thirteen

MOLLY WENT STRAIGHT TO DINNER at the McCormacks’. She decided Brooke’s behavior denied her the right to a ride home. The laws of physics supported this: If a person had to chauffeur you around town, then that person definitely existed. So if Brooke wanted to pretend Molly was transparent, then she could find another driver. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d stranded Brooke at a truck stop. Someone, either voluntarily or under terrified duress, would give her a lift.

It took Molly ten minutes to decipher Max’s chicken-scratch handwriting, but eventually she managed to punch an address into the Lexus’s navigation system that it recognized. Molly didn’t even care. Wherever she ended up, be it Max’s house or a prison replete with serial killers, it would be an improvement over her afternoon.

The directions took her to the end of a cul-de-sac off a pothole-plagued road near the Hollywood Bowl and deposited her in front of a two-story shingled Craftsman bungalow. The house, which sat like a madcap anomaly between two neat little thatched cottages with tidy porches and blooming window boxes, was nearly as patchy as the street. Someone had tried, and failed, to improve it by adding a turret, and its compact, wild yard was dotted with gnarled vegetable patches and a knot of trees heavy with fruit. The effect was more romantic than run-down, though that appeared to be a fluke of nature rather than a landscaping plan.

As Molly parked behind a rusty 4Runner, a very compact bald man emerged from the garage dragging a dishwasher in a little red wagon. He squinted at Molly, then offered an absentminded salute before tugging his cargo to a dilapidated shed. An avocado fell from a tree with a thud, narrowly missing her head.

“Thank God you found it,” Max said, appearing on the porch. “MapQuest usually tries to make people turn into the side of the mountain.”

As she walked up the steps, Molly noticed Max’s face was scrubbed clean, her hair held back by an old bandanna. She looked about twelve years old, and rather striking, almost fragile. Without the aggressive eyeliner and her shaggy green mop, Molly could see Max’s eyes, which Molly had thought were dark but which actually had flecks of amber glowing in them.

“Maxine, have you seen my soldering iron?” the bald man asked, coming out of the shed and holding a disintegrating weed whacker almost as tall as he was.

“Dad, meet Molly. She just moved here. She’s Brick Berlin’s new kid.”

Mr. McCormack looked confused. “Is he the tan parent your mother is always complaining about?”

Max shot Molly an apologetic look. “Yeah, probably.”

“Right, right. Welcome!” he said, shifting the weed whacker to his other hand so he could shake Molly’s. “I hope Maxine and Theodore have been helpful.”

“Teddy would kill you if he heard you call him that,” Max said.

“Theodore can’t hear anything over that guitar,” Mr. McCormack said. “Molly, I hope you like veal parmigiana. We have plenty.”

“Ew. You can have mine,” Max said. “Veal is disgusting. Dad, weren’t you looking for something?”

Mr. McCormack clapped his head to his head. “Yes! The iron. I am never going to get this thing to work without it.”

“Dad’s an inventor,” Max explained.

“I’m going to revolutionize the alarm clock,” Mr. McCormack announced.

“Just don’t test this one on me,” Max grunted. “I still have a bruise from that thing with the lacrosse stick.”

Mr. McCormack stared at the weed whacker. “Dinner’s in an hour, girls,” he said, and wandered off through the calf-length grass.

“That means anytime between half an hour and five hours,” Max explained as they stepped onto the cluttered porch. “He loses track of time when he’s working.”

“My mom did that,” Molly said. “We once had dinner at midnight because she didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought on a prom dress.”

“So you get it,” Max said, opening the front door and shuffling through the foyer, down a hallway lined entirely with bookshelves, and into her bedroom at the back of the house.

Max’s room, like the lawn, was a complete disaster. The floor was covered with library books, magazines, a tangle of indistinguishably clean and dirty clothes, and several newspaper pages folded to the crosswords—half-finished, and done in pen. There was one black Doc Marten sitting on top of Max’s dresser, and the cactus on the bedside table was dead.

“I didn’t know you could kill those things,” Molly said, moving aside a pile of bras to sit in the overstuffed corduroy armchair across from Max’s bed.

“I can kill anything,” Max said, plonking down in the middle of her unmade bed. “So what did my mom want with you this afternoon? She was on a rampage this week. She called me into her office four times. I’m already on track to beat my record.”

“What’s your record?” Molly asked, grabbing a crossword and fanning herself.

Max leapt off her bed and flipped a switch on the rickety window air-conditioning unit. It shuddered on with a wheeze. “If you think it’s hot now, try sleeping in here during a real heat wave. Every summer my parents decide to get central air, and then every summer they find out it’s, like, twenty thousand dollars. Teddy once slept in the backyard.”

Max flopped back down on the bed, her bandanna slipping two inches down her forehead. She shoved it up impatiently. “What were we talking about?” she wondered.

“Your record,” Molly prompted.

“Oh, right!” Max crowed. “Okay, so one week last year, I got called to my mom’s office nine times! It was epic.”

“How did you pull that off?”

Max looked pleased with herself. “I was helping Teddy’s class boycott their fetal-pig dissection unit in biology. And that was also the week they decided they could do unannounced locker checks, which is a total violation of our civil rights. So I chained myself to my locker in protest. And then I ditched geometry. Six weeks of detention. What’d you get?”

Molly rolled her eyes. “Prison,” she said. “I have to work on the play with Brooke.”

“Ew. Why?”

“This is all part of Brick’s big master plan to turn us into best friends. He’s also making us share a room.”

Max looked horrified. “He’s making you sleep in the same room as the person who told our gym class that your drinking problem started because you were born a boy?”

That was a new one.

“Who was born a boy?” Teddy asked, appearing in Max’s open doorway.

Max gestured at Molly with a lazy thumb.

“No way,” Teddy chuckled. “Turns out Indiana’s just full of secrets.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s not really a dude, Teddy.”

“Tell me another one, dummy,” he said, coming in and perching on her windowsill. “I mean, it’s not like her name is Max or anything.”

“Don’t you have some T-shirts to shrink?” Max retorted. “Anyway, don’t worry about it, Molly. I don’t think very many people believed her.”

“Well, just as long as a few of them did.” Molly sighed sarcastically and rubbed her temples.

“Way to go, Max, now you’ve given her a complex,” Teddy said.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Molly said. “That’s not even the worst thing that happened today.”

“Yeah, I heard Magnus talking about the corn husks in the hallway. That guy is such an idiot.”

“No, get this,” Molly said. “After your mom told me I have to do costumes for the play, I went to tell Brooke and she acted like I wasn’t even there.”

Teddy wrinkled his brow. “The silent treatment? At her age?”

“More like the invisible treatment. People actually asked her to acknowledge me and she pretended she didn’t know what they were talking about,” Molly said. “Even Shelby Kendall was surprised.”

Teddy and Max exchanged glances.

“What was Shelby doing there?” Teddy asked, patting the pockets of his cargo shorts, looking for something. Eventually, he emerged with a pack of cinnamon gum. “Want some?”

“That stuff makes my tongue numb,” Max announced.

“I wasn’t offering it to you,” Teddy said mildly. “Indiana?”

“No, thanks,” Molly said. “Shelby caught up with me afterward. I guess she overheard the whole thing. She gave me her business card.”

“She would have business cards,” Max grunted. “Let me see it.”

Molly dug the card out of the pocket of her jeans. Teddy hopped onto the bed with Max to examine it. Their height difference was such that he looked like he was folding himself in half just to scoot up next to his sister. But somehow they were still unmistakably related—same waves in their hair, same crooked smiles, same crinkled noses as they studied Shelby’s card.

“How much do you wanna bet her dad charged her to use the Hey! logo?” Teddy said.

“Are you going to call her?” Max asked.

“No,” Molly said. “I mean, right? She’s so weird. She was all, ‘I’ve been watching you,’ like she was about to go through our trash.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure she would have done that before she talked to you,” Max said.

Molly peered at her and saw she wasn’t kidding.

“I think you should call,” Max added, after a moment.

“No, you don’t,” Teddy said, crinkling his brown eyes with dismay.

“It’s a good idea,” Max protested.

Teddy gave her an incredulous look. “In what universe?”

“Brooke hates Shelby, and Brooke is being mean to Molly,” Max said slowly, as if she were explaining a complicated concept to a very stupid person. “Therefore, if Molly becomes friendly with Shelby, it will turn Brooke into a crazy person, which is going to be incredibly satisfying for all of us.”

“Maybe for you,” Teddy said. “But Shelby is bad news.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Max said. “Maybe Shelby actually likes Molly. You don’t know.”

“Shelby doesn’t like anyone,” Teddy said. “Unless they can get her something she wants, and usually, that something is a story.”

“Look, you can only take the high road for so long,” Max pointed out. “Unless you’re Gandhi, but I think we can all agree that he was exceptional.”

“Hello, I’m right here,” Molly said, waving her arms. “Don’t I get a vote?”

“Depends who you’re voting with,” Max grinned.

Teddy raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Me, obviously,” he said, yanking Max’s bandanna down over her eyes.

Molly chuckled and sent up a silent word of thanks that the McCormacks hadn’t joined the faction of the Colby-Randall student body that was filling her locker with agricultural waste products. Hanging out with them reminded her of all the long afternoons she used to spend in Charmaine’s room, talking about nothing in particular. It was just easy, comfortable, like the battered old recliner her grandfather sat in to watch Pacers games and tell the same old story about the time he met Larry Bird. And now that she was grappling with this unwelcome social problem, Molly appreciated having acquaintances—friends, she hoped—who could give unbiased advice.

Max smacked Teddy’s arm—for a whippet of a girl, she seemed awfully strong—and scooted away from him, before turning her attention back to Molly. “So what’ll it be?” she asked, ripping off her bandanna and throwing it casually at Teddy’s face. “Fight the Evil Empire, or be all boring and nice?”

Well, mostly unbiased.

“I feel like getting in the middle of this Brooke-Shelby feud might be a bad idea,” Molly announced.

“Finally, someone is talking sense,” Teddy said. “Well, other than me.”

“I’m just saying, Brooke won’t stop pushing you until she sees that you can push back,” Max argued. “So, yeah, Shelby Kendall might be kind of a dillhole, but she’s also a means to an end. Imagine how satisfying it will be when Brooke chokes on her edamame because you and Shelby are palling around at lunch.”

“Girls,” Teddy muttered.

“What?” Max asked.

“Well, it’s just that if two guys are mad at each other, we brawl and then it’s over. Girls resort to psychological warfare. It seems exhausting,” he explained.

“Don’t be such a sexist,” Max snapped. “This isn’t like that.”

Teddy rolled his eyes good-naturedly and flicked a tank top off the bed. “Well, what it’s like, then?”

“It’s… okay, it’s kind of like that. But come on. Brooke deserves to get a taste of her own medicine for once,” Max said. “Don’t you think?”

Teddy tugged on a lock of her hair. “You’re just saying that because she called you Maxi-Pad for, like, two whole years.”

“Well. Maybe a little bit,” Max admitted. She turned to Molly. “Seriously, though, do you want this thing with Brooke to go on for years? Because I feel like it could.”

Molly looked down at the business card in her hand. The idea of living through Brooke’s backstabbing and mind games until the day she went to college made her skin feel too tight. Besides, for an alleged dillhole, Shelby had been friendlier at Colby-Randall than Brooke. Molly took a deep breath and tapped the card against her mouth before smiling timidly at Teddy and Max.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”