Today, as a tribute to Beyoncé and independent women everywhere, I called Maddie and congratulated her again.
“Can I say something cheesy?” I asked her.
“I’m never opposed to cheese,” Maddie said solemnly, and we laughed.
“Seriously, though.”
“Seriously,” she said. “Cheese.”
“Ahem, ahem. All strong women are allies, and if I can’t run the world, you should, and you should know I’m behind you.”
Maddie was quiet for a bit. “That means a lot, Sammie. Really.”
“Well, you mean a lot to me.”
“You, too. Your opinion always means a lot to me.”
“Will I see you before you go?” I asked.
“I’m already down the coast with my aunts. But I’ll be back before school starts. We’ll see each other again soon.”
“I hope so,” I said, and when we hung up, I remembered how I had compared our debate tactics to blowing up a balloon. And maybe this is the NPC talking but something inside me had swelled up, but thankfully didn’t pop.
As I have hinted throughout this book, Bette Elise McCoy perhaps was not born of this earth. Let’s just say Mom and Dad “brought her back from the hospital” in late February. As a baby she was mostly quiet except when she had the thing that babies get when their stomach is always upset. To this day, she will not eat these foods: bananas, lemon or anything that has lemon in it, pineapple, Ritz crackers, oranges, mango, papaya, carrots, pasta, corn, squash, baby corn, and hot dog buns.
Bette used to have an invisible parrot that she named “Barrot.” She claims she can talk to birds of every kind. I will point out that most of this claim comes from her running at any group of birds and saying, “Fly, fly.” So, yeah, sure, the birds “listen” to her.
Anyway, Bette entered the fourth grade a whiz at math. She also, as you can see, has a strong imagination and is not afraid of what people think about her. Let’s say that for many years these two skills do not mix, and maybe Bette will not make a lot of friends. I can say that with a lot of truth because I see a lot of myself in Bette and that’s probably why I am so hard on her. I hope she doesn’t just spend all her time talking to herself, like me.
But this is my book. So I say that instead of spending her teenage years cooped up studying, Bette will make friends with someone like Maddie right away, and know that she isn’t alone, and she isn’t the only one.
Let’s say her best friend is really good at playing guitar and Bette is great at the words and the math of writing great songs (because a lot of it is math, especially for more windy-long-tons-of-sounds songs, Stuart told me that) and together they form a band called BARROT. HA-HA yes.
So BARROT gets big in the Upper Valley playing gigs and soon they go to New York City. They will blow everyone’s heads off with their crazy opera pop. They will do costumes and whole huge sets like Alice in Wonderland. They will play in Canada, they will play in Europe, they will play in Africa and India and Asia. They will make music like the two Beatles guys damn damn what are their names except they never break up.
They will live two floors from each other in an apartment building. The two friends, Bette and Whoever, will raise birds of every kind on the roof, and they will write songs and albums together for the rest of their lives.