Pink & Green is the New Black (21 page)

Hey Travis. Meet me by my locker before 1st period tomorrow. Okay? Goodnight.

After I send it, I immediately feel better. I'm taking a step in the right direction. The Travis thing was a fun experiment, but maybe he's not the right boy for me. Or maybe it's just not the right time. I need to get over Yamir before I can like anyone else.

A few minutes later, he texts back.

OK. Sweet dreams.

So he has no idea what's about to happen. Maybe boys really are clueless. I don't want to hurt him, but truthfully I bet there's a line of girls in our grade who'd want to go out with him. He's cute, and he has a planetarium in his house. I'm sure he'll find someone who likes him more than I do.

I toss and turn all night. It's not the Travis thing I'm worried about. I also need to figure out my costume. And I'm stressed about the spa. I know Penelope has it all under control, but things could go wrong.

I want everything about this to be perfect.

My grandma told me that Albert Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I'm basically doing that this year. Trying for a perfect last semester, trying to make things perfect for the AGE girls, trying to make the Masquerade perfect.

And I'm insane. There is no perfect. Things can never be perfect.

And what does perfect even mean? One person's perfect isn't the same as another person's perfect.

I need to accept that and move on. Maybe life isn't meant to be perfect. It's meant to be complicated and messy and confusing, and that's what makes it exciting and memorable. I mean, things with Erica Crane have always been up and down—and while it's been a lot of down, it's certainly been
interesting. And the whole thing with Travis: it's not ideal, and I may be breaking his heart pretty soon, but the experience has taught me that even if someone likes you, you might not like them, and you can't really force yourself to. Lots of things in life are far from perfect, but maybe that's okay. Maybe we learn things from the imperfections.

Maybe perfect is really just another word for boring.

I needed all these things to happen—heartbreak with Yamir, Erica telling everyone my secrets, Claudia coming home to ask us for advice, ups and downs with Sunny—to make me realize this.

There is no perfect. There's only hoping for the best. And rolling with the punches.

That's it.

I get to school the next morning and Travis is waiting for me by my locker. He's wearing baggy army-green cargo pants and a long-sleeved navy T-shirt. He looks so cute. I wish he didn't look so cute.

“What's up?” he asks, still leaning against my locker, like a boy in some back-to-school clothing ad.

“Let's walk,” I say, after my coat and books are put away. I take my bag and the books I'll need for the first few periods.

We walk up to the steps to the second-floor bathroom, but
obviously he can't go in there; it's a girls' room. So we walk farther down the hall until we find an empty classroom. I think it's used for the Mandarin class, and the Mandarin teacher doesn't come until fifth period.

We go inside and sit down at the desks. He slicks his hair back but it's all disheveled, and I immediately wonder if I'm making the wrong decision. Travis is cute. He's boring, but still cute.

“Talk to me, Desberg.” Calling me by my last name—I love that, for some unknown reason. I've always loved it. Now what should I do? I have no idea.

“So, you heard about the ‘no dates to the Masquerade' thing, right?” I ask. “I'm really glad the whole executive committee agreed. This way no one feels bad.”

“I didn't hear that,” he says. “But okay.”

“So, like, we're not going as a couple,” I say, trying to rephrase what I just said. Some part of me thinks he's not getting what I'm saying.

“Yeah, whatever.” He raises his eyebrows. “That's fine. I'm doing some costume theme with my boys.”

“Your boys?”

“Yeah. Gavin, Evan, Nicolai, Carmine, maybe even Luke if he can get his act together.”

“Oh.” So Travis wasn't even really concerned about going
with me. He wasn't worried about a costume theme with me. And he hasn't asked me to hang out in a few days. Maybe we've already broken up. Maybe I can just let things cool off naturally.

“So that's all you wanted to tell me?” he asks. He seems anxious to go. He keeps looking at the big clock above the door. That must be it: he knows what's up. That we're just not compatible, but he doesn't want to openly break it off either.

We're good. We're on the same page.

“That was it,” I say.

“Cool. I gotta run and talk to Mr. D-H before class. He was not pleased with my essay on
The Outsiders
.”

“Good luck with that.” I smile. He doesn't ask me to walk with him, and he doesn't grab my hand or even try a little kiss before he goes.

I'm relieved. Everything is working out.

Lucy's tip for surviving eighth grade:

Don't assume you know how others feel.

Word about the no-dates
plan spreads like wildfire throughout the eighth grade. Everyone is psyched about it—which is kind of surprising. All this year I thought people were in a rush to grow up and act like they're in high school. But they're not. Everyone just wants to hang out with their friends, and maybe talk about boys, or talk about girls. But nothing too serious.

It's refreshing.

Of course, it took Erica Crane's heartbreak to make this happen. And she'll probably never know the good deed she did. But maybe that's okay too. If she knew, it would go to her head.

I spend the rest of the day feeling pretty great. I'm off the hook with Travis, and everyone's excited that no one's going with a date. I even get an e-mail from Clint's dad about how thrilled everyone is with the vendors I found for the green
cafeteria, and how if I want a job in Old Mill Schools Dining Services when I'm older, I'm hired.

I told him I'll keep it in mind. I think I'd be much happier as a makeup artist or a spa consultant, but you never know. This year is proof that everything can change—ideas, plans, aspirations. Being able to roll with it is what's most important.

Mrs. Deleccio and another science teacher have taken my composting idea and are handling it themselves. I'm so disappointed that I couldn't find time to do it. But I'm still glad I suggested it. Sometimes you really can't do it all. And I guess realizing that is more important than trying to do everything and completely freaking out and letting people down.

Sunny comes over after school to hammer out our costume plan. The AGE girls are going as oldies singers, like in “The Shoop Shoop Song.” Annabelle's mom is really good at sewing, and she's making them poodle skirts and everything. They told me they have the “pink” part of the theme covered.

Apparently Travis and “his boys” are going as some kind of toe fungus. On his way to lunch he said, “We're gonna rock the green. Believe me.”

It sounds completely disgusting, but whatever. I'm not planning on spending that much time with him anyway.

“Did you ever talk to Evan about the medicine bottles?” Sunny asks me. She's been going on and on about the grossness
of what Evan's planning on wearing and how she's not going to be able to look at him.

“No. I left him a voice mail and then figured we'd talk in school, but we haven't had a chance,” I say. To be honest, I'd totally forgotten about it.

“Oh. He never checks voice mail.” Sunny shakes her head. She hops off my bed and goes to grab her bag off my window seat. When she gets back, she hands me her phone. “Call him.”

“Now?”

He answers on the first ring, and I feel a little silly calling Sunny's boyfriend when she's sitting right here.

“Lucy!” He pauses and crunches some chips or pretzels or something. “I'm so glad you called again. I have to tell you about this thing I saw in the Berkshires.”

“Yeah? Tell!”

He starts by telling me about a crafts fair he went to with his grandma and how one booth had a table of all these old medicine bottles. “It seems like the same thing you found in the basement of the pharmacy. But people would come up with questions or advice they needed. Like, one person wrote, ‘How will I survive winter?' and then another person answered with ‘Stand in direct sunlight, even when it's cold.'”

“Cool, but I don't really get it,” I say.

He explains how the questions were taped to the bottles,
and people wrote advice on little slips of paper and put them inside the bottles.

“Sometimes it was a little hard to see the answers, so you'd have to shake the bottle a little,” he says. “It was just a cool, crafty kind of thing. It seems like something you'd love. And then Sunny mentioned the bottles you found. And I thought it could be a good addition to the Masquerade.”

“Oh!” I yelp, and Sunny startles. “I love that! We can have an advice booth. I can bring all the bottles from the pharmacy!”

“Exactly!”

Evan and I hang up, and I'm overcome with appreciation. Evan thought of this amazing idea, and it incorporates something from Old Mill Pharmacy. And all because Sunny remembered the medicine bottles.

“So what should we do for our costumes, though?” Sunny asks me after we've stopped discussing the medicine bottle idea.

“The Pink Ladies!” I exclaim. “From
Grease
!”

“Yeah?” Sunny doesn't seem thrilled.

“I mean, it fits the whole pink theme so well! And we love
Grease
. We know all the songs by heart.” I pause to let it sink in. “It'll be like a tribute to our friendship.”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .” Sunny smiles. “But we might need more than just the two of us to really pull it off. And is it too similar to the ‘Shoop Shoop girls'?”

“It's similar in that we can hang out with them and it'll be cool. But not too similar, like we stole their idea,” I say, and then something occurs to me. “We should ask Zoe and Erica if they want to do it too.”

“Do you have the flu? You're asking
Erica Crane
to dress up with us?”

I plop down on the bed next to her. “Things have changed, Sun. We're almost in high school. Erica even sits at our lunch table now. She'll never be nice, but she'll always be here, so there's nothing we can do about it.”

“Wait.” Sunny furiously hits my knee. “Isn't Zoe's mom some kind of fashion consultant? I bet she'd be able to find us the most amazing costumes ever.”

“Yes!” I high-five her.

We set up a second-floor-bathroom meeting with Erica and Zoe for the next morning. I hope that they're into this idea. It'll be awesome to have Zoe in our group, because I know her mom will make sure we have the most amazing costumes in the grade. But it's not only that. After all we've been through, it makes sense for us to be in a group with Erica and Zoe. It will symbolize a changing of the times, a new order of things.

We're growing up. We're nicer to each other now. Just because we spent the past seven years as enemies doesn't mean we can't spend the next four years as sort-of friends.

Lucy's tip for surviving eighth grade:

Always aim to be inclusive.

“So this is our idea,” I tell
Zoe and Erica in the second-floor bathroom the next morning. “Making sure we stay in line with Erica's awesome idea for the Pink and Green theme of the Masquerade, I think we should be the Pink Ladies.”

“What?” Erica asks. I can tell she's in a bad mood. She still has her sunglasses on.

“Like from
Grease
,” Sunny explains. “Lucy and I have been obsessed with
Grease
since, like, second grade, when my mom kind of didn't want us to watch it.”