Page 8 of The Way I Used to Be
“Yeah, two sounds right,” Mara agrees, with this strange twinkle in her eye.
“Why not three?” Catholic Schoolgirl asks.
“I don’t know if I have time for three extra books, with regular schoolwork and everything,” Stephen says uncertainly, looking around the table for support.
“I agree.” I say it firmly, just so I have something to say. Stephen smiles at me. He had, after all, supported me on Columbus.
“All right. I think we have a majority then. Two books per month it is!” Miss Sullivan concludes.
“Edy, this book thing was the best idea you’ve ever had!” Mara squeals the second we cross the threshold of the outside world, as we prepare to walk home after school. “That guy today was, like, so cool.”
“You mean the guy with blue hair and all the piercings?” I ask in disbelief.
“It’s not blue. It’s black with little steaks of blue. It’s awesome—he’s awesome.”
Okay,I mouth silently.
“Things are about to get good, Edy, I can feel it,” she says, clasping her hands together.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is just the beginning—me and Cameron. We can only get closer from here on out, right?” She trails off, looking into the distance. And I know I’ve lost her; she’s gone into her obsessive fantasizing state: “Yeah,” she continues, finally looking at me again, her eyes wide. “We’ll get to know him now that we’re all doing this book thing. We’ll become friends first. They always say that’s better, anyway. It will be—”
I have to tune her out, though, because she could go on like this for hours, planning out how things will be.
“You noticed the way he was looking at me, right, like,lookingat me?” I hear her say.
Sometimes I wonder if she gets it, like Miss Sullivan and Stephen—how they just get it. Most of the time I think so, but then sometimes it seems like we’re on different planets. Like now.
“Maybe I should dye my hair blue?” she concludes, after a monologue that’s lasted almost the entire walk home from school.
“What? No, Mara.”
“I was just making sure you’re listening.” She smirks.
“Sorry, I’m listening,” I lie. We stand at the stop sign at the corner of my street. This is where we part. I go straight. She goes left. Except I can’t force my feet to move in that direction. It’s like I’m in quicksand. She stands there looking at me like maybe she really does get it. Like she knows something is wrong.
“Wanna come over?” she asks. “My mom won’t be home until later.”
I nod my head yes and we start walking toward her street.
“Okay, so I won’t dye my hair blue”—she grins—“but I am getting contacts. I already guilted my dad into it. We’re going to the eye doctor next weekend.”
“Sweet,” I tell her as I push my own glasses back up over the bridge of my nose.
We have no choice but to walk past his house to get to Mara’s. Kevin’s house. It hardly matters that he’s not there. I can feel my legs weakening the closer we get. I suddenly hate this neighborhood, loathe it, despise the way we’re all so close that we can’t get untangled from each other’s lives.
I already see Amanda in the front yard as we approach their house. His sister. She always seemed so much younger than me—I always thought of her as this little kid, but as I’m looking at her right now she doesn’t seem so little. She’s only one year behind us in school. We used to play together a lot when we were little, before Mara moved here in the sixth grade and took her place as my best friend. Their youngest sister is with her, along with another little kid—probably a neighbor—bundled up in layers, playing in the snow. It looks like they’re trying to assemble a snowman, but it’s really just a big blob of cold white. Amanda stands next to it, winding a scarf around and around the place where the top blob and the middle blob meet, while the two little kids scream and throw snowballs at each other.
The kids are oblivious to us, but Amanda sees us coming. She ties the scarf in a final knot and then places her mittened hands in her coat pockets; she stands there watching us. She doesn’t say anything, which is strange. Even though we weren’t technically friends, not like we used to be, we still talked, still got along at the occasional family get-together.
When I don’t say anything either, Mara fills in the blanks: “Hey, Mandy!”
Mandy. It’s what we all called her after they first moved here. It didn’t stick. I remember that’s how they introduced her the first time we met. It was at my eighth birthday party, back when our two families started celebrating everything as one, because Kevin and Caelin were inseparable from the very beginning. Kevin was always included, and his family by extension. But I guess that was a million years ago.
“Hi, Amanda,” I offer, trying to smile.
She crosses her arms and stands up a little straighter. “Hey,” she finally replies, monotone.
