“Are you two going to keep—” Hal interrupted, but this time I didn’t care what he had to say.
“Nia, I have never, never done anything to you and now you’re acting like—”
“You’ve never done anything to me?” Nia stood up and took a step toward me, lowering her voice until she was practically hissing. “You’ve never done anything to me? Oh, that’s a good one, Callie. Um, do the words Keith Harmon mean anything to you?”
I took a step back, but it wasn’t just to get away from Nia’s scary voice. The words Keith Harmon did mean something to me.
“That wasn’t me.”
“Yeah, right,” said Nia, turning her back on me.
I reached out and grabbed for her arm. “Seriously, Nia, that wasn’t me.”
She snatched her arm away from me, like there was something revolting about my touch, and I was reminded of Traci’s aborted cootie shot earlier. “Well, like my mom says, ’Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.’”
At first I didn’t realize what she was saying, and then I did. “My friends are not dogs!"
“Maybe not on the outside,” said Nia, and she went back to snapping pictures of the car.
My heart was pounding. If I was all about avoiding confrontations, Nia was all about having them. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.
But even as I thought that, I couldn’t help cringing a little at the memory of what Heidi had done to Nia in seventh grade.
Nia and Heidi weren’t just in the same math class that year, they also had English together. One day, maybe a week after she’d turned Heidi and Traci in for cheating, Nia left her English notebook behind in class. Heidi picked it up because, as she told us at lunch, she wanted to be a good citizen, and then she dropped it; it happened to flip open, and what did it happen to open to but a page with a few notes on direct objects and predicate adjectives and a small heart in the margin with the initials NR and KH inside of it.
The truth is, I really don’t know exactly what happened or whose idea it was because my dad and I went to Washington, D.C. that weekend to meet my mom at a NASA conference she’d spent the week attending. But apparently, Heidi or Traci or Kelli or maybe all three of them created [email protected] or some address like that, and they emailed Nia and then Nia emailed “Keith” back and then “Keith” emailed Nia and so on. By Monday morning, Heidi had a whole string of emails to show me and the rest of the seventh grade, emails in which Nia admitted she’d always thought Keith was cute and agreed to go out with him sometime. At that point, Nia was just a little geeky with her goofy braids and glasses, but she wasn’t a leper. And even then Cisco Rivera was Cisco Rivera, so maybe if she’d never pissed Heidi off, she could have survived middle school as a neutral. But no.
The whole thing was really, really bad. For a long time, Nia couldn’t walk by anyone without hearing something like, Going to meet your boyfriend, Nia? Or, Oooh, Nia, I think I just saw Keith, were you looking for him? Every time I passed Nia’s locker, I’d see something stuck on it—a piece of paper with NR and KH on it or a dead flower or, once, simply the words AS IF!!!!!! As far as I was concerned, she’d brought the whole thing on herself (what had she been thinking, that Heidi and Traci would allow her to live in peace after she turned them in?), but even I felt kind of bad for her by the end.
Part of me knew I should say something to them, but it wasn’t like I was that good of friends with Heidi and Kelli and Traci. I still felt a little as if … I don’t know, as if I were on probation or something. I mean, now if they did something like that, I would definitely tell them to stop. And anyway, they wouldn’t do anything like that anymore. People do a lot of stuff in middle school that they wouldn’t do in high school. You can’t judge someone forever based on one mistake.
Right at that moment, as if she’d been sent or something, Bea Rossiter limped out the front door. I watched her get into her mom’s waiting car and drive away.
I closed my eyes. What had happened with Bea was different.
But a little voice in my head said, Was it really?
I was glad when Hal’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “We can’t help Amanda if we don’t work together.”
Nia whipped around to face him. “You know what, Hal? Just shut up already. You don’t know that she wants our help. You don’t know why she did this. So why don’t you stop with your whole I-can-read-the-tea-leaves-guru thing, okay? Because it’s starting to get on my nerves.”
I gave Hal a look like, What can you do with a lunatic like that? but he was looking intently at Nia, which kind of annoyed me.
“Hey,” he said quietly. When she didn’t meet his eyes, he said it again. “Hey.” I couldn’t help being jealous of his gentle tone. It was like even though she’d just yelled at him, he really cared about her.
She covered her face with her hands for a second and breathed in deeply. “I just don’t understand. Nothing makes sense. I thought I was … never mind. I am so freaking out.”
Hal took a step toward her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You thought you were what?”
“Nothing,” said Nia, and she shook her head, like it was a door closing. “Anyway, why won’t she call us back?”
“I don’t know,” said Hal. He briefly touched his pocket, where I could see the outline of his phone through his jeans.
“It’s not like her,” said Nia, her statement a question, like things had gotten so topsy-turvy that she needed Hal to confirm something she already knew.
“It’s not like her at all,” agreed Hal.
It was weird to be standing there with no one to talk to while the two of them had their little moment. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like such an outsider. That’s the thing about being an I-Girl: you’re never on the outside. Of anything. I went back to taking pictures of the car, but I couldn’t focus, and I knew none of my shots were going to be any help if we were trying to decipher a message. When my phone’s memory was full, I just stood there. Nia and Hal were talking quietly on the other side of the car. For something to do, I went up close to one of the windows, but I’d looked at the design on it (a rainbow with a huge, puffy cloud at either end) so many times that I didn’t really know what the point was of looking at it again.
What was Mr. Thornhill’s car like inside? I was sure he was a total neat freak, and I pushed my nose against the window to see if I was right, but it was impossible to see past the stripes of the rainbow.
“Okay, we should probably start cleaning,” said Hal, standing up and addressing me over the roof of the car.
I couldn’t help being annoyed. What, now that they’d had their little chat we could get on with our work? Did they get to decide everything?
Without saying anything, I went over to my bucket, got the spray bottle, and started shooting cleaning fluid at the car. Almost the second the stuff hit the drawing, the chalk began to dissolve. I barely had to rub at the surface to get it to disappear. For a minute, I found myself thinking that it was nice of Amanda not to make us work too hard, but then I was irritated with myself. Whatever Amanda’s purpose, she so clearly was not trying to show how deeply she cared about me, Hal, or Nia. Maybe she thought it was hilarious to play a trick on us or maybe she just wanted