“I made it.” I blink, like my action will somehow make the words on the page disappear. That Coach Ortiz used some sort of magic ink to torture the girls who didn’t make the team.
But no. There’s my name up there:
Veronica Conway.
Libby’s name is right below mine. Claudia and Tabitha made the team, too.
“No!” Next to me, Lauren’s eyes widen in shock. She turns to me. “I … didn’t make it.” Her voice is wooden, like she left all her emotions and energy on the field.
I reach out to give her a hug, but she pulls away. “I … need to go.” Her sobs trail behind her as she runs down the hallway, and I move to follow her, but Tabitha puts her hand on my arm. “It’s okay,” she says, her face a mix of excitement and sadness. “I got her.”
I watch Tabitha trail Lauren, then look at the list again. I feel the same way, only for a different reason. Of course I’m excited I made the team. I’ve been waiting for this list to go up for days. Years, even, if you count the first All-Star game I went to when I was eight, when I stood on the third-base line, my fingers curled around the chain-link fence, my eyes wide open.
Of course I’m excited, I repeat to myself.
Then why do I keep checking the list, wishing that my name wasn’t up there?
“We did it!” Libby bounds up next to me and gives me a hug, and I push the traitorous thoughts away. That’s what they are, after all. I’m a softball player, which means I play softball. Coach Ortiz herself decided I was good enough.
“We did!” I force some energy into my voice and hug her back. “It’ll be so much fun!”
“Totally.” Libby leans closer to whisper in my ear. “This means that after the talent show this weekend, everything will be fine. Back to normal.”
I pull away at the word normal and stare at the list again. Normal would be my mom being home. Normal would be my mom never going away in the first place. But in a way, Libby’s right—playing softball is as normal as things can get right now. I force another smile and turn back to her. “Absolutely.”
“Sharing secrets again?” Claudia’s voice comes from behind us, and I whirl around to face her.
“No! Really. I promise.” My words come out so fast that they sound insincere and rehearsed, and I take a deep breath. “We weren’t sharing any secrets, Claudia.”
She’s not looking at me, though, and I follow her eyes to the list. “Congratulations,” I say softly. “You did awesome at tryouts.”
“You too,” Claudia finally says. She sounds like a kid forced to be polite, but I’ll take what I can get.
“Claudia, I—”
She shakes her head and cuts me off. “Veronica, don’t. I … I don’t know why you didn’t tell me the truth about what’s going on. I don’t even know exactly what’s going on, but I do know that you don’t trust me. And that hurts. A lot.”
Tears prick at my eyes and I nod furiously. “I know. I really do. And I get why you’re mad. I just … can we talk? So I can explain?”
Claudia moves to let a few other kids look at the list. Her face hasn’t changed expression at all. I feel like I’m back at our kitchen table, when my parents explained Mom’s alcoholism. Except now the places have changed—now I’m the one listing all the ways I’ve messed up.
“Please.” I clasp my hands together. I probably look silly and everyone is probably watching, but I don’t care. I want my best friend back.
Claudia sighs loudly. “Fine.”
My eyes light up.
“Later, though.” She looks up at the clock, which is about to ring for first period. “After school.”
“I can wait.”
And I can. I think back to the kitchen table again, about all this time that Mom’s been gone.
I’ve learned to do that, at least.
“I have been keeping secrets from you.” Claudia and I are sitting in my backyard, her on the tire swing, me on the ground beneath it. It’s sunny and warm and the sky is a clear blue, but inside, I feel full of dark clouds.
“And you told them to Libby instead?” Claudia’s voice is shaky. “I’m your best friend, Veronica.”
“I know.” I pluck a blade of grass from the lawn, then force myself to meet Claudia’s eyes. “I didn’t tell you for a reason, though. I know you’ve been sad about your parents and I didn’t want to stress you out even more.”
“You keeping secrets stresses me out.” Claudia pushes off the ground, setting the tire swing twirling in a circle. I watch her spin, my own head whirling even faster. “And that’s … well, it’s a dumb reason not to tell me. I’d rather be more stressed out than be totally in the dark.”
I imagine Claudia and me stumbling through a darkened room, reaching out for each other and banging into things. It’s exactly the way I’ve been feeling lately, at home and with her.
“Lights are good,” I admit.
I think Claudia cracks a smile, but by the time the tire spins back around, the smile’s gone again. “Yeah. And secrets are bad.”
“I know.” My nose does that “I’m totally going to cry” tingly thing, but I don’t try to hold back the tears. I’ve been holding back too much lately.
“Mom isn’t on a business trip.” The first words are hard to get out, but once the dam is breached, the rest of them flow out like roaring floodwaters. “She’s in rehab and she’s been drinking too much and she’s an alcoholic and I was afraid that if I told you you’d worry or look at me weird or think Mom was messed up or I was messed up and … and … I might not get to do softball because Mom and Dad are all stressed and they’ll be too busy to bring me and it costs money and I don’t know what I even want to do…” I break off, my breath coming in gasps.
Claudia reaches down and squeezes my hand. “I’m so sorry, Veronica.”
I squeeze back. “Thanks.” I look up at Claudia hopefully, but that’s all she says. “Are you still mad?” I ask.
Claudia sighs, then stops the tire swing and finally looks me in the eye. “Yes. No. Kind of? I’m just sad, I guess. And confused? Why didn’t you trust me?”
“I did trust you, though! I do!” I want to hug Claudia, but I can’t risk doing anything that could make things worse. (She’s on a tire swing, too, so that’d be pretty awkward.) “I was just trying to make your life easier. And to be honest, I guess I was a little bit jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“That your mom wants to spend so much time with you. Meanwhile, mine’s off at rehab and Dad’s working nonstop. I miss them.”
“I miss you,” Claudia says. “And I wish I could have helped more.”
“I miss you, too!” A tear drips down my face. “I miss everyone.”
“Except Libby.” Claudia bites her lip. “Is she your new best friend now?”
“No way!” I climb onto the tire swing next to Claudia, causing it to dip us both backward. I grip onto the chains. “She is my friend, though. She was easy to talk to.”
I don’t know how to tell Claudia that sometimes it’s easier to share a life-altering secret with someone besides your best friend.
How, that way, you don’t have to push through layers of childhood memories.
How starting off on a clean sheet of paper means that you don’t have to find a clear space to write a new story on.
(I don’t tell Claudia why Libby understands so well, though. That’s not my secret to share, after all.)
“Oh.”
“I didn’t want you to worry.” I try to catch Claudia’s eye, but she’s looking at the grass. At the sky. At a squirrel running by. Anywhere but at me, the worst best friend ever. “And I didn’t want you to look at me any different. Remember how you said I’m Veronica with the perfect family?”
“Right. That.” Claudia sighs.
“We’re not perfect at all,” I admit. “Dad’s Mr. Cheerful half the time, Mom’s not even here, and I’m…” I trail off. “I’m just angry. A lot.”
“I guess maybe there’s no such thing as a perfect family,” Claudia says softly.
“Maybe not.” My eyes follow a bird as it flits from tree to tree.
“Did you know that some people think birds bring good luck?” Claudia follows my gaze.
The bird finally settles down in a nest at the top of our old oak tree. “Grandma Helen told me that once,” I say. “She said that a bird pooped on her head on her way to her wedding, and that it was actually a good-luck sign.”
“Ew!” Claudia covers her head with her hands.
“Exactly.” I giggle, then cover my mouth in horror. “Can you even imagine? I’d say it’s the exact opposite of good luck. But Grandma said that she just wiped it off and went and got married. I guess it worked, because they never got divor—” I break off, my hands flying to my mouth. “Oh no. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Claudia waves her hand in the air. “It’s okay. Really. My parents probably are going to get divorced, and no amount of bird poop is going to stop that from happening.” Her words are sad, but there’s a twinkle of something else—hope? acceptance?—in her eyes. “It’s probably a good thing anyway.”
“A good thing?” I say slowly.
“Yeah.” Claudia grasps onto the chains and tilts her head back toward the sky. “You’ve heard them fight. It’s awful.”
“True.” I remember going over to Claudia’s house during winter vacation. We made friendship bracelets to the soundtrack of her parents yelling about her mom not refilling the car with gas and her dad not vacuuming the house enough. Claudia turned the music up so high to drown them out that I practically lost my hearing.
“It only got worse,” she says.
“Yeah, I know.” That’s why we hung out at my house after that. Then at Tabitha’s and Lauren’s when I got so embarrassed about my mom that I didn’t want anyone over, either.
“I saw a robin in the backyard one morning last winter, after they had a really big fight.” I’m not sure what Claudia’s point is, so I let her keep talking. “It was hopping around our garden, even though everything was all bare and wilted. There were leaves blowing all over the place, a bunch of dirt, and this little bird, just bopping along.”
I smile at the idea of a bopping bird. I bet it loves music as much as I do.
“I went online to look up what robins eat and found this whole website about bird meanings. About how seeing a robin, especially in a garden, means that good luck will happen to the people who live there.” Claudia grips the chains more tightly. “It made me think that Mom and Dad were going to stop fighting so much, that all I had to do was find enough robins and everything would fix itself. I found so many robins, but it never worked out.”
She sniffles, and I reach out to touch her shoulder. “This really stinks.”
I didn’t know what to say to Claudia before. I didn’t know what someone with separated parents would want to hear and I didn’t want to make it worse. Now, though, I say what’s in my heart. I say what I wanted to hear—what I still want to hear—from people. That when parents have problems that kids can’t fix, it just plain stinks.
Claudia wipes her eyes but doesn’t quite get one of the tears dripping down her right cheek. I reach out and get it for her.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” I say simply. “I wanted to. To make up for what a jerk I’ve been.”
“You haven’t been a jerk.” Claudia takes a deep breath and wipes her face again. “You were scared.”
“So were you,” I say. “And I should have trusted that you’d be here for me. You’ve never given me any reason not to.”
“What about that prank I played in fourth grade…” Claudia trails off, that same spark entering her eyes again.
I immediately know what she’s talking about. “When you put glitter in every single pocket of my softball bag…”
“And when you opened it up, it got all over your mom’s car?” Claudia is laughing so hard she almost topples over. “That was the best!”
“It was not!” I exclaim. “I got grounded for the whole weekend and it took ages for me to brush my hair without getting glitter all over the place.” I giggle. “Mom said you were a bad influence on me.”
Claudia bites her lip. “Maybe I am.”
“What? No,” I protest.
“Or at the very least, maybe I’m not a good friend.” Claudia sniffles. “I wish I’d shown you that I could be trustworthy with the stuff about your mom.”
“You did! I mean, you are.” I take a deep breath and try to explain. “I think I just didn’t want to change things with us. I didn’t want to make you sadder or hurt our friendship with all this bad news.”
“But your bad news is reality,” Claudia says. “Same with the stuff about my parents. That’s why I told you. Because I know that our friendship is strong enough to survive a little bit of sadness.”
“Or a lot,” I say.
“Or a lot.”
“I’m sorry I kept Mom’s alcoholism a secret.” I say it as firmly as I can, and I look Claudia in the eyes. I need her to know how serious I am. “I know—I guess I knew all along—that you wouldn’t judge her. Or me.”
There’s a teeny-tiny part of me that’s still afraid that Claudia will judge me—that everyone in the world will—but I push it deep underground, under another layer of hard rock that no shovel will be able to penetrate.
“I’m sorry about the talent show, too. I didn’t mean to leave you out.” I kind of did, but I don’t tell her that part. “You can be in the act, too, if you—”
“No way!” Claudia laughs and shakes her head. “But I will be there cheering for you.”
“Yay!” Having Claudia in the audience will make the show even better.
“Your mom is awesome.” Claudia gives me a hug. “I’m glad she’s getting better. I’m glad your family will be getting better.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen once Mom is home. Or what she’s going to be like when I see her again.” I say the words quietly. It’s the first time I’ve spoken my fear out loud.
“She’ll be different. You’ll all be different. Just like my family will be.”
“What if that stinks, too?” I ask.
“It might. But it might not.” Claudia’s voice is hopeful, but her eyes look worried. Maybe we’ll both be worried for a long time. Maybe that’s okay.
“But we’ll get through it.” I hug her back.
“Together.”