Don't Ever Change (11 page)

“How do you know it’s older?” Miranda asks, slightly slurring.

“Because,” Steph says, spearing a tortellini, “like the Roman Empire.”

“Don’t be an idiot, pasta’s from China,” I say, and this time I don’t see it coming: Michelle jabs an elbow and catches me right in the wrist, knocking over Miranda’s wine glass, which is already empty.

“Anyway,” Bart continues, oblivious to everything, “it was a pretty cool Thanksgiving. We saw the Pieta and a bunch of dope sculptures, and the Pope waved from his window, which was awesome.”

“Sounds supercool, Bart,” I say, glaring at him spreading more butter on more bread. “Better than being in generic-ass New York gobbling some big, nasty turkey at least.”

Just then Michelle pinches my arm, stands up, and says sternly, “Bathroom,” which in this context means me and her and Steph,
now
.

I follow the two of them across the fake rustic piazza and under the fake vine-covered trellises leading to the bathrooms. Michelle shoves the door open and we all file in, even though it’s a single—one toilet, one sink, one candle, and one framed painting of a Venice canal with a little gondola bopping along the choppy water.

“Don’t look at the art,” Michelle says.

“Hey, you guys don’t get to be the mad ones here,” I say. “You both lied by omission.”

“It was a last-minute thing,” Steph says. “We didn’t know for sure they were coming.”

“Lying! You did too know, you planned it.”

“We just thought it would be fun,” Michelle says.

“It was
already
going to be fun, because it was going to be the three of us and we always have fun, no matter what.”

“
More
fun, then,” Steph says, and then Michelle says, “A different
kind
of fun.”

“No one say ‘fun’ again or I’m going to flip out,” I tell them.

No one does but I flip out anyway, letting loose one sad and lonely scream because I feel left out and lonely, and those are the last two things I should feel when I’m with my two best friends.

“We
like
Bart,” Michelle says, and she means all of us—even me.

“I’m okay with that,” I say, sighing. “I just don’t know why he has to be here.”

“Because it’s cool sometimes to have other people around, not just us.”

“No, we’re the coolest,” I say.

“Miranda’s cool too,” Steph says. “She’s a writer.”

“She doesn’t seem like one,” I say. “At all.”

“Eva, we can’t all be Eva,” Michelle says.

The toilet in the other bathroom flushes loudly through the thin walls; a man coughs. If everything inside of us isn’t being dropped down a hole, then it’s being hacked up, and I don’t want to go back to the table. Not unless we’re all laughing, all forgiven, all in agreement about who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside looking in.

“Well, what does she write?” I ask.

“Really, really beautiful songs,” Steph says. “Like poetry.”

“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten about songwriting, about even the idea of poetry.

“Even though you were rude,” Steph says, collecting herself, “we’re not mad.” She looks to Michelle for verbal agreement.

“Even though we have every
right
to be,” Michelle says.

“I was just giving them a
pizza
my mind,” I say, trying to reconnect.

“Ha-ha,” Steph says, not smiling.

“You’re the one who put cheese on it,” Michelle says to me, accusingly.

She’s the first one out the door.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I’M LYING IN
bed at midnight, mentally prepping for my girls tomorrow, visualizing how to introduce the journals and the pens, but it’s so absurdly hot in my room I keep getting distracted. I flip open my phone: I’ve got one message from Shelby, wanting to hang out this weekend and
not
talk about boys (re: Zack), but there are no postgame amendments from Michelle or Steph, obviously. Lindsay emailed again, and it’s kind of cryptic (
Comin 2 San D NETime soon? cuz lez hang
), and Foster wrote saying he’s trying to figure out a way for the boy
not
to die.

Every summer my mother declares it the hottest summer she’s ever felt in Los Angeles, and even though she’s factually wrong, I’m still not looking forward to the year when it finally gets cooler and turns autumn right on schedule with the rest of the lonely planet. I hope L.A. gets hotter and hotter year after year, until one year summer lasts all the way until the next summer, and beyond that even.

One reason I don’t mind the heat is because I can’t sweat. Not even in the areas where it should be easy: armpits, crooks of elbows, backs of knees. I wish I could, because it feels like there’s something inside me that needs to be sweated out. I close my eyes and imagine taking a bath—
aye, there’s the tub
—and then I imagine Sunny Skies Day Camp being scorched by sunshine. I try to
will
the sweat out. Maybe if I played prisoner ball. Maybe if I played prisoner ball in sweats. Maybe if I had sex. Maybe if I had the hottest sex.

That’s when Elliot calls. I pick up on the first ring, which he wasn’t expecting. I can tell he was expecting to talk to an answering machine, because what he says sounds like a speech, but because it’s a nice speech I don’t interrupt. He’s somewhere in Texas, north of Austin, on his way to Oklahoma City, then Little Rock.

“Then Nashville, then Louisville, then Baltimore, then Philly.”

“Wow,” I say.

“I’m counting off days.”

“That’s what I’d do.”

“Our L.A. gig is in some parking lot on Melrose outside some record store,” Elliot says. “Have you heard of it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m having an okay time”—that’s the word he uses—“are things being okay at camp?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d say they’ve been mainly okay.”

“Sorry I haven’t called,” he says.

And then Elliot exhales in that specific way a smoker exhales, between words, so I ask if he’s smoking. He is! I never knew that he smoked—I
hate
that he smokes—so I launch into a tirade about tongue cancer, which to me seems even grosser than lung cancer, and about those tiny electronic boxes they put in cancer patients’ throats to help them talk.

“I only smoke when I’m stressed or when I’m having fun,” he says.

That makes no sense to me.

Then Elliot brings up how we only have, like, six or seven weeks left before I leave. But I can’t tell: is he just counting off days on a calendar, or does he mean we only have six or seven weeks—the rest of this hot, lonely summer—to
do something
, to know each other, or fall in love, or form some bond that’ll last into fall when I’m running through the Boston rain with a newspaper covering my head? I don’t know and I don’t ask, because I’m still mad about the smoking and I won’t change that, not for him.

“Well,” I say, wrapping up, “don’t have too much fun.”

“
Don’t have too much fun?
” Elliot asks, disappointed.

“How about, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’?”

“Okay,” he says. “So don’t do anything then.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THE MORNING STARTS
great, full of promise. We all sing “Boom Chicka Boom” at Morning Ceremonies—even me, even
Alyssa
—while Foster and I exchange funny looks. During the “Happy Birthday” song for Meghan Bremner, who’s turning nine, my girls shout out alternate lyrics (“
you look like a monkey
,
and you smell like one too
”) and erupt into laughter. When I’m handed our schedule, I’m disappointed to see we don’t have any overlap with Foster’s boys until free play, which isn’t until two. But we have Swim as our first activity, and that usually puts the group in a good mood.

But today Alexis Powell doesn’t want to get in the pool. She refuses to even wear a bathing suit. I tell her that’s fine, she doesn’t have to. I let her wear a baggy T-shirt over boys’ trunks and let her sit out the underwater test. She wants to just dangle her feet in the water, so I let her. And later, when she wants to lie on a towel and flick her fingers in a puddle, I let her do that too.

But it keeps going like that through the whole day.

“I don’t want to ride the horses,” she says.

“I don’t want to run in the relay race.”

“I don’t want to be in the skit.”

“I don’t want to hike Mount Bony.”

“That’s okay, that’s fine,” I tell her, because most of it sounds boring to me too, and not that big of a deal. “You can be my second assistant, like a
junior
junior counselor,” I say, and for a moment I worry it’ll make the other girls jealous, but it doesn’t. They don’t care, and honestly, they’re not paying attention anyway.

The truth is Alexis
isn’t
fat, but she’s getting there, and I’m not helping. I don’t make her do anything all day except hold the clipboard, which she clutches against her hip and occasionally drops in the dirt. I can tell this is how she gets by: pretending to faint at strategic moments like right before archery, or staging a migraine when it’s her turn to return the kickballs to the gym. I know it’s kind of wrong to enable her—she’s here to play, she’s here to interact, to exercise, to move her little fat butt—but I also know Alexis Powell
hates
camp, so maybe it was sort of wrong to send her here in the first place. Why should Alexis Powell have to go anywhere or do anything she doesn’t want to do? Why should any of us, really?

At two, when it’s time for free play, I notice Foster gathering his group around the big rock. I lead my girls to a patch of grass in the shade farther away, so we can have a little privacy. I unzip my backpack and dump out the journals and pens in a messy pile on the ground. I smile, eager, but no one smiles back; I gesture to the books for the girls to each take one. No one moves.

“Take one,” I say. “You guys, seriously, they’re for you.”

“You were carrying those all day on your back?” Alyssa says. “Pbbth.”

“They aren’t that heavy,” I say.

“They aren’t heavy,” Alyssa says, “but they
are
ugly. I mean, I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I mean, really, that’s what covers are for.”

“You can put stickers on yours,” I say, and finally Alyssa picks one up, and then all the other girls do, one after the other—slowly, and not at all enthusiastically. “And a pen,” I say, and then they pick those up too.

“If we really want Curl Powder,” I start, “and Girl Power too, then our voices have to be heard. Remember Anne Frank? That’s what I’m talking about, how if she never wrote that diary, then no one would ever know she was up in that attic, and then generations of societies wouldn’t have her amazing story. Now, we all have amazing stories, I’m sure of that, so all we have to do is write what we know and then something unbelievably amazing will come out. There’s this saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, and what people mean when they say that is that the written word is superpowerful. I think you’re all very specific and interesting, and that means your stories are important to tell.”

The girls rustle a little. They flip through the pages of their empty books with equally empty faces. I can’t tell if this is working, if I’m empowering them.

“Everyone can personalize their books, like I said, with stickers and whatever else.”

“Can we use it as a diary?” Lila asks, and then Renee asks, “Yeah, can we put our secrets in it?”

“That’s fine, I guess.”

“I’m not good at writing,” Zoe says, and then Maggie agrees. Billie’s already drawing something in her book, a bunch of smiling puppy faces. Then Jessica gets up and starts looking in the grass for her pen cap, which she’s somehow already lost. Jenna’s carving a
J
in the spine of her book with a safety pin, and there’s no time to wonder where she got the safety pin or whether I should take it away, because Rebecca’s throwing more questions at me and Alexis is . . . crying.