“I do,” Alfie explained, after thinking about it. “Because she’s the one giving the sleepover.” Duh.
“Pathetic,” EllRay said, shaking his head. “You’re better than that, Alf. You gotta stand up to her, if she’s really acts that way! Or at least stand up for what you want.”
“You just don’t get it, that’s all,” Alfie told him, jumping up from her brother’s chair. “I don’t know why I even bothered asking for advice! You’re not a girl.”
“You just figured that out?” EllRay asked, laughing again.
“I should ask my friends, instead,” Alfie told him. “They’ll help me decide what to do.”
“If anything,” EllRay said, and he turned back to his pronouns.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alfie asked, pausing at the door.
“It means that sometimes, you don’t do anything,” EllRay told her. “You just let things happen the way they happen.”
“Huh!” Alfie said-snorted. “That’s sure not my motto.”
“I know that,” EllRay said, still smiling as he shook his head. “Bye, Alfie,” he told her. “Hint, hint.”
“Good-bye yourself,” Alfie said, eager to have the last word.
Brothers. Hah!
7 Miffed, Hurt, Irked, and Furious
“Let’s go hang out at the campfire,” Phoebe said to Alfie at morning recess the next day, Wednesday.
“Okay,” Alfie said. “After I go to the restroom. You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
Recesses at Oak Glen Primary School were set at different times for different grades, so the hall was not too crowded as Alfie headed toward the girls’ room. But as she was about to pull open the restroom’s heavy door, out charged Lulu Marino. Lulu looked excited, and her face was pink, as if she had just won a tetherball game on a very hot day.
“Move it,” Lulu exclaimed, bumping into Alfie in the doorway. “And mind your own business, while you’re at it.”
“Hey,” Alfie said. “I am minding my own business.”
Because what business could be more personal than a visit to the restroom?
“Don’t say it that way,” Lulu warned. “And the point is, you know what I mean.”
“Not really,” Alfie muttered, making her way into the restroom.
Lulu could be so weird, Alfie told herself, trying to hold her breath for as long as she could. It wasn’t that the girls’ restroom smelled nasty most of the time, but there was always that possibility. And the too-sweet smell of foamy handwashing liquid mixed with the sharp odor of whatever it was the custodian used to clean the floor at night was gross, in Alfie’s opinion.
Today, though, the only unusual thing going on in the girls’ room was the sound coming from behind the closed door of one of the restroom stalls.
Some girl was crying, Alfie realized, horrified.
Crying! With great gulpy sobs!
Alfie froze. Crying at school was way up there on Alfie’s list of nightmares-come-true, right after wetting yourself at school and hurling in class. But there were three kinds of school crying.
There was crying on the playground if you got hurt, which was okay. Not great, but okay—because you’d been wounded in battle, basically.
And then there was crying in front of other kids if you heard something really sad, like a dog dying in a story, or if someone hurt your feelings on the playground. That was embarrassing, but it was understandable.
Crying all alone in the bathroom, though? That was just sad.
The only thing worse would be for someone to see you doing it.
But just as Alfie unfroze enough to make a dash for a stall before the crying girl could exit hers, the other girl’s tan metal door swung open—and out came Bella, mopping at her splotchy, swollen face with a handful of tissue-y toilet paper squares. “Oh!” she said, seeing Alfie. “I’m sorry. And I’m not really crying.”
“Okay. Fine,” Alfie mumbled, disappearing into her stall.
Phew! Close one, Alfie thought, latching the door.
And by the time she went to wash her hands, Bella was long gone.
The new play area was sunken, sandy, and shady. It had two slides, “one straight and one curly,” the littlest kids in school boasted. There was also a circle of upended logs to sit on. Alfie and her friends had started calling this area “the campfire,” even though there was never a fire in the middle, of course.
It was just an ordinary day, Alfie told herself as Phoebe greeted her on the sloping path, and they walked toward the log circle. But the day seemed to have its own sour personality—in spite of that morning’s cloudless blue September sky. The only second grade girl who truly seemed happy today, Alfie thought, was Lulu Marino, the “special darling” sleepover queen.
Bella was nowhere to be seen.
“Were you really best friends with Lulu last year?” Phoebe whispered. She had moved to Oak Glen from Arizona over the summer, and she was still catching up on the other girls’ stories.
“I guess,” Alfie said again. She tried to remember that far back.
Alfie and Lulu had often played dolls when they were on playdates together. Even then, Lulu liked more to fuss with the dolls’ small clothes than to make up stories about them. And making up stories was one of Alfie’s favorite things to do.
The two girls used to watch cartoons, too—more at Lulu’s house than at Alfie’s, because Alfie’s parents had so many rules about TV during the day at their house.
The girls even invented a silly but fun game they called “Upside-Down Heads,” where they would lie on the grass, their heads together but their bodies stretched out in opposite directions. How funny Lulu had looked then, with her eyes seeming to be at the bottom of her face, perched atop her straight bangs! And she herself must have looked unfamiliar too, Alfie guessed, with her mouth where her eyes were supposed to be.
They even tried drawing pictures of each other that way.
It was hard to remember exactly why this had been such a crack-up when they were six years old,
