Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth grade:
Spend time with your family. It can help.
An hour has passed and Claudia’s still not here. I think she said an hour, but maybe she said a few hours. I don’t know.
My mind is spinning with all the horrible things happening: Yamir and I breaking up, Claudia’s mystery trip, Sunny being annoyed with me, pressure from Erica. I need to talk to someone, and there’s only one person I can think of.
“Evan, hey, it’s Lucy,” I say, as soon as he answers.
“Hey!”
“Listen, I hope it’s not weird that I’m calling you, but after our chat at the beach, I really think you might give the best advice.”
He laughs. “Well, thanks.”
I sit back on my bed, and try to even out the feathers in my down comforter. “Everything felt crazy at the party last night. Didn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” He asks in a way that sounds like he’s actually interested in the response.
“I mean, the whole thing with Yamir showing up, and Erica and Elias, and now I think Sunny’s mad at me.”
I wait for him to say something, but he’s quiet for a few seconds. Maybe it was a mistake to call him.
“Lucy, you always get worked up over this stuff, and then it’s fixed in, like, a day,” he tells me. “Just go with the flow.”
I don’t even know what that means. It sounds like good advice. But also like something to say when you can’t think of anything else.
“Yeah.”
“Yamir is obviously confused. So let him work out his stuff.”
Again, it sounds good, but is he really saying anything?
“You and Sunny are the perfect couple. How do you do it?” I ask. I hear all kinds of noise coming from my mom’s room. Things dropping. Doors closing. Exasperated groans. I have no idea what’s happening out there.
“I don’t know, I guess we’re just awesome,” he says. “You shouldn’t compare your relationship to ours, though. Everybody’s different.”
“Look,” he says. “Travis likes you. Yamir’s been a little bit of a doofus lately. So just go with it. And who cares about Erica? She’s never going to be nice.”
“Maybe she’s on a path to being nicer,” I say.
“No, she’s not.”
“All right. Well, thanks, Evan,” I say. “You can tell Sunny I called you. I don’t want her to think I’m going behind her back or anything, or that she’s been replaced by you!”
“Okay, I gotcha.” He pauses, and in the background I hear the screeching-tire sounds of some kind of car video game. I guess he was multitasking. “Catch you later.”
I end the call and wonder if I feel any better than before I called him. Maybe a little. Maybe not. I guess I don’t feel any worse.
I walk downstairs to grab some kind of a snack. Stress eating is hard to avoid on days like this.
Mom is in the foyer, putting her coat on. “I have to go,” she says.
“What? No. You can’t go. Claudia will be here soon.” I decide to sit on the bench by the front door so I’ll be able to see Claudia when she comes.
“Don’t even ask. Adrienne had some kind of problem with the pet sitter she lined up and now she’s in a bind, and I need to go over and check on the animals every day this week. Apparently in addition to the cats, she has two birds now. The animals have been alone for three days already.”
“Eww. Gross.” That explains all the crashing and banging I heard before. My mom always drops stuff when she’s in a hurry.
She makes a face. “I know.”
We are not cat people. Or bird people.
Mom should be more put out by this. It’s making me even madder that she’s not as angry as I am.
“Where’d your mother go?” Grandma asks, coming down the stairs.
“Adrienne. She needs someone to check on her cats and birds.”
“Your mother does not know how to say no.” Grandma sits down next to me, and we look out the window together. “She’s left us to deal with your sister alone, I guess.”
“Apparently.”
We sit there quietly for a few more minutes and then Grandma says to me, “You sure it’s only your sister that’s troubling you?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“I see. It’s okay to not know.”
Grandma’s usually pretty comforting, but I don’t feel like having some kind of deep discussion. Not when everything’s falling apart.
If I don’t figure out how to make Erica happy, everyone will know that I haven’t been honest about Yamir. The AGE girls will know I lied to them.
Eighth-Grade Masquerade is in a month, and my life is a complete disaster. I think I’m better at handling grown-up problems. Eighth-grade problems seem much, much harder.
I should never have attempted a perfect last semester. A merely okay semester would have been a lofty enough goal.