Drive Me Crazy (11 page)

Chapter Eighteen
Cassie

L
ana’s pretend headache idea is brilliant. Too bad it doesn’t work. When we finish our macaroni, we go out on the dance floor. We jump up and down and shake ourselves silly, and a bunch of the groomsmen fake fight with each other to partner up with us, making Lana blush. When it’s time for toasts, Nono and Howie are right in front, lifting champagne glasses with the parents of the bride. As usual, my Nono is the life of the party, and her crazy scheme has worked out beautifully. Maybe it’s why I think getting back into her room will be so easy—as her granddaughter, I should be able to pull off crazy schemes, too.

But it turns out Nono and Grandpa Howe are
too
chummy with everyone.

After two super-chocolaty cupcakes and more punch, Lana’s looking a little sick herself, but she can’t turn down Howie when he comes over to twirl us on the dance floor.

Four songs later, I break away to find Nono. As I search the crowd, I hold my hand to my temple and try to make it shake a little. When I finally find her, she’s laughing with a bunch of ladies by the photo booth, peering at a strip of pictures they just took together.

“What is it, darling?” She bends to get a better look at my face.

“I’m getting a headache,” I say, making my voice as weak as possible. “Can I go see what we have in the first aid kit?”

“Oh dear,” she says gently. And then—unbelievable—turns right to her gaggle of new girlfriends and asks if any of them have any pain medicine. Before I know it, there are six hands offering up different pills and powders.

“Thank you,” I say, not having to fake my bad feeling anymore.

Nono leads me over to lie down on one of the loungers. She gets some water from a nearby waiter and wets a napkin to press across my brow before handing me the glass. She watches as I swallow down the pills, then takes my right hand and pinches, hard, in the place between my thumb and pointer finger.

“This pressure point usually helps me,” she says. “It’s been a lot of stimulation today, huh? Probably you haven’t had enough water, either. Old Nono always forgets the basics, doesn’t she?”

I sip the cool water to keep from answering, wondering what will happen to me now that I’ve taken those pills when there’s nothing wrong with me at all.

“Everything okay?” Howie asks, coming over with Lana.

“A little too much exertion, I think.” A wisp of guilt flickers in Nono’s face.

“Do you need to go down—” Lana starts, but I interrupt.

“One of Nono’s friends had some aspirin. I should be okay soon. You guys go on and enjoy the party. I just want to sit here a little bit.”

“You sure you don’t want to turn in?” Howie offers in a way I can tell is trying to be nice.

“You’re having such a fun time, and I don’t want to—”

“I might be a little tired too,” Lana jumps in. “I’ll go down to our room with you.”

In her face I see she’s doing this because she knows how terrible I feel about our failed mission, not out of any desire to stop dancing.

And maybe it’s because the cupcakes, the pills, and
my phone still being on lockdown really are making me sick—or maybe it’s the rush of gratitude I’m feeling for Lana—but I blink back real tears and nod to her. “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lana says as soon as we’re alone together in our room.

I flop down on the bed, Lana-style, though I let my feet dangle over the edge.

“It doesn’t matter to me anymore what we do on this trip. I might as well not show my face back at home,” I say.

“We’ll think of something,” she says, though she sounds glum too. “Maybe you should take a bath. That always helps my mom relax when she . . . has a bad day.”

“I don’t want to move from this spot.”

“Come on. I’ll fill the tub for you. It’ll feel good to soak your muscles.”

She gets up, and soon there’s water running in the bathroom. After a minute I hear her in there, talking. On her phone. Which she still has, and I don’t. For a second I’m outraged. Of course
she
has her phone still. Perfect do-gooder just like Tom. I don’t like her trying to hide it from me, either. I’m about to pound on the door, tell her she doesn’t have to fake something nice like running a bath just to make a phone call, but my anger vanishes when I see the clock. It’s only nine thirty—way too early for us to
be down here getting ready for bed instead of having fun upstairs at the party. If it weren’t for me, Lana’d still be up there having a blast.

Through the door I hear her say, “Love you too, Mom,” and then it opens.

“I just had a thought. You can use my phone, if you need to. To call Kendra Mack.”

“Thank you,” I say, grateful and miserable and now feeling even worse, “but I don’t know her number by heart.”

Of course Fiona’s number I still remember, because we memorized them together on the first day of sixth grade, when we got our own phones. But Kendra Mack, and Cory Baxter, and the rest of my existence are trapped in that phone.

My life is utterly ruined.

In the morning, party-hardy Howie and Nono call our room at eight thirty, not sounding the slightest bit tired. They’re all giddy about taking me and Lana to Bakersfield’s crowning glory, Camelot Park.

“I haven’t been to an amusement park since I was, like, seven,” I whine to Lana through the open bathroom door while I’m doing my hair. She’s rummaging in her bag, and I can’t help noticing the mess she’s making. T-shirts and pairs of socks spill out around her.

“Trust me, it’s better than the Crystal Palace, or the downtown walking tour that Grandpa Howe and I looked at. There’s some cool history here, but not
that
cool. We picked out Camelot Park because we thought it would be
fun
.”

I put my straightening iron down and stare at her. I’m not 100 percent sure, but Lana sounds mad at me. It gives me a surprisingly bad feeling.

“What are you looking for over there?”

“I could’ve sworn I packed my plaid cap in here somewhere, but I can’t find it.”

“I brought a baseball cap, if you want. It’s pink.”

“What I want is
my
cap.” She leans back on her heels and pushes more things to the floor. Her voice is tense, impatient. “My mom got it for me, which makes it special, because she doesn’t get me cute things very often.”

Lana’s level of anxiety about a hat seems a little excessive, but then I guess Nono thinks my involvement with my phone is excessive too. I cross the room and kneel next to her.

“Two sets of eyes are better than one, right?”

“I just could’ve sworn I had it in this side pocket.” Her voice is elevating like she’s on the edge of a temper tantrum. “So it wouldn’t get smushed.”

“Tom says usually whatever you ‘could’ve sworn’ is actually the opposite of what you did.” I arch my neck,
looking for her book tote. “What about in there?”

She gets up glumly and goes for it. When she looks in her book bag, she laughs.

“Right here,” she says, holding it up.

I’m relieved to see her smiling. To help out, I start rolling her T-shirts up into tight little logs, putting everything back in her duffel so tidily that there’s even room for more things on top.

“How’d you get to be so good at that?” she says, seeing what I’ve done.

I shrug. “My mom always says if I keep my things nice, it makes her more motivated to get me nice things. At this point it’s mainly a habit. Your mom doesn’t mind things being messy?”

A weird, stricken look crosses Lana’s face, and she looks down at the cap in her hand. I feel like I’ve said something wrong.

“Lana, is everything okay?”

She doesn’t lift her chin or her eyes. “My mom—”

I wait, but she closes her mouth and shakes her head.

There’s a quick knock at the door: Howie and Nono, ready for our Big Day in Camelot.

Either finding her cap
really
turned her mood around (and I have to admit it’s supercute on her), or Lana doesn’t want
Howie and Nono knowing something’s wrong. As we ride the elevator to the lobby, she pours on the eagerness extra thick. It’s like she’s trying to convince herself and the rest of the world that everything is fine.

“I think we should do the bumper boats first.” Her voice is so
My Little Pony
high it makes my teeth hurt. “They have giant hoses on them that you can squirt each other with, so we’ll have gotten soaked early but can dry off for the rest of it.”

Nono suggests we do the wet stuff at the end, to cool us off, but I point out that would mean we’ll be soaking on the drive back. Really I just don’t want Lana starting up again.

“I don’t mind what we do first,” Howie says, “as long as it involves ice cream.”

“You bet!” Lana says, practically pulling him to the car.

She is definitely hiding something, and I’m going to find out what it is.

After banana splits for breakfast, two and a half hours of mini golf (the line for the bumper boats was too long for it to be our first activity, Lana decided), plus Skee-Ball in the arcade and a basket of hand-cut potato chips smothered in gooey blue-cheese sauce, Lana seems a little more relaxed. She also, I noticed, sent a secretive text, and when she got an answer back quick, a lot of the tension went out of her
face. Now we’re leaning in together, smiling into Howie’s camera. After the picture, Nono stands up and holds out her sticky hands.

“Time for me to take a mini bath, I think,” she says. “You girls want to join me?”

She takes a step toward the bathrooms without reaching for her purse. Lana kicks me under the table. I realize this is my chance.

“I think I want to finish the rest of this,” Lana says fast, gesturing to the basket. It’s still soggy with a few fries and melty blue cheese at the bottom. “But we’ll be behind you.”

I nod in agreement, trying to think of how to distract Howie so that I can get into Nono’s purse. As Nono strolls off, I say a silent prayer that there’s a bumper-boat-length line in front of her.

Lana watches after Nono for a second, then dips two fingers around in the sauce and licks them off.

“That was excellent.” She stands and wipes her hands on her shorts. I make a mental note to tell her that Rule Number Nine is Don’t Be Disgusting. “We should scope out the go-karts,” she says. “In case the line’s long there, too.”

“I don’t think there’s any harm in waiting for Tess,” Howie says calmly.

I trade glances with Lana.

“But there’s already people over there, see?” Lana points a greasy finger. Breaking Rule Number Three seems okay right now. “What if they’re lined up around the back of the building?”

“I’ll wait for Nono,” I offer.

“Well, if you’re that excited.” He ruffles Lana’s flyaway hair.

“You okay here?” Lana asks, giving me a thumbs-up behind her back.

“Nono won’t be long.” I wave them away.

Lana takes Howie’s hand and beelines for the go-karts. As soon as they’re a safe distance away, I plunge my hand into Nono’s purse. I’ll say I was looking for hand sanitizer if she catches me. It doesn’t take much digging, because my phone’s right there, in the narrow inside pocket. I jam it into my own purse and push Nono’s a good arm’s length away from me before I look up and see Nono dropping her paper towels into the trash just outside the restrooms. She waves, and I think she must immediately know what I’ve done.

“Lana was anxious about the go-karts,” I explain coolly when she gets back. “I volunteered to watch our stuff.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” she says. “Thanks for waiting. Let’s go!”

She links her arm in mine and we skip toward the
go-karts, our steps bouncing high. When she smiles down at me, my smile is just as wide. It doesn’t matter who beats me on that track, not even Howie. In the Keep Cassie Away from Her Phone game, Nono just lost.

Chapter Nineteen
Lana

I
can tell from the way Cassie’s beaming that she’s got her phone back. Right away I’m nearly as excited as she must be to see what her messages are, but when I raise my eyebrows to her in a question, she shakes her head very slightly—
not yet
.

I can’t say that I mind waiting, since it involves whipping around the go-kart track. Grandma Tess is in a neon-purple cart, me in fire-engine red, Cassie in a turquoise-blue one painted with ocean waves, and Grandpa Howe in a cart called “The Monster,” with flames on the back and a big, toothy mouth on the front. In our first race, a big tattooed dad with a dark-blond beard wins overall, but Grandpa Howe comes in a victorious second, and Cassie and I aren’t
far behind him. It’s so much fun we immediately buy tickets for another round, and this time Grandma Tess pulls across the finish line first with both hands raised over her head.

“What’s next?” she says, pushing her silver waves into non-flyaway shape.

Grandpa Howe suggests victory hot dogs, or at least something to drink.

“I need to let some things out before I put more in,” Cassie says, glancing at me.

“I’ll go with you,” I add.

“You girls know where it is?” Grandma Tess has a tiny frown between her brows, and for a second I think she knows that our sudden need for the bathroom has nothing to do with toilets.

Grandpa Howe puts an arm around her, though, and turns her in the direction of the arcade. “I’ve got some Skee-Ball ticket winnings to cash in. Then we’ll wrangle up some more snacks. What do you say?”

“Sounds great,” Cassie and I both say at the same time, hard and fast. We look at each other and laugh nervously, and take off for the ladies’ room.

“Ahhh, I can’t do it.” Cassie hands me her phone under the wall between our stalls. “You check.”

“That’s silly.” I push her hand back with my foot and come out to wash my hands. Cassie lets me into her stall and we face each other, leaning on opposite walls. She didn’t even have to go.

“What if he didn’t text and this is for nothing?” She’s still holding the phone but not turning it on.

“You’re not going to know unless you do it.” This is something Tamika’s said to me more than once. “Just turn it on and find out.” In my opinion, sometimes Tamika jumps into things without worrying about them enough, but I think Cassie’s done plenty of worrying in the last twenty-four hours. “Here, I’ll do it with you.”

I hold my thumb over Cassie’s and press her power button down, hard. We watch together as the screen blinks. Cassie’s biting her lip, so I channel as much confidence as I think I’d need from a friend at a time like this. Soon enough, her phone
bleep
s five times, and Cassie’s face lights up for a second, before it immediately pales.

“I can’t look.” She hands the phone to me. “At least tell me who they’re from.”

Her phone is fancier than mine, so I fumble a little to find the right icon.

“Two from Kendra Mack, it looks like. And three from”—I hold it out to her—“this number that you don’t have a contact for.”

“It’s him,” she squeals, grabbing the phone and bouncing up and down. “It’s him, it’s him, it’s really him. I can’t believe it.”

“Well, what does he say?” We can’t be in here too long, or Grandma Tess might come check on us, especially after Cassie’s “headache” last night.

“Okay, okay.” She stares into the screen, and I watch her face break into a slow smile, and a blush.

“The first one he says he’s sorry he can’t call, but that Izzy Gathing gave him my number and is it okay to text. The second one just says ‘How are you doing?’ Then Kendra Mack texted to ask what’s up and how the trip is going. The most recent one is this morning, Cory asking does he have the right number, since he hadn’t heard back from me. So cute. He’s anxious too! I have to text him right back. What should I say?”

“Tell him you didn’t have a signal until now. And that . . . I don’t know, you’re having fun?”

She starts thumbing the screen. “I should ask him a question too, right? To keep the conversation going?”

“Just remember to put that on silent if you’re keeping it awhile,” I warn her.

“Right, right.” She’s still typing. “I need to write Izzy Gathing and Kendra Mack too, to thank them and say what happened.”

“I’ll wait for you outside.” I reach for the lock. “That way if Grandma Tess checks, she’ll see I’m still waiting on you.”

She stops typing long enough to grab me around the neck in a hug. “Thank you so much for being here with me,” she gushes. “You are the best.”

When Cassie comes out of the bathroom, the transformation is pretty remarkable. She hooks her arm in mine and skips us back into the arcade, where she suggests we try the driving game, since we didn’t do so hot on the real-life go-kart track.

We duck inside the console, dark and enclosed like the inside of a real race car. Cassie drops in the quarters for a single round and goes back to her phone.

“Cory might text back,” she explains. “I asked him what we should play, since he knows a lot about video games. That was smart, right?”

“Definitely,” I answer, though a strange feeling creeps behind my shoulder blades. I wanted to help Cassie get her phone back to check it and send something quick to Cory, but I didn’t think she’d hold on to it. If she gets chatting with him, not to mention with her friends about him, we’ll be right back to where we were before—something I don’t want for myself, but also for Grandma Tess and Grandpa Howe.

While Cassie texts and giggles and squeals in anticipation next to me, I crash three times in my race, and finally lose.

“Are you sure you should have the phone out like that?” I ask her. “Grandma Tess and Grandpa Howe might see.”

Cassie shoves her head outside the race-car console.

“They’re over there, at the basketball thing.” She gestures with her head, and I stretch out to see Grandma Tess holding the ball while Grandpa Howe places his hands over hers, showing her just how to bend her wrist and press the ball forward. I wonder if he’s told her any stories about when he used to coach his sons’ elementary school basketball team. “They won’t even see,” Cassie says.

“Okay,” I say, sinking into the driver’s seat, still afraid they’ll look over.

Cassie takes her time snapping a panoramic of the arcade. “Let’s see what he thinks of this.”

She sends it and sits there, happily watching the mock race on the screen and not moving.

“Want to play a round together while you wait?” I’m starting to get bored, and annoyed that Cassie wants to stop having fun just so she can wait for Cory to text her.

“I guess so.” She puts her phone in her lap, with the screen facing up so she can still see if a message comes in.

Neither of us is very good, but Cassie blows up before
I’m even halfway done with the race. She watches, cheering me on, but her knee is jittering up and down, and I can tell she’s not very into it. I think I liked things better when she didn’t have her phone.

“How about some kind of shooting game?” I suggest. “Maybe that’ll get out some of your frustrations.”

“I’m not frustrated,” she says coolly.

As we climb out of the race-car game, I can’t help rolling my eyes. We pass Grandpa Howe and Grandma Tess at the basketball hoops and wave, before moving to the back of the arcade, where I spot one of those fantastic dancing games with a touch-sensitive floor. I remember the Hustle, and dancing at the wedding. Maybe a little dancing will bring Cassie back to the moment, and help me have fun, too.

“Come on, this is better than shooting,” I say.

Cassie looks skeptical. “People are watching.”

I turn in place, scanning the whole arcade. Besides Grandma Tess and Grandpa Howe at the hoops, there’s one kid at the Whac-A-Mole, a couple of men in a serious game of foosball, and two little girls and their mom rolling balls up the Skee-Ball ramp and laughing as they roll back down.

“No one’s watching. And even if they were, they’d just see us having fun.” Fun the way Grandpa Howe’s had since he moved to Berkeley, I think, and met Grandma Tess. Fun like I want my mom to have again. The kind you
should have whenever you can, since there might not be another chance.

“Whatever,” Cassie sighs, checking her phone again.

I stifle another eye roll, deciding if Cassie’s not going to have fun, at least I will, and maybe she’ll join me. I plunk in enough quarters, and as the music starts I ham it up, bending my knees and shimmying my hips the way Mom does when things really get groovy in our kitchen. Cassie stands there and gawks, and tells me to cut it out, which for some reason makes me want to do it more. I cross my eyes, flop out my tongue, and shift my head back and forth. I swivel my knees in opposite directions, then do my best to moonwalk as well as Dad can.

My game screen buzzes that I’m not following the moves right, so I switch for a minute to the easy jumps and kicks it wants me to. When I look over, Cassie’s staring back at her phone. I wish I knew how to do back handsprings or something. Instead I start chopping at the air like one of Tamika’s judo moves.

“You better get your groove on, Cassie Parker.” I shift into Egyptian poses like the screen’s telling me to do. “Hate to have to tell Cory Baxter what a loser you are on the dance floor.”

Her head snaps up. “Those are fighting words, Lana Thorton-Howe.”

I smile. “I know they are. He text you yet?”

She scowls. “No.”

I rock forward and back, and kick, following the screen. “Well, this is a lot more fun than standing there looking desperate.”

This makes her finally put her phone in her purse. “That’s it. You’re on.”

She steps next to me with an intense look on her face and jumps into the moves even better than I was doing. We make it to round six together before we have to put in any more quarters.

But of course instead of going straight for her wallet, she goes straight for her phone. “Ooh, ooh! He wrote back! Four times!” she squeals. I plunge into my own quarter stash, so we don’t lose out on the game.

“He says he doesn’t know any of the games in my picture.” Cassie frowns. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

I plunk my change in the slot just in time. “Is what weird?”

“That he doesn’t know these games? These other texts are goofy, too. Look—”

She holds out her phone, but I’ve had to start bouncing and twirling already, so it’s too hard to see. “Read them to me,” I say.

“He says he’d much rather play a game with me called
Who Takes the Grossest Selfie. He wants me to send him a picture with, like, my tongue out or something. Then he asks me who I think is uglier, Neftali Manji or Cheyenne Taylor.”

“Ha,” I say as she joins me on the floor, frowning.

After a series of quick turns in a row, and a bunch of high kicks that take fast footwork and concentration, Cassie says, “I’m not sure what I should say back to him.”

“Say to whom?” Grandma Tess asks from behind us, startling us both. We pause, mid-bounce, and look at each other.

“We were just pretending,” I say fast.

“Pretending we were at a real dance,” Cassie adds.

“And what would we do if—if someone asked us to dance.”

Cassie nods.

“Well, it would depend on what kind of dancer he is, right?” Grandma Tess says with a smile. The game starts counting down for us to add more quarters, but neither Cassie nor I make a move. “How does this thing work? It looks like fun.”

“We can add you in, if you want,” Cassie says. She still looks nervous.

“Howie should be in on this too.” Grandma Tess
stretches up on her toes and waves him over from the change machine.

“Oh, I don’t know about this,” Grandpa Howe says when he arrives, peering at the screen while Grandma Tess pushes in enough quarters for all four of us to play. “Gonna need a good dance partner.” To my surprise, he holds out his hand to Cassie.

Cassie glances at Grandma Tess a second, hesitating, but she raises her eyebrows at Grandpa Howe and takes his hand. “You better not make us lose,” she teases. “Nono will be insufferable all afternoon.”

He winks at her, and she smiles. Grandma Tess applauds and moves into position. “Lana, you stand in front so I can watch you and the screen. I already know how good you are.”

Once again the music starts up, and the four of us hit it. Dancing in pairs is different from dancing individually—we get to do underhand turns, swerve in opposite directions, and this one part where we punch to the beat in alternate rhythms. Cassie and Grandpa Howe are pretty good, but he’s not as coordinated as Grandma Tess, and we’re winning. In the final countdown, right as it looks like they’re going to lose, Grandpa Howe takes Cassie’s hands, twirls her around, and somehow lifts her off the ground and
spins her over in a flip. When she lands on two feet, her eyes and mouth are open in laughing surprise.

Grandma Tess and I are so shocked, we stop to clap, but Grandpa Howe and Cassie keep going and finish the dance. We end up losing by a single point, but it so doesn’t matter.

“Hope that was okay,” Grandpa Howe says to Cassie. “Just thought we needed to pull out all the stops there.”