The Secret Language of Girls Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: What Would you Trade?

  Chapter 2: Attack of the Killer Hearts

  Chapter 3: Angels

  Chapter 4: Talk to Me

  Chapter 5: Why Look at the Moon?

  Chapter 6: The Magic Kingdom

  Chapter 7: Kiss

  Chapter 8: Hoop Dreams

  Chapter 9: The Secret Language of Girls

  For my beautiful nieces,

  Hannah Dowell, Kirsten Dowell, Gabrielle Jonikas, and Elizabeth O’Roark

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank the following people for their encouragement and support: Susan Burke; Caitlyn Dlouhy; Erin Dlouhy (for making the friendship bracelet on the cover of the book); Amy Graham; Virginia Holman; Danielle Hudson; and Clifton, Jack, and Will Dowell.

  what would you trade?

  “Do you think bugs have dreams?” Kate asked Marylin, nudging a rock with her foot. A mob of roly-polies scurried toward the sidewalk in a state of panic.

  “I don’t think bugs even have brains,” Marylin said, pulling her knees to her chest so the roly-polies couldn’t crawl up her legs. “I wouldn’t touch those if I were you,” she added. “They might carry really gross diseases.”

  Too late. Kate was jabbing roly-poly after roly-poly with her finger to get them to curl into tiny balls. She scooped up a bunch of the silvery bugs and watched them roll around in the palm of her hand. “Yum,” Kate said. “Want some peas for dinner?”

  It was at times like these that Marylin thought Kate still had some growing up to do.

  A lightning bug flashed a few feet away from where Marylin and Kate were sitting on the front steps of Kate’s house, and then the evening sky dimmed just a notch and suddenly the yard was filled with lightning bugs. According to Marylin’s little brother, Petey, when lightning bugs flashed their lights, they were sending signals to each other. Here I am, they were saying. Have I told you lately that I love you?

  Kate was up and running. She swooped like a bird every time a lightning bug flashed in her path, using her cupped palm like a small butterfly net to nab one bug after another. The sky dimmed another notch, and now Kate’s tanned legs looked white as paper, as though she’d turned into a ghost. Marylin could see Kate’s bare feet glowing like two little moons as she ran through the damp grass.

  “Okay, let’s see here,” Kate said, walking back to the steps, her hands trapping the flashing lights, red glowing through her fingers. She peeked through the small crack between her thumbs. “I count six, no, seven lightning bugs. What would you trade for seven lightning bugs?” she asked Marylin.

  What would you trade? It was the game Kate and Marylin had been playing ever since the beginning of nursery school, when Marylin had moved into the house five mailboxes down on the other side of the street. What would you trade for my peanut butter sandwich? My Mickey Mouse ears? For seventeen Pixy Stix?

  Marylin dug into her pocket and pulled out half a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. She held it out to Kate.

  “No trade,” Kate said. “I’m not allowed to chew gum unless it’s sugar free.”

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Marylin said. “Take it or leave it.”

  Kate opened her palms to the humid air and watched the lightning bugs flutter away into the dark. “I guess we shouldn’t trade living things, anyway.”

  The porch light flickered on. Marylin stuck out her leg in front of her and examined her foot. “How about toes? I’d trade toes with you.”

  Marylin thought her toes were her worst feature. She couldn’t believe she had never noticed how weird her toes were until Matthew Sholls had pointed it out to her at the swimming pool the day before. Her second toes were longer than her big toes, and her little toes barely existed. All the rest of her toes were sort of crooked. Kate had perfectly normal, straight toes. Her big toes were the longest, just like they were supposed to be. Kate’s little toes were like two plump peanuts.

  Kate sat down next to Marylin. “Toes? Who cares about toes?”

  Marylin faked a laugh. “Yeah, I know, it’s pretty dumb. You’re right. Who cares about toes?”

  “Come on,” Kate said. “Let’s go see what’s on TV.”

  Marylin followed Kate inside. The air-conditioning hummed a steady stream of cool air through the house. Marylin shivered a little as she and Kate made their way down the stairs to the basement TV room. She should have brought a sweater with her. She should have brought some socks to cover up her crooked toes.

  As much as Marylin hated to, she had to admit it: She was the sort of person who cared about toes.

  In three weeks Marylin and Kate would begin sixth grade. The idea of starting middle school made Marylin’s stomach go icy cold, like she’d swallowed a cupful of snow. She thought it was possible she would start having boyfriends in sixth grade. A lot of girls she knew had boyfriends. It was a very normal thing to do.

  The fact was, Marylin hadn’t officially talked to a boy since she’d punched Dale Morrell in the nose in fourth grade. Boys made her nervous, and Marylin preferred to avoid nervous-making situations. But according to the books on puberty her mom had given her last week, any second now she could be chasing Dale Morrell through the hallways of Brenner P. Dunn Middle School trying to make him kiss her. Marylin had known some fifth-grade girls who had done that. Brittany Lamb was practically famous for it. It was the sort of thing Kate couldn’t stand. Kate hated kissing of all kinds.

  Marylin had mixed opinions about kissing. She liked it when her dad kissed her on the nose at bedtime, but she hated being kissed by Grandma McIntosh, whose kisses left gooey, fuchsia lipstick prints on Marylin’s cheek. As for kissing boys, well, Marylin just didn’t know. If they were movie stars, sure. Marylin had already spent a lot of time imagining kissing movie stars. But in real life Marylin didn’t know any movie stars. She knew boys like Matthew Sholls and Dale Morrell. They were not the kind of people who inspired her to dreams of kissing.

  Before going over to Kate’s house, Marylin had been sitting on her bed, pulling her left foot as close to her head as possible so she could examine her toes, when her mother had walked into the room and flopped down next to her.

  “Mom, do you think my toes would look normal if I put nail polish on them?” Marylin asked. She wiggled her toes so her mom could take in the full effect of their weirdness.

  “You have wonderful toes!” Marylin’s mom exclaimed. “You have my aunt Bette’s toes. Everyone loved Aunt Bette.”

  “Yeah, but did everyone love her toes?”

  “What is this toe obsession of yours, Shnooks?” Marylin’s mom put on her I’m-a- concerned-mother-and-I’m-here-to-help face, which Marylin liked a lot better than the leave-me-alone-I’ve-just-had-a-fight-with- your-father face she’d been wearing earlier in the afternoon, right after Marylin’s dad had left on another business trip. Marylin tried not to think about the fight or the trip or the fact that she had to spend the night at Kate’s tonight so her mom could call up Aunt Tish and complain about her dad. She’d rather think about toes.

  “I don’t want to miss out on any of life’s big opportunities because of my toes,” Marylin explained. “Am I too young for plastic surgery?”

  That was when her mom talked to her for a long time about boys and how, no matter what, Marylin was not to pull any stupid beauty stunts to get boys to like her, like bleach her hair platinum blond or pluck off all her eyebrows or get plastic surgery on her toes. And makeup was definitely out. Marylin’s mom was famous for being against eleven-year-old girls wearing makeup. It was one of her favorite topics of discussion.

  “You’re a very pretty girl, Marylin,�
� her mom insisted. “People pay to have hair like yours—it’s like moonlight. And brown eyes? Please! Don’t ruin what nature’s given you.”

  “But what about nail polish, Mom?” Marylin asked when her mom was through. “Nail polish isn’t really makeup.”

  Her mom considered this for a moment. Ever since she and Marylin’s dad had been fighting so much, you could sometimes get her to change her mind about things. It was like she had only so much fighting energy in her. “No black,” she said finally, giving Marylin a stern look. “I absolutely forbid black.”

  “No black,” Marylin had promised.

  “So when did you start painting your toenails, anyway?” Kate asked Marylin during a commercial break. “I can’t believe your mom would let you do that.”

  “She said it was okay,” Marylin said, wiggling her toes so they shimmered a little in the TV’s blue glow. “I just can’t use black or purple or anything like that. My mom said pink is perfectly respectable.”

  “Whatever,” Kate said, turning back to the TV, where a glamorous woman was shaking her head around so that her hair bounced up and down like a Slinky. The woman was wearing a long, silky dress that was cut low in the front. Watching her made Marylin feel itchy. She wondered what the glamorous woman’s parents thought when they saw her on television. Did they wish she’d covered up a little more?

  Marylin picked up a pen and a pad of paper from the coffee table. Lately she’d been practicing her signature, trying to make it look more sophisticated. Who knew—maybe she’d be a movie star one day and would have to sign autographs left and right. A few weeks ago she’d changed the spelling of her name from Marilyn to Marylin, to make it seem less old-fashioned. How her parents had come up with the idea of naming a girl born on the very brink of the twenty-first century Marilyn was beyond her.

  “Who’s ‘Marylin’?” Kate asked, peering over Marylin’s shoulder. “Did you know you were spelling your own name wrong?”

  “This is how I spell my name now,” Marylin explained. “It’s the new me.”

  “Why do you need to be a new you?” Kate wanted to know. “There’s nothing wrong with the old you. I like the old you.”

  “I’m sick of the old me,” Marylin said. She hadn’t realized this until she said it out loud, but she instantly knew it was the truth.

  Sounds of distress from the kitchen suddenly tumbled down the stairs. “Scram! Go on now!!” Kate’s mom cried. “Get away from there, you dumb cat!”

  Kate jumped up. “What’s wrong, Mom?” she called, running to the stairs.

  “Oh, there’s this stupid cat—” Mrs. Faber’s voice broke off. Marylin could hear her pounding on the window. “Stop that! Stop that!”

  Kate flew up the steps, Marylin following close on her heels. When they reached the kitchen, Mrs. Faber was out in the yard chasing an orange cat with a bird in its mouth.

  “Drop it, you stupid animal!” Mrs. Faber yelled after the cat as it disappeared in the dark border of the boxwood shrubs. She turned to Kate and Marylin, who had joined her in the yard. “This is why we have a dog,” she said angrily. “Dogs don’t eat birds.”

  “Don’t you remember that time Max tried to eat a duck?” Kate asked her mom. Max was the Fabers’ basset hound.

  “Max wasn’t trying to eat the duck,” Mrs. Faber said, sounding irritated. “He was trying to smell it. That’s what basset hounds do. They smell things.”

  Marylin heard a peeping noise from the bushes in front of the Fabers’ screened porch. She followed the peeps until she found a nest perched on a tight canopy of branches illuminated by the porch light. In the nest was a tiny gray bird with its mouth opened so wide, Marylin could see all the way down its throat.

  “It’s waiting for its mom to come back to feed it,” Kate said, coming up behind Marylin. “It looks really hungry.”

  “I don’t think its mom is coming back,” Mrs. Faber said. She patted Kate’s shoulder. “I think the cat got its mom.”

  “I guess we’ll have to feed it, then,” Kate said. “We’ll put its nest in a shoe box and keep it inside, where it can be warm at night. We’ll find it some worms.”

  “It probably won’t make it, Kate,” Mrs. Faber said. She sounded sad. “I don’t think the little bird will make it without its mom.”

  Kate ignored her mother. Turning to Marylin, she said, “Go get Petey. He can help us dig up worms. Tell him to bring a flashlight. And ask your mom if she has an eyedropper. We’ll need an eyedropper.”

  Marylin felt like a soldier taking orders from General Patton. “Yes, sir!” she said to Kate, and then she turned and ran through the damp grass toward home, wondering when Kate had suddenly become boss of the world.

  The lights were on at the new people’s house, Marylin noticed as she crossed the street. It used to be the Savoys’ house, but then Mr. Savoy got a new job in Boston and Mrs. Savoy decided she’d prefer not to move to Boston with Mr. Savoy. Marylin’s mother was on the phone with Mrs. Savoy every day for almost a month, discussing the pros and cons of various apartment complexes around town.

  The new people had a girl who was a year older than Marylin and Kate. Her name was Flannery, which Marylin had learned the day before, when she and Kate had gone over to introduce themselves. If Marylin had been the new person on the street, she would have been shy and not said too much, just asked a few questions about school and what kind of clothes everybody wore. Mostly she would have just appreciated two girls coming over to say hi, even if they were only sixth graders and she was a seventh grader. Flannery was not that type of person at all. She’d started bragging immediately how she’d been the most popular person in the history of her old school, and she was sure that everyone in her new school would be really boring.

  “Talk about a huge letdown,” Kate said as she and Marylin had walked back over to Marylin’s house. “I was hoping she’d be a good person to be friends with. And I was especially hoping she’d like basketball, but she is definitely not a team player.”

  Marylin knew exactly what Kate meant. But at the same time, she’d found Flannery a little bit fascinating, in a scary sort of way. Imagine not caring what people thought about you. Imagine being one hundred percent sure you would automatically be the most amazing person in your class, as Flannery most certainly did.

  Marylin tried as hard as she could, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine being a girl like Flannery.

  The little bird was peeping from its nest in a shoe box on Kate’s desk. Marylin struggled out of her sleeping bag and pulled herself up on her elbows to look at the clock radio, which informed her it was 2:13 A.M. She wondered if the little bird would ever fall asleep.

  “Maybe it wants another worm,” Kate said from her bed, startling Marylin. She hadn’t realized Kate was awake.

  “You just gave it a worm at midnight,” Marylin said. “How many worms can a baby bird eat?”

  “How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Kate answered, giggling.

  “What?”

  “It’s a joke my dad tells,” Kate explained. “I don’t remember the answer, though.”

  Marylin sighed. Kate was back in first-grader land. She looked like a little kid just waking up, with her short brown hair sticking out in a million directions, like a tornado had touched down on it for a few seconds. “Maybe you should get some sleep,” she told Kate gently.

  Kate picked up a flashlight from her bedside table and trained its beam on the shoe box. The little bird’s beak glowed red in its light.

  “I can’t sleep,” Kate said. “Someone has to stay up with the bird in case it needs anything.” She scootched out of bed and walked over to her desk, where she dipped the eyedropper in a glass of water. “Are you thirsty, little bird? Do you want something to drink?”

  Turning to Marylin, Kate said, “We ought to give it a name so we can call it something besides ‘little bird.’ How about Pee Wee?”

  Marylin slid back in her sleeping bag. “It’s probably g
oing to die,” she said. “I’m not sure naming the bird is a great idea.” Then Marylin thought maybe that was a mean thing to say, especially at two fourteen in the morning. Still, it was about time Kate learned the facts of life. It was time that Kate grew up a little bit.

  “But maybe it won’t die,” Kate said, sitting on the floor next to Marylin’s sleeping bag. “Remember in second grade when Priscilla Jones got really sick and everyone thought she was going to die? But she didn’t. She got well again because she had really good doctors.”

  “Priscilla Jones wasn’t a tiny bird without any mother,” Marylin pointed out. “And besides, you’re not a doctor.”

  “But I might be someday,” Kate said. “I might grow up to be a vet.”

  Marylin closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the clock read 4:38 A.M. Kate was sitting at her desk, hovering over the peeping little bird.

  “Pee Wee, Pee Wee, Pee Wee,” Kate was singing to the little bird. “One day you’ll fly through the trees.”

  When the sun forced Marylin’s eyes open the next morning, the first thing she noticed was how quiet Kate’s room was. As soon as she saw the shoe box on Kate’s desk, Marylin realized why. The little bird had stopped peeping.

  Marylin looked around the room as though she expected to see the little bird perched on the windowsill or asleep on Kate’s pillow. Instead she saw Kate’s feet on Kate’s pillow. Kate’s head was propped against a stuffed giraffe. She was snoring small, whistling snores.

  “Little bird?” Marylin whispered as she worked her way out of the sleeping bag. “Pee Wee?” she whispered as she walked over to Kate’s desk. “Are you ready for your breakfast worm?”

  The little bird lay very still in its nest. Marylin slowly reached out her finger toward it. She didn’t want to scare the little bird. But the little bird didn’t move when Marylin touched it. It just lay there, cold and stiff.

  “I guess you died,” Marylin said to the little bird. “I guess I knew you would.”