The Battle of Darcy Lane (6 page)

“There's just Peter and Andrew, and they're not that
cute,” Taylor said, which was a change of tune but then I realized she
had
pretty much stopped flirting with Andrew. It was true he'd never really flirted back.

I said, “Peter totally is,” before realizing I probably didn't want Alyssa knowing who I thought was cute. Because if Alyssa decided to like Peter, I'd be so mad. And worse, what if he actually liked
her
? Maybe she was mean to him because she liked him. Maybe he actually liked it? Maybe he'd only kiss me if he couldn't kiss her instead.

“Yeah, if you like band geeks.” Taylor looked at Alyssa, who smiled approval.

I was so beyond mad that we had even ended up here in my backyard. It was exactly the scenario I'd been putting all of my energy into preventing. I thought if I could spend enough solo time with Taylor, Alyssa would never really compete. But when I called Taylor in the morning to get to her first and invite her over, she'd said she'd love to “. . . if Alyssa can come, too.”

How could she not know that that was like the rudest thing in the world? How could I say no without seeming like I was doing more suffocating?

I'd made a fist while saying, “Sure, of course!” in the sweetest tone I could manage.

So here we were.

Alyssa had brought some magazines of her mom's, and they were both flipping through them. I reached for the
sunscreen on the table next to my chair.

“I think it's a little late for that,” Alyssa said.

I studied the white lotion in my palm, and had a quick thought about clowns and pies. Specifically the ways clowns smash pies into people's faces. I said, “What are you talking about?”

“I just mean you already look like a tomato.” She turned a page. “A freckled tomato.”

“Alyssa,” Taylor said, like it was a warning.

So Alyssa
was
mean! Even Taylor thought so!

“What?” Alyssa sniffed a perfume sample in her magazine. “It's true.”

“But you don't
say
it!” Taylor shook her head, but she was smiling.

I put the sunscreen tube down. “At least I won't get cancer.”

“I don't burn; I tan.” Alyssa closed her eyes and looked up at the sun.

“Doesn't matter.” I rubbed in my lotion. “You can still get cancer. Tell her, Taylor.”

Taylor's grandfather had to have a chemical peel on his nose because of skin cancer. And he was Italian and dark-skinned. We'd both been horrified when he turned up at her family's Memorial Day barbecue with his face practically falling off.

“Chill out, Julia.” Taylor shook her head. “It's just a little tan.”

“Your grandfather's
nose
practically fell off!”

“He's old,” Taylor said.

I put my sunglasses on to hide my eyes. I tried to talk myself through a game of Russia in my mind as a distraction.

Throw, catch.

Throw, bounce, catch.

Throw, bounce, catch.

Throw, clap, clap, clap, catch.

And on and on . . .

Mom came out of the house a few minutes later with a pitcher of lemonade and some polka-dot plastic cups. Her freckles were even worse than mine, and I felt horribly embarrassed of her in her tank top and shorts that showed so much of her skin. Freckles everywhere.

“I thought you girls might like some lemonade,” she said.

Alyssa smiled real wide and said, “Thanks, Mrs. Richards.” I didn't even know how she knew my last name. “That's so sweet of you.”

Mom raised her eyebrows at Alyssa. “Well, aren't you polite.” She poured a glass and handed it to Alyssa, and I could see that Mom was reading the headlines on the magazine on the table. One of them was,
TEN MOVES THAT WILL DRIVE HIM CRAZY
.

“I hope you're wearing sunscreen,” she said to Alyssa.

Alyssa sat up straighter, like she was offended. “Of course I am.”

Taylor snickered when my mom was gone. “You're unbelievable,” she said to Alyssa.

An hour later, when we got tired of swimming and lounging, Taylor suggested we go hang out in my room. I tried and tried to talk them out of it but there was no escaping—Alyssa said she really wanted to see it—and then there we were, standing in front of my unicorn poster.

“So are you
sure
you don't believe in unicorns?” Alyssa giggled.

“Oh,” I said. “That old thing?”

With Alyssa in my room, everything looked unbearably babyish. I wanted to cut my flowery bedspread to pieces and shatter the carousel on my shelf before Alyssa could spot it, but then she did.

“
How
old are you?” Alyssa snorted, and Taylor laughed.

While they were looking at the clothes in my closet, I swept the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs figures on my dresser into a drawer in a panic. Dopey hit his head on the drawer edge too hard, and cracked into pieces. I gasped.

“What happened?” Taylor asked.

I closed the drawer. “Oh, nothing.”

I took down a photo of me and Wendy that had been stuck in the edge of my mirror and slipped it into the same drawer. If Alyssa got a look at her, I'd never live it down.

“Julia, my dear,” she said. “Your room is in serious need of a makeover.”

“Well, I haven't done anything in here because I'm moving down the hall.”

Taylor sat on the bed. “Since when?”

“Since this weekend,” I said. “Me and my mom looked at bedspreads and stuff when we were in the city. It's going to be awesome.”

My mom called out from downstairs. “Girls! Sorry, but it's time to go home.”

It was still only midafternoon. If they left, I knew they'd probably just go to one of their houses and hang out some more without me. And the more often they did that, the more I was sunk. “But Mom!” I yelled out.

“Sorry! Time to go!” Her voice may have sounded normal to Taylor and Alyssa but not to me. So I showed them to the door and stormed into the kitchen. “Why did you make them leave?”

“I need help with dinner.”

But she didn't look like she needed help with dinner. She was reading the newspaper, and dinner wasn't for at least two hours.

I turned and looked at her and was about to say something about how she was ruining my life, but then I felt this feeling of relief come over me, like someone had pulled a plug on my feet and tension could just drain out through my toes. I was glad they were gone. I had to work so hard all the time when they were around.

Mom flipped a page in her paper and sighed. “What can I say”—she shook her head—“I don't like her.”

She pushed the paper aside. “And you, dear daughter, are not going to spend your whole summer throwing a ball around and reading trashy magazines. I've signed you up for a music day camp starting next Monday. For two weeks.”

“What?” I felt that fist form again. If I was off the block for two weeks, I'd never be able to keep Taylor on my side. “You can't do that!”

“I can. And I did.”

“You're ruining everything,” I said, now that it was officially true.

“Yeah, well,” she said. “Sometime that's my job.”

“Well, what did you decide about the room?” That would be at least one good thing that was happening to make my life not entirely miserable. “Can I move, at least?”

Her shoulders drooped. “Honey, we're going to need to hold off on that right now. But we can certainly spruce your room up a bit.”

“But I
just
told my friends it was happening.”

“That wasn't very smart of you.” She got up and dumped her water into the kitchen sink and refilled it with newer, colder water. “And what do
they
care, anyway?”

“You don't even use that office!” I shouted. “Ever!”

She put her glass down and just stood there, looking
out the kitchen sink window. Her voice was deep when she said, “Go to your room.”

I stormed upstairs and took the unicorn down off the wall, rolled it, and shoved it in the back of my closet. I flipped over my flower bedspread to the solid green side and put the stuffed monkey in a drawer with some winter sweaters that I couldn't imagine ever needing to wear again.

I put the carousel in the closet, too, and declared war on some old mermaid decals on the wall. But when I tried to peel one off, it ripped, leaving a mermaid amputee behind. I groaned and flopped down on the bed, where I was left looking up at a shelf that held a whole row of glassy-eyed dolls—dolls!—each of them dressed in the traditional garb of their country of origin. I wanted to box them up and send them all back to where they'd come from.

I wanted to get rid of everything.

The problem was this: I had nothing to put in its place.

I played Russia in the
backyard after dinner and wished Peter would come out but he didn't. After a while, Dad came out with a beer, sat in a lounger, and said, “What on
earth
are you doing?”

“It's a game,” I said. “It's called Russia.”

“Why's it called that?” He snapped the can open.

“Some Cold War thing from the eighties or something?” I was on sevensies, so I dribbled the ball seven times, hit it toward the side of the house, and caught it.

“Fascinating,” he said.

“Do you remember it? The Cold War?” I wasn't really sure what it was.

“I was young, but yes.” He put the beer down beside his chair. “What do you want to know?”

“Well,” I said. “What
was
it?”

He sighed. “It was basically years and years of conflict and tension between Russia and the US. You've heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?”

“Uh, not really.”

“That was the peak of it.” He relaxed back into the chair. “Basically, we—the US—tried to overthrow the government of Cuba and failed. And then Russia offered to put missiles in Cuba so that we could never do that again, and the whole thing escalated into a situation where everyone thought we were headed for nuclear war. Total mutual destruction.”

“Yikes.” I was moving on to eights.

“Yeah. But mostly it was everybody making veiled threats, nobody really wanting to confront each other for real. A ton of psychological game playing and power grabs.”

“Sounds like my life right now.”

He sipped his beer. “That bad?”

I didn't want to get into it with him—the Alyssa-Taylor Crisis—so I just said, “Mom signed me up for camp without even asking me. Sounds like a power grab to me.”

I threw and caught my fourth of eight, but I was losing interest in the game.

“I'm sure she thinks it's what's best for you,” Dad said. “And she is, you may have noticed, often right.”

“But why won't she let me have her office?” I threw the ball against the house and caught it.

“It's complicated, Julia.” He sat up, straddling the lounger. “But I'm working on it, okay?”

What could be so complicated about it?

“Don't stay out too late.” Dad got up. “Your mom wants to say good night.”

He drifted in to watch TV, and I went up to say good night to Mom, who was going along with my strategy of pretending we hadn't had that fight that afternoon, and went to my room. I climbed into bed with my book, which was starting to get
really
good, especially now that one of my main daydreams was that my parents would send me away to live with some relative I'd never heard of, where I'd meet some tragic boy who saw ghosts in the pond in the backyard and who also just happened to be Peter.

I read page after page after page, grateful that the book pushed out the bouncing balls of Russia—and thoughts about the inevitable end of the world—for a while.