Thirteen Plus One (4 page)

I stomped off. First she forgot my cake, and now she wanted
me
to call Dad and ask him to go buy one? And if he said no, then what? Was I supposed to trudge the five miles to Whole Foods and do it myself?

Blah, blah, blah,
mean-me said.
Whine
,
whine, whine. At least you have a roof over your head. At least you’re not
starving, or in a prisoner detention center, or missing an eye.

Note to self (to add to the others I’d racked up) :
Stop being
so self centered. Your self centeredness would make starving
blind people throw up a little in their mouths.

Late afternoon sunlight gave the kitchen a magical glow, not that I was in the mood for magic. I skimmed the table, the counters, the granite island, but Mom’s cell phone wasn’t there. On the funny half-desk by the back door, however, I spotted a slim black box topped with a red bow.

My breath flew out of me, and then I sucked it back in. I felt ashamed, jittery, and buoyant all at once.

Don’t get your hopes up,
mean-me said as I hurried over.
Don’t get excited over nothing.

I pulled off the bow. Underneath, etched into the top of the box, was an image of an apple.

Omigosh, omigosh.

I lifted the lid to reveal a sleek, white iPhone. An
iPhone.
I slipped it out of its box and marveled at how smooth it was. How nearly weightless. I turned it over and saw that it had sixteen gigabytes of memory, which was a
ton
—enough to store all my dreams and more. Could dreams be stored?

I found the ON button and held it down, and—
oh, the glory—
the screen came to life, complete with a multitude of fabulous application icons. TEXT, CALENDAR, PHOTOS, WEATHER... and that was just the first row. There were four more rows beneath. Holy pickles!

One of the icons was designed to look like a tiny piece of legal-pad paper. Underneath it was the word NOTES. I tapped it, and up came a screen-size piece of legal-pad paper. I tapped it, and a miniature keyboard popped up.

I tapped out, “Hi! I‘mvwriting a nitr on my brand mew iPhone ! ”

Across the piece of paper appeared the sentence, Hi! I’MVWRITING A NITR ON MY BRAND MEW IPHONE!

I hugged my phone to my chest and twirled around.
I
love
you,
little
iPhone!
I told it telepathically.
Happy happy happy!
Me so
happy!

I stopped short, struck by inspiration. This whole day had been a complete roller coaster. I’d gone from joyful one moment to crestfallen the next. I’d been “fun” Winnie, and I’d also—
ugh
—acted like a spoiled baby. But somehow, I just knew it, all of those ups and downs were part of a bigger picture. I tingled with the awareness of being
this close
to putting it together.

Sandra’s advice had been to live in the now. She said I should move forward while sneakily not
thinking
about moving forward ... but I knew myself well enough to realize that, alas, I wasn’t going to become an instant Zen master. Maybe I needed to come up with a more Winnie-friendly plan?

I imagined a calendar with its pages flipping, flipping, flipping, the way they do in movies to show the passage of time. Up till now, maybe that had been my ... whatever Sandra called it. My
paradigm.

But! Maybe Sandra was right, and I was ready for a paradigm shift! And hey, I could do it. I was fourteen, after all.

I deleted my “Hi, I‘mvwriting a nitr” note and started typing a new note. It would be like the note I wrote myself as a ten-year-old, the one I later lost. Only, this note I’d keep close.

My fingers felt clumsy as I tapped the tiny keys, but slowly, and with lots of corrections, I made a to-do list. Some of the things I put on it were variations on the goals I’d come up with earlier in the day. Others I came up with on further deliberation.

I gave one final tap to my keyboard and read my list from start to finish:

 

My list wasn’t perfect. So?
I
wasn’t perfect. But I was fourteen, and I had a plan.

Have a Deep Moment with Sandra

A
COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER MY BIRTHDAY, my English teacher and Cinnamon’s English teacher brought both our classes together and had us watch an old movie called
Black Widow
. I didn’t know why. Nobody knew why. But every so often, Ms. Kozinski and Ms. Adler did this sort of thing, and the two of them would whisper and giggle in the back of the room while we watched the film.

They were good friends, Ms. Kozinski and Ms. Adler. They went shopping together and had margaritas together and gossiped about guys together. How did we know? Because they told us. Cinnamon and I especially loved it when Ms. K and Ms. Adler went on double dates. They always came back with ridiculous, horrible things to say about the guys in question, like that Ms. Adler’s date smelled like cheese or Ms. K’s date brought up NPR every third sentence.

“Well, I heard on NPR ...” Ms. Adler might say in a pompous voice, and the students clustered around her desk would giggle and egg her on.

Ms. Adler wasn’t the greatest teacher in terms of actually teaching us academic, English-y stuff, but I liked the fact that she was a grown-up and still had fun. I liked the fact that she still had a BFF, and that they tried on shoes together instead of playing bridge or doing frozen meal swaps.

I expected Cinnamon and Dinah and me to stay BFFs forever. I imagined the three of us having crazy weekends and then sharing the details with each other during Sunday brunch at some swanky restaurant. Or maybe not a swanky restaurant. Ms. Adler and Ms. K were swanky-restaurant types, but maybe Cinnamon, Dinah, and I would have brunch at a pub, or a truck stop.

Anyway, the tagline for
Black Widow
was “She Mates and She Kills. No Man Can Resist Her.” It was about a woman who married one rich man after another, murdering them all and inheriting their money. When class ended, Cinnamon leaned over and said in my ear, “Dude, that black widow lady is my role model.”

“Cinnamon,”
I scolded. “She is not your role model. She
killed
people.”

“Not ‘people.’ Just guys.”

I gathered my books and stood up. “Ha ha.”

“The lady in the movie used guys the way guys use us,” Cinnamon argued. “And that’s what I’m going to do from now on.”

I headed into the hall. “Cinn, you are going to end up a dried-out, wrinkled pill if you don’t get over this I-hate-guys kick.”

“But I do hate guys,” she said.

“No, you hate Bryce.”

“Same diff.”

I twisted sideways to avoid being rammed by a seventh grader. “I think you need to go out with someone else,” I told her. “Someone who’s not a player.”

“Okay, great idea,” Cinnamon said with over-the-top chirpiness. “Make him for me, will ya? Snap your fingers and make him materialize?”

I shot her a look and considered pulling out my hair ... or hers. Today she was wearing it in a topknot, held in place with a fork.

“I can’t ‘make’ you a boy,” I said. “There’s no such thing as the Boy Factory.”

“There should be,” Cinnamon said.

“You just have to ... be nicer. Lose your attitude.” My gaze traveled up. “And maybe not jab weapons of mass destruction in your hair.”

“A fork isn’t a weapon of mass destruction,” Cinnamon informed me. “A fork is a weapon of minor destruction. Like for stabbing the hearts of cheating, lying exes.”

“Uh-huh, doing great,” I told her. “You’ll have a new boyfriend in no time.”

I spotted Dinah by her locker, deep in conversation with a girl named Mary. Mary was doing most of the talking, while Dinah listened intently and gnawed on her bottom lip. I frowned, because what could Mary be saying to make Dinah look so ... involved?

I didn’t mean that in a weird possessive way. Dinah was allowed to have friends other than me and Cinnamon. She was even allowed to have intense conversations with other people. But we hardly knew Mary, and anyway, Mary was ... strange. Sometimes she was overly fawning, complimenting girls’ outfits or teeth or skinniness with an enthusiasm that seemed fake. Other times, she just seemed blank. Checked out.

“Dinah?” I called.

Dinah’s eyes widened with relief, or so it seemed to me. Mary looked displeased.

“Don’t tell,”
I heard Mary whisper as Cinnamon and I approached. Then she focused on me and Cinnamon and plugged in her smile.

“Winnie! Cute shirt,” she said. “And Cinnamon. Love your nails.”

Cinnamon glanced at her nails, which she’d painted with her highlighter. They were neon orange.

“Thanks,” she said.

Mary laughed—fakily—and took off, though not before giving Dinah a meaningful glance.

When she was out of earshot, I said, “Don’t tell what?”

“Nothing,” Dinah said, closing her locker. “She ... um ...” She shrugged.
“Nothing.”

“Dinah,”
I said.

“Should we get out of here?” she said. “Want to walk to 7-Eleven and get Slurpees?”

Cinnamon made a
chhh
sound with half her mouth. “Not 7-Eleven. Too likely to see Bryce there.”

And Lars,
I thought, feeling grumpy. The problem with having Cinnamon date Lars’s best friend, and then get dumped by Lars’s best friend, was that I was now in the position of having to choose between my BFF and my boyfriend, since where Lars was, Bryce so often was.

Wait a sec,
I thought. Dinah brought up Slurpees instead of answering my Mary question as a distraction technique—and she
almost
got away with it.

“Dinah?” I said. “When someone says ‘don’t tell,’ that means you
do
tell. Maybe not the whole world, but at least your best friends.”

“True dat,” Cinnamon said.

“What does Mary not want you to tell? ” I pressed. “Why was she even
talking
to you?”

Dinah looked wounded. “Gee, thanks.”

“Oh, you know what I mean. Do you guys even have any classes together?”

“She’s in the hip-hop club with me,” Dinah said. “Could we not talk about it? Seriously, it is
so
nothing.”

Except it obviously was, or she’d tell us.

“Fine,” I said. Deliberately, I fished my iPhone out of my backpack and tapped the Notes application. I pulled up a fresh piece of pretend-paper and typed, FIND OUT WHAT’S UP WITH MARY WOODS!!!

I turned my phone so Dinah could see. She rolled her eyes.

“We could go to the mall,” Cinnamon said. “I could get my lip pierced.”

“No,” I said. Westminster didn’t allow facial piercings, and anyway,
please.

“We could go to a tattoo parlor.”

“And that would be another no.” I exhaled, like a bull. “You guys are being annoying.
Both
of you.”

My phone buzzed, and I glanced down and saw that I’d received a text from Sandra. It said,
“bored!!!! need smoothie!!!! wanna come?”

“why yes,”
I typed back, dropping a mask over my delight so that Dinah and Cinnamon wouldn’t ask to tag along.

I dropped my phone into my backpack and said, “Sorry, kids. Sandra needs me.”

“So I’m getting a tattoo by myself?” Cinnamon asked. “That means no heart with
Winnie
in it, you know.”

“I’ll try to get over it,” I said.

 

At Smoothie King, I vented about Cinnamon and Dinah. Sandra’s typical MO when I complained about things was to imply that my problems were stupid and tell me to go away. But today, remarkably, she listened.

“Here’s the thing,” Sandra said, keeping her straw in her mouth as she talked. “Remember when you and Amanda quit being friends?”

My cheeks got hot. It was an old wound—the fact of Amanda ditching me to be more popular—and I doubted it would ever fully heal. “She dropped me for Gail Grayson in sixth grade.”

“And do you remember what I told you?”

“That sometimes friends outgrow each other,” I recited. I shuddered, because it sounded as awful now as it had then. A disturbing question burbled up in my brain, one I hadn’t considered back when I was eleven. “Hey ... did you mean
me
outgrowing Amanda, or
Amanda
outgrowing me?”

She answered immediately, and with a flip of her hand. “Well, Amanda outgrowing you. Duh.”

I made an indignant noise.

“But not in a
bad
way,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you rather be you than her?”

“Excuse me?”

“If the two of you could switch identities ... would you?”

My bottom lip had a chapped spot on it, and my teeth found the flaking bit and tugged. Amanda was prettier than I was, and more popular—or used to be. These days, her status went back and forth. Sometimes she showed up all black-eyeliner-y doom-and-gloom and hung out with slouchy, scowly Aubrey. Other days I saw her in the cafeteria with superstars Gail and Malena, and she’d swish her Alice in Wonderland hair and be effortlessly fabulous in her slinky jeans and outfit-y tops that came from an entirely different planet than, say, my ratty-but-beloved Dr Pepper T-shirt.

On those days, she outshone Gail and Malena without even trying, and I felt perversely proud of her.