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We all chewed for a few seconds, considering who should be included. I took a sip of my Sprite and said, “Maybe we should just invite everybody.”

  “Yeah, right.” Kirstyn snorted.

  “Seriously,” I said. The middle school is so small, only about sixty kids per grade, sixth through eighth, that everybody gets to know everybody very well and there isn’t really a popular group or anything. Everybody is friendly to everybody else, though of course you have the people you sit with most or have on speed dial. The five of us are tight, but we’re friends with everybody. It’s not like middle school in the movies, all catty and nasty. “It’ll be fun, with everybody, and easier.”

  “The whole school?” Kirstyn asked, looking at me like I had announced I was actually planning to wear the eggplant dress she’d drawn.

  “No!” I laughed. “Just the eighth graders.”

  “The other eighth graders will have their own parties to go to graduation night,” Kirstyn said. “We wouldn’t want to go to their parties; why would they want to come to ours? Like, if Bridget Burgess had a party, would you want to go?”

  We all looked around at one another. The truth is, no, none of us would want to go, and also there is almost zero possibility that Bridget Burgess would have a party anyway. “I guess not,” I admitted.

  Gabrielle laughed, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I guess not!” We all kind of laughed along. Gabrielle is gorgeous. She’s always had the long tumbling dark hair and full, perfectly shaped lips; now that she’s on the travel swim team all winter and the one star on our pathetic track team in the spring, she has the hardbody to match. High school boys drool over her. But we’re her best friends. We know she’s a total goofball.

  “So?” Kirstyn uncapped her Sharpie. “Who makes the final cut, then? Should we write a list?”

  “On the other hand,” I said, “we are friendly with most of the people in the grade, so maybe it would be nasty to leave out just like eight or ten. I mean, it won’t make that much of a difference, right?”

  “Not that much, no,” Zhara said softly. “An additional eight people would be about, um, six hundred dollars more, total.”

  We all kind of looked down. So awkward! Poor Zhara: Did she really think I was asking about how many dollars of difference it would make?

  “Okay, what the heck, right?” I said, loud enough to break the awkwardness. “Let’s just invite ’em all.”

  “Says the class president,” Ann chimed in, her mouth half full of tuna.

  “Shut up, Ann,” Kirstyn said.

  I shrugged at Kirstyn. “If some people don’t want to come, they won’t, and at least we’re not being exclusive.”

  Every year in elementary school we got a talk from the school psychologist about how wrong it is to be exclusive, how hurtful it can be to leave somebody out. As if adults don’t choose their friends? It’s actually physically impossible to sit next to everybody at once. Please.

  “True,” Ann added. “We want to be inclusive.”

  “Sure,” said Zhara, eyes glued to her page of budget calculations. “Phoebe’s right, it doesn’t make that big a difference, so we may as well, I guess. If everybody agrees.”

  “So, is it unanimous?” Ann asked. “We’re inviting the whole grade?”

  We all shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” Gabrielle said, crumpling up her lunch garbage and tossing it in a perfect arc into the garbage can.

  “Fine,” Kirstyn grumbled, recapping her Sharpie.

  I smiled at her. We all always agree, ultimately. I was sure that within a few minutes, Kirstyn would forget she’d ever even had a different thought.

  I was wrong.

  3

  “GETTING PSYCHED FOR THE party,” a blushing girl named Melinda blurted, closing her locker, across the row from ours, at the end of the day. Her best friends, Jade and Syd, were blushing beside her. “I mean, you know, if I—I mean, if we—whatever. I mean, it’s gonna be so awesome…if we get—”

  “Great!” I interrupted, smiling at her.

  “Okay, bye!” Melinda barely managed. They all dashed away, latched to one another’s arms, whispering about how embarrassing that was.

  I shrugged and turned back to my locker. As I gathered up my stuff, I asked Kirstyn, “So, what else do we need to figure out? Anything?”

  “We’ll have to order more invitations, for one,” Kirstyn said sharply, slamming her locker shut. “My mother’s going to freak.”

  “You guys,” I said to the other three. “Wait until you see these invites Kirstyn found. They are so cute.”

  “I can’t wait,” Zhara said.

  “I guess I’ll call the place when I get home and up the order by a dozen.” Kirstyn grimaced, then swiveled her icy stare toward Ann. “Ann, did you ever call the Crazy Balloon Lady from Pleasantville?”

  Ann slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’ll call tonight,” she said.

  Kirstyn slid her eyes away.

  “Sorry,” Ann mumbled. “I’ll write myself a note.” She looked nervously from me to Zhara to Gabrielle. Kirstyn had been freezing her out all day. Ann was looking increasingly wrecked.

  “Well, see you guys later,” Zhara said quietly. She’s the only one of us who doesn’t do track, so she headed toward the early bus.

  “Bye,” I yelled after her. “Call you later!”

  We all gathered up our book bags and our clutches, and hurried down to track practice. As we changed into our uniforms, Kirstyn bent close to me and whispered, “Ann’s all like, we should include everybody, but the thing is, I am seriously not supposed to say this to anybody, but my mom is a little concerned about Ann’s family.”

  “What about them?” Actually, I’d been the one who was all like everybody should be included, but that was obviously not the point.

  Kirstyn twirled a wisp of her soft blond hair above her forehead. “My mother wouldn’t go into details,” she whispered. “But, you know, Ann’s family isn’t exactly, you know, quite as comfortable, so…”

  “You think they…” I was whispering, too. “You think Ann’s family can’t afford the party?”

  Kirstyn shrugged.

  “Wow.” I’d never really thought about that possibility before. “Seriously?”

  “Ann’s mom called my mom and was all like, do we have to hire a photographer? Couldn’t we just buy some of those crappy disposable cameras and let the kids take pictures of themselves?”

  “Really?”

  “I know, hideous. But I was eavesdropping on the phone upstairs so I heard her. Of course my mom was like, Well, that might be a thought….”

  We headed toward the sinks to check our ponytails. “Also,” Kirstyn whispered, “you know how everybody was supposed to give me a check for the down payment for the club? Ann didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Kirstyn just raised her eyebrows.

  “Did she say anything?”

  “No,” Kirstyn admitted.

  “Maybe she just forgot,” I said.

  Kirstyn closed her eyes slowly. “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I kind of shrieked. “Forget the party?!”

  “Phoebe, shh! I just mean, maybe we’re making too big a deal of it.”

  “Of what?” I grabbed her and pulled her into our locker row.

  “Graduating,” Kirstyn whispered. “Maybe we should just say, Hallelujah, we’re out of here, and move the heck on.”

  “Come on, Kirstyn,” I said, cramming my stuff into my locker. “It’s going to be the best party ever! It’s, what did your mom say? It’ll be a night we’ll all remember the rest of our lives.”

  “My mother. She’s even more excited for this party than you are. She’s like in heaven, planning it.” She blinked her big blue eyes at me. “It’s destined to be lame, Phoebe. No older boys will come to a middle school graduation party.”

  “Oh,” I said, finally understanding.

  “I’m not
just thinking about Justin Sachs, Phoebe. I don’t even like him anymore and you know it. It’s just, face it. We’re inviting all the same loser dweebs we’ve known since they were wetting their overalls in pre-K. What’s the point?”

  “The point is us.”

  She shrugged. “Things don’t always just work out, you know.”

  “Sure they do,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You have no idea, Phoebe, you really don’t.”

  “Seriously, I swear. With your mom planning it? And the five of us?” I gave her my most confident smile. “This party has to be great. Screw Justin Sachs. But you gotta give Ann a break, huh? You’ve been crazy harsh on her. You know it. She’s just a little spacey, lately. So what? Ease up, okay? Let’s go.”

  I started out toward the track, but Kirstyn didn’t follow. When I turned around, her eyes were blazing at me.

  “She’s not the only one who didn’t pay.”

  “Who else?”

  “You.”

  “I paid,” I said, smiling. My face was heating up, but that was ridiculous; I remembered getting the check from my mother like two weeks earlier. “My mom gave…”

  She grabbed her notebook out of her locker, opened to a middle page, and thrust it toward me. I looked down at her neat chart, with her cute rounded letters and ruler-straight lines drawn in purple. The only two without Xs in the down payment boxes were ANN and PHOEBE.

  “I didn’t pay?” I dug my clutch out of my locker and unzipped it. “Are you sure?” I asked, pulling stuff out of it, kneeling on the cold painted locker-room floor. “I’m pretty sure I got the check from my mother—Yes, I remember giving you the check! We were over by the…” But then, beneath old notes, pens, gum, my cell phone, and two tubes of MAC lip gloss, I found the crumpled check my mother had written. “Oops.” I handed the check to Kirstyn. “Sorry about that.”

  She held the crumpled check pinched between her pointer and thumb tips. “No problem. Hey, so can you sleep over Friday or not?”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course.” Whoops. She had asked me on Monday. I’d forgotten to ask my parents but I knew they’d say yes; they always did. All five of us love our sleepover parties; we talk ourselves hoarse and by dawn we can’t stop laughing. Allison thinks we act like second graders but we don’t care; we love ourselves.

  “Good,” Kirstyn said icily.

  “Sorry,” I added. The more superior and tough Kirstyn acts, the more fragile I know she’s feeling. Maybe her dad had been yelling more lately, or maybe she really was stressed about leaving our safe cocoon at Goldenbrook. Maybe she had tried to contact Justin, her ex, and he blew her off again. Ouch, that would make anybody prickly. Or maybe she really was fed up with middle school. Though I couldn’t really see why. Everything was going great. But I smiled at her. “Okay?”

  “Well,” Kirstyn said, still standing there stiff, my crumpled check dangling from her hand. “Come by seven.”

  “All right. But Kirstyn, listen. Don’t worry. Maybe Ann’s check is in her clutch too,” I said, willing her to put the check away and stop holding it like it was contagious. “I’m not the only space cadet.”

  “If she flakes out on the party and leaves us all in the lurch,” Kirstyn said, narrowing her eyes, “none of us will ever forgive her. Right?”

  “She’s not…nobody is flaking out, okay?” Yikes, you could see why half the girls in our grade were afraid of Kirstyn and the other half followed her around, begging for her attention. “It’ll be the best party ever,” I said, softer.

  She wiped a fuzz off the check and slid it into an envelope stapled to the inside cover of her notebook. “It better be.”

  “Come on; we’ll be late.”

  As we pushed through the heavy locker-room door, Luke Stoddard and his buddies walked by.

  “Great day,” Luke said.

  “Absolutely,” I answered. I watched him go, thinking, Phew, that boy can sure wear a pair of soccer shorts. Kirstyn was watching me watch him; I noticed when I pulled my eyes away. “What?”

  “Don’t even tell me.”

  “Shut up,” I said, shoving her lightly on the shoulder. I’m trying to be better at that, at like, reaching out and touching people. Apparently I’m not so smooth at it yet.

  She stumbled, then crinkled her tiny nose. “Hello, Phoebe? We’re supposed to be moving forward, not back to sixth grade.”

  “I’m not…”

  “Right. You just batted your flirty green eyes at Luke Stoddard. Can you say reruns?”

  “I totally did not!” I protested, but my stomach was in a knot as we jogged up the hill toward the rest of our team.

  Luckily, track was just as boring as always, and everything was back to normal at home after, too: Mom worked late, Gosia tracked down everything we couldn’t find like mayonnaise (Allison) or a calculator (me), and Dad bopped around all goofy, helping everybody with homework while trying out a new song for his kindergartners about sharing—until we all screamed at him to shut up and stop sharing it with us.

  School the next day was regular, too: four-minute bursts of everybody buzzing about the party—who’d get invited, what they’d wear, whether they should ask someone out to it—interrupted by deadly forty-two-minute stretches of teachers droning on about some academic thing everybody was too spring-fevered up to even pretend to learn. It was great. My cheeks hurt from smiling by fifth period.

  Since Wednesday is our only nontrack day, Kirstyn and I rode the early bus home. That was fun, too, since we got into a whole theory about how global warming had melted everybody’s brains slightly. I was just kidding, I thought, until I walked into my house.

  4

  “MOM!”

  We stared at each other across the expanse of the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was that she was barefoot. Her perfect toes, just like Quinn’s, lay in their rows like peas still snuggled in their pod. That’s what I was thinking was weird at first, that Mom was barefoot in the middle of the day.

  “Where are your shoes?” I asked her.

  “My shoes?”

  I noticed she was kind of squinting, and she was holding a bottle of medicine, and she was home. Honestly that’s the order in which it occurred to me: barefoot, squinting, medicine, home.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have a cramp,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  The thing is she never has a cramp. She never has anything wrong with her at all. She doesn’t even wear glasses. She never had braces. Other moms are always getting headaches or going to the chiropractor or getting their boobs or their veins done, but my mother doesn’t even stub her toe.

  And she never comes home in the middle of the day. Once when I broke my arm, she came home before I went to bed, even though she had a work dinner she had to go to, so she had to head right back into the city again after she signed my cast. Seeing her barefoot in the kitchen when I walked in after school was as crazy as it would have been to walk into social studies third period and see her barefoot in front of the class.

  “Is that why you’re home?” I asked.

  She rested the bottle and the cap on the counter and squinted up at me, like she was trying to see me more clearly, or figure out who I was.

  “You have cramps?” It occurred to me that maybe I was the one in the wrong place.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you sick?” When she didn’t answer right away, I felt the blood drain from my face. I have heard that expression before but never had the sensation, and it really does feel like that; you feel all the blood dripping down out of your skull and you can feel your brain, and your nose, suddenly chill.

  “I just had to get out of the office and drive, and it became clear to me what I had to do. Commit. It’s a golden opportunity. Could you do me a favor?”

  I ran around the center island to her side. Maybe there really was something wrong with her. Maybe she was seriously ill, and everybody knew it except me. How could my sisters not have told me? A
h, that brought the blood back up where it belonged.

  I wanted to do the right thing, let her lean on me, or carry her up to her bed like she would have done for me. I realized I was almost as tall as she is, which meant I had grown again, or maybe it was just that her shoes were off.

  I didn’t know what to do. I lifted my hand to touch her arm, but that seemed too weird, stilted, awkward. Ack, she’s Mom. She doesn’t need help, ever. I tried to pretend I was Quinn, who would know how to act.

  Meanwhile my hand hovered in the air, as if I were waiting to be called on by a teacher. By the time I realized that, it was too late to drop it without being really conspicuous, so I just let it hover there, as if that’s what I sometimes do when I am completely relaxed, just raise my hand, my gravity-averse left hand.

  My mother looked at my hand with slight curiosity for a moment. I was about to explain that I was stretching, just stretching my arm, or checking the, um, air pressure, when she put the pill bottle in it and said, “Thanks, Phoebe.”

  It was the store brand of ibuprofen. That was sort of reassuring. She wouldn’t be taking ibuprofen for something serious, I didn’t think. Daddy gives me ibuprofen for a sore throat or an imaginary fever and sends me to school. It would be prescription stuff if something really bad were going on. Right? Or at least not the store brand.

  “Can you get the cotton out?” Mom asked me.

  “Sure,” I said, poking my finger in and fishing out the long curl of cotton on top of the pills. “Why?”

  Uh-oh. Maybe it was a trick question. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take it out, just answer whether I could? Maybe there was something disgusting about getting the cotton out? How long had she been standing there in the kitchen, girding herself to pull out the cotton? Was she about to spring into her shoes, dash out the door, and go back to work? Should I be doing something? What if she asked me to help her up to bed?

  Oh, dread.

  The picture of her leaning on me up the long front stairway was too frightening and melodramatic for me to imagine without going weak in the knees.

  I recognized, as I was thinking all this, that I was kind of freaking out, and wondered if this is how it must feel to be Allison, who is constantly freaking out. Holding the bottle in one hand and the cotton snake in the other, I watched them both quiver.