Big Summer(21)

Darshi’s friends were eating actual food, but all Drue and Ainsley and Avery had were Diet Cokes and plates of salad: iceberg lettuce, a sprinkling of fake bacon bits, a few chickpeas, and no visible dressing. I flashed back to the dry tuna on lettuce that my nana had tormented me with during the summer she’d stayed with me, when I’d been six and my parents had been working at a summer camp in Maine. Is this what girls here eat? I wondered. Clearly, not all of the girls: Frankie was eating a cheeseburger from the hot-food line, and Darshi had opened up a Thermos full of pale-brown pureed chickpeas over rice.

I unzipped my backpack. It was a plain dark-purple nylon backpack, and I had spent a week before school started embroidering patterns on the back, starbursts and paisley swirls in threads that were orange and turquoise and indigo blue.

“Ooh, whatcha got?” Drue asked, leaning over to look. Shyly, I unzipped my lunchbag and showed her what my father had prepared. There was a Tupperware container of poppy seed flatbread crackers, spread with cream cheese and topped with slivers of lox and circles of cucumber. There was a small bag of homemade trail mix with fat golden raisins, dried cranberries, walnuts, and coconut flakes, and a container of cut-up carrots with a cup of yogurt-dill dip, a hard-boiled egg with just the right amount of salt and pepper in a twist of wax paper, a pair of clementines, and a half-dozen Hershey’s Kisses.

“Chocolate!” said Drue, helping herself to a Kiss. It should have been aggravating, but the funny, sneaky way she plucked just one foil-wrapped chocolate was instead endearing. “Nice lunch.”

I felt like I owed her an explanation. “When I was little, I loved Bread and Jam for Frances,” I said. “Do you guys know that book?”

Ainsley blinked. Avery shrugged. Darshi said, “That’s the one about the badger, right?”

“Oh, I remember!” said Drue. “And she wants to just eat bread and jam for lunch, and so her mother makes her eat it for every single meal?”

“Yes,” I said, delighted that there was something Drue and I had in common. “My favorite part of the book was the description of all the foods the other badgers brought to school. So my dad made me this. He calls it a badger lunch.”

Ainsley bent her head and whispered something in Avery’s ear. Avery giggled. Ainsley smirked. Drue ignored them both.

“You’re so lucky,” Drue said. “God. I don’t think my father even knows where the kitchen is in our house. He’ll just hand me a few hundred bucks whenever he’s home and we’re both awake at the same time.”

“Does your father work nights?” I asked. It was the only explanation I could imagine for a dad who wasn’t awake at the same time as his daughter. Ainsley tittered. Avery rolled her eyes.

“Ha,” said Drue. She smiled, looking amused, the way I imagined I would look at an insignificant creature who had managed something surprising—a mouse that did magic tricks, a golden retriever who’d stood on his hind legs and burst into song. “No. He travels. For business.”

“The Cavanaugh Corporation?” said Ainsley. “You know? That’s her family.”

Drue swatted Ainsley’s shoulder. “It’s fine.”

Except it wasn’t, I realized. I should have known that a girl with the last name Cavanaugh was one of those Cavanaughs, the same way I should have realized, somehow, that Drue’s mother’s family had founded the school.

Drue picked up one of my clementines without asking permission. Darshi gave me a look from the side of her eyes: You see? I watched as Drue removed the peel in a single, unbroken curl, before turning to Ainsley and saying, “So, did you end up going to the thing?” Ainsley giggled. Avery twirled a piece of her hair, folding it over so she could examine it for split ends. The three of them launched into a discussion of a Labor Day party at someone’s house, laughing and picking at their salads, ignoring me and everyone else at the table.

While Drue and her friends chattered and giggled and moved their food around, I answered Darshi’s questions about my previous school and doggedly ate my way through everything my dad had packed, without tasting any of it. At the bottom of my lunch bag was a note. I turned away, meaning to slip the note into my pocket, but somehow Drue, who’d been talking to Avery, was suddenly looking at me again.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said, and crumpled the note, which read Mom and I are proud of you and love you very much, into my hand until it was a tiny, hard ball. I pushed it into the very bottom of my pocket as the bell rang. Drue, Avery, and Ainsley rose in unison, lifted their trays, and marched toward the trash cans. I trailed behind them to toss my own trash and walked to my next class alone.



* * *




On my way to phys ed, my last class of the day, Darshi Shah grabbed me. “I need to tell you something.”

“What?”

Darshi pulled me into an empty classroom. A Spanish classroom, I guessed, judging from the posters of Seville and Barcelona on the walls and the conjugation of the verb that meant “to go” on the Smart Board. With a toss of her curls, Darshi said, “Drue Cavanaugh is bad news.”

“What do you mean?”

“She uses people. She’ll make you think that you’re her friend, but you’re not.” Darshi pulled off her glasses, then put them on again. “She did it to Vera Babson in fourth grade, and she did it to Vandana Goyal in fifth grade, and then she did it to me.”