“Oh. Hey. I mean, hi. Hi, Emma.” I patted her awkwardly on the back. The cheerleaders were always nice enough to me, but I couldn’t help feeling like they saw me as this weird birth defect of Olivia’s, something she would have been wise to have removed but for some reason chose to live with.
“I still can’t believe you guys didn’t try out for cheer squad last spring,” Emma said, stepping out of my lackluster embrace and shaking her head in amazement.
“I couldn’t. Soccer,” I answered immediately, even though after one awful season as the world’s worst soccer player, I’d dropped it.
“Dance class,” said Livvie.
Emma made a pouty face. “But we do the tumbling class and we cheer. You could do both.”
“I know!” said Olivia, ignoring Emma’s implied criticism. “You guys are awesome.”
I smiled vaguely.
Placated by Olivia’s praise, Emma waved good-bye to us, made Olivia promise to have lunch with the squad on Saturday, then skittered off to join her fellow cheerleaders. As I watched her go, I spotted Bethany and Lashanna. They waved at me and I waved back. I’d been nervous that they’d be mad when I didn’t go out for soccer again this year, but they’d seemed to understand.
Taking Livvie by the hand, I started walking toward them, but she pulled me back, reaching into her bag and pulling out her phone. “Wait a sec.”
I groaned but stayed put while Livvie fussed with her phone, then swiped at a lock of heavy blond hair that had dropped over her eyes. Until last summer I’d also had long hair, though my hair is so black it’s almost blue. But the day after we were thrown out of NYBC, Livvie came with me to Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and watched me get approximately three feet of hair chopped off my head. When the woman asked if I wanted to take a lock to remember it by, I just stared at her like, Why would I want to remember my hair?
No more dance. No more soccer. I shivered slightly. My parents and my guidance counselor were on my case to pick an extracurricular activity and to pick it fast. I’d played some tennis up at my grandparents’ this summer, but was I seriously going to try out for the tennis team like I’d told my parents I might? Livvie slipped her arm around my waist, and we stood shoulder to shoulder as she held the camera up at face level. “Say, ‘Olivia is so cheesy.’”
Glad to be pulled out of my thoughts, I repeated, “Olivia is so cheesy,” and she snapped the picture. To say Livvie had dealt better than I had with our being dumped from NYBC would be an understatement. Sometimes I wondered if the secret to being well-adjusted wasn’t blond hair.
“Nice,” she said, angling the screen toward me. Livvie and I were almost exactly the same height—five seven—so our faces were right next to each other. Olivia was grinning widely, her dimple pronounced, her eyes sparkling.
“You look like a prom queen,” I told her. “I’m all ‘Take me to your leader.’” I have big eyes, which I’d always known but which I hadn’t fully appreciated were quite so enormous until I got my pixie cut. I looked exactly like a cartoon drawing of an alien.
“You’re beautiful. Your eyes are seriously awesome. No joke.” She hip-checked me absently, still studying the screen. “Am I crazy or do I have a picture of you wearing this exact same shirt?”
I glanced at the cap sleeve of my dark blue T-shirt. “That’s impossible. I’ve never worn this shirt before.”
“Hmmm …” Livvie bit her upper lip and stared at the image, then shrugged. “Well, whatever.” She dropped her phone into her bag, took me by the hand, and led me toward the front steps of Wamasset High, so named because on this site a proud tribe of Wamasset Indians made their last stand against a group of British settlers who were ultimately successful in their attempt to brutally exterminate every last one of them.
“Do you think it’s comforting to the dead Wamasset that the descendants of their murderers attend a high school named in their honor?” I asked.
Livvie’d been trying to get me to have a more positive outlook on life, and now she turned around and pointed her finger at me threateningly. “Stop that.”
I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, and we headed into the lobby. The noise was deafening. Bethany and Lashanna weren’t anywhere to be seen, but half a dozen cheerleaders were, including Stacy Shaw—one of the captains of the cheerleading squad—and Jake’s would-be girlfriend Emma.
STACY: (Screaming.) Aaaaah!
EMMA: (Also screaming.) Aaaaah!
(They embrace.)
STACY: (Wails.) I wish you’d gotten captain. (She bursts into tears.)
EMMA: (Also bursting into tears.) Staaaaaaay!
STACY: Emms!!!!
EMMA: I love you so much.
STACY: I love you so much. (They continue to embrace, weeping.)
Olivia and I made eye contact. “You regularly lunch with those people,” I pointed out.
“They’re not as bad once you get to know them,” she insisted.
“Let me guess: That’s what you tell them about me, right?”
Laughing, we turned out of the lobby and down the two hundreds corridor. When we got to my homeroom, Livvie hugged me good-bye.
“Fortress after school, right?” she asked, even though odds were we’d have at least a couple of classes together.
“Right,” I agreed. As I hugged her back, I realized something. “Hey, Livs,” I said, pulling away. “You’re not just my best friend—you’re my extracurricular activity.”
Livvie pressed her hands to her chest and got a dreamy expression on her face. “I’ve always longed to be an extracurricular activity.” Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and headed down the corridor. “Love ya,” she called over her shoulder.
“Love ya,” I called back.
I stepped into the classroom, nervous for a second that no one I hung out with would be in homeroom with me, but then I saw Bethany. She saw me, too, grinned, and moved her bag off the desk next to hers. Grinning back at her, I made my way across the room. Just as the bell rang I slipped into my seat, and then Ms. Evans raised her head from the papers she’d been shuffling on her desk, walked over to the door, and shut it. She looked around the room at all of us as we slowly got quiet. “Welcome, everyone!” she announced, the tight curls of her perm bobbing as she nodded and smiled at us. “I hope you all had a wonderful summer.”
It was official: junior year had begun.
In Olivia’s backyard was an enormous beech tree that had to be about a hundred years old. In it was what we call the fortress.
The fortress was a … thing her dad and Jake built in the tree a few summers ago. It was supposed to be a place that would lure the twins, Tommy and Luke (they were eight now), outside for hours of fun so they wouldn’t drive their mom batshit with their running around in the house.
Everyone called it the fortress, but really it was just a platform. The plan had been for it to be a real fort, with walls and a ceiling and everything (I remember looking at some pretty complicated architectural drawings her dad commissioned), but then Jake made the football team and wasn’t so into building