Meanicures (14 page)

“Well,
I’m
super busy organizing our next fundraiser,” said Olivia. “You’re on your own.”

It seemed like we should be working on this together. Was this what happened when your karma went down to a subzero level? “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything,” I said.

“Don’t screw it up, like you screwed up the Endangered Animals Club,” Olivia said.

“How did I …” My voice trailed off. There was no point arguing anymore.

“Okay, I
just called Combing Attractions and talked to Poinsettia, and we set up a time,” I said when we met in the cafeteria for lunch the next day. It seemed like almost everyone around us was wearing one of our club T-shirts. We’d been selling more and more T-shirts all week; our supply was nearly out. “She said we could do it whenever we wanted. I told her Saturday at two o’clock. Isn’t that great?”

Olivia had set up a table to sell our remaining tees, and Taylor and I were supposed to help.

“Hm,” said Taylor while she folded T-shirts into neat stacks.

“Thrilling,” said Olivia.

“And I made some invitations, too. Do you guys want to go hand them out while I sit here and man the table for a while?” I offered.

“Um … I don’t think so,” said Taylor.

“There’s not really room for you,” Olivia added.

“But I—I started this club with you,” I said. “I designed the shirts with you.”

They just looked at me as if I were some stranger.

I threw up my hands. “Fine, I’ll go invite them to the meanicure.” Why did I have to do everything?

As I crossed to the other side of the cafeteria, where the cheerleaders were holding a bake sale, Kayley came in, carrying a plate of baked goods with her uninjured hand.

When she saw me headed her way, she dropped the plate, which smashed into pieces. Cookies rolled across the floor.

She ran back out the door, while I walked up to Cassidy, Alexis, and the other cheerleaders.

There was no line at their table. They wouldn’t need the cookies Kayley had just dropped.

I stood there for a minute, evaluating my choices: undercooked lemon bars that oozed lemon filling onto the plate, or vanilla cupcakes with brown charred circles around the outside edges.

“They look bad, don’t they?” said Cassidy. “They look terrible.”

“No, not at all. I’ll buy a cupcake,” I said.

“Great!” Alexis grinned. “Fifty cents. Thanks
so
much.”

There was a loud, sad clink as the two quarters I’d given her hit the bottom of the can.

“So the reason I’m here,” I said, shifting the cupcake in my hand so I could give them the invitations, “is this.”

Cassidy and Alexis each scanned their invitations.

“There’s an extra one, for Kayley, if you could give it to her,” I said.

“We’ll give it to her later,” said Cassidy. She kept skimming.
“That
place? You want to meet there?”

“It has a great atmosphere. Ambience,” I explained. “Whatever.”

“You got your haircut there, didn’t you?”

“Mm-hm.” I nodded. I wanted to say,
Don’t you remember? You wrote a blog post about it. You said I lost my best feature, remember?

“It really is a great cut for you,” said Cassidy. “Totally shows off your cheekbones. It must have taken a lot of courage to do that. Your mom always wanted you to keep your long hair, but you just chopped it off, and it looks ten times better than before.”

What was I supposed to say? That I wanted her to not like my haircut, or anything about me, because the fact she did was sort of creepy. I thought it was just more evidence we needed to change.

“Maybe I’ll get my hair cut the same way!” Cassidy said.

“What? No! I mean, um, think about it for a while first,” I said. “’Cause, you know. Trust me. It’s going to take a long time to grow back.”

“True. Well, if they do good haircuts, they probably know how to do good manicures,” Cassidy reasoned.

“Exactly. So, okay, you guys will come, right? You’ll be there?” I asked.

“Sure!” said Alexis.

“And it’ll be our treat,” I announced.

“Why? That’s silly. We’ll treat,” said Cassidy.

“No!
No, you can’t. I have a, um, gift card. It’s cool.” I smiled nervously. I didn’t have to tell her that I’d have to cash in my meager savings from babysitting jobs, birthday gifts, and household chores just to afford their manicures. But
they
couldn’t pay.

“So, we’ll see you Saturday afternoon at two o’clock, okay?” I asked. “Thanks!”

“No, thank you,” Cassidy said sweetly.

The syrupy tone to her voice made me a little nauseous. If she hadn’t been such a good friend to me not that long ago, it would have made no sense at all.

“Wait—Madison!” Cassidy suddenly called as I started to walk away.

“Yeah?” I paused.

“You know that day, when you got your hair cut. We did this online thing, and it was really stupid, and I’m totally sorry about it,” said Cassidy. “It was so immature. I mean, I bet you didn’t even
see
it, but if you did see it—”

“I saw it,” I said calmly.

“Sorry,” Cassidy and Alexis said at the same time.

“It’s, uh, okay. I mean, thanks. I guess.”

I walked back to the T-shirt table, kind of in a daze.

“Did they say yes?” Olivia asked, looking up at me.

I nodded. “They’re pretty excited about the idea of a free manicure.”

“Thank goodness.” Taylor sighed. “I thought for sure they were going to turn us down.”

“Me too,” Olivia said. “In fact, if they show up and this actually works, I’ll be totally shocked.”

“Agreed. It’s a juvenile and misguided plan, just like your idea to get rid of them in the first place with that stupid ceremony,” Taylor added. She turned to Olivia. “What were we thinking when we agreed to go along with Madison?”

The way she was glaring at me, and the way her words stung, it was almost as if she’d just punched me in the jaw. We’d been friends for so long, and now she was sitting there, criticizing every single thing about me.

“Well, at least I did
something,”
I said. “At least I tried.”

“Well, maybe don’t try so hard next time,” Taylor said.

I glanced around the cafeteria, angry tears filling my eyes, tears that I didn’t want Taylor or Olivia or anyone else in the room to see. “You know, if that’s how you feel, you don’t have to come Saturday. Neither of you have to come. I’m the one who started all this, and I can stop it on my own.”

“Oh, we’ll be there,” Olivia said. “We have to make sure you don’t screw up.”

Where was all this coming from? Since when did I screw up everything? “You know what? Sometimes, I don’t even know why we’re friends,” I said.

Taylor folded her arms across her chest. “Sometimes, neither do I.”

“Then we definitely don’t have to
stay
friends!” I said.

I walked out of the cafeteria, tossing the burned cupcake into the trash on my way.

We’d never had a fight as bad as this—ever. Everyday teasing or giving each other a hard time—that was one thing. But now, all of a sudden, it seemed everyone had turned on me. Instead of standing up to the mean girls together, we’d split apart, and I’d ended up alone.

Maybe I’d lost the mean girls—or a little of their meanness—but I’d lost my friends, too.

What if we went ahead with the meanicure party and it
didn’t
work?
Then
where would I be? It’d be five mean girls against me. I didn’t want to think about those odds. Or had I turned into one, too?

We were halfway through dinner—Chinese takeout—which I wasn’t eating, when Mom reached over and put her hand on my arm. “You’re so quiet. What’s wrong? What happened?”

Sometimes when I try to hide things from her, she notices them even more. I like that and I hate it at the same time.

“She got those photos back from Halloween,” Parker said.

“Quiet,” Mom warned him.

“She realized that what she thought was a fake wart was actually a real wart, which means her nose is that warty all the time,” he went on.

“Knock it off. I need to hear from Madison, not you,” Mom said sternly.

“Fine.” Parker dished more fried rice onto his plate, making a mound the size of a football. He always insists on using chopsticks, even though he can hardly pick up a shrimp with them, never mind endless grains of rice. I wouldn’t mind, but I have to stay at the table until he’s done, too—it’s a family rule. I have better things to do with my life than watch him try to catch sticky rice with a chopstick.

At least, I used to.

“Madison. Spill,” Mom told me as I stacked baby corn with my fork to make a miniature cabin. It’s amazing the projects you can start when you’re stalling at the dinner table.

“We sort of had a fight.”

“Who?”

“My …” I was going to say “friends” but it didn’t seem accurate. “Olivia. And Taylor. They totally took shots at me this afternoon.”

“Seriously? They hit you?” asked Parker.

“Not shots like that. Just verbal shots,” I explained.

“Why would Olivia and Taylor do that to you?” Mom took a sip of water, so calm that I found myself becoming irritated. I wanted her to grab the phone and call somebody, make things right. Or I wanted her to scream a little and be outraged. She could wave that magic Mom wand she used to have and make everything stop hurting with a Disney Band-Aid.

“That’s the thing. I don’t know why they did, exactly,” I said. “I mean, I kind of know. But …”

“Madison, you’re not making sense. Tell me what happened.”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you.”

“Sure you can.”

“No.”

Mom looked exasperated. “If you refuse to give me any more information than that, then I can’t help you. But I’m sure that any argument you had isn’t permanent. I bet it’ll have blown over by the time you go to bed tonight.”

I narrowed my eyes. How could she talk about my life like it was a weather front? “I don’t think so,” I said.

She went on, offering more unhelpful advice. “Sometimes we don’t know why people say what they do. Maybe they’re just having a bad day, but they take it out on us. All you can do is ride out the storm.”

“Mom, I’m sick of your weather metaphors! They don’t help!”

She looked startled. “Maybe not now, I know. But—”

“No, you don’t know. You don’t understand.” I pushed back my chair, leaving my uneaten dinner on the table, and ran for the stairs. I slammed the door to my room and flopped onto the bed, head on hands, staring out at the ocean. There was a gleam of moonlight on the water.

Maybe that’s a sign
, I thought. For a second I had this
brief glimmer of hope. Maybe someone had already apologized. Maybe something good was about to happen. I jumped up to check my computer.

Nope. No e-mail. Nothing.

Parker opened the door a crack and poked his head in. So much for hope. (Not to mention privacy.)

“You know what?” he asked. “Don’t sweat it. They’ll get over it, and so will you.”

“Right,” I said. “What makes you think that?”

“You’ve been friends forever, why would you
stop
now?” he said. “People don’t just stop being friends.”

“Cassidy and I stopped,” I reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah. Well, uh …”

Usually I’m thrilled when Parker is speechless. This time … not so much.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tried reading a book; I watched a movie; I even read my math book, cover to cover. I couldn’t stop worrying about the manicures. Would they work? Would my friends become my friends again? Would we all stop being so mean, or would just some of us change back? What if it
didn’t
work, and we were stuck this way forever? I couldn’t let that happen.

Finally I got up, pulled on my robe, and went downstairs. First I sorted through Mom’s boxes of samples in the basement, putting together custom gift bags—not just for the original mean girls but for Olivia and Taylor, too.

Maybe sample sizes weren’t enough, I thought as I filled the small canvas bags Mom always kept on hand for gifts to prospective clients. Maybe we needed the quart sizes. Or the gallon ones.

After those were done and labeled, I went up to the kitchen. I found a box of cake mix, but first I quickly made a batch of Rice Krispies Treats with chocolate chips.

This is going to work
, I told myself as I slid the angel food cake pan into the oven at midnight.
This has to work
.