The Secret Language of Girls (7 page)

The snow blanketing the front yard made Marylin think of vanilla frosting. She scooped some up with her bare hand and licked it. The snow tasted sweet and fresh and made
Marylin’s tongue tingle. She wondered if Eskimos ate snow for dessert. They could pour chocolate syrup on it and it would almost be like having a sundae.

“Marylin, what are we doing out here?” Elyse asked, rubbing her hands together. Behind her the trees held out their frozen branches as though they were asking each other to dance.

Marylin turned to Kate and flapped her arms. She was sending a secret signal that only Kate would understand.

“Snow angels!” Kate yelled.

The four girls stood in a row with a few feet between each of them. “Okay,” Marylin instructed. “On the count of three: one, two, . . . three!”

Everyone flopped backward into the snow. Arms and legs scissored in frozen jumping jacks. Overhead the stars flickered and flamed.

When they stood up, four silvery angels were spread across the yard.

“Marylin, what are you girls doing?” Marylin’s mom stood at the front door, her robe wrapped tightly around her. Ashley and Kayla peeked out from behind her shoulders.

“Come and look, Mrs. McIntosh!” Kate yelled. “It’s like heaven out here!”

“It’s freezing!” Marylin’s mom ducked back inside. A few moments later she returned to the doorway wearing rubber boots.

“What is all the commotion about?” she asked, trudging through the snow toward the girls. She sounded annoyed. “I find two of you on the phone asking someone if he’s got Dr Pepper in a can, and the rest of you are outside catching pneumonia. Marylin, I just don’t know why you let these things happen.”

“Look, Mom,” Marylin said. “Just look.”

Her mom looked at the snow and didn’t say anything for a second. “Snow angels,” she said finally, making the words sound like the beginning of a song. “Your aunt Tish and I
used to love to make snow angels.” Marylin’s mom flapped her arms, as though she could make an angel in the air.

“Go ahead, Mrs. McIntosh,” Brittany said. “We’ll do it with you.”

Marylin’s mom nodded her head. “It would be nice to have a yard full of angels.”

For the next week, until the snow melted completely and ran in rivulets to the street, the angels stayed stretched out across Marylin’s lawn. Every time she walked down her driveway, Marylin thought it was pretty the way the angels melted a little bit every day so that by the end of the week their wings were touching, as if the angels were holding one another up. Her mom’s angel was the tallest, and Marylin’s angel was right next to it, and Kate’s next to Marylin’s. Marylin could see the marks in the snow where their arms had flapped and flapped, as though any second they expected to fly.

The afternoon sun streamed through the window, making a puddle of light on the kitchen floor. Kate watched it for several minutes, wondering where light went once it got dark outside. Did it fly off to outer space, or did it just stop existing? And did light really have a speed? How could anyone tell? It looked like it was just sitting there to Kate.

Kate walked over to the refrigerator and opened the freezer compartment. Who needed Marylin and Flannery when life was full of interesting scientific mysteries? Who needed
friends when you could have a milk shake? Kate decided that she absolutely did not care that Marylin and Flannery were ignoring her, as though she were a pocket of air taking up space on the school bus. It had happened so quickly, without any warning. There had been the party, where everything was like old times—Kate and Marylin, Marylin and Kate. And then Flannery had come back from her trip to Washington, D.C., and a week later no one was talking to Kate anymore.

“You are going to blow up like a balloon if you eat ice cream all the time,” Tracie said, walking into the kitchen, where Kate was scooping some Rocky Road into the blender.

“Is that what happened to you?” Kate asked. “Is that your excuse?”

“Oh, please,” Tracie said. She opened the refrigerator and took out a can of diet soda. “I weigh exactly what I’m supposed to for my age and height.”

Tracie was fourteen and acted like she’d recently been crowned Queen of the Universe. She spent two hours a day in the bathroom glopping makeup on her face and spritzing styling gunk all over her hair. It was a wonder Kate ever got a chance to brush her teeth. She’d probably have a mouth full of cavities next time she went to the dentist, just because Tracie couldn’t leave the house without looking like a movie star.

Kate pushed the
MIX
button on the blender. “It must be a real pain, being so perfect all the time,” she told Tracie.

“It can be,” Tracie said. “But I do my best to live with it.”

Kate pushed the
PURÉE
button so she wouldn’t have to hear anything else that Tracie said for the next thirty seconds. She watched as the fudge and nuts and marshmallows blurred together into one beautiful shade of chocolate brown.

Tracie sat down at the kitchen table and leafed through a fashion magazine. “So why aren’t you at Marylin’s?” she asked. “Last time I checked, you were practically living over there.”

“Marylin’s boring,” Kate said, pouring her milk shake into a glass. “She never wants to do anything good anymore.”

“Or maybe she just doesn’t want to do anything with you,” Tracie said. “I can’t say that I blame her.”

It occurred to Kate that throwing her milk shake at Tracie would be a very satisfying thing to do right at that moment. Unfortunately she’d used up the last of the ice cream, and she’d hate to waste perfectly good Rocky Road on someone as dumb as her sister.

“I’ll forget that you said that,” Kate told Tracie on her way out of the kitchen. “I know you’ll feel very horrible about it later, and that’s enough for me.”

Tracie’s gulping laughter followed Kate out the front door to the porch. It was the story of Kate’s life. She had friends who didn’t act like friends and a sister who didn’t act like a sister. Maybe everyone she knew should watch more TV so they could get an idea of how normal people treated each other.

Kate sat down on the top of the steps and began drinking her milk shake. Her next-door neighbor Courtney was standing in her front yard. Courtney was six, and she thought everything Kate did was terrific. Kate could dump a bucket of mud over her head and run in circles around her yard, and Courtney would say,
I want to do that! Show me how to do that!

“Kate, look what I found!” Courtney yelled. From a distance, in her bright-green jacket, Courtney looked like a giant frog. Kate was amazed that little kids never seemed to care about what they wore. Once she had seen
Courtney walk down the hall at school dressed in ballet slippers, overalls, and a sweater wrapped around her head like a turban. Courtney appeared to have no idea that at that moment she looked like the weirdest person in the world.

“Look what I found with my stick!” Courtney called again. A dingy white piece of fabric was waving from the top of Courtney’s stick like a flag. When Courtney got closer, Kate realized it was a dirty sock.

“That’s gross,” Kate said. “What in the world do you want that for?”

“It’s a clue,” Courtney said. “I think it’s a murderer’s sock.”

“Why would a murderer’s sock be in your front yard?”

Courtney thought about this for a moment. “Because it fell off of him when he was running away.”

“Courtney,” Kate said, sighing very loudly to
emphasize the fact that she was starting to get annoyed, “what makes you think there’s a murderer around here?”

Courtney smiled. “Buddy told me.”

Buddy was Courtney’s invisible friend. According to Courtney, Buddy never slept, and he could sneak into people’s houses without them knowing, and sometimes he had lunch with the president. Courtney always relied on Buddy for the inside scoop.

“Whatever,” Kate said, draining the last drop of her milk shake. “I’ve got to go in now.” She stood up and turned toward the front door. Just because her so-called friends no longer spoke to her didn’t mean Kate was going to make a habit of hanging out with six-year-olds.

“But, Kate!” Courtney said, running over to the bottom of the steps. “What if the murderer comes back tonight looking for his sock? He could go into your house and kill you!”

“I’ll make sure Max sleeps on the end of my
bed,” Kate said, not bothering to turn around. “Okay?”

“I don’t know, Kate,” Courtney said, sounding worried. “I think I better come over and spend the night with you, just in case something bad might happen.”

Courtney’s big dream was that one day she would be invited to spend the night at Kate’s house. She was always inventing excuses about why it was very important that she sleep over. Last week she claimed her mom had a cold, and if Courtney didn’t spend the night at Kate’s, she would probably catch her mom’s cold and die.

“If the murderer kills me in my sleep tonight, you can have all my Barbies, okay?”

“Can I have the Dream House, too?” Courtney asked, sounding excited. Then she must have realized that if Kate got murdered, she wouldn’t live next door anymore. “You know what? I don’t think there really is a
murderer,” she called after Kate. “I think Buddy was making that up.”

Kate slammed the front door behind her. She wondered which was worse—an invisible friend who made up stories about murderers coming to get you, or real friends who stopped talking to you. Not that she cared, really. She was sick and tired of Marylin and Flannery. She didn’t want a thing to do with either of them.

On Thursday morning Marylin and Flannery had officially been ignoring Kate for three days.

It all started when Kate went to the bus stop in front of Flannery’s house Monday morning. She said hi, the way she always did, the cold December air turning her breath into a cartoon bubble, but Marylin and Flannery didn’t say anything back. Kate tried a few more times to get Marylin and Flannery to say something, but they wouldn’t. Kate almost turned around
and went home. She suddenly felt like she had a temperature.

Instead she got on the bus and took a seat behind her two so-called friends. She leaned forward and asked, “Did I do something that made you mad? Is that why you’re not talking to me?”

Marylin and Flannery looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Flannery leaned over and whispered something into Marylin’s ear. Then they both started laughing hysterically.

“Go ahead and be that way,” Kate said, sitting back in her seat. “It just shows how immature you are.”

“I’d rather be immature than be a certain unnamed person who smells like they haven’t had a bath in three months,” Flannery said, without turning around.

Kate put her chin to her chest and sniffed. She couldn’t smell anything bad. All she could smell was the laundry detergent her mom used.
She sniffed to her left and sniffed to her right. “There is nothing wrong with the way I smell,” she said.

This made Marylin and Flannery laugh even harder. Kate felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She looked out the window and worked very hard not to blink. She wasn’t in the mood to cry.

Marylin and Flannery kept ignoring Kate all day. Kate made the mistake of following them to Marylin’s house after school, thinking there was some way she could make them talk to her. She thought she might be able to reason with them. Kate was a very reasonable person after all, and until recently Marylin had practically been the most reasonable person on the face of the planet. They should be able to talk things out, shouldn’t they? That’s what happened when friends had problems on TV. They communicated with each other. Kate and Flannery
and Marylin just needed to communicate.

As it turned out, Marylin and Flannery were not in the mood to communicate that afternoon. They let Kate follow them into the house and upstairs to Marylin’s room, but whenever Kate tried to talk to them, they acted like she wasn’t even there. Kate sat with her back against Marylin’s purple love seat, which Kate had helped Marylin pick out at the furniture store the year before. Marylin and Flannery sat on Marylin’s bed and talked in especially loud voices, as if they wanted to make sure that Kate wasn’t missing a word, even though she was sitting only five feet away.