Best Friends for Never Read online

  “Oh! Wow!” I said, the butterflies in my stomach replaced by wiggling slimy worms. “Thanks!”

  It wasn’t until lunch on that first day, when I finally had the chance to eat something that would take away the awful taste of apple pie, that I started to wish my ankle had taken just a little longer to heal. Because that’s when Coach Thackary and the other coaches got up in front of the salad bar and announced when tryouts would be for the fall sports teams. Kids actually cheered. Like foot-stomping, table-slapping cheers. For sports. It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen. The enthusiasm! It would have been contagious if enthusiasm for sports was something I was interested in catching.

  I mean, not everybody cheered. Zooey and the Ts, for three. Zooey just glared while the Ts snickered and said things to each other. Piper told me that the Ts were on the soccer team but Zooey just doesn’t do sweat.

  “Are you stoked?!” Fee asked us, her smile all dimply, until she looked at Celeste.

  “Celestia?” she asked, in this funny, coaxing way. “Why are you not cheering for Coach Thacka-Wacka?”

  Celeste swallowed. “Because I’m not going out for field hockey.”

  “WHAA?” Fee said, and even though she said it in her funny voice, I exchanged a look with Piper. We could both tell Fee was upset.

  “Don’t make me feel bad about it,” Celeste said quickly. “Mom said I had to choose between field hockey and skating. I can’t do both. I mean, I could, but I wouldn’t be able to give my all to either one, so what would the point be? I had to choose, and I chose skating.”

  Fee pressed her lips together, then said, “But field hockey is our thing.”

  “You could start skating again,” Celeste said. “You were really good.”

  “Forget it,” Fee said shortly. “I understand. I’m sad. Like, devastated. But I guess I get it.”

  “It will be fine,” Celeste said, her voice turning hard. “Hattie will play field hockey, right, Hattie? You’ll replace me.” Her voice was so un-Celeste-like that I was too shocked to do anything but nod in agreement.

  Here’s how you get on the field hockey team: At tryouts, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction of the ball, and then wait in a state of complete panic as it gets whacked closer and closer to you. Then take your club and hit it as hard as you can to get it away from you before you are attacked by a mob of club-wielding athletes.

  Of course, they call them field hockey sticks, not clubs, but you can’t fool me. Those things are weapons.

  Coach Thacka-Wacka said I showed good defensive instincts and laughed when I told her I was just trying really hard not to get killed. Then she put me on the team, and I’ve been running for my life three practices and a game a week ever since.

  But today, being Harvest Festival Eve: There is NO field hockey practice! In fact, they canceled all after-school activities. I guess the thinking is that everyone else needed to conserve their energy because of the Harvest Festival, which should tell you something about how serious they are about the festival. Because the only thing they like more than apples here are sports.

  The weather started to cool just a few weeks after school started and now, in mid-October, I am thankful to have my stripy to pull out of my locker when the last bell rings. I join the stream of kids pushing out through the glass front doors of school and smile when I breathe in the chilly air. Newly fallen leaves make a colorful carpet on the ground. I know, by winter, they will turn brown and crunchy and depressing. But for now, they’re lush and bright.

  “HATTIE!” my friends call out to me in goofy, dramatic unison as I step outside. They’re already sitting on one of the cozy wooden benches that line the circular courtyard in front of school.

  “I’M HERE!” I call back, and then I theatrically limp toward them through the crowded courtyard, my right Converse sneaker bumping over the cobblestones as I drag my foot.

  “FESTI-VAL! FESTI-VAL!” Piper calls out to me, pumping her arms in victory. “Hattie’s first festi-val!”

  I hear a few people shout out what sounds like either JINX or JANX in response to Piper’s cheer, which I make a mental note to ask Piper about later. I’ve realized that people say all sorts of whackadoo stuff in this town, inside jokes from preschool, and Piper is my dictionary app to figure things out.

  Like the reason that whenever Siobhan Greene stands up to read a report or give a presentation, everyone mutters “Bonjour” is because she studied at a fancy French preschool and insisted on doing all of her homework in French for all of first grade.

  I reach my friends and flop down across all three of their laps, a comfy bed of coordinating corduroys. “Holy cannoli,” I say with a happy sigh, pulling the sleeves of my stripy sweatshirt over my chilly hands. “I really missed you guys!” Celeste and Fee have their heads tipped together, a set of shared earbuds supplying the silent-to-everyone-but-them sound track that makes them both croon, “Give me a chaaaaance,” spreading their arms wide and then collapsing into giggles.

  Piper grins down at me, the swoop of her blond surfer bangs hanging over one eye, her braces glinting in the sun. She pulls one of my tiny curls and gives a Ramona Quimby–worthy boing! “You saw us, like, literally, three minutes ago in bio lab.”

  “I know!” I exclaim. “And it was the longest three minutes of my life!” I sit up, wiggling to make room for myself on the bench, taking off my glasses to rub off the fingerprint Piper accidentally just made over my right eyeball. “All anyone in our grade can talk about is Zooey.”

  “Well, it’s the biggest thing that’s happened all year,” Fee says too loudly as I put my glasses back on and blink her into focus.

  “Not everyone’s talking about it,” Celeste says from the other side of Fee, pulling out her earbud, and then doing the same for Fee. Celeste’s bright silver astronaut-looking BMX helmet is perched on top of her head, ready to be tugged down into place. With all the drama at lunch, I’d forgotten how nervously giddy Celeste seemed to be earlier in the day, announcing to our squeals that she was skipping ice time today and tomorrow for the festival. She’d make it up on Sunday, she’d said with a gulp, even though it means she’ll have to miss church.

  “Is that bothering you? That thing with Zooey?” Piper asks, linking her arm with mine and giving it a squeeze. “You’ve been acting funny since lunch.”

  I look at her in shock. “Of course it bothered me!” I say, so loudly that a couple of boys from the soccer team look over as they walk by. I flush and lower my voice. “It was awful!”

  “It’s middle school !” Fee says emphatically, like that explains everything.

  Piper sighs. “Is that why you keep talking about it, Hattie?”

  “ME?!” I squeak, surprised. “I’m not talking about it!” My mind whirs. In every class we went to after lunch, people were talking about what happened with Zooey. But I wasn’t! I was just listening. And maybe asking a couple of questions to make sure I understood correctly: Did someone see her mom pick her up from the front office, or was it the guidance office? Were Teagan and Tess really spotted in the girls’ bathroom after lunch and was one of them maybe really crying? Were they later spotted in the principal’s office? Or were they just walking by?

  “Yeah, right, you weren’t talking about it!” Fee practically screeches, and this time even more people look over in our direction. She lowers her voice.

  “You’ve kind of been talking about it all day, Hattie,” Celeste says, not exactly unkindly but not all sunshine and lollipops, either.

  Fee wrinkles her brow at me. “Didn’t this stuff happen in”—she lowers her voice to a faux-tough-girl growl—“Brooklyn?”

  “I guess … I mean, I’m sure it did.” I falter, standing up and slipping on my backpack, embarrassed to realize they’re right. I have been obsessing about what happened to Zooey all day, but that’s just because it is so awful! I have an icky feeling in my belly then, like all of a sudden I realize I’ve been eating all of that gossip instead of listening to it, and now I have gossip indigestion.

  Everything was different in Brooklyn. I was different. “There were popular kids at my old school,” I finally offer, turning back to face my friends, “but the school was so big, I guess it didn’t really matter?” I don’t know why I say this as a question, but thinking back to my school in Brooklyn has me feeling sort of wistful and sad. “Everyone just sort of did their own thing.”

  “Yeah, but what was your own thing? Like, what would you and your friend Rae do?” Celeste asks, looking up at me as I stand awkwardly in front of them. I flush, wondering if she somehow knows that I never played organized sports until I moved here, or that my usual thing was reading fantasy books and crocheting mythical creatures on a blanket in the grass at the park with Rae. Or that we succeeded in wearing only T-shirts with cats on them for an entire year of school.

  They are all looking at me with interest now and I shrug, looking away. “Same things you do here. You know, sports. And stuff.”

  “Anyway,” Piper says as they stand up and sling on their own backpacks. Celeste gets her bike from where it’s leaning behind the bench, and we follow the noisy tangle of kids out of the courtyard. “Forget about the mess with Zooey. She’ll be fine. There are a ton of other groups that will take her in.”

  “She could sit with us,” Celeste says, getting on her bike but not pedaling, just coasting along with us, parting rivers of colorful fallen leaves as she does. We move down the sidewalk that follows our school’s tree-lined driveway toward Main Street, more crowded with kids today because of the cancellation of sports, their unspent energy making them tumbly and loud like puppies.

  “No, thanks!” Piper says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry for what happened to her, but that doesn’t mean I want her sitting at our table. I mean, can you imagine?” Piper says, shuddering. “Her just sitting there, staring at you?”

  “She wouldn’t sit with us anyway,” Fee says. “That would be like a three-rung drop. She’ll sit with Izzie Lin and those kids.”

  “Whatever,” Piper says pointedly to Fee. “All I’m saying is, she has options.” She looks to our right down the grassy slope that flattens into the practice field for field hockey, and she sighs. “You guys have basketball tryouts in a couple of weeks, right?”

  “Basketball?” I squeak, trying to hide the there-are-other-sports? panic from my voice.

  “Yeah, city girl,” Piper teases, “we can’t play field hockey in winter.”

  “Wish you could be on the team,” Fee says to Celeste.

  Celeste shrugs and says, “I am on a team, just not the field hockey team.”

  “I know,” Fee says quietly. It is my cue to leave them to their conversation and fall into step beside Piper.

  “Do you think Teagan and Tess will get suspended?” I ask Piper.

  “I guess so, probably in-school suspension. They won’t have to stay home or anything. Someone saw them in the front office during fifth. They violated the No Bully Pact.”

  “I’d forgotten about that!” I say, now remembering the printed sheet promising we would never bully others, which we all signed in homeroom the first day of school. “I wish that thing had been, like, binding. Like something that would have actually stopped them from being mean.”

  “How? Somebody slide-tackles them before they can say anything?” She acts this out for me, raising her flat palm above her eyes like she’s looking across a crowded room and shouting, “Bully alert!” before lowering her head and running in place, then leaping onto me and just hanging there.

  “Like this?” she asks, legs wrapped around me, resting her bony chin on top of my shoulder.

  I laugh, bending over a little so she can scramble down. “Kind of ?”

  “OH MY GOSH!” Piper cries, stopping so suddenly on the sidewalk that we all bump into one another, Celeste’s front tire bouncing off the side of my shoe. The remainder of the kids from school pause to see if we’re going to keep going.

  “Sorry!” Piper says to them. “Move along! Nothing to see here!”

  When they’ve passed, Piper looks at me, eyes wide, and grins.

  “What?” I ask.

  Piper gives Fee and Celeste a mischievous look. “We should probably tell Hattie that she’s going to get jinxed.”

  Fee breaks into a wide, goofy smile and says slowly, “She totally is, isn’t she?”

  “It is her first festival,” Celeste says solemnly. “Perfect time for a Harvest Jinx.”

  “Wait, what is a Harvest Jinx?” I ask. “I keep hearing people mention it. I thought it was some sort of apple strudel or something!”

  Piper cracks up at this. “Oh, you’ll wish it was strudel!”

  “It is so not strudel,” Fee says.

  “Then what IS it?!” I practically screech.

  Together, the three of them recite, “Make a promise before you think, and you could get a Harvest Jinx!”

  They all look at me, grinning, like they’ve actually explained something.

  I stare at them. “I don’t get it,” I say flatly.

  “Oh, you’ll get it all right!” Celeste says. “If you get jinxed.”

  “Haven’t you heard the poem?” Fee asks. “We all learn it in second grade, for the pageant on the common during the festival.”

  “I didn’t grow up here, you know that!” I say, laughing.

  “Do you?” Celeste asks, and then she laughs this weird sort of laugh and I’m not exactly sure if it’s mean, but it’s definitely not friendly.

  “Peanut’s driving us crazy with practicing!” Piper says, interrupting the strangely tense moment and swatting my ffftttt finger away. “She has one line and repeats it a zillion times a day. You haven’t heard the poem, ever?”

  Peanut is Piper’s little sister, the youngest of what Piper calls the Ladies Packenbush, consisting of Piper, her four sisters, and her mom. And get this, the Ladies Packenbush’s home base is one of the stately old Victorian houses that ring the town common, one of the houses that I drooled over when looking at pictures of Trepan’s Grove before we moved here.

  “Of course I haven’t heard the poem! I grew up in—”

  “Brooklyn!” Fee interrupts, with her awful imitation.

  “Anyway,” Piper says excitedly as we start walking again, following the sidewalk’s turn down Main Street toward the center of town, “the poem is all about this thing called the Harvest Jinx that says you have to keep any promise you make from midnight to midnight the day of the Harvest Festival, or you’ll get jinxed.”

  Just then, a long, shiny pickup truck with GET A GOODY AT GOODY FARMS! stenciled on the side pulls up beside us.

  “Fiona,” Fee’s mom is saying before her window is even rolled all the way down. We all have to look up to see her, because the truck is so darn big. “Hop in. We have a lot of work to do.”

  The first time I met Fee’s mom, I was secretly kind of disappointed. Fee had said her mom’s family had been farming the same land for, like, three hundred years and I guess I thought that meant her mom would look like a farmer in a children’s story. Overalls, bandanna, hair in braided pigtails. I thought she’d be a warm and cozy sort of person. But instead, I met the woman who is now studying us through the driver’s-side window. She has sleek hair and diamond studs and perfect makeup and the long, strong-chinned face that you usually see in ads for Things Rich People Buy. Basically, Fee’s mom is what Totally Popular girls turn into when they grow up.

  Fee’s looks favor her dad more, exactly the sort of cozy, round-faced, dimpled farmer you’d see in one of those baby books with pages so thick you can chew them.

  “Fiona! Say your good-byes!” Fee’s mom says again, more sharply this time. Her eyes flick over our group, a feeling that raises the little hairs on the back of my neck. Her gaze settles on Celeste and she breaks into a wide smile. “Celestia Martin, Future Olympian! So nice to see you!”

  “Hi, Mrs. Goody,” Celeste says politely. “Nice to see you, too.”

  “How is our gold-medalist-in-training today?” Mrs. Goody asks.

  Piper makes a harumph sound beside me. We’ve discussed the fact that Mrs. Goody would probably like us better if we were either rich or on track to represent our country in the Olympic Games. “She should see me juggle,” Piper whispers beside me, and I stifle a giggle.

  “Skating’s fine, Mrs. Goody,” Celeste says.

  “Well, keep at it,” Mrs. Goody says. “Not everyone has the body for—”

  “Okay. Meet you guys at the Dentist’s House tomorrow morning?” Fee interrupts, shooting her mom a look.

  “Yep, nine a.m. sharp!” Piper says cheerfully.

  “Let us give you a ride home, Celestia,” Fee’s mom says. “You can put your bike in the back. I’m sure your mom wouldn’t want you riding around town with all of these delivery trucks lumbering around.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. G!” Celeste says.

  Piper and I wave good-bye as the truck pulls away, and then Piper says, “So … you know how Fee used to ice-skate, too?”

  “Yeah. Why’d she stop?”

  Piper sighs. “She said she didn’t have time for it, but honestly? I think her mom made her stop. Not directly, but … ”

  “How’d she do that?” I ask, even though the sinking feeling in my belly tells me I know the answer.

  “Last year Fee kept making all these comments about herself, really mean stuff, about how she was bigger than all the other girls on the skating team and she was going to break through the ice. And even though she’d say that stuff in front of her mom, her mom would never correct her. Never be like, Don’t be dumb, you’re not fat or So what if you’re not the same size, if you love to skate, you should skate. She’d just sit there and raise her eyebrows. And then when Fee decided to quit, she told her mom and her mom was like, Maybe it’s for the best, dear. You’re built more for field sports, anyway.”