13
Horatius at the Bridge
Monday, December 8
Our buses, their sleek bodies trembling in the parking lot behind the school, looked a little like monsters. You know? Exhaust curling in the early-morning air, looking like smoke rings from some ancient creature. It felt out of this world.
Or maybe I just wanted to believe it was another world because I was feeling so weird and alien.
It should have been the happiest morning EVER! I DID IT! We did it! We raised all the money we needed and still had some to spare. I was going to get the chance I’d been praying for—a chance to meet the editors of Executive, Jr. face-to-face. A chance to learn how to grow my business and become a butt-kicking leader. Everything I ever wanted. And all of my friends were coming, too.
Only, Sara and Becks didn’t want to be my friends. They’d made that clear. Just thinking about it made me feel sick inside. Lauren and I had been forced to find two other people to room with. Red volunteered, which was okay, I guess. Then one of the girls who’d helped with the cupcakes, Ebony, became our fourth.
Not Becks.
Not Sara.
Not that having only Lauren left from my old group was bad. Lauren was cool and all, but it had always been the four of us. With Sara and Becks dissing me, I felt lonely inside.
“You gonna be all right, Peanut?” asked Dad. He had driven Mom and me to the school. I tried to give him a whatever shrug, but he knew when I was blowing him off. He continued to give me that worried Dad look until Mom opened her door.
“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “We’d better get going.”
I started to slide across the seat, pushing open the door, when Dad caught my arm.
“Brianna,” he said. I hesitated, and he went on. “You’re gonna be just fine, baby. Believe that.”
As if on cue, the opening notes to another song filled the car, and it was enough to lift me out of my funk, for the moment at least. I gave my father a playful punch. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, smiling. “ ’Cause I’m awesome like that.”
“You’re dang right you’re awesome. Go! Get outta my car, brat. Have a great trip!”
I shut my door, let out a long, shaky breath, and headed to the bus. Right about now I should’ve been experiencing the nervous energy I get when it’s time for a field trip. About to miss several days of school, going to a new city, wearing new field-trip clothes—awesome, right?
Instead, something cold and heavy weighed against my chest. Was it dread? A broken heart? Gas?
Or was it loneliness weighing me down?
We still had about twenty minutes to go before we left, so the bus was less than half-full.
“Hey, girl!” A hand shot up. I worked really hard to make my smile look convincing. It felt broken, though, hanging limply on my face.
“Hey, Red, what up?”
Because she was Red and Red was crazy, she couldn’t help herself, even at that early hour. She made kissy sounds and her eyes got big and round.
“Ooooo! Look at your hair. It’s all swingy and purdy!” she said.
Aunt Tina had talked me into getting something called a blowout. That blow-dryer in the salon was hotter than Satan’s tanning bed. Now, instead of bouncy curls that snapped up around my shoulders, my hair stretched straight down the middle of my back. It felt weird, having my hair blowing in the wind like that.
“Thanks,” I said. “Gotta get used to it. With my hair fluffy, I think it kept my ears warm. But now…”
“It’s so cold outside. Wonder if this is what it feels like inside my ballet teacher’s heart.”
Okay, Red was funny, in a dark comedy sorta way. “I thought you told me your ballet teacher was heartless,” I said, pushing my bag under the seat and climbing in next to the window. She’d already told me she was not a window seat kind of girl.
“Heartless… frozen heart? It’s a fine line,” she said, easing back her seat. “You okay?”
Shrug. “Just awesome,” I said, mimicking her ouuuuuuusome tone from the first day we met.
After that, the whole woe-is-me act left me feeling sick of myself. I hadn’t really gotten over anything, but I couldn’t just sit around moping. I hated that mess. So I decided to at least act like I had some sense.
Red and I joked around about who was going to be overdressed for the trip and who’d wear too much makeup trying to look older. We wondered which of her many cardigans Mrs. G. would wear in her official capacity as chaperone.
Click boarded the bus a little while later. He looked half-asleep, but when he saw us, his face broke into a wide grin. He sat in the seat in front of us, but turned around on his knees to show us the screen on his camera.
“Oh! You put it all together!” I squealed. We’d done a movie this time about kids on a bus trip. I’d helped him set up the shots and move the figures. But I hadn’t seen it all put together.
He adjusted the camera so we could see the finished project. When it was over, we cheered and Click beamed. Red said, “It amazes me how you guys do those little movies. It’s so cool.”
Another boy leaning over Click’s shoulder said, “Now that’s what’s up!” We all laughed. Click reached inside his bag and pulled out a sketchbook.
“What’s this?” I asked as he handed it over the seat to me.
He grinned. Click-click! In addition to being a mini-film maker, Click was an excellent artist.
“That’s so cool!” Red said, pointing at the pages. Click did a little bow in my direction as I read the title.
The Adventures of Cupcake Girl!
I flipped through the pages and laughed harder and harder. A cupcake crusader for justice—now that’s really what’s up. “Click, you could not have done a better job. Thank you!”
Click-click.
His cheeks reddened. “Wish I had known you were changing your hair. I would have made her look a little different,” he said, glancing at my blown-out do.
As the buses filled, the party atmosphere grew. Everybody had something to say about my hair. Ebony boarded the bus wearing a navy-and-white scarf wrapped around her head.
“Just got my hair done,” she said, plopping down next to Lauren, who was across the aisle from me and Red. “Gotta keep it pinned up ’cause I know I’m going to sleep on this bus.” Then, as if to prove the point, she let out a long yawn. She looked over at me and her eyes popped out. Then she was, like, “Girl, you need a scarf!” And she handed me one out of her bag that still had the tag on it. Aunt Tina was right. Black girls have to learn how to protect their ’dos.
We were all laughing and joking and having a good time. At least, until I looked out the window and into the second bus. I saw Mrs. G. talking to someone. When she moved, all the laughter drained out of me.
It was Becks, and Sara was standing right behind her. Prya and Paisley were with them. It was easy to see that the Peas were in control, that Becks and Sara were following them around like puppies.
Why couldn’t they see what was going on with those girls? What was it about the Peas that made my friends like them… like them better than me?
It just didn’t make any sense.
It was five thirty in the morning. We’d been rolling along for about half an hour. I poked my earbuds into my ears and cranked up my playlist. After seeing Becks and Sara with their new besties, I just needed to drift away. Darkness settled in around the outsides of the bus. Already most of the kids who’d gotten on making noise and grinning ear to ear were sleeping—some even snoring. Mom was sitting two rows behind the bus driver next to another parent, way ahead of where we were sitting.
Red stretched her leg, pointed her toes, and reached her foot toward the ceiling of the bus. I yanked one earbud free and looked at her.
She eyed me back and said, “What?”
“Do you want to be a ballerina when you grow up? Can you make a living at it? How much money do ballerinas make?” I sat up, pulling the other earbud free, too. Red’s blue eyes flashed like jewels. She always wore that thick black eyeliner and her signature black clothes. Always tried so hard to look tough. That was why the whole ballerina thing still threw me for a loop. Looking at her in the bus’s dim light, though, I thought her face looked soft. Pretty.
She laughed. “You ask a lot of questions.”
I shrugged. “Just curious. I never took dance when I was little. I was more into sports.”
“And cooking?”
“That came later.”
“So you didn’t always want to be a mega-millionaire with a cooking show or whatever?”
I sighed.
“I do care about things besides money,” I heard myself say.
She turned to face me. I could see the streetlamps along I-75 reflected in her gaze. “Hey, I know I haven’t known you very long, but one thing I do know is you talk about your future, like, all the time. Gotta admit, sometimes it’s pretty annoying.”
“Um, thanks?”
“No, I mean… well, yeah, I won’t deny it. Sometimes I’m, like, ‘That girl needs to give it a rest!’ But I gotta hand it to you, Justice, when you commit to something, you really commit. At least with you, it’s not so much that you talk about money, you talk about success. Most kids think the two are the same. But I can appreciate the hard work you put into everything. You’re cool like that.”
At the same exact time we both crisscrossed our legs and tucked them beneath us on the seats. Then we laughed.
My smile disappeared, though.
My tone grew serious. “I used to be so sure of myself. So sure of what I wanted,” I said. “But since coming to middle school, it’s like so much has gotten turned upside down.”
Red was nodding. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I know exactly how you feel.”
I kept going. “In elementary school, I had never thought about journalism. Becks, my…” I caught myself. What was she now? Still my friend? “I mean, Becks was the writer in our group. She wanted to be a novelist. Travel the world. Maybe be a reporter, too. Not me. I Googled journalists when we were working on a project in fifth grade. Most of them do not become millionaires.”
“So you never wanted to be a journalist.”
“That’s just it. Now, I don’t know. Maybe. I like it—a lot. Mrs. G. is an excellent teacher. When she talks about the power of the press, I don’t know, it makes me wonder if that might be something I would love to be part of.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except I’ve been going on and on for so long about being a baker and a millionaire, so I feel like that’s what people expect from me. Sometimes I feel… trapped. You wouldn’t understand.” I blew out a huge sigh.
“Understand what?”
I lowered my voice. “Lately, I feel like I’m pretending all the time.”
Lowering my head, I practically whispered, “Want to know the truth, Red? Sara and Becks have been driving me insane! I love them, but the longer we’re in middle school, the more I’m starting to feel like we don’t have as much in common. They were my best friends because they’d always been my best friends. But… I don’t know.”
She gave me a look. “You think I don’t know anything about fakery? Wake up, Justice!”
I shushed her because her voice rose. Lauren, who was dozing across the aisle, sat up.
“What’s up, you guys?” she asked.
“Nothing, Lauren. Go back to sleep.”
A minute or so later, Red whispered, “Look around, Justice. I’m a redheaded white chick in a predominantly black city at a predominantly black middle school. I dress like a goth and hide ballet slippers in my book bag. And you think you’re the only one who feels like a fake?”
We both sat in silence for a bit after that. It was after seven before Red and I said anything else.
I said, “You never answered my question.”
“What question?”
“Do you want to be a ballerina when you grow up?”
She smiled a little smile. “I don’t think about it, really,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I told you before that I’d been dancing for nine years, but not exactly consecutively.”
“Why not?”
She took a long pause. Finally, she answered.
“I was born with a rare heart disease. Started having heart surgeries when I was still a baby.”
I could feel my eyes bulging.
“Don’t go all dramatic on me, Justice. Spoiler alert—I survive!”
We both laughed. Then she looked around to make sure no one was paying us any attention, then reached down and pulled back the collar of her shirt. A thin pink scar zigzagged across her pale skin.
“Does it hurt?”
“Don’t be lame.” She laughed. “It doesn’t hurt. At least, not anymore. I started dancing when I was really young, about three. By then I was healing and getting healthy and they told my mom I needed to build up my strength. She’d been a dancer, so…”
“So she felt comfortable putting you in dance.”
“Exactly. And everything was all good, until about two years ago. I came down with pneumonia and the next thing we knew, I was out of school again, undergoing surgeries. I came closer to dying than I ever had.”
“God, Red! I’m so sorry!”
Again she paused. Took a breath. Finally, she said, “I’m not. Now, every day that I dance feels like a victory. I don’t think about being a ballerina when I grow up. Dancing makes me feel alive—it’s like celebrating that my heart is healthy. So I don’t do it because it might turn into a career. I do it because it’s like my way of being grateful. Ballet is what I love to do. When we read that story in the Free Press about Lacy and her friends, it really touched me. I wish I’d had friends like that when I needed them.”
It was my turn to be quiet for a bit. I reached over and squeezed her hand. “Well, you’ve got a friend like that now.”
Red leaned back against the headrest. “You know, I’m only on this bus, going to this conference, because you made it seem so do-or-die. I mean, you are truly committed. My ballet teacher freaked when she found out I’d be gone for a few days.”
“Why?”
She turned in her seat and faced me.
“I won the lead role in the Nutcracker performance at the Fox Theatre.”
“Oh my goodness! What a huge honor!” I practically squealed. “It must feel so good to accomplish something like that.”
“After several surgeries and a lot of time alone, tell you what, Justice. It doesn’t feel nearly as good as making a friend. So, don’t blow it. Now hush up and get to sleep!”
The swoosh of the bus’s tires created a soothing rhythm. I drifted away, conscious of one important thing:
The tension that squeezed my insides whenever I thought about Sara and Becks changing, well, it seemed to loosen. For the first time in weeks, I felt like I could breathe just a little bit better.