Chapter 1

As soon as I got off the school bus I heard my best friend, Bunny Larrabee, calling me. “Emily, Emily!” I peered around for her. I’m nearsighted. Dr. Weiss says I should wear my glasses all the time, but I hardly ever do. I don’t like the way I look in them, but it’s not just vanity. I have a theory that the less I use my glasses, the more my eyes will improve from the muscles being forced to work. In the meantime, though, I have to admit that anything more than five feet away is kind of blurry.

“This way,” Bunny was yelling. “Over here, Emily.” Just as I finally located her in the crowd of kids, she ran toward me and grabbed my arm. “Emily, look at us!”

“Oh, no!” We were wearing practically identical outfits, flowered jeans, black cotton sweaters, and black boots.

“I can’t believe this,” Bunny said. “I went for these clothes half asleep; I didn’t even think about what I was going to wear.”

“I did.” I’d stayed in bed ten minutes after the alarm, figuring out my clothes exactly. Of course, being best friends, it wasn’t the first time we’d ever come to school dressed alike. We used to do it all the time when we were in the sixth and seventh grade, but at least then it was planned.

“Well, our earrings are different, anyway,” I said. I was wearing dangly purple bead earrings that I’d bought on sale. Bunny had on the Guatemalan ones her father had given her after one of his trips. They were handmade little knitted dolls in native costume: a tiny man in her left ear and a tiny woman in her right ear.

“Let’s braid my hair,” Bunny said as we went up the stairs into the building.

“Then we really will look like twins.” I’d done my hair in a single braid down my back, with a bow at the top.

“I should only be so lucky. You gorgeous thing!”

I blushed. Bunny is always doing that, talking as if I’m a beauty queen or something. Even though I’m aware that it’s just her way of building me up, building my confidence, it sort of works. When I’m with her, I do feel much prettier than usual.

In the girls’ room, I started brushing and braiding her hair. It’s thick and honey-colored. Mine is sort of wispy and dark. I like her hair much better.

“Did you watch Meridith Finkle’s show last night?” Bunny sighed. “If I could ever be one tenth as funny!”

Bunny wants to be a clown or a comedian. She has a million jokes and a rubber face. I think she’s going to be famous someday.

“I love her voice and the way she walks and everything about her. Her timing is exquisite.… I wanna grow up to be Meridith Finkle!” she honked in a flat voice, just like Meridith Finkle’s.

I laughed. “You’ll have to get fat first.”

“Oh, don’t say it!” She puffed out her cheeks. “Shad made fudge last night. My whole diet down the drain. Now I’ll have to be extra good all week.”

Shad is Bunny’s nine-year-old brother. She also has an older sister, Star, who’s away at college studying physics. They’re all smart in that family, but Shad is so smart, I think he might get to college before either Bunny or me.

“I was eating my fudge and I was eating Shad’s fudge,” Bunny went on. “I couldn’t stop. I had a fudge hunger, a fudge craving, a fudge obsession. Shad got so mad he tried to beat me up.” She snickered. “That skinny little pacifist didn’t know who he was tangling with.”

Bunny went on talking, but suddenly I sort of blanked out. Did you ever have that happen to you? Someone innocently says a word, and all at once there’s this moment from the past in your mind that pushes everything else away. It was the word tangle that did it. That, plus braiding Bunny’s hair, I think, because the memory was about braiding: my father combing and braiding my hair one morning about seven years ago.

It was so strange. There I was, in the girls’ bathroom, calmly pulling one strand of Bunny’s hair over the other, and yet I seemed to be there, too, back in the living room of our old house on Oak Street. The feeling was so vivid my cheeks got hot, my whole face flared up.

In my mind I could see little things like a crumpled tissue on the floor near the brown couch and a loose thread on my father’s sweater, and I could feel the boniness of his knee as I leaned against him. I heard him calling me Miss Tangles and saying that Mom wasn’t out of bed yet, so he’d braid me this morning. And I remembered how I was convinced my father was the tallest man in the world and the nicest and definitely the most fun.

“My hair doesn’t look good this way, Em,” Bunny said. “We gotta take it out.”

Her voice startled me. My stomach jumped. It was like being awakened from a dream. As suddenly as it had come, the memory, the whole thing, the realness of it was gone.

“You can wear a braid, Em, because you’ve got great bones,” Bunny was saying, “but pulling my hair back makes my front teeth look even huge-er.” She started yanking out the braid. “I hate these teeth! They stick out.”

“They do not.” I pushed her hands away from her hair. “Let me do that, you’re making a mess.… Did I ever tell you how my father used to make up songs for me?”

“Only about a million times. And my teeth do too stick out. It’s the curse of my life.”

“I remember one he used to sing. ‘Frogboy is comin’ to visit Emilybird, ooh la ooh la, bring her some green guggy food, ooh la ooh la …’”

Bunny looked at me in the mirror. “Pardon me if I don’t comment; I don’t want to insult your father’s talent. I like him too much. Remember when he took us up in the balloon?”

I nodded. “He never writes,” I said.

“Oh, Em, don’t start getting depressed.”

“He never calls, either.”

“When my father goes away on a trip, he doesn’t write or call, either.”

“My father’s not away on a trip, Bunny.”

First bell rang. Bunny put her arm through mine. “Smile. Or I’ll have to tell you a joke.” I forced my lips up. “You gotta do better than that,” Bunny said. “I see a joke is needed here.”

“Bunny, shut up, please.” Why couldn’t I just be gloomy and depressed if that’s the way I happened to feel?

“Did you hear what the ceiling said to the wall?”

“Nooo.”

“Hold me up, I’m plastered.”

“Drunk joke, ugh.”

“A guy spent thousands of dollars to have his family tree checked out … he discovered that he was a sap.”

“Bun-ny.” But I laughed that time. “That was a terrible joke. I laugh at anything.”

“You are my best audience,” she admitted.

I dug into my sack and pulled out a copy of Great Bones, the book I’d finished reading last night. “You have to read this.”

“Who’s the cute guy on the cover?”

She always wanted to know that. “You’re going to love this one. There’s one part in there that’s so hilarious, where the girl says, ‘My name is Jan Bones. Call me Jan or call me Bones.’”

Bunny looked at me, raising her eyebrows. “That’s as funny as it gets?” She flipped through the pages. “Any hot scenes?”

“A few.”

“How far do I have to read to get to them?”

“On page fifty, they kiss—”

“Fifty! Not before that?”

“Bunny, it’s worth the wait. When they kiss, it’s so romantic. When I read that part, I could imagine myself being Jan. They’re near a waterfall and I could practically hear the water, and it was like I was Jan—”

“You have a great imagination, Em.”

“—and I was trying to tell him I wanted him to kiss me.”

“What do you mean, you wanted him to—I thought you said they did kiss.”

“They did, but first she had to convince him.” I stuffed the book in her knapsack. “Promise you’ll read it this weekend.”

“I’ll read it, I’ll read it.”