The Secret Language of Girls (2 page)

“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 lights were on at the new people’s house, Marylin noticed as she crossed the street. It used to be the Savoys’ house, but then Mr. Savoy got a new job in Boston and Mrs. Savoy decided she’d prefer not to move to Boston with Mr. Savoy. Marylin’s mother was on the phone with Mrs. Savoy every day for almost a month, discussing the pros and cons of various apartment complexes around town.

The new people had a girl who was a year older than Marylin and Kate. Her name was Flannery, which Marylin had learned the day before, when she and Kate had gone over to introduce themselves. If Marylin had been the new person on the street, she would have been shy and not said too much, just asked a few questions about school and what kind of clothes everybody wore. Mostly she would have just appreciated two girls coming over to say hi, even if they were only
sixth graders and she was a seventh grader. Flannery was not that type of person at all. She’d started bragging immediately how she’d been the most popular person in the history of her old school, and she was sure that everyone in her new school would be really boring.

“Talk about a huge letdown,” Kate said as she and Marylin had walked back over to Marylin’s house. “I was hoping she’d be a good person to be friends with. And I was especially hoping she’d like basketball, but she is definitely not a team player.”

Marylin knew exactly what Kate meant. But at the same time, she’d found Flannery a little bit fascinating, in a scary sort of way. Imagine not caring what people thought about you. Imagine being one hundred percent sure you would automatically be the most amazing person in your class, as Flannery most certainly did.

Marylin tried as hard as she could, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine being a girl like Flannery.

The little bird was peeping from its nest in a shoe box on Kate’s desk. Marylin struggled out of her sleeping bag and pulled herself up on her elbows to look at the clock radio, which informed her it was 2:13
A.M.
She wondered if the little bird would ever fall asleep.

“Maybe it wants another worm,” Kate said from her bed, startling Marylin. She hadn’t realized Kate was awake.

“You just gave it a worm at midnight,” Marylin said. “How many worms can a baby bird eat?”

“How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Kate answered, giggling.

“What?”

“It’s a joke my dad tells,” Kate explained. “I don’t remember the answer, though.”

Marylin sighed. Kate was back in first-grader land. She looked like a little kid just waking up, with her short brown hair sticking out in a million directions, like a tornado had touched down on it for a few seconds. “Maybe you should get some sleep,” she told Kate gently.

Kate picked up a flashlight from her bedside table and trained its beam on the shoe box. The little bird’s beak glowed red in its light.

“I can’t sleep,” Kate said. “Someone has to stay up with the bird in case it needs anything.” She scootched out of bed and walked over to her desk, where she dipped the eyedropper in a glass of water. “Are you thirsty, little bird? Do you want something to drink?”

Turning to Marylin, Kate said, “We ought to give it a name so we can call it something besides ‘little bird.’ How about Pee Wee?”

Marylin slid back in her sleeping bag. “It’s probably going to die,” she said. “I’m not sure naming the bird is a great idea.” Then Marylin
thought maybe that was a mean thing to say, especially at two fourteen in the morning. Still, it was about time Kate learned the facts of life. It was time that Kate grew up a little bit.

“But maybe it won’t die,” Kate said, sitting on the floor next to Marylin’s sleeping bag. “Remember in second grade when Priscilla Jones got really sick and everyone thought she was going to die? But she didn’t. She got well again because she had really good doctors.”

“Priscilla Jones wasn’t a tiny bird without any mother,” Marylin pointed out. “And besides, you’re not a doctor.”

“But I might be someday,” Kate said. “I might grow up to be a vet.”

Marylin closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the clock read 4:38
A.M.
Kate was sitting at her desk, hovering over the peeping little bird.

“Pee Wee, Pee Wee, Pee Wee,” Kate was singing to the little bird. “One day you’ll fly through the trees.”

When the sun forced Marylin’s eyes open the next morning, the first thing she noticed was how quiet Kate’s room was. As soon as she saw the shoe box on Kate’s desk, Marylin realized why. The little bird had stopped peeping.

Marylin looked around the room as though she expected to see the little bird perched on the windowsill or asleep on Kate’s pillow. Instead she saw Kate’s feet on Kate’s pillow. Kate’s head was propped against a stuffed giraffe. She was snoring small, whistling snores.

“Little bird?” Marylin whispered as she worked her way out of the sleeping bag. “Pee Wee?” she whispered as she walked over to Kate’s desk. “Are you ready for your breakfast worm?”

The little bird lay very still in its nest. Marylin slowly reached out her finger toward it. She didn’t want to scare the little bird. But the little bird didn’t move when Marylin touched it. It just lay there, cold and stiff.

“I guess you died,” Marylin said to the little bird. “I guess I knew you would.”

Marylin sat down in the desk chair. The thing was, she hadn’t really known the little bird would die. She had just said it to be mean. Maybe the bird had heard her and lost all hope.

Kate’s snores made a soft music from the bed. Marylin thought about waking her up to tell her about the little bird, but she didn’t. Instead she sat very quietly and looked at her feet.

She would trade her pink toenails to hear the little bird peep.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a friend who everyone will miss, especially me.”

Kate stood over the little bird’s shoe box in the backyard, her hands clasped at her waist, a black hat pulled low over her brow. Marylin thought the hat added a respectfully somber note to the proceedings, even if it was from Mr. Faber’s Charlie Chaplin costume.

Marylin had been afraid that Kate would start crying that morning when she woke up to find that the little bird had died. But Kate had just stroked the little bird’s down a few times and said, “Well, I guess he’s with his mom in heaven now. I guess he’s probably pretty happy about that.”

Then she had thrown on a pair of jeans and her “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt and carried the little bird’s shoe box downstairs to the screened porch.

“I’ll fix us some cereal while you get dressed,” she’d told Marylin after she’d come back inside. “Then we’ll plan the funeral.”

The funeral procession left the screened
porch for the woods lining Kate’s backyard at 11:30
A.M.
Kate carried the little bird in its box, followed by Marylin and her brother, Petey. Kate had asked her mom if she wanted to come, but Mrs. Faber said funerals made her sad, and besides, she had to go to work.

“Does anyone have any last words they’d like to say?” Kate asked after her opening remarks. She took off her black hat and held it over her heart.

Petey stepped forward. “I didn’t know Pee Wee very well,” he said. “But I wish I did. From what everyone says, it sounds like he was really nice.”