Wicked Sweet Read Free Page B

she was hot and sick. She walked in the front door, opened the freezer, and stuck her head inside. I carried my one box (containing colored pencils, sketchbooks, my collection of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and an empty piggy bank) to the top of the creaky stairs and set it in the corner. I had my special things—I was moved in. I opened the window and leaned out to see what the world would look like. That’s when I saw Chantal in her backyard, crouched in the shade, staring at a glass bottle glinting in the sun. A sprinkler waved over the flowerbeds on the steep incline.
    “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey!” She didn’t hear me. I got louder. “Hey you, in the backyard.” She still didn’t look up. I pounded down the stairs, stopped to watch my mother run past clutching her stomach, vomit in the toilet. “Jesus, I’m pregnant,” I heard her tell Dad 2. “I just know these things,” she said.
    When she had her head back in the freezer, I approached her.
“Mom. I’m going to meet my best friend next door.” I just knew Chantal and I had a shared destiny.
    “Hey.” My shadow stretched over the glass bottle in Chantal’s dandelion-free grass. I could see the bottle had strips of duct tape markings all up the side. “What are you doing?”
    “Watching evaporation.”
    “Cool. Can I watch, too?”
    “It takes a long time, evaporation. You have to be real patient.”
    “Oh, I’m patient,” I said. “Dad Two says I’m charming, too. He says I could tame a grizzly bear.”
    “Whoa,” she said. “I’d like to see that.”
    We were made for each other: two geeky girls with shared time, loneliness, and dreams of being important one day. I’ve always believed that I moved next door to my soul sister, but maybe things have changed.
     
     
    Now, I’m standing on the hill, looking fabulous in my bikini, beside the guy I want most to notice me, and I’m shouting for Chantal to come back. I have waited too long. Shocked that she bolted like she was being chased, but worried that Parker would lose interest, I did nothing. Now, though, I run after her. I don’t know how to convince her, what I can say to prove that some things can stay the same.

Chantal
    Swoon .
    T he wind generated by my bike’s velocity down a mountain road is substantial enough to carry off the choked gasps of my panic attack. By the time I get home my stomachache has traveled from my gut to all my extremities. I struggle to shove my bike into the garage, lift my legs high enough to climb the concrete steps to our house. My fingers fumble the key in the lock.
    I collapse on the couch and click on the remote. I rarely watch TV, influenced by a mother who says it rots my brain. We only have a TV because my dad loves the Golf Channel, aka the snore channel. I stare at the screen, looking for a reason to get up. If my mother discovers me here, she’ll start asking questions. Should she discover that I have no summer plans, my fate could be worse than a summer without a project. She likes the summer to have a structure—her structure.
    The summer I was eight, my dad took my mother and me to visit his family out east. At the beginning of each driving day, my mother detailed the gifts she’d bought for my cousins, smocked sundresses from our town’s seamstress who was famous for sewing a smocked sundress once worn by Princess Beatrice of York. The seamstress even had a picture as proof.
    “It’s an heirloom piece that can be handed down generation after generation,” my mother said.
    After the third time she said it, my psychologist father responded so softly I almost didn’t hear, “The gifts are secondary. They want to see us.”
    At Lettuce Loaf (as in let us loaf—get it?), the cottage floors were transformed into bedrooms for the cousins and my parents slept in the attic in two twin beds—the penthouse, Dad called it.
    I trailed after the cousins to the lake, the mini-golf course, the water park, and a daily visit to the soft-serve ice