And I found it piercingly unfair that someone like Mike Domski would never comprehend how much those two words destroyed my beautiful best friend.
Anger rose up inside me like lava. I reached for the closest object and hurled it at Mike. That turned out to be my slice of pizza, and it hit him square in the chest, leaving a triangle stain of oil and sauce and hot pepper flakes behind on his shirt before it fell with a splat on his brown suede shoes.
“Oops,” I said in my most unsorry voice. A bunch of people gasped, and I even got a few laughs.
Mike curled his lip. “Damn. You know what? I threw out the student council handbook Ms. Bee gave me. But I’m sure I saw a whole section about election rules and the kinds of stunts that could disqualify a candidate. Tell you what, Natalie — I’ll double-check if she has an extra copy and let you know.”
I rolled my eyes as Mike stalked off. But really, inside, I panicked. Had I ruined everything, just to defend Autumn’s honor? Had I handed the entire election over, the thing I’d been dreaming about and working toward for the last three years, to Mike Domski?
Tears welled up in Autumn’s eyes. “Come on,” I said, stuffing our things into my book bag. I didn’t want her to humiliate herself even more. “Let’s go to the library.”
“I’m so sorry, Natalie,” she whispered. “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble. I’ll die if you get disqualified!”
Autumn moved too slow, so I grabbed her hand and pulled her along. “You didn’t have to defend me like that,” I muttered. If she could have just ignored Mike like I did, this wouldn’t have happened.
She shook her head. “That’s what best friends do for each other,” she said with resolve. Autumn wiped her eyes with one hand, and with the other, she squeezed mine tight, the way I’d always squeezed hers.
I am not an every cloud has a silver lining type of person, but one undeniably good thing did come out of the original Fish Sticks debacle: It saved my friendship with Autumn.
Autumn and I had met forever ago at the pool. We were six, and our moms had signed us both up for swimming lessons. Autumn had gone to Ross Academy since kindergarten, but I went to public school, so I’d never seen her before.
I noticed her right away. Her blond hair was light like the underside of a lemon peel, and it hung all the way to her waist. I liked the way it floated through the water, and watched with utter fascination as it turned green from the chlorine over the course of our lessons.
But that’s not why I really noticed her. It was because Autumn was the most spastic swimmer in the pool. She’d splash more than anyone else and always looked somewhat distressed.
When the lifeguard made us partners, I groaned, because each lesson ended with a kickboard race and the winners got to pick a Jolly Rancher out of a big glass bowl in the pool office. I pretty much knew Autumn and I would never have a chance. We didn’t, either. We never won a single Jolly Rancher. Even though I was probably the fastest kickboarder in the pool, I could never go fast enough to compensate for her.
I would’ve been mad . . . but Autumn was so nice. Once, I’d shared my towel when she’d forgotten hers, and she said thank you about a million times. And she was surprisingly silly, too. She taught me how to make a particular kind of fist, that when you squeezed, it would shoot a stream of water.
Except those things didn’t exactly make us friends, just girls who swam together. My parents both had extremely demanding jobs — Mom at her architecture firm, and Dad at his ophthalmology practice. Either one would show up at exactly five minutes to three, and I’d get put in the car, even before I’d had a chance to properly dry off. Autumn, on the other hand, would make plans to play with one girl or another as soon as she was out of the pool, like swim class was a warm-up for the fun she was about to have.
It wasn’t until the very last lesson, when the lifeguard let kids jump off the highest diving platform, that Autumn and I bonded for real.
Autumn froze with terror, but I forced her up the ladder with me. Mainly because none of the other girls in class would do it, probably because they all wore two-pieces and a jump that big could easily make you lose your top. They hung near the shallow end and laughed as the boys leaped off and did ninja kicks or screamed like Tarzan. I wasn’t scared, but it did feel like we were climbing forever. At the top, I laced our wrinkly fingers together and counted to three before jumping. Well, I jumped. Autumn sort of got pulled along with me, screaming the whole way down and getting water up her nose once we plunged in.
She doggy-paddled out of the pool, coughing hard. I followed her, feeling terrible, and decided that I would sit out with her for the rest of the lesson. Instead, Autumn raced to the ladder. She kept jumping. On her own. Each time, she’d spring a little higher, a bit farther out. I loved watching her test herself. Autumn had real courage, buried deep down inside her. All she’d needed was a push from me.
We announced ourselves as best friends when our moms arrived to pick us up that day.
Autumn and I were definitely an odd couple. She would show up at my house in a skirt and sandals, even though I’d tell her I wanted to try to get the boys down the block to invite us to play Manhunt. She’d say I was the worst fingernail painter in history, and that she’d do a better job with her left hand than I’d do with my right.
I wasn’t a tomboy. Sure, I’d wear my cousin Noah’s hand-me-downs, but sometimes I’d pick out a sundress, even if we weren’t going to church or out to dinner. I had a collection of stuffed bears that lived in a nylon hammock strung over my bed and I cried like a baby the time Christopher Clark threw a garden snake he’d found behind his garage at me. But before Autumn, I really never had any friends who were girls. None lived on my street.
Autumn was like fizzy water, light and bubbly. I always knew it, but when I transferred to Ross Academy for junior high, it really became clear. For the first time, I saw how effortlessly Autumn made friends, much more easily than I did. So many people would say hi to her in the halls. I remember feeling lucky that I had gotten in early. Lucky, and a little nervous.
She’d get invited to sleepovers. She’d have girls wanting to sit next to her at lunch. Even though Autumn stuck by me, I could still feel her drifting away. Not intentionally, of course. But I think saying no to invitations and trying to score me pity invites had started to get a little old for both of us.
Autumn explained I could be a know-it-all sometimes, only she said it in a much more polite and gentle way. I didn’t deny it. My parents were both intellectual types, and that sort of thing permeated everything we did as a family. We had our kitchen radio always tuned in to NPR. We did brainteasers over dinner. We shared the Sunday paper. And family vacations were to science centers or fossil expeditions or historical monuments. Maybe it made me weird, but it definitely made me smarter than most people I knew. But smart didn’t necessarily cut it in junior high.
I had invited Autumn to come with my family to a laser show at the planetarium. Her face fell, and she explained that she’d accepted an invitation from Marci Cooperstein’s family to visit their lake house for a week.
I played it cool, but inside I steamed. Marci had been trying to edge in on my friendship with Autumn for months. Autumn had held Marci off, but I guess the promise of Jet Skis and barbeques and bunk beds were too much for her to resist. It was seven days of pure misery for me. I made my mom take me to the library about
