An hour later, we were still playing Liar and Spy. While we talked, I gave Ava and Bailey manicures and pedicures. When I finished their nails (and also Madeline’s, who promised Ava she’d leave us alone if we let her hang out for a little while), Ava did my toes and Bailey painted my hands. “You’re the worst nail painter ever,” I told Bailey. “I think my fingers have more polish on them than my fingernails do.”
“I just do things differently,” she said, laughing as she slapped the brush against my fingers. The way she painted nails almost reminded me of the way a modern artist would flick a brush at a canvas. She held my hands out in front of her and studied her work. “I think it looks beautiful,” she said.
“Um . . .,” I said. “It’s definitely creative. Maybe not something I’d pay for, but . . .” I giggled. Each of my nails was a different color, and the polish was messy and glopped on. But at least they were my real nails, grown in and healthy-looking. Since I’d started hanging out with Bailey and Ava, I’d stopped picking at my nails. I guess I was just more relaxed or something, but I didn’t seem to have much nervous energy at the lake. So even though they didn’t look perfect—or even pretty—they looked sort of healthy and fun. And they reminded me of an awesome night.
Most of the time that night, we were laughing hilariously about someone’s seriously funny or seriously stupid secrets—but sometimes the truth someone shared was also sort of sad.
I’d discovered that, when she was seven, Bailey had thrown up in the pool at swimming lessons (yuck!). In keeping with the pool theme, she also told us that when he was eight, her brother pooped at the bottom of the pool during swim team practice, thinking it would be funny (super-yuck!).
Then Ava told us about how her stepfather kept a snake in his bedroom that only ate live mice (um, cool?). We also found out that one time she made and ate an entire tube of Halloween slice-and-bake cookies in one night and felt so sick afterward that she hadn’t eaten them since.
I admitted that I once stole a poster of a cute puppy sitting on a dictionary that was hanging up in the school library (pitiful). And neither of them believed me when I told them that my dad had once toilet-papered his own house, just so people would think he was popular (I guess TP-ing was a sign of coolness or something in the town where he grew up).
After Madeline went to bed—with Coco trotting along happily behind her—I reluctantly confessed that I’d once let Jake Theisen read a note that Heidi had given me where she talked about how hot he was. “Why?” Ava asked, without any judgment. “Why would you do that to a friend?”
“I don’t know,” I said, realizing that I really didn’t know. I guess it had just seemed funny at the time, but Heidi was crushed when she found out. “I wish I hadn’t.”
I also admitted that I’d been lying to everyone about dance tryouts. “Soccer doesn’t really get in the way at all—practice is on different days, which everyone will eventually figure out. I just don’t want to humiliate myself in front of the whole school by trying out. Sometimes,” I confessed, “I worry about looking stupid.”
I thought this was a very profound statement, but Bailey and Ava both laughed. “What?” I demanded. “What’s funny about that?”
“Um,” Bailey mumbled through a mouthful of Oreo cookie, “you and everyone else. Do you think you’re the only person in the history of seventh grade that’s worried about her reputation?”
I held out my hand for a cookie and shook my head. “No, it’s just—I don’t know. I feel like I have more to lose if I really embarrass myself.”
“That is so self-centered,” Ava said, lifting her eyebrows. She rarely put things so bluntly, so it caught me off guard. My cookie tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and I kind of wanted to spit it out.
Bailey nodded. “You’re more popular than ninety-nine percent of our class, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bigger deal when you do something stupid. It’s just a bigger deal to you.”
“But it is a bigger deal,” I pressed on, though my face was getting hot, and I was a little queasy. I hated when Bailey and Ava confronted me about saying selfish things. They didn’t understand what it was like for me, how it felt like everyone was always watching me, waiting for me to screw up, just so they could laugh at me. It was like I was more visible than most people at school. Most of the time, I liked it that way, but sometimes I felt like I had to be extra cautious. “I just mean, when I do something that makes me look stupid, it seems like the whole school is watching.”
“They’re not,” Ava said. “You just think they are.”
“But they are,” I argued. “If I did something completely embarrassing—like fall on my face during dance tryouts—everyone in school would know about it.”
“Yeah,” Bailey admitted. “I guess you have a point. But the thing is, if you just laughed it off, you could probably make people forget about it in two days. If one of us humiliated ourselves in front of the whole school, it would probably get blown up into this huge deal and whatever it was would follow us around until we graduated from high school. Like Susannah Green! Everyone called her Crybaby Green all last year because someone spread a rumor that she started crying about missing her favorite stuffed animal during Spanish. Remember that?”
The look on my face must have made it obvious that I was the one who had spread around the rumor about Susannah. She really had cried about something stupid and babyish, like missing her stuffed animal. I think. I wasn’t actually in the same class with her when it happened, but Heidi had given me the details and, of course, we’d laughed about it all week.
Who does that in sixth grade? Susannah really hadn’t lived it down, but I’d never really thought about it much after that day. It didn’t affect me on a daily basis, so I’d never really considered that the story had never gone away. It trailed her all year. Because of me. “Wow,” I said finally. “Poor Susannah.”
“Yeah,” Bailey sighed. “The thing you maybe don’t realize is, most people care a lot less about what you and your friends are doing all the time than I bet you think they do. Mostly, I think people just kind of try to stay out of your way and hope you don’t even notice them.”
I began to pick at my pinkie nail for the first time in over a week. Bailey saw me and said, “Hey! You’re going to ruin my hard work.”
“Oh,” I said, stuffing my hands under my thighs. “Sorry.” After a moment’s pause, I said, “Do you guys avoid me at school?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Bailey said, smiling sheepishly. “But it’s a whole different world here at the lake, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And you guys are so different than I thought you would be.”
“At first,” Ava said quietly, “you were exactly like I thought you would be. But now, you’re different.”
“I’m really glad you guys ended up being here with me this summer,” I said. “I don’t think I would have survived without someone other than my parents to talk to this whole month.” All night, I’d been surprised at how much I was telling these newish friends. But at the same time, it was such a relief to confess some of my real feelings and fears to someone and know that the truth wouldn’t come back to haunt me.
Because I knew my secrets were safe with Bailey and Ava, I also told them about my relationship with my parents and how much my dad had changed over the last two or three years. I’d complained about my annoying and critical parents with Heidi and Sylvie, of course, but I’d never admitted that my relationship with my mom and dad made me feel sad sometimes. I felt sort of wimpy, somehow, admitting that I was bummed because my dad never wanted to take me for ice cream anymore—that just sounded like a preschool problem. But I had a feeling Ava and Bailey might understand that it hurt to be forgotten by your parents. That sometimes I wanted to be noticed for more than my bad habits and worse attitude.
“My dad and I used to be really close,” I said. “But then, it was almost as if one day, he decided I was just this obstacle that moves around the house and gets in the way. We used to hang out on the weekends, avoiding my mom together, but now I feel like we’re all avoiding each other at the same time.”
“Why would you avoid your mom?” Ava asked. She’d told us, earlier in the night, about how her dad had ended up getting primary custody of her and Madeline when her parents divorced. Apparently, he had a more flexible job, and her mom travels all the time—so it worked out better for everyone for them to live with their dad most of the time. But I could tell Ava missed having her mom at home and missed having her around for a lot of regular life and girly stuff.
“She’s really critical, and we just don’t get along,” I said. “She’s not the warmest person on earth.”
“I don’t think I’ve even said a single word to her in the three weeks we’ve been here,” Bailey said, pulling her eyebrows together. “She hardly ever comes to the bonfires at night, does she?”
“Nope. She’s sort of afraid of people.”
“Is she really?” Ava asked. “Like she has a phobia or something?”
“No,” I said, laughing at how serious Ava looked. She looked worried, as though my mom suffered from some sort of chronic problem, instead of just major stranger issues and general crankiness. “Not like that. She’s just sort of snobby, I guess.” But then I realized it wasn’t snootiness; it was something else. Something that I myself had felt in the first few days at the lake. “Actually, it’s not that she’s snobby, but I think she’s maybe afraid she won’t really know what to say to people she doesn’t know that well. She’s not great at just chatting with strangers, so sometimes she comes across as unfriendly or sort of bossy and harsh.”
“Is she unfriendly?” Bailey asked.
“More shy than anything, probably,” I said, shrugging. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it all that much. But I think it’s in situations like this, where she doesn’t really know anyone at all, that she’s super-bad at faking it. So she’s been a total grump all month, and my dad has been so consumed with work that I don’t even really know why he forced us to come with him. Except for the night we all went on that picnic, I’ve hardly even seen him.”
I took a deep breath. I was really annoyed, all of a sudden. “I think my dad would have been a lot happier this month if he’d just come alone. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about my mom and me screwing up his ‘reputation.’ ” I made quotation marks in the air, since that’s what I’d heard him say to my mom when he was giving her a hard time about her rarely showing up for the evening activities. I think my dad was getting pretty frustrated with my mom’s bad attitude at the lake too. So maybe he and I still had something in common.
“Do you ever tell your parents how you’re feeling?” Bailey asked, her eyes wide and innocent.
“Ha.” I laughed bitterly, thinking about all the times I’d told my parents how I was feeling and how well that had gone over. “They don’t really care for my honesty. The whole sharing-our-feelings thing doesn’t really happen in our house.” Then I thought about it for a second, and realized that most of the time, me sharing my feelings meant me talking back. I hadn’t told my dad that I missed our ice-cream outings, or that sometimes it would be nice to talk to him instead of formally communicating with him.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, since I was getting bummed out after a night full of fun. So I waved my hands in the air and said, “Let’s stop talking about my defective relationship with my parents and move on to something more interesting. Do you guys realize we’ve only played half of our game? No one has done Spy yet. The game is Liar and Spy, right?”
Bailey yawned. “Yeah, but what are we supposed to spy on? It’s pitch-black out there, and remember, the friendly raccoons are out now.”
“True,” I said. “I forgot about the raccoons.”
“But would it be worth risking a run-in with the raccoons . . .,” Ava said, rubbing her hands together, “if we spied on Brennan?”