A Tale of Two Besties Read online

  “Oh no, Lily! I think you bent your wings!”

  They were definitely crumpled. The frame had bent completely, and in some parts the wires were sticking out of the purple and blue mesh. It made me sad; they were the last gift my grandmother ever gave me before we left Maryland, and even though I was too old to be wearing a costume, I put them on that very day and promised I wouldn’t take it off until the next time I saw her. I’m sure she didn’t expect me to keep that promise, but, to be fair, I didn’t expect her to pass away before my tenth birthday.

  “They look like a mangled Muppet!” I said. Maybe it was the memory of my grandmother, but now I felt completely desolate. Meanwhile, Harper, being Harper, pragmatically got to work trying to smoosh them back into shape. “You know, you know, this is a bad omen! Something is trying to tell us that going to different high schools is a bad idea.” I shivered.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Harper. “It’s not a bad omen, it’s physics. That’s what happens when you crush something into your bag. Plus, they’re old, anyway.” I must have had a horrified look on my face, because she smiled and gave me a big hug. “Look, I think I can save them. We’ll have our superpowers back up and running in no time!”

  Harper always knew what to say to distract me from my looping thoughts—including saying nothing at all. “Didn’t you bring your towel, Lily? Here, you can share mine.” Harper scooted over. “Help me Instagram some final summer memories of the Ferris wheel.” She pulled out her phone—which had on a pink rubber case with big bunny ears—and we made funny faces with the park behind us, pretending to be happier than we were. The shrieks of delight from the roller coaster almost overpowered my thoughts, and the heat from the California sun tried to soothe me into drowsiness. My mind was suddenly flooded with the realization that, from now on, Harper and I would be taking selfies in different places, with different people. Before we knew it we were going to become “Like” friends—those kids you see who heart every photo but never even hang out.

  After a couple of pics where I must have looked a little too lost in reverie, Harper turned on her side to face me.

  “Thinking about Pathways?” she asked.

  “Are you a mind reader?”

  “Yes. Maybe I should make my own Tarot app,” Harper giggled. She stopped when she saw my face.

  “Come on, it won’t be so bad. I bet you get to take all the macramé and collage classes you want! And you probably won’t have to dissect frogs, or do math.” Harper’s biggest fear in life was cutting into an animal, which was thanks to her older sister, Rachel, who almost got expelled her freshman year after bringing in fifty live toads to biology as part of a protest. The funny thing is, Rachel isn’t even the big animal lover in the family. It’s Harper who spends all her time taking care of sick dogs at the rescue center.

  “I don’t care about any of that,” I said, picking up a carrot stick and nibbling on it, hoping it would calm my knotted stomach. “I’m not going to have any friends there. Everyone is going to think I’m a weirdo.”

  “Starting high school is scary for everyone.” Harper made a face. “Look, who will I know besides Rachel and her friends and Tim?”

  “At least you’ll have Tim,” I said, morosely thinking of my cute ex-boyfriend with his slouchy posture and perfectly hidden tickle spots.

  Harper rolled her eyes. “Ugh, Tim.” She had never understood my infatuation with her oldest friend. “You’re going to find yourself a bohemian boyfriend in ten minutes at school and forget all about him.” This was Harper’s biggest blind spot. She didn’t have any sense for romance. She traded out her guy crushes daily, obsessively checking their stats and info online like she was creating a personal fantasy draft of cute boys. She felt the need to virtually stalk every boy we’d ever meet for weeks, obsessing over his social media history—who he tagged, who he’s faved, who he retweeted and whose stuff he “liked”—and determining his crushability entirely on the results of her Internet detective-ing.

  I’ve only liked one boy ever: Tim Slater, who was actually more like our third sidekick and has known Harper since they were both in diapers.

  Tim is the perfect kind of guy: sort of geeky in a Wes Anderson-y kind of way, knows the origin story of every super villain from Marvel, and can make any type of nautical knot in under sixty seconds. He’s really funny but totally hates the idea of improv groups, can whistle the theme song from every TV show ever made, and—most importantly—has no idea of how attractive he is. He’s like a girl in one of those high school movies where you take off her glasses and oversized “Save the Direwolves” T-shirt and brush the hair out of her eyes and voila! He’s like Clark Kent—dweeby and doesn’t look like much—that is, until he turns into Superman. He’s even got a really square chin, like a superhero, and very straight, white teeth which, combined with his crooked smile, are totally devastating. His fingernails are never, ever dirty and he has very soft hands, which he used to gently break my heart into a million pieces. Ugh.

  I shook my head to clear away the spider webs. I had liked Tim and we dated and it didn’t work out for a number of reasons, and it was time to stop thinking about him.

  “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I explained for the billionth time. “No boyfriend is going to know that ‘Cups’ song is from summer camp and not an oversampled Anna Kendrick single. No boyfriend will help me on an intelligence mission to the teachers’ lounge to find out if Ms. Bulgari is actually a witch. No boyfriend,” I added slyly, “is going to spend a day walking around with me with Skittles in our bras to see if Tim Slater notices that we’re candy-padding.”

  Harper broke out into a big grin. “You don’t know that. Pathways is supposed to be full of guys in candy push-up bras who love anything campy.” We both erupted into giggles that felt relief personified. Laughing with Harper feels like catching my breath after I didn’t even know I was holding it in.

  Harper scooched over and gave me a big hug. “Lily, you are going to make TONS of friends!” she whispered, stroking my hair as I began to morph into a cry-baby yet again. “You are the most magical person I know!”

  That was such a Harper thing to say. She’d always been super popular. People just wanted her in their circle, and not just because she looks the part of a Californian Dream Girl. Harper’s style is pretty understated—her signature look is something like a dove gray tank top paired with jeans and her beach-ready mermaid hair, which sounds super minimalist but she pulls it off, especially thanks to her beautiful dark eyes and her yoga-perfected posture. She’s like a Disney Princess in Rag & Bone. She never tried to “express herself” with fashion, always letting herself bring personality to her clothes rather than the other way around, which was such a rarity in LA. People were always stopping her on Melrose, assuming she was an actress. Not in a “Oh, weren’t you on that ABC Family tween comedy?” way, either. It was more that you got a sense from Harper, could feel something that radiated off of her telling you that she was someone Special. You could tell just by the way she looked at you, no matter what she was doing, that she was having the best time and wanted to make sure you were, too.

  But even if Harper wore a bag over her head, she’d still be picked for captain of the step team and probably class president. The thing is, Harper is classy. She actually listens when people talk, and you can tell she isn’t just trying to think of what to say next, or worrying if there is spinach in her teeth. She’s very “present,” which is a term my mom uses a lot to describe people who aren’t wracked by social anxiety and neuroses.

  “I’m not like you, Harper,” I said. “I get nervous around new people.”

  “So we’ll text each other during every class!” Harper pulled out her cell phone and waved it in front of my face. She was a stealth ninja at not getting caught by teachers with her phone out. “If something’s wrong, you text ‘GAWKWARD SOS’ and I’ll tell you what to do! And then at the end of the day,
Rachel and I will pick you up. If anyone is giving you trouble . . .” Harper mimed a punch. “KABLAMO!” She picked up my broken wings and studied them. “These actually might be fixable.” She began to dig in with her fingers, refashioning the wires and massaging the cloth back over the broken parts. You had to love a friend willing to chip her nails on your wings the day before her freshman year in high school.

  I’ve been gawkward—which is a portmanteau of gawky and awkward—for as l long as I can remember. But it was only after meeting Harper that I discovered that being different could be a power instead of a curse.

  On my first day of school in California all the way back in fourth grade, I discovered my two good luck charms. The first was Harper herself. She was like a human amulet who warded off bad vibes and made me even somewhat accepted . . . or at least, not a totally shunned outcast. The second charm was my iridescent fairy wings, which transformed me from the creepy, weird new girl named Lily into my true persona: the Gawkward Fairy, who could save the world with her social anxiety, making the bad guys so uncomfortable that they would forget about fighting or blowing up the world and just call it a day and go home early for some TV and snacks.

  “Hold on one second, I need to get something,” Harper said. “You stay right here.” She carried my wings with her, but left me on the towel with the rest of her stuff. After a couple of minutes, her phone made a chirping noise, and I picked it up.

  It was a text. From Tim. His name on her screen still had the power to make my heart race, which I hated, but the breakup had been mutual, and I knew we were better friends than boyfriend/girlfriend anyway.

  Still, I won’t pretend it didn’t still get under my skin that Harper was the one Tim always ran to first with big news. I guess maybe it made sense though—I wasn’t big into my cell phone the way Harper was—for me it was just a tool for texting, not Internet stalking. And even just cellular communications can sometimes get out of control. I found most people’s emails and texts to feel very emotionally violating. Like, people send the most intense texts while you are just walking around the world. You could be in a mall casually browsing for crop tops (ew, but never crop tops) and someone you’re not even that great friends with will just send you the most insane text, like, “MY PARENTS ARE DIVORCING!??!” And what do you respond? “BRB”? Ugh. Every time you send a text instead of reaching out for real, a little bit of your soul dies. I’m one hundred percent sure that is true.

  Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why Tim hadn’t texted me, too, as I clicked his message on Harper’s phone.

  “Watch this!” it said, with a link to a video. By the time Harper came back, I wasn’t warm anymore. I was cold, cold, cold.

  “Ta-da!” She said, holding up my wings. She had gone to buy some scarves on the Pier and was waving them in front of my face. I tried to ask her what they were for, but it was like my throat had swollen shut. “What is it? What are you watching?” she asked. “Is it another ah-mazing cat video?”

  Harper delicately pried the phone out of my trembling hands.

  “Why are you looking at SchoolGrams?” SchoolGrams is an app that allows anyone with a student ID number and PIN to upload and access movies and pictures tagged with a school’s name. You’re only supposed to be able to look at things from your own school, but people share their passwords all the time, and things go viral pretty quickly. The video was tagged #HollywoodMiddle. My stomach sank as I pressed Play. There were very few positive or uplifting videos that got uploaded to SchoolGrams—most of the time they were taken without people’s permission and used for humiliation purposes. The school system had tried several times to ban the app after kids complained of bullying, but the developers always made the defense that SchoolGrams was just a platform and it was up to us to determine the kind of content we put on there.

  The video was shaky and there was a lot of audio distortion—very amateur. All I could make out were two girls on the park bench having drama. One of them was crying and the other was patting her shoulder and talking very fast and in this really, really high-pitched voice, like she was half-trying to sound reasonable and half-screaming.

  “Is that Jessica Samuels and Stephanie Adler?” Harper brought the screen closer to her face and frowned. “No way.”

  Stephanie and Jessica were girls in our class who were kind of nice, but also kind of NOT nice. We ate lunch with them, but they were mostly Harper’s friends from growing up. Until last year, they dressed the same, did their hair the same, they even laughed the same flittering snicker-giggle. Last fall, though, Stephanie’s style all of a sudden got all Coachella-street-blogger, while Jessica was still wearing Lacoste Polo shirts and Uggs and doing her hair in tight, Ariana Grande–style ponytails. Then one day, Jessica wasn’t even sitting with us at lunch. You could see her blond tresses, finally relaxed from their tight bun, draped over Matt Musher’s shoulders as she lovingly fed him French fries dipped in ranch sauce.

  “You stole my boyfriend, you slut!” One of the girls—it was hard to tell with all the Shaky-Cam—screamed at the other. “I can’t believe you kissed . . . *garbled*. You were my best friend!” Here, the angrier of the girls had wrestled her way on top and bent her former bestie’s arm back, punctuating her words with a quick, upward yank.

  The other girl howled, and the video cut off after some fumbling by the intrepid cameraman.

  “Wow, did Steph . . . hook up with Matt?” Harper asked, sounding confused on multiple levels. Matt Musher was a boy in our class who was okay-cute, but kind of a jock.

  This was exactly why I hated the Internet: Clicking a link allowed you to peer into someone’s personal humiliation file, making you feel dirtier than if you were the one who made out with your best friend’s boyfriend. We couldn’t think of much to say after that, so I put my head down and closed my eyes, pretending to take a nap. Harper picked up her book and turned over to tan her back.

  That afternoon, the minutes flew by between us. I was unable to keep them there, though I wished they’d come back. I wish I could have gathered up those minutes like flowers to hang upside down in my room, until they were dried out: less fresh, but more permanent. So they’d stay with me forever and never die and never hurt.

  But instead I could practically hear the countdown clock ticking: eighteen hours, forty-five minutes and thirty seconds till Pathways. Make that twenty-nine seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.

  It must have been a little bit later—but not too late, because the sun was still out—that I heard a strange, sad call coming from underneath the boardwalk. A chill coursed through me.

  “Whoa,” said Harper. “Is that an owl?”

  “Yeah, we used to have a lot of them in Maryland.”

  “What is it doing up so early?”

  I sat up, remembering something. Something foreboding. “Harper, have you ever heard of the owl of Minerva?”

  Harper sighed and lay down next to me on the blanket, folding her arms above her head and closing her eyes. “I love story time.”

  I continued.

  “Okay, so this owl flew around, crying out warnings for travelers who’d stayed out in the forest past dark, and so were in great danger of getting lost there forever. But the thing is, the owl always flew super close to nighttime, so by the time you saw it, it meant you were already doomed. Harper, what if that’s our owl of Minerva? What if we’re already doomed?”

  I knew how intense I sounded, but sometimes intensity is the way to the truth. Or maybe I was just FREAKING OUT.

  Sixteen hours, ten minutes, and eleven seconds. Ten seconds. Nine seconds.

  “Lily, you’ve got to snap out of it!” Harper was using her annoyed voice. “We are not doomed. We’re just freshmen! But it is getting late, and we still have two items on the agenda.”

  “You’d be a great events planner,” I said, only half-sarcastically, because Harper is actually fantastic a
t remembering all the details that I’d never remember. Like: Turn off the lights when you leave the house. Don’t put on lotion right before you put on jeans and don’t fall asleep with your hairband on if you don’t want to lose circulation for like ever. Don’t leave KIND bars in your backpack for too long or they’ll turn into a sticky, backpack-ruining mess.

  Like: Oh man, Harper’s birthday was coming up. And I knew she was about to ask me about PuppyBash. Every year, on the night before her birthday, Harper arranges for one of the volunteers from PuppyTales, a rescue organization for strays, to drive up to a park or some other public location with about fifteen dogs in mobile cages. We take turns playing with them and giving them exercise, and instead of presents, Harper always asks for donations to PuppyTales. Last year our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Beatty, even took home a puppy to adopt: a tiny little Shih Tzu named Maxine. It was brilliant. I guess you could call us activists, kind of.

  Actually, please call us activists, it feels very grownup.

  “At least you have PuppyBash to look forward to! And whatever else we do . . .” Harper said.

  She was always so obstinately vague about her birthdays. She always goes all-out planning PuppyBash, but when it comes to her real birthday celebration, it’s always up to me.

  “Yeah, there’s always that,” I said, trying to cheer myself up, at least for Harper’s sake. “That will be fun!”

  When I didn’t say anything else, Harper dropped the subject, turning her back to me and rustling my wings. “Ta-da! Here! All better!” She had bandaged up the broken parts with the gauzy fabric of the scarves, turning them into something a winged Katniss might wear.

  “Oh my god, they’re perfect! You made them perfect again!” I tried to hug her but of course I almost smooshed them all over again, so I had to just be okay with spiraling into a sea of thank yous, over and over.