Inevitable and Only(21)

“It’s gorgeous,” I told her.

She actually smiled—a tiny one, but I saw it in the mirror. “Thanks. I really like your highlights. Did your parents freak out about them?”

“Not really,” I lied. “Okay, just a little bit. But at least they’re not permanent. Mom said the hair dye was fine but I’m not allowed to pierce anything except my ears until I’m eighteen.”

Her eyes widened. “Would you want to pierce something else?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I like eyebrow rings. And lip rings. A belly button ring sounds too painful, plus what if it gets caught on your shirt or something and you rip it out?”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly.” I wrapped a hair tie around the end of her braid and slid off the bed to examine my handiwork from the front. “Oh, it looks great! But wait—can I try something else? We have ten more minutes till we have to go, and I never get to practice on anyone.” Raven never let me play with her curls.

She checked her watch. “Sure.”

I undid the braid, brushed her hair out again, and clipped half of it on top of her head. Then I French-braided the rest from the nape of her neck up to the crown of her head, braided a few strands back from her temples, and gathered all that hair into a neatly coiled bun. I stepped back to evaluate.

Elizabeth looked in the mirror and gasped. “Wow. I have Renaissance Festival hair! I love it. Thanks, Acadia.”

“That was fun,” I said. “And it’s Cadie.”

She smiled at me this time, and I smiled back. “I’ve always wanted a sister,” she said.

I couldn’t truthfully say the same, so I was glad that at that moment Mom called up the stairs, “Girls! Time to go!” and we headed off to school.



The first thing I did once Dad finally left, of course, was to check the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. But audition results weren’t up yet.

I filled in Elizabeth about Meeting as we waited in the crowd of students milling around outside the cafeteria.

“Quakers call their service ‘Meeting for Worship,’ but it’s not about worshipping in the sense of priests and prayerbooks,” I said, then quickly added, “not that you aren’t welcome to worship, of course. Worshipping is fine. But I mostly think of it as, like, a chance to clear my head. People can stand up and speak, if they feel moved, but you definitely don’t have to.”

“Speak about what?”

“Anything that’s on your mind. Deep thoughts. Spiritual stuff. Current events. Whatever.”

Elizabeth was looking at me as if I’d just announced that we were going to sacrifice a goat and dance around a bonfire.

I sighed. “I’m sure it’s really different from Catholic school. But it’s not so bad. And we only do this on Tuesdays.”

I imagined a little speech bubble over Elizabeth’s head: So God doesn’t exist the rest of the week? But all she said was, “It sounds interesting.”

“The other days, we have electives. I’m doing yoga.” I checked Elizabeth’s schedule. “Oh, you’re signed up for Student-Led Readings. Mom taught that last year. All the students take turns picking something for the class to read that they think is—” (I made air-quotes with my fingers and imitated Mom’s voice) “—‘intriguing, instructive, or incendiary.’”

Elizabeth was biting her lip and looking nervous.

“You can probably get excused from Meeting if you really don’t like it,” I said. “Everyone’s very flexible around here.”

“Is it all the yoga?” she said, and it took me a second to realize she was trying to make a joke. “You know, flexible.”

I grinned at her to show I got it.

Elizabeth sat quietly next to me through Meeting. After a few minutes of silence, Kieri Cantor stood and said her older sister’s baby was due any day now, and asked us to hold her in the Light. I closed my eyes and pictured Kieri and her sister and a new baby, surrounded by a warm, protective glow. Then Josiah Sampson stood to talk about how the president was creating our generation’s Vietnam by sending troops to the Middle East. Manny Sampson (his twin brother) rose to say that Vietnam was totally different, dude. He sat and we all absorbed that for a little while. A minute or two later, Heron Lang got up and said she’d noticed some street art on an abandoned building that morning on her way to school, and it made her think about how even broken-down things can be reborn. We sat in silence after that until we closed Meeting by shaking hands with our neighbors.

“I thought Quakers were pacifists?” Elizabeth said as we left the cafeteria. “That was a lot of war-talk for a prayer meeting.”

“Well, it’s supposed to be a time for quiet contemplation, not political arguments, but I guess pacifists get more upset about violence than most people. Plus, we’re not all Quakers. Even though I think I’m more Quaker than Jewish at this point.”

At that moment, I saw a crowd clustered around the bulletin board, and I bolted for it.

As I looked up at the board, an ache hit the spot right between my eyebrows. That feeling I got, once in a while, when I knew something was going to happen right before it did. Like the time Dad and I went to outdoor Shakespeare last summer, and we entered the basket raffle at intermission. Right before they drew the winning slip of paper out of the basket, I got that ache in the center of my forehead, and then I heard, “And the winners are … Ross and Acadia Greenfield!”