Meanicures (6 page)

Looking at my dolls, I thought about how once last year Cassidy and I had taken my Malibu Barbie and turned her into Bar Harbor Barbie for a school project—we’d made orange rubber boots for her, and built a lobster trap from toothpicks. (They tend not to
make dolls and toys about Maine because we’re not as glamorous as California—but if you want a red stuffed lobster, there are a hundred to choose from.)

But sometime last year things changed with Cassidy. It had started out with small things I didn’t really notice at the time. Like one time she uninvited me to a sleepover at her house, telling me at the last second that it was called off. Then I found out at school that it hadn’t been—she’d just decided to invite Alexis instead.

Or the time we had plans to go to the movies, and she didn’t show up. I finally called her, and she said, “Oh, something came up.”

It was agonizing at first. I used to lie awake at night and wonder: why did she want to be friends with them, instead of me? Why couldn’t we all be friends, like we used to be?

There was this weird, almost geological shift happening, like Cassidy and I were two glaciers moving in opposite directions.

“What happened? You used to be such good friends,” my mom walked around saying, for what seemed like weeks on end.

“Mom, things change. People change,” I’d try to explain.

“Not
that
much.”

“Yes, they do. You don’t understand!”

“Just call her,” my mom would say over and over.
“It’s a misunderstanding, that’s all. You don’t stop being friends overnight.”

The first couple of times I took Mom’s advice and called Cassidy, the only person at her house who wanted to talk to me was her
mom
. She’d go on about how much she missed me, and ask why I hadn’t been to their house lately, but I didn’t want to say, “Because your daughter is being kind of a jerk to me lately.”

At the same time, my mom was stuck a decade back, wondering why Cassidy and I didn’t wear the same dresses or take ballet anymore.

Meanwhile, the same thing was happening with Team Tay-Kay, when Kayley decided she wouldn’t do any extra training sessions with Taylor anymore because it “ruined her concentration.” And Olivia and Alexis stopped co-owning the bunny they’d shared for two years because Alexis suddenly decided keeping bunnies as pets was way too juvenile for her.

Maybe those things wouldn’t have been terrible on their own. People grow apart and all that. But Kayley, Cassidy, and Alexis couldn’t seem to let well enough alone. They had to openly drop us. Repeatedly. In public. They quit riding bikes to school with us, turned the other way when we passed them in the halls, and, worst of all, blocked the chairs around their lunch table when we tried to sit with them the second day of seventh grade. By the time we quit arguing with them about it, we were left with no place to sit, and carried
our lunches to a couple of folding chairs in the corner, by the racks where everyone left their dirty dishes and used trays.

It was beyond embarrassing.

So, maybe Poinsettia was right.

Time for big changes.

Changes were good.

I heard a noise like something snorting—a small whale, maybe. I turned from the mirror, and there was Parker, standing in the doorway. “What are you doing in here?” I asked. “You’re supposed to knock fir—”

“Whoa,” he said, stepping back. “I didn’t know the storm was
that
bad.”

“What do you mean? The surf?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at the whitecaps in the ocean.

“No. I mean, it blew your hair away,” he said, laughing.

“Get out. Out!” I ran over and slammed the door behind him.

Little brothers should not be seen or heard.

Maybe I should work on a plan to get
him
out of my life, too, I thought. As soon as possible.

“Where did
you
get
that adorable cut?” Olivia cried when I walked into the Whale after supper and pulled my umbrella out of the twisting wind. I’d called my friends and asked them to meet me at Olivia’s parents’ restaurant as soon as they were done eating.

“A new place, on Main Street. Combing Attractions,” I said.

“It’s really cute!” Olivia ran over to take my raincoat and hang it on the rack just inside the door. “I love it, Madison.” She was already a lot better at talking with her braces.

Olivia was wearing sparkling silver long-bead earrings. She made all her own jewelry with bead kits, and was always giving us new homemade bracelets and necklaces for presents. I hoped her dangling metal earrings didn’t get caught in her new metal braces. I didn’t know why I thought that, but I did.

“Never heard of it,” said Taylor. She wore a green Payneston High hoodie, jeans, and blue plaid rain boots that squeaked as she swiveled on the stool. “The color is awesome! So did your mom fix that for you?”

“I got it fixed myself, actually. At the salon,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were going to get your hair cut?” asked Taylor. “We totally would have gone with you.”

“Yeah, you ran out on me. I didn’t know where you went,” said Olivia.

“I don’t know.” I walked over to the counter and slid onto a stool next to Taylor. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it.” I waved hello to Olivia’s mom, who was at the host stand, while her dad was probably somewhere back in the kitchen. They made the best fish chowder for miles around—not to mention their fried clams—but they served seafood lots of different ways, too.

“Do you remember when Kayley dyed her hair purple, so then I dyed
my
hair because we were Team Tay-Kay, only mine didn’t come out right and I had that magenta streak straight down the middle like I was a really weird skunk?” Taylor said. “My dad went absolutely ballistic, ‘You have a meet coming up and nobody goes into a meet looking like that, what were you thinking?’ and we had to go to the drugstore and stay up like half the night dying it back to brown, except it was more like black?”

“How could I forget that?” said Olivia. “I think we went through about eight towels that day. So, if your mom wasn’t there when you got your hair colored, what did she say when she saw it?”

“She’s trying to deal with it.” On my way out that night, she’d actually admitted that it was not a horrible thing.

“So. What’s your idea?” Olivia asked. We all scooted in close to the counter.

I looked over my shoulder at the restaurant to make sure nobody we knew happened to be in hearing range. I caught Cameron Hansen’s eye—he was there with his family—and waved awkwardly.
Hi, remember me? The idiot from this morning’s update with the red face and the green hair? Yeah, it’s the new and improved me, now
.

I hope
.

“Well, I was thinking we need to kind of clean the slate, you know, with Cassidy and everyone,” I said.

“Clean the slate? How?” asked Taylor, squinting at me.

“When Cassidy and I were friends, we said we’d always, always have our hair long,” I explained. “We had to have the same headbands, the same braids, everything. I just don’t want anything in common with her anymore. I want to cut all our connections.”

“So, you’re done!” Olivia gave me a high five. “Hair cut, mission accomplished.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it’s only a start.”

“Um … what do you mean?” asked Olivia. “Are you planning to cut it even shorter?”

I laughed. “No—I just meant it’s the start of something.”

“You’re losing me,” she said. “Have a fry.”

“What are you thinking?” Taylor asked me. “You sound like you have a plan.”

I shook my head and felt the strange sensation of my short hair moving on my neck. “Here’s the thing. While I was having my hair cut, this other stylist kept talking about breaking up with this guy, and my stylist said she should write him a letter and then burn it. She said it would help her get him out of her life. He’d leave her alone after that,” I explained.

“Burn his name? And a letter?” Olivia shook her head. “Sounds crazy. Who is this person, anyway?”

“I don’t know. She was coloring my hair at the time. I might have missed some of the details,” I admitted with a smile. “But just think about it for a sec,” I urged. “We want the mean girls out of our lives, right? We want them to stop harassing us. So why not give the same thing a try?”

“Sure,”
said Olivia, spraying me a little. “Something
like
that, maybe. But … that?”

“I just wish I could completely ignore them,” I said. “I hate that it matters to me what they think or do, when they obviously don’t care about us.”

“I know, it’s not logical,” Taylor added. “I keep trying not to care if Kayley does better than me this year or whether she goes to state or whatever.” She sighed. “But I do. So then I tell my mom, and she’s like, well, you just have to be teammates, you don’t have to be friends, that’s part of growing up, blah blah blah.” She paused. “So what were you saying, Madison?”

I drained the last of my soda and pushed the glass away. “I want us to have a good-bye party for them.”

“A party with them?” Olivia asked. “Are you nuts?”

“She didn’t say
with
them,” Taylor pointed out. “She said
for
them. As in, good-bye. To get them out of our lives. Right?” She looked at me, and I nodded.

“Well … how?” asked Olivia.

“That’s the part I don’t know yet,” I said. “I was hoping we could use your computer and look up some ideas. I mean, I know we can have the party at my house. We have a fireplace and we can definitely burn their names. But what else?”

“Let’s see.” Olivia had her computer on the counter, where she often sat to do her homework while her parents worked. She looked over at the two of us. “What are we talking here? A witch thing? Witch dot com?”

“No, no.” I shook my head. “Something more civilized.”

“Definitely,” said Taylor. “I am not into potions and spells.”

“Me neither. I couldn’t even read the first Harry Potter,” said Olivia.

While we were talking, Olivia found some articles on self-help sites about how to deal with negative energy and get rid of “toxic” people. We weren’t really sure if that’s what we meant.

“Let’s plan on the name-in-flames stuff,” Taylor said. “But what else can we do for a good-bye party?”

I pictured tossing Bar Harbor Barbie into the fire. Probably that would create an environmental disaster. So maybe we wouldn’t burn everything—maybe we’d burn the names, but just put away a box of things from the time when we were BFFs.

“Whatever we do, it will have to involve lots of snacks and a movie,” said Olivia.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because all our fun nights do,” she said. “Duh.” She reached for a small bowl of mixed nuts on the counter and took a handful.

“Then we’ll eat anti-mean snacks,” I said.

Olivia’s forehead creased in thought. “What are anti-mean snacks?”

“I don’t know. Sweet things? Anything with lots of sugar?” I guessed. “Do I have to come up with everything?”

“How about ‘mean-free,’ ” Olivia suggested. “You know, in the tradition of sugar-free, gluten-free …”

“Sounds good,” said Taylor.

“What night should we have the party?” I asked.

“Saturday?”

“I can’t Saturday,” both Olivia and Taylor said at the same time.

“Okay … how about Friday?”

“Well, what are the chances we’ll go to the dance Friday?” asked Olivia.

“Uh, slim,” I said. I thought about Hunter and how Cassidy had pushed me to talk to him about the dance,
when all he wanted was my homework so he could go to the dance. With someone else.
Her
, probably.

“What’s so special about it, anyway,” commented Taylor. “I bet it will be totally boring.”

Suddenly Olivia turned to us with a deadly serious expression. She looked pained, like she had just bitten her cheeks with her braces.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

She adjusted one of her earrings, which had gotten tangled in her hair. “You know that old saying, don’t shoot the messenger?”

Taylor and I both nodded.

“Madison, I really don’t want to show you this. But I have to,” Olivia said. “I was looking for stuff about the eighth-grade dance, just in case, you know, we wanted to know more … and I came across this. It’s like … evil.”

She turned the computer toward us, and I saw in big letters: PAYNESTON PEEPS. That’s our school’s social networking site.

And right below that, under Today’s Update (still not favorite words of mine):

GOING ATTRACTIONS

WHAT SEVENTH GRADER RECENTLY LOPPED OFF HER MARTIAN-GREEN LOCKS? WE THINK SHE LOST HER BEST FEATURE, BUT YOU BE THE JUDGE
.

VOTE ON “BEFORE” AND “AFTER”!

View results here.

“Before” was the picture Alexis had taken of me
outside school that morning. Hunter was standing behind me, holding up his fingers in a V above my head.

I really did hate him now.

Wow. It really was
that
green
, I thought.

Under “after,” there was a picture of me walking out of Combing Attractions that afternoon. My hair was blowing all over the place in the wind, and some strands seemed to be floating straight up to the sky. I looked slightly possessed, or like I’d been caught in an electrical storm.