From Twinkle, With Love(72)
Dadi put a finger to her chin. “Hmm … The archipelago makes me think of travel. Perhaps you’ll be seeing the world soon. And the heart with little cracks in it … Perhaps you feel you’re giving away pieces of your heart?”
“But if this is telling the future, does it mean that I’m going to have my heart broken?” My mouth went a little dry at the thought. I mean, my heart was already pretty much in smithereens. How much worse could it get? Actually, Universe, forget I asked that question. Okay? I do not want to know.
“Only time will tell,” Dadi said, looking steadily at me. “We must embrace the good with the bad.”
So there you have it: I’ll travel and have my already-broken heart pulverized, maybe. Or maybe this is all just crap. Who can say?
Oh God. Why did I even agree to do the stupid film in the first place? I am so not in a film-festival mood right now. I just want to burrow under the covers on my bed and stay there until the new millennium. Is that too much to ask?
Love,
Twinkle
Friday, June 26
Vic’s car
Dear Haifaa al-Mansour,
The burrowing plan didn’t last too long. I was ensconced in my covers and had just unwrapped the first Peanut Butter Cup I’d pilfered from the kitchen when I heard the doorbell ring. I poked my head out from under the covers, my heart thundering. Was it Sahil? Maddie? But then Dadi walked in and told me it was “that girl who looks like her head’s on fire.”
Victoria Lyons.
I scrambled out of bed, wiped the chocolate off my hands, finger-combed my hair (I mean, I am still her director, come on), and walked out. Sure enough, Victoria stood there, all statuesque and tall, her big red hair looking especially shiny. She noticed me staring. “You like?” she asked, patting the crown of her head. “I asked my stylist to use this new snail slime treatment I read about in Vogue. They only use it in Japan right now, but …”
“Snail … slime?”
“Yeah.” Her green eyes were humorless. “It’s great for your hair. And supposedly it’s good for your pores, too.”
“Right.” I folded my arms across my chest. I didn’t need snail slime in my hair; I already had it smeared across my life. “So. What’s, um, up?”
She shrugged and walked over to my couch, where she sat down in a flounce of her retro circle skirt, putting her wedge-clad feet on my coffee table. “I was worried about you. You left the party all weird yesterday, and I saw you moping around at school today looking pathetic. What’s going on? Does this have to do with the mysterious boy you were getting all vamped up to see that one night?”
I saw Dadi straighten at her cutting board in the kitchen. She was stress cooking because she knew I was upset and wouldn’t talk to her about it. “Um, do you want to go to my room?” I asked Victoria, nodding my head at Dadi’s back.
“Oh, sure.” She stood up and walked off, like she owned the place.
Sighing, I followed her.
Once we were safely ensconced in my room (Victoria sat on my wobbly computer chair and squealed, “I love how authentically rickety things are in your house!” which I’m pretty sure she meant as a compliment?), I grabbed a pillow to my chest. “Thanks for coming over to check on me. That’s so nice of you.”
“Duh,” Victoria said, picking up my change jar and looking at it interestedly. She probably had never seen pennies before, having dealt only in Benjamins. “It’s what friends do. So, tell me what happened at the party last night.”
I blew out a breath. “Ugh. Where do I even start? Okay, so Maddie and I had a fight. I mean, I tried to apologize to her for blowing up at your house that one night. When I yelled at Lewis and everyone?”
Victoria nodded. I’d already apologized to her in her car yesterday.
“So, she just refused to accept my apology. Which, okay, after I talked to Sahil, I kinda get why she was mad.” Glancing at Vic, I shook my head. “I was making some bad choices, and Maddie was right to call me out on it. But at the same time, she isn’t blame-free. She’s been pulling away from me and blowing me off for Hannah and her other friends for a long time. She’s changed so much about herself, but somehow it’s all my fault for how I’ve changed? I told you, right, how she didn’t even want me to come to Hannah’s party?” It stung to talk about it, and I rubbed my chin and looked away, at my twinkle-light photo wall. I’d put up more pictures of me and Sahil, Skid, Aaron, and the others who were in the film. Maddie’s and my pictures were off to the sides now, no longer the main focus of my life.
Victoria leaned back in my squeaky chair and picked up one of my pens. Tapping it against the palm of her other hand, she said, “Hmm. Okay, so first, Maddie pulling away from you? Totally sucks. She didn’t handle that well at all. I even told her a couple of times that she should invite you to my place to hang out. But then Hannah would just say, ‘Twinkle’s just going to be out of place here. She doesn’t know all the people we know, so it’s better for her if we just leave her out.’”
“Great.”
“And Maddie went along with it. But here’s the thing—I don’t think Maddie wanted to leave you out. It was more like … she didn’t know how to integrate you into her new life. Especially with the loudest, most convincing one among us—Hannah—telling her it was for your own good.”