Pretty Is

Andy Sherman followed me around in the halls today. It was so embarrassing! Every time we changed classes I’d go to my locker and there he was.

I wish I’d never been nice to him. Marina was smart—the first time or two he tried talking to her, she looked right through him as if nobody was there. He finally took the hint.

Today Mrs. Baker said I’m the best student she’s had in 20 years! She wants me to concentrate on the Bach for the music festival. I would love to get first place and I’m going to practice really hard. I only have 4 weeks!

Actually I shouldn’t be thrilled. Mrs. Baker’s probably had about 5 cello students in her whole life. Cello is not exactly a big thing in Shipley. This is such a dumb little town—I can’t wait to get out of here.

“I want to find out who you-know-who is,” muttered Hannah, turning a page. “I’m sick of cello lessons and hundreds on math tests.”

Got an A on my paper about A Separate Peace. It wasn’t a great paper but Mrs. Grayson loves me. She’d give me an A no matter what I wrote. Wish Mr. Lowery was like that. I have to get better in chemistry or I’m going to blow my average. If I don’t get into a great college with a great music school, I’ll just die.

Wish Jake and Hannah would shut up. They’re downstairs howling about something, The Simpsons maybe. They always have time to slack off—I never do. It doesn’t really matter for them anyway. They’ll go to some okay college and have a good time and live in Shipley forever. I want to do better than that. But anyway it’s still not fair. I work all the time and they just take it easy.

“Take it easy! What does she know,” Hannah said as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” faded out. Then, in the second of silence before “With a Little Help From My Friends,” I heard the slam of a car door in the driveway.

We jumped up, and Hannah went to put the diary back while I dashed to the CD player. It took me a long minute to find the right button, but finally I saw “power” and hit it. In the sudden quiet I heard someone moving around downstairs.

I glanced around the room, and it looked just the way it did when we entered. We started to tiptoe out, and then Hannah said in a frantic whisper, “The CD! Take it out!” I fumbled the disk out of the machine and into its box, putting the box carefully on the rack.

A minute later we heard footsteps on the stairs. My heart was still racing. Guiltily I grabbed a book from the table next to the bed and pretended to be reading the back cover. Hannah didn’t pretend to do anything; she just leaned back with her hands behind her head and stared out into the hall.

The footsteps reached the top, and the person who stepped into view was not Jake—it was Laura. Hannah and I cracked up.

She rested the cello case on the floor and gave us a disgusted look. “What is with you two?”

We just kept giggling, and she went on to her room. We heard the key in the lock, and the door closing.

It was the Fourth of July, and I was sitting on the porch swing, waiting for the long hot afternoon to end so we could go to the picnic and fireworks. Monica was over on the Lovingers’ driveway with her basketball. She’d been dribbling and shooting for close to an hour while I read a book, with the thumps of the ball and the rattling of the hoop for background music.

Almost a week had gone by since we’d found Laura’s diary. I hadn’t looked at it again, but Hannah had, twice. She figured she’d read at least half of it by now. She’d told me what was in it, a lot of boring stuff about school but sometimes some pretty juicy gossip. And she’d found out the identity of Mr. You-Know-Who, but the name didn’t mean anything to me since I didn’t know that many kids who were going to be juniors in high school. Hannah said he was cute, though.

Hannah and her family would be at the picnic and the fireworks, and so would just about everybody else we knew. It was the same every year—we went to the high-school stadium and spread out a blanket on the field, and had a picnic, and there were two or three bands that took turns playing. The high-school pep band played patriotic songs, and then there was maybe a country-rock band from New Bern or Durham, and maybe a fiddler playing bluegrass.

While the music was going it’d be slowly getting darker and cooler, and the kids would be running around all over the field, and pretty soon there’d be lightning bugs along with the mosquitoes. We’d catch lightning bugs and put them in paper cups that still smelled of lemonade, and we’d clap our hands over the cups and watch the glow through the waxy paper.

By the time it got dark enough for fireworks, it would be almost my bedtime, and I’d sit on the picnic blanket and lean back on Mama or Daddy, and my eyes would half close but I’d still watch the big sparkly bursts and wonder what exactly was raining down in those trails of blue and gold, and whether it ever landed on anyone’s head.

“Hey, Miss Erin,” Daddy called from inside the house. “Phone’s for you.” I went inside for the cordless and brought it back to the porch swing, saying hello on the way.

“Oh yes. So right away she figured it had to be me, and she pitched a huge fit, and Mama got into it, and now I’m grounded. For a week. All because of your dumb idea about mixing up her socks.”

“Yeah, but they just thought I was lying. So I told them you did it, but they still thought I was lying. They were yelling at me so much, I finally admitted I had a key, and then Mama made me give it to her. So now I can’t read the diary ever again.”

“Not really, but they think I did. Laura kept saying, ‘Did you read my diary? Did you? Did you?’ And I kept saying no, but then she said I must have because it wasn’t exactly where she left it. But that’s a lie, I left it under the sweaters where it always is. But of course my parents only believe her, they never believe me.”

I felt sick inside. I stared at Monica playing basketball, without actually seeing her. “I’m really sorry,” I almost whispered. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

“Well, you just have fun at the fireworks. I can’t go. I can’t go anywhere for a whole week. You go have a great time.”

I sat with my family and watched an ant climb awkwardly across a tiny gap from a grass blade onto the blanket. I flicked it back onto the grass.

The McLarens came in—Mrs. McLaren, Laura and a friend of hers, and Jake—trooping past us in search of a good place to settle. Mrs. McLaren said hello to my parents, but not to me.

I just shrugged, and right then Samantha’s mother stopped to talk to Mama, so she didn’t ask me any more questions.

Monica had brought her backpack, and when I saw what she was now pulling out of it, I groaned silently. Well, almost silently. She crossed her legs—her hairy legs—and began to knit. Half of a blue square hung from one needle like a flag, and click by click she was adding a row.

How weird could you get? Sitting there knitting, like somebody’s old grandma, in the middle of the Shipley Fourth of July picnic. And Mama admiring her stitches, as if there wasn’t anything weird about it.

I hunched on the farthest corner of the blanket and tried to become Frodo, hiding from the Black Riders. I pressed myself to the earth, underneath an overhang of rocks and tree roots, my hobbit friends close beside me. But I couldn’t feel the shelter—I felt exposed, as if the whole world was looking at the back of my neck, and my friends kept slipping away. I stared at my knees and waited for dark.