Best Frenemies (2 page)

After a twenty-minute drive up Sheridan Road, past the dazzling array of large houses (each beautiful yet each distinct from the others in terms of style), the bus finally pulled up to Lakeside Middle School.

“Here we go,” Cassidy said to Alice with a deep breath. “We got this!” Alice and Cassidy had discussed their initial middle school entrance several times over the summer. They would exit the bus in slow motion, the wind in Alice's hair and a wide, confident smile spreading across Cassidy's face as heads turned. “Who are
they
?” everyone would wonder, and make it a priority to befriend these two new, self-assured girls.

The reality was different, however. Nobody seemed to notice when Cass and Alice got off the bus, and they realized that slow motion was something that only happened in the movies and definitely not when the bus driver was telling you to get a move on.

The parking lot was a mob scene as it swarmed with students, all of whom seemed to know each other and were shouting to be heard above one another. A teacher with a clipboard stood in the crowd of kids like a rock stuck in a rushing river. She looked like she was imagining herself in another place, far, far away, as bright orange earplugs stuck out on either side of her head.

Alice wondered whether all these kids were really as confident as they seemed or if they were all faking it (well, maybe not the eighth graders: if she were in eighth grade, she'd swagger a bit too). She hoped at least one or two people, like her, were faking.

“Cassidy! Alice!” Alice turned to see Evie Gibson, April Searcy, and Xia Han—part of her and Cassidy's crew from elementary school—rushing towards them. For a few minutes before the bell rang, they
ooh
ed and
aah
ed over each other's summer upgrades: Cassidy's haircut, Evie's cute clear-framed glasses, Xia's braces, and April's brand-new lack thereof.

“And what is
this
?” April asked, fingering Alice's panda backpack. “I want to adopt him and take him home and make him my best friend and name him George!”

Alice laughed at April's signature move, the over-the-top-gush.

A moment later, the girls followed the jet stream of students headed towards the double doors. Each one was being held open by two crabby-looking older teachers with matching sweat marks on their upper lips.

“A fancy backpack for fancy
honors
homework,” Evie teased, giving her shoulder a friendly squeeze.

“Yeah, you ready to rock this? I heard that in honors you get an exam on the first day,” said Xia as the girls let the big school swallow them up.
An exam? Great. Here we go,
thought Alice, trying to be brave.

“Hey, Evie, what was horseback-riding camp like?” Cassidy asked, changing the subject. “Did you ride horses the
entire
time?” She grinned at Alice and winked. Cass knew talking about honors made her embarrassed—and caused her to blush redder than Cassidy's cardigan—to talk about honors classes and brains in general. Maybe after she'd settled into honors classes, she'd feel okay about talking about it more, but for some reason it just made her bashful, even though she knew Cassidy wanted to cheer her on as much as possible, despite the potential awkwardness.

“Yeah, like, did you eat dinner while you rode a horse?” asked Xia, laughing.

“Did you
sleep
on a horse?” April asked.

They're all going to be in class together and I'll be solo,
Alice thought.
They'll keep joking around without me.

As if reading her best friend's nervous thoughts, though, Cassidy handed the notebook back to Alice.

“I wrote down my locker combo in it,” Cassidy explained with a smile. “So you can put the notebook in there when we can't meet up. Write down yours so I can give it back to you after you write to me.”

“Thanks,” Alice said, grateful that she already had a little something from Cassidy to get her through her first class.

The second bell rang, but instead of feeling brave with Cassidy's locker combination in her hand, Alice felt a surge of panic, especially as she saw April, Evie, and Xia start to drift to the classroom across the hall from where she would be.

“I'm nervous,” Alice whispered into Cassidy's ear, decorated by a gold-pink shiny ball. She caught a whiff of the delicious-smelling coconut oil that Cassidy put in her hair.

“You'll be great!” Cassidy said. “Awkward mom high five?”

The girls performed the weird stiff-armed high five they'd seen their own moms do a million times. “Yeah!” Cassidy cheered, and gave a double thumbs-up. Alice laughed. Her best friend always knew how to cheer her
up on the outside, even if she was still a little uncertain on the inside.

Unlike out in the school yard, the kids in Ms. Garrity's homeroom looked a lot more like Alice felt—nervous and unsure—which made her feel better. Plus, she spotted a few kids in her class who she knew from elementary school, like Christy Gillespie, with her short blond springy curls. Alice had always admired her for being supersmart but incredibly friendly. “I love your earrings, Christy!” Alice said as she passed by Christy's desk, complimenting the little panda-shaped studs with tiny pink hearts on their bellies.

“Bears are so in right now!” Christy said, nodding at Alice's backpack.

Okay,
Alice thought.
So maybe this won't be
so
bad.

Alice didn't want to look picky, so she grabbed the first empty desk she saw and pulled out a (regular-size) notebook and pen. A dark-haired boy seated next to her smiled uneasily.

“Can I confess something?” he leaned over and asked after a moment.

“Sure,” Alice said.

“I'm totally nervous,” he said. “I kept having dreams all week that they put me in the wrong class and I failed
everything. Do you think that's normal?”

Alice nodded. “None of my good friends from last year are in this class, and I've been freaking out about not knowing anyone.”

He smiled. “I'm Aaron Woolsey.”

“Alice,” she said. “Alice the nerd.”

Aaron laughed. “And you can call me Aaron the geek. Tell me something I don't know—oh, wait, you can't, because I'm
so smart
!” he joked.

Alice grinned as the final bell rang and Ms. Garrity stood at the front of the class to read attendance.

Christy's nice, Aaron is funny, so maybe it's all going to be okay,
Alice thought. She let her eyes wander around the room, relaxing into the idea that in a few weeks she'd know everyone's names, even the people she'd never seen before.
Everyone seems pretty normal,
she thought. But then her eyes landed on the mean-looking girl from the bus. She looked up at the same time, making eye contact with Alice. Her frown deepened.

Maybe she was just nervous, like everybody else! Alice smiled, newly full of confidence after cute and nice Aaron's friendly conversation, but the curly-haired girl just narrowed her eyes and pointedly looked ahead at Ms. Garrity. It was if her eyeballs had said, “Don't even think about it.”

Oh no.

“You guys probably know all this stuff already, but we're going to go over it, just for fun,” said Ms. Garrity sarcastically as she flipped open a manila envelope and began to run down the school policies. Alice gave herself permission to zone out, pulling out the purple notebook and opening to its first promising blank page, feeling reassured by the ♥
you!
note Cass had written beneath her locker combination on the inside of the front cover.

She glanced up at Ms. Garrity, who was wearing an unflattering khaki skirt cut to a weird place on her legs, above the ankles and below the knee. Even Alice's mom, who wore yoga pants like it was her job, would call the skirt “unfortunate.” Ms. Garrity continued to read the announcements almost comically loudly and slowly, as if she were just killing time and couldn't stand to have to actually look at or speak with the students.

That gave Alice a brilliant idea: if she could paint a clear picture of what her homeroom was like for Cassidy, and Cass did the same for her, they wouldn't feel that far apart after all. And if they ever exchanged funny stories about what happened in class, they could each perfectly picture what happened.

Alice drew a grid on the page and started
diagramming a funny seating chart of the kids in the class. She illustrated Christy Gillespie's seat with flowing curlicues, then noted “Cute! Nice!” next to Aaron Woolsey and described the kids she hadn't met yet with words like
Hawaiian-shirt kid, too-strong-perfume girl
, and
shoes I want to steal
.

Alice wrote
Me!
inside the square that indicated her desk, and doodled a little panda on the edge to indicate her backpack. When she got to the mean-looking girl's seat, Alice scribbled a frowny face with a dark V between her eyes to indicate her furrowed brow. The effect was funny. Alice had to suppress a giggle.

“I said, did you hear me, Alice Kinney?”

Alice was jolted out of her illustration. It felt like her armpits went from dry to nervous and sweaty in one second.

“Excuse me?”

“I appreciate that you're taking notes so studiously, but it's really not necessary in homeroom,” said Ms. Garrity, who really seemed like she was in a really bad mood for so early in the year. She leaned against her desk and crossed her clog-clad ankles as if she were already exhausted. “What I was asking is whether you knew if your parents were going to be providing us the permission slip for you to participate in biology labs.”

“Oh. Yes,” Alice said in a tiny voice. Her face was burning up so much she was tempted to touch it to see if it was as hot as it felt. The other students stared at their desks, probably thinking,
I'm glad that wasn't me
.

“Great, thanks for letting me know,” said Ms. Garrity, diving back into her announcements.

Out of habit, Alice glanced to the seat on her right, which was where Cassidy used to sit when they were in homeroom together last year, when everything was easy and made sense. Whenever anything funny used to happen in class, Alice would glance over so she and her best friend could laugh together, like the time before Christmas break when they secretly added a tiny cap and beard to the stuffed duck Mr. Shears kept in his science lab and everyone in the class noticed, one by one, except for Mr. Shears. Or whenever she or Cassidy got in trouble (like the time they got chided for disrupting Mr. Shears's class, even though they could totally tell he thought it was funny too), they'd perfected the art of sneaking a quick look to each other for reassurance.

However, this time Alice found the opposite of reassurance: with Cassidy being in the other room, her glance fell again on the dark curly-haired girl from the bus, who stared at Alice and rolled her eyes before
fixing her gaze pointedly to the front of her room, as if to say, “It's not
that
hard to pay attention, is it?”

Alice looked back miserably at her desk, yearning to write about this already to Cassidy, but obviously, she couldn't. She was stuck, both in her seat and in this dumb smart-kid class. Why did things have to change? Was it too late for her to move back down to regular classes? What did that girl have against her, anyway?

“So,” Cassidy asked, bumping her hip against Alice's as the two girls stood in the school parking lot. They were fifty percent waiting for the bus, fifty percent trying not to look too obvious as they scoped out the football team stretching on the field next to the lot. “Was it better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?”

Alice smiled and raised her hand to her forehead to create a visor against the golden afternoon sun. It was so unfair that school always started during the most beautiful time of year.

“You know, it wasn't all bad,” Alice admitted, and it was true. Everything had been smooth sailing after the embarrassment of homeroom. “My English teacher might not actually be evil.” English was taught by Mr. Nichols, a wiry, energetic young teacher with twinkly brown eyes and rolled-up shirtsleeves and a funny type of sarcasm.

“Well, I hope you all like reading, because we're going to do a lot of it this year,” Mr. Nichols had announced, handing out copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
to the class. Alice felt like she had caught a break there—she and her parents had listened to the audiobook a few summers ago on a road trip down south. (Perhaps being nerdy was hereditary.)

Alice had loved
To Kill a Mockingbird
so much that they had rented the film version as soon as they got home, and she had developed a bit of a secret crush on Gregory Peck, the actor who played the handsome and good hero of the story, Atticus Finch. . . . although it was something she would never, ever tell anyone—not even Cassidy. So Alice looked forward to actually reading the book, and she hoped that meant that she'd have a pretty easy time with the work that came with it.

Mr. Nichols gave them a list of some of the other books they'd be reading in class, and while Alice hadn't heard of a lot of them, they had exciting, adult-sounding titles like
Lord of the Flies
and
Brave New World.

After English was math, which came easy to Alice in a way that she couldn't explain. She just understood it, which thrilled her parents, since they both had stopped taking math classes after high school. Sometimes when they were out to dinner, they let her figure out how
much to tip their waiter. Her dad had even mused once over the breakfast table that summer, “You know, I bet you could handle taking some math classes at the high school.”

“NO!” Alice replied so loudly that he put his hands over his ears. Being in honors classes was enough. She didn't need to head across town to the huge, scary high school, which was overrun by football players who probably ate middle schoolers for lunch. Actually, not even for lunch—just for a snack.

“It's okay if she's just in the grade she's in,” Alice's mom cut in, reassuring her.

Mr. Sellke, bearded and full of a geeky sort of excitement that only math teachers could pull off, tried to recruit volunteers for the math team with terrible puns (“I think you would all make great
additions
to the team!”). Alice kept her head down and tried to make herself invisible. Just because she was good at math didn't mean she wanted to make it her hobby. Plus, if she got signed up for math team, with its after-school practices, she'd
never
see Cassidy.

Alice hid behind her red curtain of hair and wrote a note to Cassidy (
Very important question: Did you ever notice that “geometry” sounds like “Gee, I'm a tree”?
)—

“Great! We have a new team member!” Mr. Sellke
cheered. Alice turned to see the sour-faced, curly-haired girl from the bus and homeroom (whose name, Alice had learned, was Nikki Wilcox), with her hand up. She
would
volunteer for one of the least fun things. She probably also loved cleaning her room, putting away dishes, and eating overcooked asparagus.

The first day was also made easier by lunch, since it was the one period where Alice got to hang out with Cassidy and her other elementary school friends. After biology, Alice entered the raucous cafeteria, nervously glancing from table to table at groups that had either known each other from elementary school or somehow had already bonded in the first few hours of school. She held her breath until her eyes finally landed on Cassidy, who waved to Alice so hard it looked like her arm was going to fall off. “Alice! Over here!” She had saved a table for their friends from Comiskey to sit together, and Alice was grateful that, thanks to her best friend, she didn't have to wander around the cafeteria like she was lost in the wilderness.

“First things first,” Cassidy said as she dramatically rolled back the foil on their hot lunch. “What on earth is this?”

“Hmm,” said Alice, examining the brown lump
surrounded by little green balls of what was presumably poison. “It may have been an animal at one point. A long, long time ago. Ice age, maybe?”

“Do you dare me to take a bite?” asked Cassidy, who put a molecule of the meatish substance on her fork.

“EEEW!” screamed the girls as Cassidy tried it.

“Mmm, squirrel,” Cassidy joked. “Delicious.” She rolled the foil back up while the other girls groaned. Then she turned to Alice. “So how's your first day going so far?”

“Okay,” said Alice. “We'll see. Most people seem pretty cool so far, except this one girl, who looks like she wants nothing to do with the rest of us.”

“That curly-haired girl from the bus?” asked Cassidy. “Maybe she's just having a bad day. Maybe she heard about the hot squirrel lunch ahead of time.”

“Probably.” Alice laughed. “We'll see. How about you?”

“Okay so far!” Cassidy said brightly. “It helps to have these troublemakers in class with me,” she said, gesturing to Evie, April, and Xia. “I don't know how I'd survive in class with a bunch of new people. You're brave, Alice!” she said, and Alice blushed. She didn't feel very brave, but Cassidy bolstered her.

“Hey, Cassidy!” said a girl Alice didn't recognize. “Maybe eat lunch with us sometime?” She gestured to a table full of kids from another grade school, who waved.

“Sure thing, Maddie!” Cass said. “Have you met my best friend, Alice, by the way? She's in honors classes.”

“Ooh, a smarty-pants!” Maddie said, raising her eyebrows, impressed. “Well, see you in French, Cass!”

Cassidy crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue at the mention of her least-favorite subject.

“Yeesh, we've only been in school for a few hours and you're making friends already?” Alice said. She felt proud (and maybe a tiny bit envious) of Cassidy's ability to talk to everyone. Alice made an effort to be outgoing, but she could never be as popular as Cassidy, who had an almost magical ability to make everyone around her want to be near her.

The summer before, at lake camp, even the counselors wanted to be pals with Cassidy, admiring her cute straw beach tote and how well she handled a canoe. The Lake Michigan fish probably would compliment her on her swimming form, if they could.

“You just make me look good,” Cassidy told Alice. “Now let's talk about the important stuff,” she
announced to the table. “I heard there's a bowling alley in the basement of the school that only four people in the entire building have access to. Did you guys hear that?”

The girls buzzed over this gossip, along with the announcement that there was going to be a pep rally in October. (Would they go? Was it going to be lame? Or cool?) There were also whispers of a fight in the west wing during second period, and a discussion of the terrible decision of somebody on the school staff to make the girls' gym uniforms red and pink. Blech!

After lunch, Alice felt invigorated by the positive energy from Cassidy and faced the rest of the day with confidence. The classes seemed manageable, the kids in her classes seemed mostly human, and before she knew it, she was back on the bus, heading home.
One day down.

Alice smiled to herself as she gazed out the window at the tiny golden leaves still hanging on to the trees. The bus turned back onto Sheridan Road to take her home. In a month or two, those leaves would be shaking off the trees, falling down on the students' heads like sunshiny confetti.

“Cassidy, did you see what Ms. Haynes was wearing
in social studies?” Tess Sawyer, one of the girls on the route, asked, leaning across the bus aisle, her delicate gold
T
necklace hanging off her neck and swaying in space.

“I
know
! It was amazing!
”
Cassidy said. “Were those bananas on her dress, or was that just a yellow-and-black design?”

“I think we should ask her next time she wears it.” Tess grinned.

“And her boots were super cool too. I didn't know teachers would ever wear, like, tough-guy boots like that,” said Cassidy.

“They look like my sister's Doc Martens,” Tess said. “Maybe I'll steal them from her closet.”

“What if we all ended up dressing like Ms. Haynes?” Cassidy said. “I can't decide if that would be hilarious or tragic.”

“My homeroom teacher was wearing the saddest skirt and shoes,” Alice offered up. “She was in a really bad mood too—maybe it's because she needs a makeover.” Cassidy and Tess laughed politely and then went back to gushing over Ms. Haynes and her long dreadlocks. Cassidy fingered her own hair as if contemplating copying Ms. Haynes herself.

Alice could feel her smile fading a bit. She couldn't
help but feel a little bit bummed that a) she was missing out on this cool social studies teacher and b) she was at a loss for conversation. Alice glanced around the bus to see if anyone from honors classes was on the route with her, but the only person she could find was Nikki Wilcox, way in the back, ignoring everyone around her as she leaned over
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Finally the big yellow bus pulled up to Cassidy and Alice's street, and the girls got off. Alice breathed in the lake air and glanced at the planters at the front of the block that Mrs. Turner kept filled with seasonal flowers. It always made the street feel like a special, cheery place. Right now the planter was brimming with bright yellow chrysanthemums, round and spiky like miniature stars, to welcome Alice and Cassidy back home.

“You want to come over? My mom was on a baking tear last night!” Cassidy offered.

Barring any big projects, illnesses, or vacations, the girls
always
spent an hour or so together after school, eating snacks and discussing the day. It was what kept their friendship strong after all this time.

“Of course I do,” Alice said, already dreaming of Mrs. Turner's caramelly turtle brownies.

“You sure you don't have too much
homework
or something, honors kid?” Cassidy teased, but Alice's
shoulders slumped beneath her backpack straps.

“Actually . . . I do,” Alice said, remembering
To Kill a Mockingbird
and all the other little tasks she had been given for the next day. They hadn't seemed like a lot one at a time, but she had more work than she realized—and it felt weird to blow it off so early.

It didn't seem right. Wasn't the first day of school just supposed to be sort of a joke day or something?

“Oh, that stinks, I'm sorry,” Cassidy said. “I was just kidding around. I didn't mean to—”

“No, it's okay,” Alice said. “Maybe if we just hang out for a minute—”

“Alice, we'll catch up soon, don't worry,” Cassidy said. “You don't want to fall behind already! Besides, isn't that what the notebook is for? So we can keep up?”

“You're right,” Alice said. She pulled the notebook out of the panda bag, which barely felt any lighter. “I already got in trouble today.”

“I would expect nothing less from you, you rebel,” Cassidy said. They had reached her parents' driveway, paved with bricks with little bright green tufts of moss poking through. Alice yearned to walk up the drive to Cassidy's house and flop on the comfy cream leather couch like always, but her best friend was right: she couldn't fall behind on her very first day.

“Well.” Cassidy shrugged. “See you tomorrow morning, I guess.”

“Okay.” Alice sighed and walked back to her house.

“Hey hey!” greeted Alice's dad, turning away from salad-making duties when she walked through the door. “You made it alive!” He held up a hand for Alice to high five, which she hit halfheartedly. “Ow!” he said, pretend-rubbing his hand on his pants in pain. Alice was
not
in the mood for his sense of “humor.”

“How was your first day, honey?” Alice's mom asked, rolling her eyes at Mr. Kinney. “I made you a nice little snack.” She gestured to the wooden kitchen table, which was laid with a blue ceramic bowl filled with mixed berries. Alice threw her bag on the alcove bench that overlooked the backyard and pulled a seat up to the table. Her mom brought her a glass of ice water, auburn wisps that had escaped her ponytail framing her face.

“So tell us all about it!” Alice's dad pulled up a chair and grabbed a giant strawberry. Mrs. Kinney expertly slid a plate beneath him to catch any drips.

“Oh,” said Alice, wanting to be polite but not quite in the mood to be chatty. She was still bummed from not being able to go over to Cassidy's house, plus she
had that stupid homework to do. “You know.”

“We did know, once,” said Alice's mom, gazing at Mr. Kinney quizzically. “But we forgot.”

“We are old,” Mr. Kinney said. “Middle school was a long time ago for us.”

“Dinosaurs and all, chiseling homework into rock slabs,” Mrs. Kinney said. “So humor us.”

“There were a few kids in my homeroom class who I knew from Comiskey. Our homeroom teacher, Ms. Garrity, was in a really bad mood,” Alice said, deciding not to mention the part where she got called out for not paying attention.

“Probably because she had to get off the beach and teach a bunch of lousy kids,” Mr. Kinney joked.