The Battle of Darcy Lane (7 page)

Girl.

Cripple.

Haunted pond.

Kiss and catch.

Peter.

9
.

When I asked Mom if
I could go over to Peter's on Tuesday morning, to find out if he was going to band camp and to see if he maybe wanted to play Wii in his basement for a while, she said sure—like it was the best idea she'd ever heard. So I went around the corner to meet him in the woods. He was waiting, right on the same log where we'd watched episode one, so I took a seat beside him. I realized that I had a ball in my hand, and I put it on the ground beside me. We'd barely started the show before we heard voices.

Girls' voices.

Taylor's and Alyssa's.

When they appeared by the pond, Peter and I froze.

“Well, looky looky,” Alyssa said. “What are you two lovebirds doing?”

“Shut up, Alyssa.” I couldn't believe she was here in the woods, mine and Peter's.

“Good comeback.” She swatted at a bug that may or may not have been a cicada.

“Does your mom know you're here?” Taylor asked.

Andrew arrived behind them. “Wait up, guys!”

“What do you care?” I picked up my ball, preparing to leave. I would have given my left arm for a unicorn to appear in the woods just then, to prove Alyssa wrong about something, anything.

“She thinks she's such a badass,” Alyssa said, and Taylor laughed.

And I thought about my tomato face and those circus clowns and I threw my ball at Alyssa.

At Alyssa's hideous face.

Hard.

She screamed.

“How did you get to be so
mean
?” I said, and the last word came out as my own sort of scream. My throat hurt from it.

Alyssa's hands were covering her face and when she pulled them away she was all red—like sunburned. “I had no idea you were such a . . .”

Birds took off—a full flock by the sound of it—right as she called me the very word I'd been calling her in my mind since meeting her. We all heard it. Even with all that squawking and flapping.

“Oh, man,” Andrew said. “I'm outta here.”

Peter looked at him and looked dazed for a minute as Andrew took off down the path. Then Taylor took Alyssa's arm and calmly said, “Come to my house. You need ice.”

I took off running toward home—Peter called out, “Julia, wait!”—and went straight to my room and buried my face in my pillow and cried.

How dare she call me that?

A minute later, I got up, wiped away tears and turned on the air conditioner in the window, even though Dad said never to run it during the day. I lay back down, took a few deep breaths, and decided to read. The girl and the crippled boy were sitting by the pond together, and a storm was brewing in the skies above them, and I got the sense that it was all building toward some big event. Like a kiss or a declaration of love or a horrible disfiguring accident.

But all of a sudden I didn't want the book to end—it was the only thing I had to truly look forward to—so I put it down and closed my eyes and imagined that it was
me
who was the victim of some horrible disfiguring accident. And that it was all somehow Alyssa's fault. And how sorry Taylor would be for not being nicer to me and how she'd be my best friend again and tell Alyssa to buzz off. Everyone would hate Alyssa at school, where I'd walk the halls like a war hero. I wouldn't be able to play Russia anymore
because of my injuries and everyone would think that was horribly tragic.

My door opened.

Mom, of course. “Are you sick?”

“No.” I rolled to my side away from her and could almost feel my imaginary wounds in my bones.

“Then what are you doing?”

“I'm relaxing. Can't I ever just relax?” I rolled my eyes before closing them again.

“Yes. For ten more minutes. Then I want to hear the sweet sound of your clarinet wafting down the hall.”

“Mo-om!” I noted the exact time on the clock.

“I'm serious.” She closed the door but came back a second later and turned off the air conditioner.

I got up exactly eleven minutes later and pulled my clarinet case out of my closet and sat with it on the bed. The smell that came out when I opened it wasn't entirely pleasant. And something about it—some weird combination of cork wax and old spit and wood—made me feel sad.

I popped a reed into my mouth to get it wet while I put the four pieces of the instrument together, and slipped the reed into its holder and screwed it into place. Resting the clarinet on the bed, I set up my music stand and pulled out some music from the school concert last year. I selected the
Swan Lake
Ballet Suite, op. 20: Scene, picked up my clarinet, and started to play.

I was hot.

I opened a window.

The curtains shifted a little, so there was at least a tiny breeze. I heard balls bouncing, and voices. Alyssa and Taylor were back at it, back at Russia.

I didn't care.

I just played the piece the whole way through and noticed for the first time how it started off sad, then got angry, then got strong, and I imagined the sound of a concert band around me as I carried the melody.

I played it again, and it sounded better that time.

After one more run through that was almost perfect, I went downstairs and made a snack, melting fake cheese onto nachos and dipping them in salsa. When I burned my tongue, it sort of felt good.

It started at the tail
end of dinner. Right as we were finishing up our last bits of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and carrots, the phone rang. And when Mom picked up, no one was there.

“That's weird,” she said, sitting back down.

Almost immediately, the phone rang again, and this time
I
picked it up. Somebody—a girl—said something in Spanish or maybe Italian or maybe just gibberish. I
wasn't sure I recognized the voice. I hung up. Then I asked to be excused.

Mom came to my room
again a while later, after the phone rang downstairs for the last time. From my bed, I had heard her picking it up a bunch of times, answering with increasing bite, before giving up and calling out, “I'm unplugging it!”

I knew it had to be Alyssa.

“Anything you want to talk about?” Mom asked, sitting on the foot of my bed.

“Not really.” I pictured the red spot that had immediately formed on Alyssa's face where the ball had hit.

Mom was looking around my room, and it was like she couldn't figure out what was different. She cleared some wrinkles in the bedspread with a flat palm. “Any idea who's calling?”

I couldn't make myself lie and I felt like I might start to cry.

So I told her.

About everything that had been going on since Alyssa had moved to the block.

How she made fun of my clothes, my room.

What she'd said about my freckles and to Peter.

About the Ouija board and the money and the peep show.

How
mean
she was.

How Taylor didn't seem to care and said I was suffocating her.

How I felt like
I
was suffocating.

Then I told her about the ball I threw at Alyssa's hideous face.

“Oh, Julia.” Her sigh sounded like disappointment.

And if it was true that I'd let her down, then I was really done for.

So I lost it.

Full-on sobbing meltdown.

Mom went to get me tissues. I tried to clean up, but she pulled me into a hug and even though I didn't want
her
to hug me, I wanted to be hugged.

“They're not worth it, honey,” she said, pulling back after a minute. “People who make you this upset, who say things like that? They're not real friends.”

“But Taylor's my
best friend
!”

She looked a little crazed then, in her eyes, and it scared me a little. Like I'd made a big mistake bringing her into this. “Is she?”

“Of course she is.” I wiped my nose.

She huffed and seemed to literally bite her tongue. “Is this how best friends treat each other?”

I didn't want to hear anything she was saying. Taylor
had to be my best friend. Because if not her, then who? Wendy? No way. Apart from that time when I stashed her photo in a drawer, I hadn't really thought about her since school let out. Didn't that mean something? That I didn't miss her? It had to.

“Why doesn't she like me?” I asked. “Alyssa, I mean.”

Mom shook her head. “You can't do anything about whether people like you or not. Except the obvious things, like not being mean or intentionally hurting someone.”

It sounded like a question. “I'm not! I didn't!”

“Okay then,” she said.

“But what am I going to do?”

“You're going to think about the fact that maybe
you
don't like
her
.” She stood and went to my mirror, pushed her hair behind her ears and studied herself. “Maybe you don't even really like Taylor all that much either.”

“Of course I do!” I shouted.

But I wasn't so sure anymore, not after the way she'd been siding with Alyssa so much. Thinking back on how things used to be, it was hard to believe that Taylor was still the same person I'd had sleepovers with over winter break, and told all my secrets, like how I once tried to practice kissing using my own hand. It wasn't that simple, though. “They live on our
street
.”

She nodded. “And I don't really like Mrs. Chamberlain, but we still live on the same street and are civil and don't
pretend we're anything more than neighbors. I'm not really friends with Taylor's mom, either. I mean I help her out with Taylor when she has work stuff and she's helped me, too, but it's not like we talk about important things.”

It was true that Mom
really
didn't like Mrs. Chamberlain, who was also saying weird things about our house or yard, like “I see you're going for the wild look with the lawn!” It was also true that Mom and Taylor's mother never really spoke for more than a few minutes. It was always just about us girls, or stuff happening on the block.

“Why
aren't
you friends with Taylor's mom?”

She looked caught out in her reflection in the mirror. “We just don't have a lot in common.” She untucked her hair from her ears and turned back to me. “When you start school again it won't matter as much as it does now.”

“But summer's another five weeks!”

“Well, you'll have camp starting next week.” She seemed ready to be done with this conversation; I felt the same. “This week, why don't you have Wendy over?”

I would not invite Wendy over if I could avoid it. “Maybe.”

We went downstairs, and I helped her clean up dinner. When we were done, she walked over to the phone and plugged it back in. It started ringing before she'd even let go of the wire.