Mavis wasn’t a moper.
Mavis was a doer.
A problem solver.
An adventure seeker.
But here she was on a sunny summer day in Landry, Alabama, sitting on a log in a vacant lot, moping.
Because here she was without a best friend again.
She had thought this time would be different.
She had been certain that she and Rose would be real best friends.
Not that fake kind like she’d had before.
The kind where someone claimed to be your best friend, and then the next thing you knew, they were telling lies about you on the playground or not saving you a seat on the bus or flinging peas at you in the cafeteria while the other kids at the table laughed.
But now here she was on this log by herself, and Rose was in her fancy house, probably admiring her seventeen dresses or eating tomato aspic on a china plate. Or maybe she was at the mother-daughter book club with a new best friend.
Mavis kept watching the street, hoping to see Rose headed this way.
But she didn’t.
The street was empty.
The vacant lot was empty except for the grasshoppers popping up every now and then in the tall, dry weeds.
The sun beat down, burning the back of Mavis’s neck and making the red dirt beneath her bare feet warm as toast.
Suddenly Mavis was struck with a feeling.
Loneliness.
A deep, sad loneliness that caught her off guard and made her cry.
A slow, quiet cry.
The tears rolling down her cheeks and dropping onto the dry dirt beside the log.
Mavis thought about that day when Mr. Duffy had talked about Edna keeping the coffee warm and how she had felt so jealous seeing what good friends Rose and Mr. Duffy were.
She thought about Rose going to Wonderland even when she didn’t really want to. She thought about how she had gone into the woods where she wasn’t supposed to go. How she had borrowed Amanda’s bike and gotten her sandals dirty and let Mavis take her mother’s quiches and liver pâté.
Mavis wished Rose were here, being her best friend again.
She swished a stick around in the dry dirt beside the log.
She wrote Rose + Mavis.
Then she tossed the stick into the bushes and headed home to listen to her mother complain about Mrs. Tully.