Best Friend Emma (6 page)

     
6
     

It is Thursday, exactly a week before Thanksgiving. I have stopped trying to stretch my stomach, though, because now I have much bigger problems than making room for pumpkin pie.

Namely, my battle to make Kry Rodriguez my new best friend.

Mine and Annie Pat’s, I mean.

Kry is being nice to Cynthia, Fiona, and Heather, but that doesn’t mean much, because she’s being nice to everyone—even to the church-friends and the neighbor-friends, who probably don’t even notice—and to
me
.

Kry is an equal-opportunity smiler.

It’s almost as if she doesn’t
care
who her new best friends are. And that just doesn’t make any sense! At least not to me. I like to keep track of things like that.

Thank goodness Annie Pat is back in school today, because that means this will be a fairer fight for Kry’s friendship. Annie Pat looks perfectly fine, not green and groany at all anymore.

She could have come back to school yesterday, Annie Pat tells me, only her mom wanted to be extra careful. (Whenever I get sick, my mom can’t
wait
for me to go back to school! But maybe that’s because she works at home. Annie Pat’s mom doesn’t have a money job right now because like I said, she just had a new baby. It’s a boy named Murphy. He has red hair, too. I guess it runs in the family.)

I called Annie Pat every night to see how she was, and to fill her in on our battle for Kry.

To tell the truth, Annie Pat doesn’t seem that into it!

But maybe now that she’s back in school, Annie Pat will see how important it is for Cynthia not always to get her own way. It’s
crucial
.

The meanies shouldn’t get to win
all
the time.

“How did you ever get the nickname ‘Kry’?” Annie Pat asks Kry Rodriguez shyly a few minutes before school starts. The mornings have turned nicer, and a bunch of us girls are clustered around one of the third-grade picnic tables. We are curled over the top of it like shrimps in a shrimp cocktail. Yum.

“I think Kry is a
cute
name, Annie Pat,” Cynthia says, as if Annie Pat has just insulted Kry by asking the question. Cynthia scowls in her almost-friend’s defense.

“Me, too,” Fiona and Heather chime in—though more to please Cynthia than to flatter Kry, in my opinion.

“Who said it wasn’t?” I ask, defending Annie Pat.

Kry laughs. “I got my nickname from my
two big brothers ‘cause I was supposedly such a crybaby when I was little,” she says, answering Annie Pat’s question.
“Wah, wah, wah
. Every little thing! Like if the dog wouldn’t let me dress him up in doll clothes, or if I didn’t get the first pancake on Saturday morning, or if I couldn’t find one of my Barbies.”

“That’s just darling, Kry,” Cynthia says, beaming in a possessive way.

“Yeah,” Fiona and Heather echo weakly.

More kissing-up—from all three of them. It’s really revolting.

“How did you get
your
nickname?” Kry asks Annie Pat. She’s not just being polite, either. She sounds as if she really wants to know.

And even
I
have never asked Annie Pat this important question! That makes me feel kind of bad.

Annie Pat blushes, which is a very easy thing to do when you have red hair. “My real name is Anna Patrice Masterson,” she tells Kry—and the rest of us. “Those were my grandmothers’ names, Anna and Patrice.”

“They
sound
like grandma names,” Cynthia mutters very softly, and Annie Pat blushes some more. But Kry won’t hold what Cynthia said against us, I reassure myself, because I don’t think she even heard.

“Shut up,” I tell Cynthia anyway—because she can’t insult my best friend that way.

Cynthia draws back, all fake-innocent and everything. “
I
didn’t say anything,” she protests, holding her hands up in the air.

What a liar!

But Kry is looking at me a little nervously, as if she’s not sure what to expect next from such a hot-head.

“
You
shut up, Emma,” Heather says to me. Her long hair is pulled back so tight into its high-up ponytail that she can probably barely blink. Heather sneaks a wide-eyed glance at Cynthia to see if she notices how loyal she is being.

“Yeah,” Fiona croaks. “Stop being so mean,
Emma
.”

Me? Mean?

“See, Emma’s always starting fights,” Cynthia pretend-explains to Kry. “But we try to be nice to her, because I guess she can’t help it. Her parents are
divorced
,” she whispers, pulling Kry gently
away from the picnic table just a few seconds before the bell rings.

Kry gasps, and she shrinks away from Cynthia’s hand.

She’s horrified about the divorce, I guess.

And for some reason, I can barely catch my breath. In fact, I feel as though I am about to start crying. I never knew that being a divorced kid was so bad!

Maybe
this
was why Cynthia didn’t want to be friends with me anymore.

“Come on, Emma,” Annie Pat says softly. “We’d better get going. Class is about to start, and we don’t want Ms. Sanchez yelling at us.”

I stumble along next to Annie Pat, thinking,
So
what
if my parents are divorced?

Why is Cynthia using this against me?

And I also think about the battle for Kry Rodriguez.

Was this the end of round two? I didn’t even know it had started!

     
7
     

This is all Annie Pat’s fault, I tell myself later in the morning as Corey Robinson staggers zombielike to the board for some more double-digit subtraction. If Annie Pat’s real name wasn’t so dumb and—and
grandma-like
, this never would have happened.

And it’s my mom’s fault, too—for getting divorced! I never knew it would rub off on me this way. But now that Kry knows all about my messy family, she will
never
want to be my friend.

Unless I think of something fast.

“Hey, Kry,” I say, sprinting over to where she is sitting one second after the lunch bell—buzzer, really—rings. Or buzzes. “Can you come over to my house on Saturday? Because my mom wants to treat us to lunch at a really fabulous place and then take us to a really cool movie. We can even drive over and pick you up at your house.”

This will be news to my mother, but once I explain what happened this morning, she’ll go along with it. I hope.

Kry blinks, surprised. She has very pretty eyes the color of acorns, and flappy black eyelashes that look like long, delicate, caterpillar legs. “Saturday? Sure,” she says, breaking into a wide smile. “Okay. What time? And do you know where I live?”

“You can tell me later,” I say, because Annie Pat—
Anna Patrice
—is tugging at my sleeve. I try to shake her away for a second so I can finish talking to Kry.

I hope Cynthia is watching this!

“What?”
I finally say to Annie Pat, whirling around, because she just won’t leave me alone. But it’s okay, because Kry has just waved goodbye and has gone to get her lunch.