The Girls (4 page)

It reminded me of last summer when my family went to Sequoia National Park. We'd been driving all day before we spotted our first sequoia tree through the car window. My dad pulled over to the side of the road, and everyone piled out to go take a closer look. I didn't really
want
to, because even from that distance the tree's size gave me the willies. So I stalled, helping my mom get the twerps out of their car seats while my dad and my bother ran ahead.

Eventually I made myself walk toward that gigantic tree as it got bigger and horrifyingly bigger. I always make myself do stuff that scares me, always. But by the time I was standing at the base of its mammoth trunk, I could barely breathe.

I looked around at my family. There was my dad, fiddling with his stupid camera. My bother was stalking imaginary bears with his toy gun. Even my mom was fussing with the twerps as if the tree towering over us was just any tree. Why did no one see what I saw, or feel as I did? Didn't they get it?

Then a woman park ranger in uniform came up and calmly told us that the giant sequoia was two or three thousand years old. Two or three
thousand
! And it had grown from a seed the size of an oatmeal flake.

She pointed to the black marks on its trunk and said they were from forest fires. Ancient and modern fires, many fires over the tree's long life, each burning a little deeper into its flesh.

That's when I got really dizzy. The black marks reached high up the trunk of the tree. Forty, fifty feet up. That meant the flames were way over our heads. There'd be no running from a fire that size. In a fire like that I'd be burnt to a cinder in an instant, as if I were nothing.

Everything about that forest was so many times bigger than anything in my imagination that suddenly, looming dinosaurs seemed possible. The whole scale of the world was off, shrinking me to the size of an ant. If that tree fell on me . . . if one of those fires kicked up . . . panic made my mouth go dry.

I wanted to go home, escape from that place where a speck of seed, a tiny spark, could grow so huge. Where things lived so much longer than I possibly could. The thought of my short life, compared with the life of the sequoia, gave me a hollow, aching fear. But no one else was upset. My dad told us to smile and he took a picture of all of us with the park ranger.

I couldn't eat or sleep that night. I thought I'd throw up just
thinking
about those trees towering over our cabin, growing taller and taller. My mom thought I was weirded out from altitude sickness.

Now I looked at the baby fire in Darcy's fireplace, but I wasn't fooled. It was pretending to be tame and innocent, but I knew that given a chance, it could become a huge wildfire, raging higher than Darcy's house, devouring the whole neighborhood in an instant.

“The fire's so pretty,” I heard Renée say. And Brianna sleepily agreed. I closed my eyes and dug deep into my sleeping bag.

Of course, if I'd
said
anything about the power or destructiveness of fire, the girls would all be quick to agree with me. They'd scurry to tell horrid fire stories, trying to outdo one another. They'd interrupt one another, falling over themselves to show how well they understood me—trying to prove that they felt just as I did. But left to their own meager imaginations, they all thought fire was pretty.

I pretended to sleep.

M
Y ROOM WAS HAUNTED. Even in the dark I could see the rhinoceros I'd won at the carnival at Candace's church. I closed my eyes, but they popped back open.

My head ached from crying and from trying not to cry. My cheeks were chapped. I crawled out of bed, turned the light back on, and squinted against the glare.

I had to exorcise my room, purge it of ghosts, chant cleansing incantations, burn incense, light candles—do
something
to get those girls out of there. I needed to reclaim my room. Make it mine and only mine.

I started a pile on the floor: the rhino, the purple lanyard keychain that Darcy had made for me. Out of my drawer and straight onto the pile went the stack of Renée's homesick letters from summer camp. Next was the autographed program from the play Brianna was in last year. I didn't have to look at it to remember what she'd written. “Maya, dahhhhhling, there's no business like it! Forever, B!”

Candace, Darcy, Renée, and I had given Brianna a bouquet of four roses, one from each of us. We'd gone wild, applauding and cheering at the curtain call. Then we'd run backstage screaming like rock fans, begging for Brianna's autograph. I'd felt a little silly doing that. After all, Brianna was only in the chorus, and she had the smallest part in the whole play. She didn't even say any actual lines. But Candace was never embarrassed about making scenes, and she got us all going.

I sat down on the edge of my bed thinking there was no saving my room—every inch was infested. I tried to remember it before the girls. When I'd just moved here.

I'd loved this room from the first second. In my old neighborhood some kids were rough. The big sister of a kid in my class went to jail for shooting another girl in the thigh with her dad's gun. We'd moved here right after that.

Life was easier here and I hadn't been a bit homesick. My folks were calmer and didn't watch me like hawks anymore. They let me walk to school alone, which I'd never been allowed to do in the old neighborhood. My sister, Lena, met Ann right away and stopped following me everywhere, which was great. The kids at school were friendly and I'd made friends. Nothing tight like Salt and Pepper, but good enough.

Everything was nice, and then it got even better when Candace swooped down from the sky and scooped me up. My gut shrank, remembering how thrilled I'd been that day when she'd asked me if I wanted to “do lunch” with her. I thought I'd gone to heaven. She was popular and she'd picked me. Suddenly that made
me
popular too.

Renée, Darcy, and Brianna were part of the package. Once Candace had shone her light on me, they all took me in as their pal.

And now? Now that Candace had decided I was no longer worthy, did
any
of them give me another thought? I knew Darcy would do anything that Candace even hinted she wanted her to. But what about the others? Brianna wasn't the type to do anything drastic, like defend me on her own. But I couldn't believe that even Renée didn't care about me at least a little.

My eyes landed on my little cactus plant. We'd each bought one at the Earth Day fair. Candace had called them the Earth Sisters and said one day we'd all share a house and reunite the sisters in our big backyard. I threw the cactus into my trash can. It made a dull thunk sound in the otherwise silent house. It landed on its side and a clod of dirt tipped out. I shoved the can deep under my desk.

But I could almost hear the cactus say, “What did I do to deserve
this?
” I snatched out the trash can, stood the plant up on the bottom, poked the dirt back in, then slid it back under the desk. Maybe I'd give the cactus to Lena tomorrow, but I'd make her promise to keep it out of my sight.

Then there were the photo stickers of the five of us, making faces, cracking up as if life was just one big party. They were plastered everywhere, all over my school notebooks.
School.
The word made my insides wither.

I scraped and clawed at the two stickers I'd stuck on my light switch. It felt good, peeling off the girls' faces in little shreds, mine included. But the white stickum stayed stuck, a reminder of what had been there.

And what about the old-fashioned hand mirror Candace gave me for my birthday? Could I keep it? I wondered if I'd ever be able to look into it and not feel this gray cloud shrivel my guts.

I added the mirror to the pile, planning to put it all in Momma's box for the homeless in the morning. I hoped the things didn't carry their bad feelings with them. That's all some homeless person needs, I thought—a mirror that makes you hurt whenever you look into it.

W
E'D BEEN TALKING about teachers from school, trying to imagine what kind of kids they'd been. Trying to imagine them our age, going to our school. It was funny picturing Mr. Adler, the principal, in regular clothes, acting like a boy. But then I noticed that Candace had stopped talking. She was just looking at the fire, not even listening to us.

I wondered if I'd said something to upset her, if any of us had. Then, without another word she burrowed into her sleeping bag and went to sleep. So maybe she wasn't mad or hurt or anything; maybe she was just sleepy. After that, conversation drifted off and soon everyone was asleep but me.

That always happened. I was always the last one awake at home too. When my dad still lived with us, I could never fall asleep until I heard his key in the front door. He was a jukebox man. Well, he had a lot of other kinds of vending machines besides jukeboxes, but that's what he called himself. He had jukeboxes and video games and pool tables in bars on the other side of town. When a machine broke or something, his answering service would call and out he'd go to fix it. No matter how late.

No one exactly
told
me that Dad's machines were in dangerous bars and bad neighborhoods, but I knew it. He hadn't taken me out on his route with him in years, but I still remembered the men slumped on bar stools, drunk in the middle of the day. I remember the way those bars smelled. I remember him taking the quarters out of a jukebox and dividing them up with the bartender. I also remember thinking that if he didn't have to support
me
, he wouldn't have to go to those places.

And on the nights when my dad wasn't on a service call, I'd still lie awake until he and my mom were asleep. I could always tell the second they were sleeping. Not just because their TV or their light went off or because they were finished fighting—but because there was a feeling, like the entire house had stopped holding its breath.

That's how it felt at Darcy's too. I knew her parents were sleeping. I knew her sister, Keloryn, was sleeping. All the girls around me were making little sleep noises like a basket of puppies. The fire in the fireplace was down to embers.

I wondered if Maya was sleeping. Maybe she was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. Maybe she was crying.

Darcy's sister probably thought I was as bad as the rest of them, and she was right. I knew what animal I was—I was a chicken. Otherwise, I would have
said
something. I would have stopped Darcy from calling Maya. Or I would have grabbed the phone and apologized to her.

After Darcy had made those calls, and we were going into the den to spread out our sleeping bags, Candace had whispered to me, “Sometimes Darcy's so
fierce
! Maybe we should enroll her in obedience school.”

I wasn't sure what she'd meant. Fierce for making those mean calls? Obedience school, like a dog? So she'd obey her master better? Her master was Candace, right? I shivered. I hadn't said anything, but Candace must have seen my confusion, because as I put my sleeping bag next to hers she added, “There's really no reason to be
mean
to someone, just because you despise them.”

I should have said something right then. If I hadn't been such a chicken I would have said, “But
you
were mean to Maya.” Or had she been? Had Candace said bad things
to
Maya, or just
about
her? It was almost as if Candace were the queen, condemning Maya to death, and Darcy was the one who carried out the order. The executioner—an executioner who loved her work. And what did that make Brianna and me?

Was Brianna one of those people who in the old days went to executions to cheer and have a big party? And what about me? I watched Darcy make those phone calls too. Maybe I didn't cheer, but I didn't do anything to
stop
it either. And there was Maya, all alone, up on the gallows.

I remembered being at Maya's house a few weeks ago. I don't know where everyone else was. It was just Maya and me. Anyway, she wanted to climb the tree in her backyard. I always said no when she asked me if I wanted to, and I usually made up some excuse or another. This time, though, she asked me, “Renée, why don't you want to, really?”

“Promise you won't laugh?” I asked.

“Promise.”

“Heights make me sick,” I'd confessed. “Dizzy, pukey sick.”

“Oh, we can cure that,” Maya had said, as if it were no big deal.

“I don't want to cure it. I'm scared to.”

Maya'd thought that was funny. “You're scared to not be scared?” She grabbed my hand and pulled me outside, saying, “If you climb up on the first branch, that really low one”—she pointed to it—“I'll get my mom to bake strudel.”

I love Mrs. Koptiev's apple strudel.

Maya hauled me over to the tree. “Put your hands on the trunk,” she said. “Feel how strong it is.”

I felt silly.

“Go ahead, touch it,” she said. “It's alive.”

I made sure no one else could see me, then did as she said.

Maya didn't make fun of me, she never picked on me or laughed at me or bullied me, she just sort of coaxed me inch by inch, until I was sitting on that branch with both my feet off the ground! Maya beamed, proud as punch. But she wasn't satisfied.

Slowly, gently, she talked me into climbing up to the next branch. She told me to look around at the view. It made me woozy to look down, and my stomach lurched, so I can't say that I
liked
it up there, but it wasn't really so horrible either.

Then Maya talked me back down. I'd been very glad to get my feet back on the ground, but still—I'd done it! We'd done it! Maya and I sat under the tree, feeling good, feeling close. I know it probably sounds dumb, but it was a big deal to me, and it seemed like a big deal to Maya.