Chapter 12
Following Hannah
One Sunday afternoon, hanging around the house, I put my hand on the phone three or four times, thinking I’d finally call Hannah. And then I thought of her bitter voice saying “You go have a great time,” and I took my hand off the phone.
Mama told me to water the plants on the porch, so I was dousing a geranium when the phone rang, and it was Hannah herself. My heart rose—maybe even leaped—at the sound of her voice.
“Do you want to, maybe, do something today?” She sounded hesitant, and that surprised me.
“Sure,” I said. “How about you come over?”
“Okay, great. So ... you’re not mad at me?”
“I thought you were mad at me.”
“Well, just at first. But I was so, like, nasty to you on the phone, when I called you on the Fourth.”
“But it was my fault you got in trouble,” I answered.
“But still, we were both in Laura’s room, and I shouldn’t have blamed everything on you. I’m sorry I talked to you in that mean way.”
“Well, I’m sorry about my stupid idea about the socks.”
“That’s okay. When should I come over?”
“Right now!”
“Put your dollar here, honey,” the bus driver said when I held it out to her. She pointed to a glass box with a hole in the top. “That’s right, honey.”
I was riding a county bus for the first time since moving to Shipley. Hannah and I plopped down in the hard blue plastic seats and looked at everything. From up here even the familiar streets looked different. There were only three other people on the bus when we boarded, but lots more got on as we crept along, stopping and starting. Most of them were black people. The only one I recognized was a crazy old man who was always sitting on a bench downtown. He held a brown paper bag on his lap and muttered to himself.
It was Hannah’s first time on the bus, too. She was the one who found out where you could catch a bus to go to the mall. She showed up at my house with a plan, and Mama said okay. Hannah didn’t even ask her mother if she could go. “She knows I came over to your house,” Hannah shrugged. “That’s all she needs to know.”
We went everywhere at the mall. We looked at music, movies, stationery, makeup, and clothes clothes clothes. On Mama’s orders we stopped in Stockdale’s, just long enough to say hi to Daddy and check in with Mama by phone. Then we looked in the arcade and said hi to Ricky and Jesse from school, who were busy shooting things on video screens. We ate hamburgers at the food court. We fingered things in practically every store. And we both bought short, glittery tops that would show our bellies, and that we knew our mothers would absolutely hate.
Mine was purple and Hannah’s was blue, and the style and color were just different enough that we wouldn’t look like twins. Buying it took all but a dollar of the allowance money I’d been saving, but I didn’t care. Hannah and I looked at each other in the dressing-room mirrors, and we looked sexy and older and really cool. Kayla was allowed to wear clothes like this, but most of us weren’t.
“My mama will blow the roof off,” said Hannah with deep satisfaction.
I grinned back at her. “So will mine.”
As it turned out, Mama was pretty calm about it. She was in the kitchen when I got home, and as soon as I walked in she asked me what I’d bought. I tried not to look nervous when I opened the bag.
Mama held the top up against me and shook her head. “Erin, you know I don’t approve of little girls wearing things like that, and neither does your daddy.”
“I’m not a little girl! Anyway, what’s wrong with it?”
“It looks cheap.”
“Well, it wasn’t. It cost twenty dollars.”
Mama sighed. “I don’t mean that kind of cheap, Erin. I mean trashy. It makes you look cheap.”
“How can I look cheap? I don’t have a price tag.”
Mama glared. “Don’t you smart off to me, young lady.”
I shrugged, and opened a drawer to get scissors. Then I just stood there holding them for a long minute while Mama and I stared at each other. Finally she gave a big sigh and said, “Well, I guess you have to do a few things on your own now. And you did buy it with your own money. I’ll let you keep it, but you are not going to wear that to school. Is that clear?”
“Sure,” I said, and clipped the tags.
I grinned to myself. I’d gotten off easy.
When Daddy came home after work, he looked at me in my purple top and said, “What the heck is that?”
“It’s my new top,” I said, miffed. Naturally, he wouldn’t have a clue about what was in style.
“Well, you better take it back to the store. It’s missing a piece.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Sue, you let this little girl go around like that?” he called up the stairs.
“I’m not a little girl,” I hollered before Mama could answer him.
He went upstairs and I stomped out to the backyard, where Monica was setting up the grill.
“I knew Daddy’d have something to say about that outfit,” she said.
“So? I still get to keep it.”
I sat on the back steps and watched her putting in the charcoal. She was really getting tall and skinny. I looked down at my stomach and legs. I was definitely not fat, no one could call me fat. But my bare belly did stick out just a little over the waistband of my shorts, now that I was sitting down. Oh sugar, maybe I shouldn’t have bought the top. But it did look good in the store mirror, I knew it did. I’d just have to be careful and not eat too much.
That night Hannah called and told me that her mother had a fit about the top. “She said I had to return it. But I told her I lost the receipt, so I couldn’t.”
“Did you really lose it?”
“No way. I just put it in the garbage. I crumpled it up and buried it under a lot of chicken bones.”
“Yucky,” I said. “But smart. Your mom’s not going to search through that.”
“Right. But she won’t let me wear the top—ever. For the rest of the summer she’ll be watching me every minute. I’ll get her back, though. You know what I’m going to do?”
“What?”
“I’m going to wear it to school the very first day.”
“How can you get away with that?”
“I’ll just wear another shirt over it, and take it off the minute I get to school.”
“Awesome. Hannah, you are so smart. I’m going to do it, too.”
It was great to hang around with Hannah again. We did a lot of the same things we used to—went swimming, or kicked a soccer ball around the backyard, or made jewelry with beads—but something about her was different now. She made a lot of sarcastic comments about people, especially her parents and Laura and a few of the kids at school. She was tougher, even a little mean, but never to me. We were a team, and we’d always stick together. I knew that, and I was sure she knew it, too. It didn’t have to be said out loud.
Hannah, Jake, Laura, and their mom would be leaving on vacation soon—a long one, to California. I hated to think about three whole weeks without Hannah. And if I couldn’t be with her, I wished my family could go on vacation to Disneyland or some other special place, instead of just spending a day at the beach now and then.
Every Sunday at church I saw Kayla, with the Shadow by her side. The Shadow was what Hannah called Danielle. And usually you could find Jane-Marie and Samantha trailing along, too. None of them had anything to say to me, beyond a bored hi. And once I heard Kayla say something about Monica’s dress, and the rest of her groupies snickered.
“What is so great about Kayla?” I demanded. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Hannah and I were sitting in the grass in her backyard. “Now Samantha and Jane-Marie follow her around just like Danielle.”
“Kayla is great,” said Hannah. “If you like prissy little blond airheads.”
I was picking stalks of clover and pulling the leaves off. You know she’s a prissy little airhead and I know she’s a prissy little airhead. But why don’t they know it?”
“It’s the look, Erin. Don’t you see? She wears shiny little skirts and a ton of makeup, and she has long blond hair that she brushes all the time so everybody will notice it.” Hannah mimicked Kayla tossing her head as she pulled an imaginary brush through her hair.
“Plus,” she went on, flopping down on her stomach in the grass, “she has more CDs and more clothes than anybody in the whole school, and she goes skiing in Colorado for vacations. That stuff makes her, like, sooo cool.”
“She used to be my friend,” I said. “Now she’s so snooty she barely says hello. And Jane-Marie and Samantha were my friends too, not like heart-to-heart, but they were friendly. And now they don’t talk to me either. I bet Kayla told them not to.”
Hannah suddenly rolled over, sat up, and looked me in the eye. “Let’s get her.”
I was startled. “What do you mean?”
“Get Kayla. Pay her back.” Hannah looked like this was something she’d been dying to do for her whole life, and now the moment had come. She was so intense, I was almost scared.
“Maybe,” I said slowly.
“You said you’d get her back. Remember? That day you were on the swing?”
“Yeah, I know. But I never could think of a good way to do it. And anyway, she has all these friends. They’d hate me.”
“So?” said Hannah. “You’ve got me. And I’ve got an idea.”