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“Nice dress,” Marta Velazquez said. “Is it your mommy’s?”
I was wearing a vintage polka-dot swing dress—two sizes too large that I’d tightened with safety pins—over a longsleeved striped shirt and jeans rolled greaser-style. I wanted to look pretty for my birthday.
I no longer felt pretty.
Cricket turned around, confused. And then . . . he did something that changed everything. He stepped deliberately in front of them and blocked my view. “Don’t listen to them. I like how you dress.”
He liked me just as I was.
I sat down quietly on my pizza box. “It’s our turn.”
But what I ached to say was, I need you.
On the walk home, he had me joking and laughing about the people who’d tormented me for years. I finally realized how absurd it was that I’d worried so much about what my classmates thought about me. It’s not like I wanted to look like them.
“Cricket!” Andy said, when he saw us approaching. “You’re coming over for the birthday dinner, right?”
I looked at Cricket hopefully. He put his hands in his pockets. “Sure.”
It was simple and perfect. My only guests were Nathan, Andy, Lindsey, and Cricket. We ate Margherita pizza, followed by an extravagant cake shaped like a crown. I ate the first piece, Cricket ate the biggest. Afterward, I walked my friends outside. Lindsey gave me a nudge in the back and disappeared.
Cricket shuffled his feet. “I’m not great with gifts.”
My heart leaped. But instead of a kiss, he removed a fistful of watch parts and candy wrappers from his pocket. Cricket sifted through the pile until he found a soda-bottle cap, metallic pink. He held it up. “Your first.”
Perhaps most girls would’ve been disappointed, but I am not most girls. We’d recently seen a belt made out of bottle caps in a store window, and I’d said that I wanted to make one. “You remembered!”
Cricket smiled in relief. “I thought it was a good one. Colorful.” And as he placed it in my open palm, I reread the message scrawled onto the back of his hand for the hundredth time that day: FUSE NOW.
This was the moment.
I gripped the cap and stepped forward. His breathing quickened. So did mine.
“You promised you’d be there!”
We jumped apart. Calliope was on the porch next door, seemingly on the verge of tears. “I needed you, and you weren’t there.”
An unmistakable flash of panic in his eyes. “Oh God, Cal. I can’t believe I forgot.”
She was wearing a delicate cardigan, but the way she crossed her arms was anything but soft. “You’ve been forgetting a lot of things lately.”
“I’m sorry. It slipped my mind, I’m so sorry.” He tried to shake the wrappers and watch parts back into his pocket, but they spilled onto my porch.
“Smooth, Cricket.” She looked at me and scowled. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.”
But she was still talking to him.
“Thanks for dinner,” he mumbled, shoving everything back into his pockets. “Happy birthday.” He left without looking at me. From their porch, Calliope was still glaring. I felt slapped in the face. Ashamed. I didn’t have anything to be ashamed about, but she had that effect. If she wanted you to feel something, you would.
Later, Cricket told me that he was supposed to have gone to some meeting. He was vague about it. After that, it was as if we’d taken a small step backward. We started school. He hung out with Lindsey and me, while Calliope made new friends. There was a quiet tension between the twins. Cricket didn’t talk about it, but I knew he was upset.
One Friday after school, he showed me a video of the Swiss Jolly Ball—a mechanical wonder he’d seen while visiting a museum in Chicago. I hadn’t been inside his house since Calliope’s icy behavior at the beginning of summer. I’d hoped this was an excuse to go into his bedroom, but his laptop was in the living room. He sat on one side of a love seat, leaving space to sit beside him. Was it an invitation? Or a gesture of kindness, in that he was offering me the room’s larger couch?
WHY WAS THIS SO HARD?
I took a chance and sat beside him. Cricket pulled up the video, and I scooted closer, under the guise of seeing it better. I couldn’t concentrate, but as the machine’s silver ball shot through tunnels, set off whistles, and zoomed across tracks, I laughed in delight anyway. I inched closer until I was in the dip between the cushions. I smelled the faintest twinge of his sweat, but it wasn’t bad. It was very far from bad. And then the side of my hand brushed the side of his, and my heart collapsed.
He was very still.
I cleared my throat. “Are you doing anything special for your birthday tomorrow?”
“No.” He moved his hand into his lap, flustered. “Nothing. I’m not doing anything.”
“Okay . . .” I stared at his hand.
“Actually, Calliope has some skating thing. So it’ll be another afternoon of bad rink food, skating vendors, and squealing girls.”
Was that an excuse to avoid me? Had I been wrong this whole time? I went home upset and called Lindsey. “No way,” she said. “He likes you.”
“You didn’t see him. He’s been acting so weird and cagey.”
But the next morning, I met up with Lindsey to find a present for him. I wasn’t ready to give up. I couldn’t give up. I knew he needed an obscurely sized wrench for a project, and I also knew he was having trouble finding it online. We spent the entire day hunting the city’s specialty shops, and as I walked home that night so proud of procuring one, I felt a nervous hope again. And then I saw it.
A party in full swing.
The Bell house was loud and packed, and there were strings of tiki lights hanging in their bay windows. This wasn’t a party that happened at the last second. It was a planned party. A planned party that I had not been invited to.
I froze there, devastated, holding the tiny wrench and taking in the spectacle. A pack of girls rushed past me and up the stairs. How had the twins made so many new friends so quickly? The girls knocked on the door, and Calliope opened it and greeted them with happy laughter. They moved past her and into the house. And that’s when she saw me, staring up from the sidewalk.
She paused, and then made a face. “So what? Too good for our party?”
“Wh-what?”
“You know, after spending so much time with my brother, it seems like the least you could do is pop your head in and wish him a happy birthday.”
My mind reeled. “I wasn’t invited.”
Calliope’s expression changed to surprise. “But Cricket said you couldn’t come.”
Explosion. Pain. “I . . . he didn’t ask. No.”
“Huh.” She eyed me nervously. “Well. Bye.”
The lavender door slammed shut. I stared at it, burning with hurt and humiliation. Why didn’t he want me at his party? I stumbled inside my house, yanked my curtains closed, and burst into racking sobs. What happened? What was wrong with me? Why didn’t he like me anymore?
His light turned on at midnight. He called my name.
I tried to focus on the catastrophic blow inside my chest. He called my name again. I wanted to ignore him, but how could I? I opened my window.
Cricket stared at his feet. “So, um, what did you do tonight?”
“Nothing.” My voice was curt as I threw back his own words. “I didn’t do anything.”
He looked upset. It only made me despise him more, for trying to make me feel guilty. “Good night.” I started to close my window.
“Wait!” He yanked at his hair, pulling it taller. “I—I just found out that I’m moving.”
It felt as if I’d been knocked in the skull. I blinked, startled to discover fresh tears. “You’re leaving? Again?”
“Monday.”
“Two DAYS from now?” Why couldn’t I stop crying? I was such an idiot!
“Calliope is going back to her last coach.” He sounded helpless. “It’s not working out here.”
“
Is everything not working out here?” I blurted. “There’s nothing you want to say to me before you leave?”
Cricket’s mouth parted, but it remained silent. His difficult equation face. A full minute passed, maybe two. “At least we have that in common,” I finally said. “There’s nothing I want to say to you either.”
