The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (20 page)

“You’re a very pretty girl, Marylin,” her mom insisted. “People pay to have hair like yours—it’s like moonlight. And brown eyes? Please! Don’t ruin what nature’s given you.”

“But what about nail polish, Mom?” Marylin asked when her mom was through. “Nail polish isn’t really makeup.”

Her mom considered this for a moment. Ever since she and Marylin’s dad had been fighting so much, you could sometimes get her to change her mind about things. It was like
she had only so much fighting energy in her. “No black,” she said finally, giving Marylin a stern look. “I absolutely forbid black.” “No black,” Marylin had promised.

“So when did you start painting your toenails, anyway?” Kate asked Marylin during a commercial break. “I can’t believe your mom would let you do that.”

“She said it was okay,” Marylin said, wiggling her toes so they shimmered a little in the TV’s blue glow. “I just can’t use black or purple or anything like that. My mom said pink is perfectly respectable.”

“Whatever,” Kate said, turning back to the TV, where a glamorous woman was shaking her head around so that her hair bounced up and down like a Slinky. The woman was wearing a long, silky dress that was cut low in the front. Watching her made Marylin feel itchy. She wondered what the glamorous woman’s
parents thought when they saw her on television. Did they wish she’d covered up a little more?

Marylin picked up a pen and a pad of paper from the coffee table. Lately she’d been practicing her signature, trying to make it look more sophisticated. Who knew—maybe she’d be a movie star one day and would have to sign autographs left and right. A few weeks ago she’d changed the spelling of her name from Marilyn to Marylin, to make it seem less old-fashioned. How her parents had come up with the idea of naming a girl born on the very brink of the twenty-first century
Marilyn
was beyond her.

“Who’s ‘Marylin’?” Kate asked, peering over Marylin’s shoulder. “Did you know you were spelling your own name wrong?”

“This is how I spell my name now,” Marylin explained. “It’s the new me.”

“Why do you need to be a new you?” Kate
wanted to know. “There’s nothing wrong with the old you. I like the old you.”

“I’m sick of the old me,” Marylin said. She hadn’t realized this until she said it out loud, but she instantly knew it was the truth.

Sounds of distress from the kitchen suddenly tumbled down the stairs. “Scram! Go on now!!” Kate’s mom cried. “Get away from there, you dumb cat!”

Kate jumped up. “What’s wrong, Mom?” she called, running to the stairs.

“Oh, there’s this stupid cat—” Mrs. Faber’s voice broke off. Marylin could hear her pounding on the window. “Stop that! Stop that!”

Kate flew up the steps, Marylin following close on her heels. When they reached the kitchen, Mrs. Faber was out in the yard chasing an orange cat with a bird in its mouth.

“Drop it, you stupid animal!” Mrs. Faber yelled after the cat as it disappeared in the dark border of the boxwood shrubs. She
turned to Kate and Marylin, who had joined her in the yard. “This is why we have a dog,” she said angrily. “Dogs don’t eat birds.”

“Don’t you remember that time Max tried to eat a duck?” Kate asked her mom. Max was the Fabers’ basset hound.

“Max wasn’t trying to eat the duck,” Mrs. Faber said, sounding irritated. “He was trying to smell it. That’s what basset hounds do. They smell things.”

Marylin heard a peeping noise from the bushes in front of the Fabers’ screened porch. She followed the peeps until she found a nest perched on a tight canopy of branches illuminated by the porch light. In the nest was a tiny gray bird with its mouth opened so wide, Marylin could see all the way down its throat.

“It’s waiting for its mom to come back to feed it,” Kate said, coming up behind Marylin. “It looks really hungry.”

“I don’t think its mom is coming back,” Mrs. Faber said. She patted Kate’s shoulder. “I think the cat got its mom.”

“I guess we’ll have to feed it, then,” Kate said. “We’ll put its nest in a shoe box and keep it inside, where it can be warm at night. We’ll find it some worms.”

“It probably won’t make it, Kate,” Mrs. Faber said. She sounded sad. “I don’t think the little bird will make it without its mom.”

Kate ignored her mother. Turning to Marylin, she said, “Go get Petey. He can help us dig up worms. Tell him to bring a flashlight. And ask your mom if she has an eyedropper. We’ll need an eyedropper.”

Marylin felt like a soldier taking orders from General Patton. “Yes, sir!” she said to Kate, and then she turned and ran through the damp grass toward home, wondering when Kate had suddenly become boss of the world.

The Kind of Friends We Used to Be

Also by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Chicken Boy

Dovey Coe

Falling In

The Secret Language of Girls

Shooting the Moon

Where I’d Like to Be

The Phineas L. MacGuire Books
(Illustrated by Preston McDaniels)

Phineas L. MacGuire... Erupts!
Phineas L. MacGuire... Gets Slimed!
Phineas L. MacGuire... Blasts Off!

by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Atheneum Books for Young Readers New York London Toronto Sydney

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

•
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
 

• An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
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• This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

• Copyright © 2009 by Frances O’Roark Dowell 

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. • Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition. • Book design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian • The text for this book is set in Lomba Book. • Manufactured in the United States of America • 0310 OFF 

• First Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition April 2010 -10 987654321-

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Dowell, Frances O’Roark. • The kind of friends we used to be / Frances O’Roark Dowell.—1st ed. • p. cm. 

• Summary: Twelve-year-olds Kate and Marylin, friends since preschool, draw further apart as Marylin becomes involved in student government and cheerleading, while Kate wants to play guitar and write songs, and both develop unlikely friendships with other girls and boys.

 • ISBN 978-1-4169-5031-8 (hc) 

• [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Middle schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] 1. Title. 

• PZ7.D75455Kin 2009 • [Fic]—dc22 • 2008022245 

• ISBN 978-1-4169-9779-5 (pbk) 

• ISBN 978-1-4424-0616-2 (eBook)