts, buzzed at a low level. I took my viola out of its case and wound my way through the semicircle of seats. I liked to get in a few minutes of practice before class started.

I was tuning my strings when Amie Newman, my stand partner, came up behind me. “Did you hear about Mrs. Tutti?”

I shook my head. “Where is she?”

Amie’s face creased with concern. “Nervous breakdown.
I heard she’s in solitary confinement at a mental ward somewhere.”

“Wow.” It was all I could get out.

Three months earlier, Mrs. Tutti’s husband died from an aneurism. He was only fifty-one. She took a few weeks off, but when she came back, she seemed almost normal. I hadn’t said anything to her. What could I say that wouldn’t sound lame? Now I wondered if maybe I hadn’t searched for the words hard enough.

“She was my favorite teacher,” I said, wincing at my choice of verb tense. “
Is,
I mean.”

Kids complained that Mrs. Tutti pushed too hard, mostly because she demanded short nails and daily practice logs. She was tough, but that’s why our orchestra had placed first at nationals. Mrs. Tutti was the kind of teacher who cared about more than a paycheck. Like when budget cuts forced one of the school counselors to go part-time and she signed on as a volunteer assistant counselor.

Amie looked like she was about to add something when a woman with tortoiseshell glasses weaved through the violin section toward the conductor stand.

“Hello, everyone. My name is Maddy Irving, and I’ll be your substitute. As you may have heard, your teacher is out on sick leave. For now, please team up with your stand partner and practice the”—she glanced at her notepad—“Mussorgsky?”

Mrs. Irving forgot to take roll until the dismissal bell rang, making me late for lunch. Up until November, I’d been able to sit
outside and eat my bag lunch under the sprawling sycamore tree in front of the school theater. The weather had forced me back inside. I’d taken to spending my lunch period in the orchestra practice room, where I wolfed down my pastrami sandwich and got a decent half hour of practice in.

This time, though, I headed for the cafeteria, a place I normally avoided at all costs. It wasn’t designed to hold all of us at once. We fit in, the way you can always get an extra shirt into a piece of luggage, but it wasn’t pleasant.

Kids scurried around me like a colony of ants. I searched for Kade and his drug-dealing sidekick; for Nora, her nose in a textbook; for Zoe, pretending she could nap while waiting in the lunch line. I couldn’t find any of them. I sighed, scanning the room until I spotted one mostly empty table. I headed for it, passing Tiffany Miller, surrounded by her loyal subjects, trading lipsticks and giggling.

By the time I reached the table, there was only one seat left. A force slammed into my shoulder, pushing me to the side. A girl bulldozed past and slid into my chair. She examined the contents of her bag lunch to avoid my scathing glare.

Lunch at Kennedy was like musical chairs, only without the music or the fun.

Three tables over, a guy rose to his feet, lunch tray topping the sci-fi books in his arms. I dropped into his vacated seat. As I pulled the carrots from my bag, I heard a scraping noise behind me. Zoe, scooting her chair my way. She didn’t say hello, just flipped open a book and started to read. I glanced at the title and laughed out loud.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, by Dale
Carnegie. Her hair fell like a curtain around her face, parting just enough for me to see the corners of her mouth lift up.

“Rule number one: take an interest in other people,” she said, slapping the book shut. “So where the hell is he?”

“Who?” I asked stupidly.

“I bet he blew off school. Do you think this was a joke? If it was, I’ll kick his ass, swear to God.”

I lifted the corner of my whole wheat bread and nudged the lettuce back from the edge.
No, of course it wasn’t a joke,
I wanted to say.
How could it be? That would be too mean.
But I didn’t say anything.

“I guess that League stuff was all a bunch of crap, huh? I was buying it, too,” Zoe said.

“The whole thing feels surreal, like it didn’t even happen,” I added.

We sat there, wondering, as we ate our lunches. Zoe had a Key lime pie yogurt and a Mountain Dew. That was it.

I decided to take Dale Carnegie’s advice and show some interest. “Are you on a diet?”

She batted her hair out of her eyes. “Are you kidding? I would never do that to myself.”

The bell rang. We traded awkward good-byes and lost each other in the crowd.

After my viola lesson on Friday, I abandoned my backpack and instrument on the front steps and rushed to the mailbox. Credit card offers, catalogs, Mom’s
Good Housekeeping
magazine. I fanned the pages of the Costco coupon book. Nothing.

What if Kade had decided we weren’t the friendship type?
I couldn’t blame him. Zoe was flippant, Nora skeptical, and I hadn’t added much of anything to the conversation. Boring, he probably thought. I wished I’d shown more interest.

Up in my bedroom, I booted up my laptop. One new e-mail, an offer to get medication from a Canadian pharmacy.

I signed on to Facebook and noticed that my old best friend had updated her status only fifteen minutes earlier.

Underneath the post, twelve “friends” had already offered sympathies. I didn’t know seven of them.

I minimized the screen and flipped open the latch to my viola case, reaching into a compartment for a rag. I polished the varnish until it shone, then tucked my viola under my chin and began Brahms’s Sonata in E-flat Major.

As I played, I thought about the time I’d invited Sofie over for our first sleepover since the move—in October, a week before she turned seventeen. We decided she’d take the two-hour bus trip each way, and I’d pay for the round-trip ticket as a birthday present.

When I told Mom, she said, “I know you miss your friend, but I wish you’d try harder to make new ones at Kennedy. Is there another person you could invite to join you?”

I knotted my arms over my chest. “I can’t ask a total stranger to come to my sleepover.”

“Well, I know, but you could—”

“Mom …”

“I get it. Butt out, right? It’s just that—”

“You’re right,” I interrupted.
About butting out
. “I’ll try harder. To make friends, I mean.”

She picked up the TV remote and tossed it into the basket beside the recliner. “OK, deal.”

I didn’t know what the deal was, and frankly, I didn’t care. Sofie was coming over, and that was all that mattered.

The first thing I did was take down the
Chronicles of Narnia
movie poster that Mom had taped to the back of my door, replacing it with a picture of Sofie and me the last time we’d trick-or-treated. I’d been a “cereal killer,” with a bunch of Cheerios boxes glued to a T-shirt splattered with ketchup. Sofie was supposed to be a rabbit, but when I showed up at her house, her mother was wigging out. Turned out she was a Playboy Bunny.

An hour before Sofie was supposed to arrive for the sleepover, I had grabbed a book and was waiting by the door. At a quarter to seven, every cell in my body was tuned to sounds from outside: high heels clacking on the flagstone, Sofie on her phone, letting her mom know she’d arrived safely, a soft knock on the door.

At seven, I speed-dialed her cell. No answer.

At 7:30, I went online.

At 7:31, Sofie signed onto Facebook.

I switched over to my account.

Subject: So, So Sorry!

I braced myself, then opened it.

Charlotte,
I have a huge test on Monday. I thought I’d be done studying for it, but it’s just too much. We’ll get together soon, promise!

How could my best friend have chosen
studying
over me? But in my heart, I knew it was an excuse. She was moving on.

With memories of Sofie haunting me, the Brahms Sonata felt more depressing than usual. The somber notes and sluggish rhythms did nothing for my mood. When I reached the last note, my phone rang. Nice finale.

I lowered the viola to my lap and answered it. “Hello?”

“Hi, Charlotte. This is Nora.”

“Hey,” I said.

Silence.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Have you heard anything, you know, about getting together or whatever?”

Nora Walker, queen of vocabulary, sounded inarticulate. It was unnerving.

“Nope, I haven’t.” All at once, the worries and insecurities I’d
tamped down sprung to the surface. “Maybe Kade doesn’t want to do it anymore. I don’t know, like he’s decided it’s not worth it, or he wants to find other people.”

People who aren’t us
, I almost said.