A Tale of Two Besties (8 page)

And then I saw the golden glint of Harper's sister's Prius.

The pact! Well, I hadn't broken it yet, had I? Was it even supposed to be that serious, or was I over-worrying because I am a worrier who needs something to freak out about at all time? The best bet, I figured, was to let Harper take the lead on the divulging of our first-day ordeals, and I'd act like everything was normal until I could figure out exactly where she stood on the BFF Pact issue. Because I was so excited to talk about my new friends and Nicole and NAMASTE, but I was also worried that I'd already messed up. With my mind made up, I started toward the car, but immediately swiveled my head back toward the school. I swear I heard something that sounded a lot like an owl's hoot.

By the time we got to Pathways to pick up Lily after school, I was in such a cloudy, quiet mood that even Rachel got bored of teasing me about detention pretty quickly.

I scanned the kids coming out of the big, Gothic main building to find Lily. Couldn't we just go
home
already? I felt like my brain had just been beaten and fried and served on top of a bed of kale. Not only did I get detention on my first day, but being at school without Lily had been way harder than I thought. All my friends from middle school were gone now, either to different schools or just lost to the cult of posturing high schoolers around the world trying so hard to be way cool. No more hugs in the hallway—now we just have to nod to each other like “'sup?” I don't know, man, nothing's “
sup!
”

Rachel was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel when I caught a flash of fairy wings and rolled down my window. “Hey! Lily!” I shouted, feeling way too relieved to see those fluttery gawkward accessories because that meant that I had finally found my friend.

“Hey!” Lily waved back and did her little jiggle-dance, where she leans back and rolls her shoulders and goes “Woo—wooooot!” I did it as best as I could from the car seat and flashed her a thumbs-up.

But just as I was feeling good for the first time in like eight hours, Lily stopped in her path and stuck out her index finger, telling me to give her a second. She was walking next to this bigger girl with pink hair and a long, flowery skirt. As soon as she saw me, the pink-haired girl slung her arm over Lily and led her away from the car.

“Who is
that
?” Rachel asked, reading my mind.

“I don't know.”

“Well, tell Flaky-cake that her ride is here, and that we're not going to wait.” I jabbed at the radio to fill the silence.

“
Au revoir
, Nicole!” Lily called behind her when she finally got to the car. She tumbled inside, smooshing her wings beside her in the backseat.

“
Bonne chance,
Lily!” the pink-haired girl responded as she strolled toward the rows of gleaming Mercedes and Priuses that surrounded the school like an invading army. Lily immediately rolled down the window, still without yet having said hello even, and started waving crazily at the girl's back. Rachel rolled her eyes and revved the engine. Unfortunately, the lot was so full that we ended up just idling in traffic.

“How was your day, Lily?” I asked. What I really wanted was for her to ask me how my day was, but Lily is sometimes in her own little world, and in that world there is no such concept as “reading a room.”

“It was, um, okay . . .” Lily looked at her feet as she shrugged off her wings and shoved them into her backpack, like she was hiding a dirty secret.

“Just okay?” Rachel and I shared a look. Nothing with Lily was ever just okay. It was either divine, inspired, obsession-worthy, or totally traumatizing. Either way, she was likely to talk about the scenario for hours. But now she seemed oddly closemouthed and subdued.

“I want to hear about
your
day,” she said, staring out the window.

“Look back at our texts,” I said, a little annoyed. I could tell my best friend's mind was a million miles away. “Pick a topic.”

Rachel nudged me in the rib cage. “Come on, let Lily go first. We regular folks need dispatches from inside the walls of Los Angeles's most expensive institution for creative talent. Give us the scoop! Is anyone already ‘the voice of their generation' yet?” I rolled my eyes, but it seemed like Lily took the question seriously, her eyebrows furrowing together in deep thought.

“Well, everyone here is so cultured and sophisticated, you know? Nothing at all like Hollywood Middle. Like my new friend Nicole? She's been to New York Fashion Week and she says the girls from Rodarte asked if they could base their spring collection on her style. And we have the craziest classes, like they are all about self-expression and self-expansion and the only gym we have to do is yoga or guided meditation, and this boy named Drew played guitar for me . . .”

“They should change the name of this school to Parkway,” Rachel interrupted as she tried unsuccessfully to both navigate out of the lot and make a joke. Rachel's near-road-rage must have put a damper on Lily's awesome-first-day high, because the rest of the ride out of the parking lot was silent, and awkward in a way I've never felt around Lily before. I pretended to be busy on my phone and sneaked a look at Lily in our rearview mirror. She was moving her mouth in these silent shapes, like she was talking to an invisible friend.

“What are you doing?” I asked, maybe a little angrily.

“What?”

“When did you start talking to yourself again?” Lily used to mumble a lot, just nonsense things you could only half-catch. But sometimes she'd say genuinely sad stuff, like she'd call herself stupid or an idiot. She started to do it less as we got older, but she had a tendency to revert back to it when she was really upset. My mom called it her “verbal coping mechanism.”

“Well, I've decided just to go with it if it starts to happen. Nicole—I mean,
someone,
I heard
someone
say—that talking to one's self is crucial to communicating with your identity and your sense of self and maybe even your subconscious. Why, does it bother you?” Lily said all of this in that same under-her-breath voice.

I didn't answer, just turned up the music instead, only to realize after about fifteen seconds that it was a commercial for Worthington Ford. Then I remembered: I had actually made a “First Day of High School” playlist to blast on the way back to the house to surprise Lily and cheer us both up. I had compiled our favorite songs from a bunch of
High School Musical
soundtracks (we were so dorkily obsessed when we were babies), but for some reason I didn't think that Zac Efron's chirpy voice would really fit the mood right now. Looking back in the rearview mirror again, I saw that Lily actually looked totally happy and content to be sitting there quietly by herself.

I guess I was the only one who had failed the freshman first day test.

“So,” I said, turning around to face Lily instead of her reflection. “How did you meet Nicole?” Lily wasn't the type to be constantly making new friends, and when she did she was never gushy about them. Usually people would approach her, thinking she was “interesting-looking,” and Lily would look right past them or smile for a bit and then walk away. It was hard for her to open up to people, and I wondered how Nicole had managed to get such a fast-track inside.

“Oh, she stood up for me in a coffee shop,” Lily said, leaning forward in her seat. “It was hilarious, she totally just told off this leopard-printy woman and her friends who were trying to get in my personal space—”

“I've never known you to have a hard time standing up for yourself,” I sniffed.

Lily looked hurt and tugged a little on one of her wings, like it itched. “Nooo . . .” she said. “I don't. Usually. But it was more like . . . the way Nicole did it. She was just really intense and intuitive about the whole thing, and afterward she introduced me to her friend who's a photographer and that guitar boy Drew, who was dressed like a doctor.”

“That's cool,” I said, turning back around to face the front. I glared out the window at the big red Metro Rapid Line bus in front of us. “It sounds like you had a great first day, Lily.” I waited for her to ask me how my day had gone, but it was Rachel who broke the strained silence instead.

“You know,” she said, turning on a small side street to avoid the freeway, “one of the best feelings I ever had was on the first day I went to Jacques's class at Beverly Community College.” I looked in the rearview mirror again and Lily and I rolled our eyes in sync.

“No, seriously,” Rachel went on. “Before I even met my
lover
”—
ugh
—
“
I walked through the doors of that new school and into its unfamiliar atmosphere, and I was practically
inhaling
it. It felt so fresh. I felt like life had just granted me a do-over. Whoever I had been before, whatever kids thought of me at school, whatever I'd thought of
myself
—none of these people in my community college class knew about any of it. I could be the girl who was going to Yale next year on a volleyball scholarship, or a Greek heiress who was also a classically trained trombone player, whose parents died in a freak boating accident and had just been taken in by her kindly aunt, who lives in a mansion in Malibu.”

“But . . . you don't look Greek,” Lily said.

Rachel shook her head. “That's so far from my point that you'd need Siri to navigate your way to it, my little baklava. The POINT is, because of that brand-new-me feeling, I wasted, like, an entire semester ignoring Mia and everyone else from high school, because I was so busy trying to reinvent myself for this whole new group of strangers. Like, I thought it would be so cool to, like, change my whole life and act like I was some new fancy foreign exchange student, only to eventually realize I missed my friends, the ones who knew I was capable of being both a psycho
and
a loving human. People that have been forced to love me forever.”

“What does THAT mean?”

“It MEANS,” Rachel said as we swung into our driveway, “you shouldn't try to be something that you're not. That's all.”

Sometimes I didn't get Rachel at all. Twenty minutes ago, she was making my life miserable and harassing me about detention, and now she was dispensing cryptic life advice. I didn't know if it was her hormones or what, but she was becoming as loony as Mom.

As tense as that car ride was, by the time we made it into the house and upstairs, knocking knees while trying to balance our trays of avocado toast and iced tea on my bed, I almost felt that things were returning to back to normal between me and Lily. That's the magic of my bedroom, which is also technically the attic. The walls are sloped like a triangle, so you have to duck to get through the door, but then it widens out to this enormous space, like an optical illusion, or Narnia. It's virtually soundproof, unless you're stomping around or engaged in a two-person dance party, so it's the greatest place to tell secrets and ghost stories. There's even a skylight above the rafters, so I can see the stars on nights when there's not too much pollution. But most important, my room has its own landline, a rare but important thing to me.

I know. You're probably wondering “Who has their own landline anymore?” Well, I earned that phone, in all its tacky glow-in-the-dark glory, fair and square. I ordered it with points from my sixth grade Scholastic book drive and asked my parents to install a separate line as a present for my twelfth birthday. No one ever calls me on it, so I mostly just used it as a nightlight, but it was one of my most treasured possessions.

I wanted to just sit there in this moment of relative normalcy, basking in the harsh light of my clunky phone, and avoid talking about my disaster of a day for as long as I could. Which was actually really easy at first, because it seemed like all Lily wanted to do after we finished our snacks was gush about Pathways. How many stories can one person have after just one day? Usually Lily is good at making up enough stories for the both of us, but they're never about real things. It's more like she'll come up with an idea like “Lady Pirates,” where we are copilots on a flying ship, and she'll have this whole backstory cooked up about our sailing route (NeverNeverLand to Majorca) and whose gold doubloons we are stealing (Jacques's). Stuff like that.

If I hadn't been in the parking lot to witness that pink-haired girl with my own two eyes, I might have thought Lily was making up another story now. She was just so . . . enthusiastic. Like, too enthusiastic, like if I didn't know her any better I'd say she was compensating for something. She couldn't stop talking about “Nicole says this” and “NAMASTE group” that. I admit I was a little jealous, both of Lily for having such a better first day than me, and of Nicole for making such a huge impression on my best friend.