The Battle of Darcy Lane (9 page)

“I guess.” Alyssa paddled over to the steps and got out of the tube and pool without getting herself wet again.

We were both up to sevensies
—I was starting to hate all that bouncing—when Alyssa said, “Do you wear a bra?”

I froze. “No.”

She studied me. “I guess you don't really need one like I do.” She threw her ball way high. “Taylor's mom is taking her shopping for one after the doctor's.”

How had Taylor not told me about that? After we'd spent the entire last year waiting and hoping for our bodies to start changing?

The ball smacked back into Alyssa's hand.

We went up to her room after a while and she plopped down in her hot pink
ALYSSA
chair, leaving me nowhere to sit but her bed, which was Queen size and covered in a silky black-and-pink jungle-patterned spread with a deep pink border. Her huge stuffed giraffe was in a far corner and didn't seem babyish after all, but more like some designer's touch to perfect the cool safari theme. Her walls didn't have any posters or pictures, just a set of big letters—also pink—that spelled out her name.

“What should we do?” I asked, thinking,
She sure does like her name.

“I don't know. Want to spy on my neighbors?”

“No!”

“It's nothing to get all scaredy-cat about.”

“I just don't want to.”

“All right, fine,” she said. “What
do
you want to do? Play with
dolls
or something?”

So. Mean.

“Let's watch TV,” I said, noticing the flat screen on the wall above her dresser.

“All right.” She tossed me the remote like she was already too bored for words. “Knock yourself out.” She flipped through a few pages of a magazine. “Beating you at Russia is going to be like taking candy from a baby.”

More flipping.

Flip, like in slow motion.

“An
actual baby
.”

How could I be so stupid? How had I read this all wrong?

“I'm not actually sorry I threw the ball at you.” I stood up. “Not at all.”

She looked up, her mouth hanging open.

Flip.

I managed, “My mom
made me
come over to apologize.”

I knew I had to leave before I either got beat up or cried.

Her eyes returned to her magazine. “Then why are you still here?”

I tossed the remote onto her bed as I left the room. “Good question.”

“I'll see you Saturday!” Alyssa called out after me, all fake cheery. “If you have the guts to even show up!”

11
.

Mom had made tuna salad
with celery and onion in it, and she was setting the table when I got home.

“Fancy,” I said, because lunch didn't usually involve placemats. I wondered if I appeared nervous about what I'd just done.

She said, “Oh!” and put a third and fourth placemat down. “Wendy called for you, and I got her mom on the line and invited them over.”

“Mo-om.” This was the last thing I needed. What I needed was more Russia practice, and fast.

“What? It's fun to be spontaneous. And you haven't seen Wendy since school let out. Besides, they say the cicadas are coming tomorrow or—”

“I'm so sick of waiting for these cicadas.” I slid into a kitchen chair.

“I would think you'd be a little bit more excited about something that only happens once every seventeen years. It's a scientific wonder!”

I rolled my eyes. This was all a good cover for how sick I felt.

She studied me and I thought she was going to say, “What happened?” or “Why do you look like you've seen a ghost?” But she just said, “Go run a comb through your hair or something. And change out of your suit for lunch.”

Upstairs, I changed and brushed my hair and opened the drawer of my desk and put back that picture of me and Wendy. In it, we were sitting on lounge chairs in her backyard, holding fancy old-fashioned fans and wearing silly hats. That might have been the day I'd invented Millionaire. Maybe it would be good to see Wendy after all.

“Julia!” Mom called after the doorbell rang. I went out into the hall and down the stairs and into a hug from Wendy and then her mom.

“Come on.” Mom grabbed the placemats off the kitchen table. “Let's have lunch out back instead.”

We talked about the cicadas as we ate, and about the vacation Wendy's family was taking that fell right smack in the middle of music camp.

“We leave the day after it starts and get back the day before the concert,” Wendy said.

“She's so disappointed,” her mom said. “But what can you do?”

“Well, we'll bring Wendy to the concert if she wants?” Mom looked at Wendy. “We'll get an extra ticket and you can come see Julia and the rest of your friends from school?”

“That'd be fun,” Wendy said. “Thanks, Mrs. Richards.”

After lunch, the moms decided to go inside to talk about some curtain project my mom was cooking up. Wendy and I sat under the table umbrella in awkward silence for a minute. I wasn't sure whether it was all in my head—if it was just me being awkward because of Russia and Alyssa—or both of us. I was relieved Wendy wouldn't be at camp if we were this miserable around each other; hopefully she'd just forget about the concert by the time it rolled around. Finally I said, “You want to go swimming?”

“If you want.” She shrugged a pale shoulder. Wendy was a girl who knew her way around a bottle of sunscreen.

I stopped myself from shrugging back. But it was true that I didn't really care one way or the other. I went swimming every day, and it wasn't even that hot out.

“I brought my clarinet,” she said. “We could play some duets.”

“Maybe later.” I wasn't in the mood.

“I got new stickers.” She reached for her beachy tote bag. “You won't believe how much the piña colada scratch-'n'-sniff ones actually smell like piña colada.”

Scratch 'n' sniff! She was still into stickers.

“How do you know what a piña colada smells like?” I snapped.

“I just do,” she said.

Why was I being so mean? What was wrong with stickers?

The wind rustled the leaves overhead and we were quiet again. Then Wendy said, “So what have you been doing? Did you do any of the summer reading yet?”

“No, mostly I hang out with Taylor and this new girl who moved in across the street. Alyssa. She knows this game you play with a ball. It's called Russia. I can show you if you want.”

“Maybe later.”

“I could use the practice,” I said, and then I braved it. “I'm going head to head with her this weekend.”

“Why?”

I could tell from the way she said it that she didn't care, and I didn't see the point of trying to explain everything that had been going on, even though Wendy would totally
understand
what it was like to be made fun of for freckles or holding your nose or a flat chest. I guess I didn't want Wendy to tell me how weird it all sounded and how I should just stop hanging out with them because they sounded horrible. Because even if that was true, this was where I lived, and Taylor was still my best friend. Not hanging out with them wasn't really an option.

“Maybe we
should
go swimming,” Wendy said.

“Yeah. Let's.”

For a while things seemed almost fun and I forgot about Alyssa. Wendy and I raced each other and tried to do cartwheels underwater, and I told her all about
The Haunted Pond
and she was totally into it. I told her, too, about how I now officially had a crush on Peter and how we had been sneaking his Dad's iPad out to watch
End of Daze
.

“Yikes,” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah, it's awesome. Scary but awesome.”

“I'm not allowed to watch it.”

“I figured.”

I watched my beach ball glide across the surface of the pool. Wendy was lying on a raft and the ball bumped into her, so she nudged it with an elbow and it came back my way. The sun was warmest on my thighs, and when the ball hit my elbow I popped it up in the air like I was a seal.

Upstairs, later, Wendy wailed
, “Oh, no! What happened to your unicorn poster?”

“Oh. It fell and ripped.”

“I
loved
that poster.” She stood in the middle of my room, and I could see now that she was starting to develop even though I wasn't. It made me want to strangle her.

Wendy said, “And something else is different.”

“Well, I'm probably moving to the other room soon.”

“Oh, no! Really?” She looked suddenly concerned and seemed to be waiting for an explanation.

I was entirely confused. “Why ‘oh no'? It's going to be awesome.”

She looked like I'd said just the wrong thing, and looked away. “Oh, yeah, totally. Forget I said anything.”

“Wendy.” I waited for her to look at me. “What's going on?”

She sighed. “You can't tell anybody I told you.”

“Okay. I won't.”

She looked away again. “My mom thought your mom was going to have another baby. I guess she was wrong. You can't tell them I told you.”

Everything got blurry. Then I thought about the weirdness about the room down the hall—the way it was so mysterious, so complicated. They had thought it was going to be a baby's room. And now . . . it wasn't? Because Dad had told me he was working on it, the room. So what did
that
mean?

Maybe that was something they still wanted? Another kid?

I liked the idea of it.

Someone to be lonely with.

“I'm sorry,” Wendy said. “I think my mom thought there'd be official news today, that that was why we were invited.”

“No,” I said. “No news.”

I didn't want to talk about it anymore. “Let's just play Spit, okay?”

“Your carousel!” Wendy practically screamed, noticing, I guessed, the circle of missing dust on my dresser when she got up to get the cards. “Did it break?”

“No. I still have it.”

“Oh, good. I thought maybe there'd been an earthquake that only hit your room or something.”

I said, “That would be pretty crazy,” but as we started to play cards, I felt like I was experiencing some serious tremors and aftershocks. I could barely shuffle the deck.

“So.” Wendy lowered her voice. “I finally got a bra.”

“That's great. I'm happy for you.” And then we just played and played while I struggled to hold it together.

“I broke my Dopey,” I said, after a while. “You know, the Seven Dwarfs I've had since I was little?”

“Stinks.” Wendy was going to town with fours and fives and sixes on one of the piles, but I had nothing to add, just jacks and queens and some nines and tens. “I bet your mom can fix it.”