The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (15 page)

“Saturday night?” Ruby had asked when Marylin brought up the subject of a sleepover. “I guess that would be okay. I’ll have to ask my mom, though. She doesn’t like it when we invite people without checking with her first.”

That was Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, home after cheerleading practice, Marylin was a jumble of nervous excitement waiting for Ruby’s call. Ruby had promised to call before dinner. Marylin tried to do her homework, the phone on the bed beside her, but she couldn’t concentrate. Outside her window, the afternoon darkened into evening, and inside, the smell of meat loaf drifted up the stairs, mixing with Marylin’s excitement and making her feel a little sick. Call, call, call, she ESP’d to Ruby, but the only time the phone rang, it was the library, a computerized voice
informing Marylin that her mother had three items overdue.

By eight, Ruby still hadn’t called, and Marylin wondered if she should call Ruby. But she knew this went against middle-school cheer-leading protocol. The second prettiest cheerleader did not call the prettiest cheerleader—it was always the other way around, no exceptions.

Marylin waited until midnight before completely giving up hope. In the morning, groggy eyed, she made her way to Ruby’s locker, where Ruby stood with Ashley and Mazie. “I thought you were going to call last night,” she said to Ruby, and immediately realized that this was a mistake. As nice as Ruby was, you still didn’t reprimand her, especially not in front of other people.

“Was I?” Ruby asked, sounding both innocent and imperial at the same time. “Gosh, Marylin, I guess I forgot. But I did ask my mom about Saturday and she said no. I forgot that it’s the youth group Christmas party that
night. My mom never lets me skip church stuff.”

“Mine either,” Ashley chimed in. “If it has to do with church, I have to be there.”

Ruby smiled at Ashley serenely. “Your mom sounds a lot like mine.”

Ashley nodded several times like a happy puppy. Marylin thought she was going to throw up. She definitely wasn’t going to ask Ashley if she could spend the night at her house. But who was she going to ask? For a popular person, she was starting to feel sort of pathetic.

The idea came to her in language arts, but she rejected it immediately. Even though she and Rhetta were friendly now, chatting in the minutes before their classes started, Rhetta showing Marylin her latest drawings, Marylin offering the occasional story idea, that wasn’t the same as them being friends. Besides, what could spending the night at Rhetta’s house be like? Marylin imagined walls painted black, cats slithering around, a crow perched in an
ornate birdcage. Marylin would probably be too scared to fall asleep.

But the fact was, it was Wednesday afternoon. If she didn’t have something lined up soon, then Benjamin’s parents would have to drive to her dad’s to get her, and they’d have to drive all the way back afterward, or else Marylin’s dad would have to drive her, and Petey would be sitting in the backseat with Marylin and Benjamin, and that was just too unromantic for words.

Rhetta, she decided with a sigh, was her only hope.

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Rhetta replied, not acting like she had to think about it or ask her mom first. For someone who dressed all in black and didn’t seem to have many friends, she sounded like having Marylin spend the night was a run-of-the-mill event. “My mom buys microwave popcorn by the caseload, so we can hang out all night eating popcorn and watching TV. It’ll be cool.”

Marylin stared at Rhetta, reassessing her. Was it possible that under that gloom-and-doom
exterior, Rhetta Mayes was actually a normal twelve-year-old girl who liked popcorn and sleepovers?

Who knew?

“So what were you and Miss Ghoul talking about?” Mazie asked after language arts. “She seemed pretty excited over something.”

“She’s, uh, interested in Student Government stuff,” Marylin stammered. “You know, all that vegetarian stuff. She’s against meat.”

“It figures,” said Mazie, rolling her eyes in Rhetta’s general direction. “I don’t know why they let freaks like her go to school.”

“Somebody’s a freak just because they don’t eat meat?” Marylin asked, surprising herself. She’d never talked back to Mazie before. It was sort of great and sort of terrifying at the same time. She decided to keep going, even though she had no idea whether Rhetta ate meat or not. “That’s pretty, I don’t know, narrow-minded, don’t you think?”

Mazie raised an eyebrow. “Let me know when you’re ready to get off your high horse, Miss Priss. And you might think twice about
the way you’re talking to me. If I felt like it, I could make your life pretty miserable.”

You’re already making my life miserable,
Marylin wanted to say. But she didn’t. One of these days, she was going to start telling Mazie what she actually thought 100 percent of the time. Maybe that would be her New Year’s resolution. In the upcoming year, she would be a truth teller. All the time, not just when she forgot to lie in order to get along.

That gave her two more weeks of being friends with Mazie. Because when Marylin started telling the truth, Mazie wasn’t going to put up with it, not for a second.

“If you wanted, I could put some makeup on you.”

Marylin took a few steps back from Rhetta. “Well, um, I don’t know. You and I sort of have different styles.”

Rhetta laughed. “I won’t try to make you look like me. I’ll just make you look more like you.”

“Well, okay, I guess.” Marylin looked at the
clock on Rhetta’s bedside table. She had forty-five minutes before Benjamin was going to pick her up. If Rhetta’s makeup job was horrible, or even the least bit not cute, she still had time to wash it off. “Just in case you were wondering, I prefer the natural look. My mom doesn’t like me wearing too much makeup. Mostly just lip gloss and maybe a little blush.”

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” Rhetta said, rummaging through a box in her closet. You could tell that the Mayeses had just moved in, the way half of Rhetta’s stuff was still packed up in cardboard boxes scattered around her room. “Do you think my dad would let me do all the makeup for the Christmas pageant if I didn’t?”

Marylin had to admit that it was unlikely that Mr. Mayes—make that Reverend Mayes—would trust Rhetta to put makeup on Mary and the angels if he thought she was going to turn them into witches and vampires and other creatures from the dark side. Still, you’d think he might worry about it just the teeniest bit.

Though, come to think of it, Reverend
Mayes didn’t seem like the worrying type. “You can call me Jack, all the youth at church do,” Reverend Mayes had told Marylin when Rhetta introduced them. “Actually, they call me Pastor Jack, and if you’re more comfortable with that, that’s fine.”

At the church Marylin went to, they called the minister Father Markham. Marylin wasn’t sure what his first name was, or if he even had one. She couldn’t imagine him ever dressed like Reverend Mayes was, in a pale blue polo shirt, jeans, and running shoes, and she couldn’t even begin to picture him sporting a little goatee on his chin. Marylin thought Reverend Mayes’s goatee was sort of cute. In fact, Reverend Mayes himself was sort of cute. But how did someone as clean-cut as he was end up with a daughter like Rhetta?

“Does your dad mind, you know, the way you dress and everything?” Marylin asked Rhetta as she applied eye shadow to the crease of Marylin’s right eye. “I mean, it’s not very church-y.”

“I think it bugs my mom, but not my dad,”
Rhetta said, breathing pepperoni pizza breath into Marylin’s face as she dabbed on the eye makeup. “My dad is a pretty contemporary guy. Like, we don’t have a choir at church, we have a band, you know? And there’s a youth band too, and the bass player has a pierced lip. My dad says clothes don’t matter and tattoos don’t matter. All that matters is what’s inside.”

Marylin peered at Rhetta in the mirror, thinking that it was absolutely impossible to know someone until you’d been in their house, and even then, you could never know them all the way. Everyone, it seemed to Marylin, had a part of them that stayed a mystery. She couldn’t figure out if she liked that idea or if it was a little scary, like there was a part of you that would always be alone. “So do you mind, like, having to go to church all the time and that stuff?”

“It’s not so bad.” Rhetta took a step back and examined her work. “It’s part of my job description, right? But that doesn’t mean I have to be all angelic and holy or anything. How boring would that be?”

Earlier that evening, at the dinner table, it had kind of shocked Marylin when Reverend Mayes led them in prayer over the pizza box at dinner, but what was even more shocking was that Rhetta had bowed her head and not seemed the least bit embarrassed about it.

While they were eating, Reverend and Mrs. Mayes ("Oh, just call me Miss Charlene, all the kids do") had asked Marylin questions about the middle school, which they told her was twice the size of Rhetta’s last school, and they asked her questions about herself. Mrs. Mayes had gotten all excited when she found out Marylin was a cheerleader.

“I was a cheerleader!” she’d exclaimed. “I loved it. You know what always bothered me, though? No one ever recognized that cheer-leading is really a sport. You have to be an athlete to be a cheerleader. I think people see that more now, but when I was in high school, everybody took cheerleaders for granted. We were just a lot of pretty faces back then.”

Marylin could see that Mrs. Mayes had probably been a good cheerleader. There was
something naturally bouncy about her, for one thing. Also, she seemed genuinely cheerful. She’d chattered on through dinner about this and that, saying funny and silly things that made Rhetta and her little brother Charlie moan and groan and giggle.

“Now, Rhetta was the cutest little baby,” Mrs. Mayes told Marylin. “But boy, was she fussy. She had colic her first year. Charlie here is lucky he ever got born, because, honey, after that first year with Rhetta screaming all day and night, I swore up and down that one baby was all I was going to have.”

Then she leaned over and gave Rhetta a kiss on the cheek. “But you turned out to be simply wonderful, didn’t you, sweetheart? The cutest two-year-old that ever was, and you’ve stayed cute ever since.”

Rhetta rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Yeah, right, Mom,” but Marylin could tell she really didn’t mind all that much.

“Your parents are nice,” Marylin told Rhetta now. “They’re really comfortable to be around.”

Rhetta blew some blush powder off a brush
and began swabbing Marylin’s cheeks with it. “Yeah, they’re okay. They’re way too strict, though. I do something wrong,
boom
! I’m on restriction for a month. Like this time last summer, when me and my friend stayed out in the backyard talking until midnight, only my parents thought I was in bed. When they realized I wasn’t, they called everybody they could think of trying to find me, and the whole time I was out back. Man, were they mad.”

“Just wait until that happens to you.” Reverend Mayes stood in the doorway to Rhetta’s room. “Then you’ll understand why we were so upset.”

He turned to Marylin. “I don’t know what time your folks are picking you up tomorrow, but I hope you’ll consider coming to church with us. Doesn’t matter what you wear. We don’t care too much about clothes at our church, do we, Rhetta?”

“Well, Mom finally made people take off their baseball caps during the service,” Rhetta pointed out.

“You have to admit, baseball caps in church
is pushing it,” Reverend Mayes said. “But otherwise, just about anything goes. If you’re afraid my sermon will be too boring, you can help Rhetta in the nursery. She has a heart for the little ones.”

“Okay,” said Marylin. “I might be able to go.”

Reverend Mayes smiled. “Fantastic! We’d love to have you. Heck, call your folks, ask them to meet us there for the service!”

Marylin looked at the floor. “Uh, my parents are divorced,” she said, ashamed to admit that to a minister. “So they don’t go to stuff together anymore.”

“That’s okay,” Reverend Mayes said kindly. “One or the other could come, or they could both come and sit on different sides. We’ve got some folks who do that.” He stepped out into the hallway, then turned back and smiled at Marylin. “Everybody’s broken, sweetie. God helps us get put back together.”

After her dad had walked down the hall, Rhetta said, “Excuse all the God talk around here. It gets old after a while.”

“It’s okay,” Marylin said. “I don’t really mind it.”

Rhetta stepped back and peered at Marylin. “Well, that’s good news. The even better news? You look fabulous.”

Marylin turned to the mirror to see, almost afraid to look. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she let out a little gasp. She was—well, beautiful. What had Rhetta done? You could hardly tell that Marylin had makeup on at all, but at the same time, she’d been totally transformed.

“I look like someone in a movie,” she told Rhetta. “I can hardly believe it’s me.”

“You look exactly like yourself, but with maybe a little more of what’s good on the inside shining through.”

Marylin laughed. “I think you have a heart for makeup.”

“I do,” Rhetta said. “I really do. Well, what I have a heart for is beautiful stuff. Like art and music and fairies. I like everything that’s beautiful.”