The Blue Girl Read Free

me.”
    “Of course.”
    “So are you watching TV?” I asked.
    “No. Are you?”
    “Mm-hmm. Switch to channel twenty-two.”
    “Just a sec. I’m going into the other room.”
    “You have a cordless phone, don’t you? I’m so jealous. Mom won’t let us have one because she thinks it’ll give us brain cancer.”
    “She’s probably thinking of a cell phone, which is what I’m on. And nothing’s been proven one way or another. What channel did you say?”
    “Twenty-two.”
    “That’s just the weather channel.”
    “I know. Can you believe that woman’s hair? It doesn’t move.”
    “Oh, my god, you’re right. It’s just like a helmet.”
    “We should send her a letter. Maybe she doesn’t know.”
    “How could she not know?”
    We spent a while channel flipping, keeping up a running commentary on everything we saw. Maxine might have thought she was normal, but she had me giggling hysterically more than a few times with her observations, and that’s something normal people never seem to do. At least not intentionally.
    “I should go,” she finally said when we landed back on the weather channel for maybe the fifth time. The weather woman’s hair still wasn’t moving. “I need to study.”
    “I thought you were naturally smart.”
    “Mensa material, apparently. But you still have to stick information in your head so that the big brain has something to work with.”
    “So that’s the step I’ve been missing. See you tomorrow in school?”
    “Of course,” she said. “It’s not like we could just blow it off.”
    I let that go. Just because I had bad habits was no reason to share them. One of the teachers at my old school used to call me a virus because of how the trouble I got into always spilled over onto whoever happened to hang around with me. I was going to make a valiant effort to not let that happen with Maxine.
    “I wish we had some of the same classes,” I said. “Or at least the same homeroom.”
    “No, you don’t. Your friend Valerie’s in my homeroom.”
    “God, does everybody know everybody's business in this school?”
    “Why are you surprised? You’re the new girl, and she’s the captain of the cheerleader squad.”
    When Jared told me she was a cheerleader, I should have realized she’d be the captain. No rank-and-file for that girl.
    “You might want to be careful around her,” Maxine added. “She can be pretty mean, and people tend to follow her lead. Trust me, I know.”
    “I’ll be the very model of a careful, well-behaved mouse and stay out of her way.”
    Maxine laughed. “I think this is going to be a very interesting year.”
    “Good night, Maxine.”
    “Good night, Imogene.”
    We hung up. After I cradled the receiver, I lay my head back on the arm of the couch and smiled happily. This felt so much better than it had been back in Tyson, where for some reason I’d always had a chip on my shoulder. Maxine made everything seem so different. Better.
    I loved Jared, but I needed a girl in my life. Someone my own age. Mom liked to act like she was our sibling, but while I loved her too, it just wasn’t the same because, at the end of the day, there’d always come a point where she’d feel the need to play the mother card.
    And who knew? Maybe if I hung around with Maxine enough I’d get smart, too. But it’d have to be by osmosis, because it wasn’t something I could ever see myself actually working on. Do as much as you need to get by—that was my motto. I’d leave it to somebody else to put in all the effort to become valedictorian.
    *    *    *
    Of course, keeping out of Valerie Clarke’s way proved to be impossible. I don’t know if it was some holdover of the way I was this trouble magnet back in Tyson, or if she’d just decided to make a project out of giving me a hard time, but I seemed to run into her everywhere. At first I managed to keep my mouth shut when she made her snide little comments, but that got old fast, and being a