UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Mom said she’d take me school shopping, but by noon on Saturday, she’s still in bed with a migraine. When I crack the door to her darkened room to ask how she’s feeling, she whispers, “Why don’t you try Mandy?”
I obsess over this idea for nearly an hour. I’m way out of practice with friends. At my old school there were girls who included me in group stuff, but no one I could call on a whim. When I finally do text Mandy, my heart beats so fast, I get dizzy. But I do it.
She texts back within five minutes, saying:
PLEASE, YES. Dying to get out.
The honk brings me outside, but instead of Mandy’s “lame-ass” car, the driveway is full of a humongous, tricked-out, bright-red monster truck. Mandy leans out the passenger-side window, peering over giant sunglasses like a movie star.
“Like my ride?” she asks in a put-on Southern belle drawl.
“Ahem. My ride,” says the driver, a hulking guy.
“Darlin’, you are my ride,” Mandy teases.
“That’s enough, Scarlett,” he says. He’s handsome in a WWE kind of way—beefy muscles, square jaw, sleepy-cow eyes. He’s got Birmingham man-hair—thick, side-swept hair grown a little too long all around, like it dreams of becoming a mullet but doesn’t quite dare.
“This is Drew,” Mandy says.
Even though he’s smiling, Drew makes me nervous. His hands are as big as my face.
The truck is Frankenstein’s monster—the paint job’s meticulous, but it covers a jumble of parts that look like they’re itching to reassemble themselves into a more comfortable arrangement. There’s a huge gash in the passenger side that I pray came from a former life and not from Drew’s driving.
I climb in behind Mandy and buckle myself in.
“Will your mom care I’m not driving?” Mandy asks. “I told Drew he should park up the block, but he was being stubborn.” She squeezes Drew’s bicep and he winces.
“Ow. Hi, Caddie, nice to meet you. How are you doing? I’m fine.” He says it like an etiquette robot, programmed to give Mandy a lesson. She goes to pinch him again, but he catches her hand and presses it flat to her leg. Drew reaches his free hand back to me, and I burrow into my sleeves. I wave Muppet-like, side to side, and drop my hand back in my lap.
Drew’s sleepy eyes look right through me in a way that makes me want to pull a bag over my head. He smiles like he knows all my secrets and finds them funny.
“I don’t think Mom would care,” I say, “but she’s in bed anyway.”
Only then does Mandy flash her lightning smile. “It’s good to be hanging out with you again, Caddie. I’ve missed you,” she says, and relief washes through me.
I always felt like I needed Mandy more than she needed me. She’s good at taking care of herself, never lets a problem get too big before she solves it. Mandy says what she thinks, does what she wants, and doesn’t look back, whereas I have to check and recheck to make sure what I’m doing is safe.
It takes me a long time to say back to her, “I missed you too.”
Drew attacks the curves on Cherokee Bend as if we’re in an armored tank. Every year, at least a couple of cars fall off these winding roads. A cross will mark the broken place in the undergrowth where one crashed down toward the golf course, or a ribbon might ring an enormous tree in memory of a car that wrapped itself around its trunk.
If I hold these ugly images in my brain for too long, they might happen to us. I need to erase them, so I breathe deep and imagine the bad thoughts floating away. It’s an old game, one that comes so automatically I barely notice it anymore.
Mandy’s telling me about the different juniors in theater. There are “the musical fiends . . . Hank’s in with them, but he likes us better”; a trio of “melancholy babies” who are “all about the harshness of life. . . . It’s like they live in a vampire novel but it’s no fun because the vampires aren’t even hot”; and a group Mandy calls “the show ponies . . . You know, the kids with the crazy stage moms who do pageants and spokesmodel contests and all that?” To distinguish herself from them, Mandy says, “Except they actually like it.”
If Mandy quizzes me later, I’ll remember every word. I’m a good listener, even with the mental background noise.
Drew takes a sharp curve, and we shift as his tire skirts a broken place at the edge of the pavement. All my muscles clench. Please let us be safe.
“Could you maybe slow down, just a little?” I ask, but Drew doesn’t hear me, and I don’t have the guts to ask again. Once we’re on Highway 280, it’s better. Drew still drives too fast, but at least he’s got a straight lane to do it in.
He takes us to Little Professor in Homewood because they’ve got a good theater section. When we get there, Drew goes in search of some guitar chord book while Mandy leads me to the plays. There are eight different editions of Hamlet to choose from, but we’re supposed to get one that keeps the original punctuation.
“Which version are you getting?” I ask.
Mandy waves a CliffsNotes Hamlet in my face.
“Haven’t you read the actual play?”
She shrugs. “I get what happens. Dude wants to avenge his father’s death. Dude says, ‘To be or not to be.’ Dude fights some people. Dude dies.”
“There’s more to it than that,” I say, picking up a special edition that looks straight out of Elizabethan England, old spellings and all.
“I know, but I don’t care about Hamlet. I want to be Ophelia. She gets to go crazy.” My heart beats too fast, and I feel like Mandy’s dropped a boulder in my stomach, but of course she wants Ophelia.
“There are never enough parts for girls.” I flip to a speech of Ophelia’s. I’ve read it over and over, but the old-fashioned spellings give it new color.
“Nadia casts girls as guys all the time,” Mandy says. “I mean, as a new person, you’re more likely to be a page or something, but it won’t be because you’re a girl.”
This is what I’ve been listening for but not wanting to hear—that I’m too late to the party and don’t even have a chance at a good part.
“I know what I want,” I say, closing the book. “If you’re done, we can go.”
“Yeah, I’m ready,” Mandy says. She tosses the CliffsNotes, grabs a copy of the special edition, and tucks it under her arm like she planned to buy it all along.
“Sure that’s not going to hurt your brain?” Drew asks when he sees Mandy’s book, and I bristle. Mandy might not be a scholar, but that’s choice, not a lack of intelligence.
Mandy smiles at me. “Caddie thinks it’s good.”
She links her arm through mine, pulling me close. Her hand slides down close to mine, and I gasp, jerk away.
“Whoa,” says Mandy, like I’m a horse, “easy, girl.”
My heart wants a breath for every beat—so much air—but I won’t let it trick me. I make my voice gentle, no stress. “I don’t like anyone to touch me lately.” The best lies have a little truth in them. “It’s weird, but I lay out in the sun the other day . . .”
Mandy knows my pasty skin never tans.
“It was dumb, but I thought with school starting . . .” I let her see me embarrassed. Making it part of the act takes its power away. “I got sun poisoning.” Her eyes dart to my super-pale hands. “I mean, I wasn’t even out long enough to burn, but I got these red bumps. That’s why the long sleeves. So gross. And it still hurts.”
“Yowch,” Mandy says, happy to keep her distance now that we’re talking about skin bumps. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, girl.”
I nod. No kidding.
Mandy decides our next stop should be Ragamuffin, a consignment shop in Southside where we can get rehearsal clothes on the cheap. Drew speeds through the Red Mountain Expressway Cut, the rust-red corridor that was blasted from the mountain, and there’s Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge. If a pagan can be a patron saint, he’s Birmingham’s. He’s the largest cast iron statue in the world, and he towers over his anvil wearing only an apron so his naked butt moons Homewood.
As he drives, Drew shifts his hand back and forth between Mandy’s thigh and the gearshift. They touch so easily.
“Peter says hi,” Mandy says.
“What?” My voice cracks.
Mandy’s fiddling with her phone. “I texted that we were out shopping. He says hi.”
“He’s the one who messed with your car, right?” I try to sound nonchalant.
“Ri-ight,” Mandy says, eyeing me with suspicion, and I immediately realize how stupidly fake I must sound. Mandy watched me meet Peter yesterday, and it’s not like I met a billion other people.
“You heard about the Great Car Caper,” Drew says, laughing.
Mandy twists around to stare at me. “You like him,” she crows. “You! Like! Peter!”
I shift my eyes toward Drew—Hello, male in the car. In the rearview, his eyes are amused.
“I don’t like him. I mean, I don’t dislike him. I don’t even know—”
“Lies! You like him. Now talk. How can you be attracted to Peter?” asks Mandy.
“I never said I was.”
“But you are,” Mandy says. “That’s clear.”
I sink deeper into my seat.
“He’s tall,” she says. “I’ll give you that. He’s got a certain boyish charm.”
Drew clears his throat.
“I’m just trying to empathize,” Mandy says. “Please. I could never go for someone so—what’s the word I’m looking for? Cocky?”
“Peter’s not cocky. Peter’s a nerd,” Drew says.
“I know! Where does he get off being nerdy and full of himself? It’s like he thinks he lives in some kind of alterna-world where nerds are cool.”
“He does,” Drew says, smiling wide. “It’s called arts school.” It strikes me for the first time—what’s a guy like Drew doing in arts school anyway?
Mandy rolls her eyes, but she smiles, too. “Okay, that’s not the problem. The problem—” Drew doesn’t slow for the turn onto University Boulevard, and Mandy has to swing forward to absorb the curve. She rights herself and goes on. “The problem is that Peter’s nutty.”
“I said I’m not interested, so it doesn’t even matter.” But I would like to know what qualifies a person as “nutty” in Mandy’s book.
“Don’t be bitchy, Mandy,” Drew says, and he looks bummed by whatever he expects her to say.
“I hate that word,” Mandy says.
“That’s why I used it.”
The what-happens-next? of the moment works like a vacuum, swallowing all sound, all breath.
Mandy zaps Drew with one of her lightning stares. He should be a sizzling pulp melting into the seat, but I guess he’s immune. Mandy turns back to me, and the next moment floods in.
“You’re talking about stuff that’s private,” Drew says, but Mandy holds firm.
“No,” she says, “You are. All I meant was he’s a goof, like that crap that he pulled with my car. But now that you mention it . . .”
“Mention what?” I ask.
Drew eyes me sternly in the rearview mirror. “It’s Peter’s own business.”
“Not if my friend’s thinking about dating him,” Mandy says.
“Peter’s your friend,” Drew says.
“Nobody’s thinking about dating anyone,” I say, but I can’t help asking, “What ‘stuff’ are you talking about?”
Drew says, “It’s from a long time ago.”
“Not that long,” says Mandy. “He had to go for counseling.”
She doesn’t know I had counseling for my panic attacks in middle school, back when Dad first threatened to split. What would she think of that?
“Mandy, Peter’s my best friend,” Drew says. “He’s a good guy. Can we drop it?”
He zooms into Ragamuffin’s parking lot, completely ignoring their speed bump. It makes my teeth clack.
“I love Peter,” Mandy says, “but can we agree that he’s nutty? You saw what he did to my car!”
“My idea!” Drew growls, shaking Mandy’s thigh. It’s playful, but he’s frustrated. “You can’t hold a grudge against him for that.”
“Fine, then I’ll hold a grudge against you,” Mandy says sharply. She hops down from the truck but says, “Ah-ah-ah,” when Drew opens his door. “You, Mr. Idea Man, can wait outside. The ladies have shopping to do.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Consider this your punishment for calling me ‘bitchy,’ and for telling me what I can talk about, AND for my CAR.”
“Mandy, play nice,” Drew says.
“Lady time,” Mandy says with a flourish and sashays toward the store.
Their fight came on so quickly, I feel like I caused it somehow. I turn to give Drew a sympathy smile, but he’s in his own world, fuming.
Inside, Mandy seems oblivious to the tension we just left. “Peter’s not a bad guy,” she says as we navigate the narrow aisles. “Drew’s right about that.”
“It doesn’t matter because I’m not interested.”
Mandy smiles knowingly. “You’re not that good of an actress, Caddie.”
Then I’ll have to get better. I already feel like I’m one touch away from having all my craziness exposed. The last thing I need is a public, puppy dog crush on a guy who shows affection through wrestling. I’d fall to pieces if he shook my hand.
And then I see the gloves.
It’s not healthy, something in me whispers, but it’s better than being exposed.
“What do we think of these?” I ask, pulling on the evening-length lavender gloves. I push up my sleeves to make room.
“Ooh, très chic,” Mandy says. “What are you, going to the opera?”
“They’re kind of fabulous, right?”
She reaches out and runs her fingers along them, down my forearm to the back of my hand. The gloves work like armor. Everything’s covered up safe.
“What if I wore them at school? They could be my thing—a signature.”
Mandy laughs. “You afraid of not being weird enough to fit in with the artists?”
“Says the girl with pink hair.”
She fingers her pink streak and grins. “Oh, I’m aware. But I like it.”
“Maybe I like the gloves.”
“Then go for it,” she says. “You know, the pink hair was partly inspired by you.”
“What?”
“Remember that time you suggested we wear pink for a week, just to see if people would notice?”
“Which they did on the very first day.”
That hadn’t been one of my games, just a game, in fifth grade. Mandy played along, and we weren’t the least bit afraid of people making fun because together we were so cool.
“You were always good at that,” Mandy says, “coming up with the zany thing nobody else would dare do.”
That doesn’t sound like me now at all, but I like that it’s how she remembers me.
I hold up the gloves. “You won’t tell anyone that I only started wearing these in time for school?”
“What? Caddie’s always worn gloves! She’s a real trendsetter. You watch. It’s going to be all evening-gown gloves at New York Fashion Week this year.”
“Don’t overdo it.”
“Who? Me? Never.”
Mandy takes my gloved hand and swings it between us like we’re kids again. The gloves are more than protection. They’re a secret, and secrets work like glue between friends.