A Tale of Two Besties (26 page)

As we descended the stairs, Nicole came into view. She was sitting with her back to us, her hair as gleaming and as silvery as the dials on the control board she was jabbing. She was wearing the same wings from the party, though they had lost a little bit of their metallic luster . . . now they just looked like they were molting.

On the other side of the glass partition was Drew, sitting on a stool and balancing his jug xylophone on his lap. His wings lay on the group in a heap: he'd apparently taken them off to jug more freely.

“You're late.” Nicole didn't even bother to turn around. “And? Not to dump all my truth on you at once, Lily, but you were very rude last night. You didn't even participate in our closing meditation service at the end of the party.”

“Sorry.” I could feel Stephanie shifting on her heels behind me. “I was distracted.”

Nicole swiveled in her chair and regarded us, eyes narrowing at the new visitor.

“I'm sorry.” She smiled at Stephanie, barely looking sorry at all. “But this is a closed session. Members only.”

I cringed inwardly, but Stephanie just smiled and extended her hand like nothing was wrong.

“Hey, I'm Stephanie,” she said. “I'm Lily's friend from . . .”

Nicole swiveled back around as if she couldn't be bothered to hear the end of the sentence. She snapped at Drew through the microphone hooked up to the recording studio. “Okay, Drew! Let's try it again. This time, I really need to hear the soul!” Drew winced, his wings shaking a little. “You need to make
love
to the jugs. Otherwise we're just listening to a guy tooting into a water bottle. You have to stop. Stop tooting!”

Stephanie laughed, muffling her mouth with her hands. I could tell from the way Jane and Drew widened their eyes that this was the most sacrilegious thing she could have done. In all fairness to Steph, the scene was ridiculous: four kids dressed up like DIY pigeons, looking like rejects from a hipster cosplay convention, yelling about making love to jugs and
tooting
. I had to work to suppress my own giggle.

Nicole wheeled back around and once again fixed on us both with a stare as steely as her plumage. “Lily, I thought I asked your friend to leave. I cannot abide anyone mocking our expression of self through music.” Stephanie grabbed my arm, and I knew if I looked over at her we'd both lose it completely.

“Come on Nicole,” I said, temporarily insane with endorphins. “No one is making fun. It's just . . .
funny
. In a good way. I promise.”

“I can call my brother,” Stephanie said. Somehow, she was still effortlessly composed, as if Nicole's withering stare and demands that she leave didn't make her feel subhuman. “I didn't know it was going to be a problem.”

“No!” I cried, surprising myself with my own forcefulness. “That's not fair. I want you to stay.” I turned back to Nicole with pleading eyes. “Come on, she can stay, right?”

“Band members only,” Nicole said. “Sorry. Them's the rules.”

“What rules? You're not even in the band!”

I had overstepped, and I knew it. I could feel Nicole's chi shifting the room into majorly negative NAMASTErritory. “Lily.” Nicole said my name in the key of a disappointed school teacher. “I am lending my services today in a managerial-slash-producer capacity. Music is always a collaboration, and no role is more necessary than that of the person who tells you when something is not living up to its fullest potential.”

“Well, can't an audience do that, too?” If I was going to alienate every single one of my friends in the same weekend, I might as well finish the job now in one broad stroke. “Stephanie can offer feedback as an audience member! Seriously, she just wants to hear us play!”

“I
so
highly doubt that. I mean, look at her.” Nicole waved her hand dismissively at Stephanie, whose outfit was so far from offensive it could have been in a
Teen Vogue
spread for “How to Appear Nonthreatening”: white tee, shorts, Vans, beanie.

“She just looks so . . .” Nicole groped for words.

Nicole snapped her fingers at Jane, who had somehow materialized behind me, in the middle of the staircase, where she was balancing a tray of chilled Kombucha tea. “Jane, what does she look like to you?”

I could tell Jane's blank stare of incomprehension annoyed Nicole even more. “I guess she looks . . . normal?”

Nicole nodded. “Very
normative,
” she said, misusing the word completely. “There's no imagination there. This outfit is afraid to tell us anything. It's the uniform of the herd of the rich, popular kids who never question authority or try to broaden their horizons. It's totally
off-message
.” Nicole grinned savagely. “I mean, of course I'm not talking about you . . . um . . . Stacy?”

“Stephanie,” I said dully, answering for my friend.

“Right. Well, I'm just talking about your fashion statement,
obviously
 . . .” Nicole's smile made it obvious that she was doing no such thing. Jane and Drew hadn't made a peep yet, which made me a little angry at them, but then I realized I hadn't really stood up to Nicole either. This whole situation made me want to curl up and die, in an all too familiar way.

Bully.

Harper's description of Nicole floated through my head like a bouquet of giant, green, sickly balloons.
Phony.
She had called NAMASTE a meaningless club, a clique, just like the kind you'd find at any other school. But how was that possible? Nicole didn't look like a bully. Her philosophical ideas about being yourself and expressing your creativity didn't fall in line with classic bully-speak. But if Nicole was treating Stephanie like poo just because of how she dressed, what else do you call that besides “bullying”?

Oh my god. Had Harper been right all along?

While all this was short-circuiting my brain, the room's bad vibes had only increased. Stephanie calmly began to collect her skateboard from where she had stashed it under the stairs. “Well, I better be going and let you guys go back to it,” she said cheerfully. “It was nice to meet you all!”

She sauntered up the stairs and I followed behind her. “I'm just going to go . . . walk her to the door,” I mumbled. Nicole scowled, but turned back to the control board without a word.

“Sorry about that,” I whispered, feeling a dark pit in my stomach as I funeral-marched Stephanie out of Jane's house. “Nicole can be intense sometimes.”

“It's no problem. I've dealt with girls like her before.” Stephanie really did look unfazed as she rifled through her bag for some ChapStick. “I can never find anything in here,” she sighed, faux-exasperated. “You know how it's always the one thing you need that's never in your gigantic purse?” She finally found the little tube and blotted a layer onto already perfectly shiny lips.

“Sure,” I said. “Kind of.”

“Take Harper.” Stephanie capped her ChapStick and zipped up her bag in the practiced way of someone who never had to look for anything, ever. “Every day when I see her in school, she's bugging me to borrow my phone charger. She is, like, constantly losing hers. And she's afraid of her phone dying and she won't turn it off during class, she told me, because I guess she's worried that she might miss a message from you.”

“Really?” My voice came out scratchy.

“Yeah.” Stephanie shrugged, one hand on the door. “I told her, they're not like dropped phone calls. Verizon can't just make a text disappear. It's always
there
, waiting for you. You know?” She paused. “Anyway, it was good to see you, Lily. I hope you have fun with your band. They seem very . . . creative.”

I gulped and nodded and closed the door behind her. Below, faintly, I could hear music playing, and Nicole yelling above the din.

“Okay,” she shouted. “This time, let me really hear you jug!”

“How much does a smoothie cost?” Rachel had stationed herself on my floor, propped up by rugs and throw pillows. In the past couple days she'd created a proper nest in my bedroom where she liked to use her laptop.

“I don't know,” I mumbled, head under my covers and pillow. “Eight dollars maybe?”

Rachel snorted. “
Eight dollars
for a smoothie? That's ludicrous. That's, like, the cost of three meals, for just one smoothie.”

My sister had been trying out some sort of paleo-keto-gluten-free-cleanse thing for the last couple of days, a side effect from her sudden “break” from Jacques. (“Jacques said we need to take time to explore other people,” was how she'd described it. “I totally agree with him,” she lied.) As much as I dislike Jacques-attack, I dislike Rachel-on-a-diet even more. The plus side of the breakup was that she was now fully available on a Sunday to tend to her depressed and lonely little sister. But another downside: For the first time in my life, I couldn't care less that Rachel was being nice to me.

“Ew, it says here that one large Jamba Juice contains the calorie and sugar equivalent of twelve donuts. Who would eat twelve donuts?” Rachel's eyes were glued to the screen. “Did you know that for two hundred and fifty dollars we can buy a pretty decent smoothie maker? If you drink two smoothies a day, that would pay for itself, in like. . . .” She turned and caught me looking catatonically right back at her. I shrugged. Math was neither of our strong suits.

“A week? Or no, a month?” Rachel went back to clicking. “I'm hearing a lot of good things about superfoods. Maybe we should get really into baby bok choy.”

“Okay, GOOPster.” My phone buzzed from the drawer of my bedside table and I groaned. I had turned it off when Lily wouldn't stop calling after I left the party, but I'd forgotten how itchy my fingers got for CandyCrush if they went too long without it, so I broke down and turned it on again in the morning. You win again, apps!

“Who is it?” Rachel asked, prying her eyes away from zoomed-in images of overpriced blenders.

“Tim wants to know if I want to go to something called Wacko with him.” I leaned over to Rachel. “Hey, can you actually Google, ‘What is a wacko?'”

“Harper! Wacko Soap Plant! I love that place!” Rachel jumped out of her blanket fort, making pillow shams and poufs rain down like she was Godzilla trapped in a Jonathan Adler store. “It's like this insane toy-store-slash-punk-rock-explosion emporium. I can't even describe it! Tell him we'll be there in twenty.”

“We?”

Rachel grabbed me by the arm and gave me a tug. I barely budged, which was an appropriate response since at the moment I was officially a wet lump of nothing.

“Stop, I feel like one giant bruise.” I yanked my arm away and buried myself even deeper under the covers.

“Your life is one giant bruise,” Rachel said, throwing on her favorite black hoodie, the one that said “Hug Life” in bedazzled letters. “Get up, we're going. I can't watch you mope around like a
Twilight
vampire just because you got into a fight with Lily.”

When I got home the night before I ran straight up to my room and practically ripped my stupid dress off. Moments later, Rachel knocked on my door, quietly asking if I was okay or if I wanted anything. When I didn't reply, she padded away, but in the morning she showed up at my door with a box of tissues and two bowls of cereal, suggesting a Netflix marathon of an obscure British comedy.

“Fine,” I grumbled now, remembering how thoughtful she was being. “We'll meet him. But you're buying me something adorable. Preferably Hello Kitty related.”

“Yay! Tell your
boyfriend
we'll be there pronto. Unless you want me to tell him, but watch out, I might start texting looooove poems from your cell phone.” Rachel made a swipe for my phone before I could stop her, and held down my flailing attempts at recovery with one hand.

“‘Hey, how did it go last night?'” Rachel read from my phone in a fake-deep voice. “‘Hey, just checking in to see if everything with Lily went okay, plz text me back. I have something 4 u.'” Rachel waggled her eyebrows suggestively at that one. I groaned and flopped onto my back as she read the last message before the Wacko one, from this morning, out loud. “‘Okay, well what I wanted to say last night is that I hope Lily threw you an excellent birthday party and it was all you ever wanted, because you are great and deserve it. That's all.'”

Rachel looked properly mollified, and handed me back my phone without another word. “Okay,” I shouted as if she were still twisting my arm (which she kind of was). “Enough. Let's go to this stupid toy shop.”

Because it was a weekend, it took us an extra twenty minutes to find parking on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Feliz, so we were a little late to arrive at Wacko Soap Plant, which was sensory overload from the moment we walked in. It was like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but for weird Day of the Dead totems and porny robots instead of chocolate rivers and Never-Ending Gobstoppers. I tried to mentally catalogue all the oddball stuff I saw, but gave up after I found a taxidermy alligator head next to a product that accurately billed itself as “Hot Dog Earbuds.” A vintage
My Little Pony
lunchbox was mounted on one of the claustrophobically tight walls, next to a hologram poster of the Hindu god Ganesh, whom I recognized from that one Simpson's episode. I spotted a
Doctor Who
TARDIS ice bucket (because yes, I do know about nerdy things!) buried under two throw pillows shaped like a red Converse sneaker and a bag of potato chips, respectively.

“Hey, you're here!” Tim raced down the aisle pushing an overflowing shopping cart, grinning like a kid in a candy store (that also happened to sell Batman plushies). “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I grumbled. To prevent Rachel from eavesdropping, I grabbed the cart from Tim and began pushing it back the way it came. I could hear Tim as he panted to catch up behind me.

“Hey, what's up? Harper?”

I didn't slow down till we reached the novelty gag section, all fake farts and spitting ink pens.

“Are you okay?” Tim stood in front of me with his hands on my shoulders. “What are you so upset about?”

“Nothing,” I muttered. “I just had a bad night.” Tim gave me a sympathetic look, as if he already knew.

“What are you, a psychic? Or am I just always having terrible nights so it's the go-to explanation?” I suddenly had this image of myself as baby rattlesnake, just snapping and biting and releasing all my bad feelings.

“No, I just figured . . . you usually text me back,” He scratched the back of his neck. “I was worried.” I thought about the millions of texts Lily had sent me since last night, filled with more emotion than all of the ones she'd sent since school started combined. Of course half of them were in all caps and totally shouty, but a couple had made it seem like she was genuinely concerned.

“There's nothing to be worried about. I'm totally fine. Last night was fine.” I grabbed the first thing I saw off the shelf and pretended to study it. “Yikes. What is this?”

Tim studied the label earnestly. “Cat Butt Gum. Looks legit. Should we get it?”

I immediately dropped it back on the shelf and wiped my hands on my shorts. When I looked up, Tim was staring at me with knowing eyes, practically willing me to tell him the truth about my birthday disaster.

“Okay, fine,” I admitted, no longer able to distract myself with juvenile candy packaging. “Lily's party was terrible. It wasn't even
for me
. She just dragged me along as a plus-one to one of her stuck-up Pathways friend's parties. And they are all such suck-tacular Vampires and Murderers going around pretending they're hippies. You should have heard them, Tim, they were so fake and condescending. And then Lily and her new BFF Nicole told me that my FAUX LEATHER shoes were responsible for, like, genocides and the decline in adult literacy or something.”

“Huh.” I waited for Tim to continue his thought. I fully expected him to be outraged on my behalf, but apparently I wasn't doing a great job describing how terrible it had been. I went on.

“So, I tell Lily it's
fine
to leave me alone at this party with the approximately zero people I know, and then she's gone before you could say ‘traitor'! Oh, and I met this guy who said Lily's friend Nicole is pure EVIL.”

“Huh.”

“So, wait, the worst part? When I go to talk to Lily, she's in the bathroom, apologizing to all her new, cool friends for bringing
me
! She's totally changed, and I don't even recognize her. And I tried to tell her how upset I was but she just told me I should leave if I didn't like it and so I did and she didn't even try to stop me!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Stop saying that!” I exploded. “I need you to be more sympathetic! You're my shoulder to cry on!” I meant that last part as a joke, but Tim took his hands off my shoulders and looked embarrassed.

“Sorry,” I said, quickly backtracking. “That was just a bad joke. But I could really use some friendly support right now, is the thing.”

Tim reached behind me and picked up a plastic box. “Do you know what this is, Harper?”

“A dorky toy?” I asked.

“No. This is a vintage edition Antman figurine. They only made one batch of these, in the nineties, when Marvel was merchandizing all their characters up the wazoo. At the time, a lot of stores didn't think they would sell, because who cares about Antman, right? Except today there's this total surge of interest in those old characters, and now it's the totally random heroes with the really ridiculous powers that are worth a fortune.”

“Okay . . . ?” I had no idea where Tim was going with this.

Tim blew his cheeks up with air and then slowly exhaled. “I'm just saying, did it ever occur to you that maybe being at Pathways helps Lily feel like she's valuable? That she's not just some novelty product”—he motioned to the junk surrounding us—“but that she's actually talented? And that it might feel good to have people appreciate her for all those same little quirks that made her an outsider before?”

“But I liked Lily the way she was! I always appreciated her!”

Tim had the ghost of a smile. “Right. And that's great. But maybe what she's expressing—albeit terribly and maybe a little misguidedly—is that she finally feels like other people, besides you, finally get what she's about. That her creativity is being appreciated exactly because it's not like everyone else's?”

“But where does that leave me?” I asked. “I feel like I'm being left behind. Everyone else I know can do stuff. You draw, Stephanie skateboards, Lily . . . well, Lily creates these entire worlds to exist in. And what's my thing? What am I good at? Liking animals? Having friends and losing them? Peaking in middle school? Are those my superpowers?”

Tim looked serious. “What's your ‘thing,' Harper? What's your ‘superpower'? Do you really not know?”

I really didn't. I did notice, however, that Tim and I were standing really, really close to each other.

“The way you believe in us is what makes you special, Harper,” Tim said. “You bring out the super in everyone.”

I wanted to cry, but I was too busy not breaking eye contact with Tim, who was less than a freckle's width away from me.

“No, I can't do anything,” I whispered. “I'm not special.”

“That statement is so far from true I'm not even going to dignify it with an answer.” Instead, Tim bent down and I stretched myself up, and then his arm was around my waist, pulling me closer into him and up against a rack of half-priced Edward Gorey piñatas. His breath smelled like peppermint. Were we going to kiss? Was I about to get my second kiss ever? From Tim Slater? Literally the only person more unfathomable than Derek Wheeler?
And
Lily's ex-boyfriend? Would I even be able to tell Lily? Would I ever be able to tell Lily anything again, ever, regardless of this? My brain knotted itself into a confusing jumble of thoughts that were all yapping at each other's heels like pent-up Pomeranian puppies.