Chapter 6, Part 2 - Asia

Asia associates with everyone, but that doesn't mean she likes everyone.

            It was a week until Thanksgiving break, and I was all about that full week off from school. No classes, no waking up at the crack of dawn. Maybe some homework, as if I’d even spend time on it. Not on my mini vacation! Thanksgiving was for relaxing, and that was that.

            “You need a heavier sweater than that,” Mom took one look at me when I walked downstairs and shook her head. “It’s just under 40 degrees outside.”

            “Is it really!?” I ran to the window to see, and was greeted by the sight of our lawn. Normally a vivid green, it was the color of the glitter star that my parents had for one of the Christmas trees. A kind of sickly blue, too pale to really be blue, but too blue to be white. And not really blue either, because grass is green, at least our lawn is. All the same, it seems to turn blue in the frost, which was clinging to each and every blade on our road. I twisted to see as many other lawns as I could, and they were all the same frosty color. “Frost!”

            “Yes, and it’s cold out, so go get something warmer.” Mom loomed up behind me, tugging at the back of my hoodie. On most days when she tried to change what clothes I wore, I would argue my way out of having to get a new outfit. If she was really serious about it, I’d make a show of getting a new shirt or skirt, and then change as soon as I got to school. But today was different; today, there was frost on the ground! That meant winter, which meant snow, which meant Christmas break and no school for nearly a month! Suddenly Thanksgiving break seemed too small and insignificant. I realize it’s no good to start worrying about Christmas before Thanksgiving, but how can I help it when I love Christmas so much, and everything about the weather changes of mid to late November makes me think of those magical December days? It’s inevitable, really. People are going to get ready for holidays when they feel moved to get ready for them, and if that’s five days to Christmas or five days to Halloween, then that’s when it is.

            I pulled on a heavy sweatshirt, something completely unflattering that hid all my curves, but it was old and worn, which made it extra comfortable to snuggle into and sleep in during boring classes. By the time I got back downstairs, Dawn was pulling up outside. Her little white car was shivering too, punching out exhaust as it tried to warm up. I could see the three oldest Chilingarians sitting inside, blowing on their hands. Dawn had to be miserable; she hated cold weather. I didn’t understand how people could hate something that could be easily avoided, by putting on extra layers and turning on the heat, how they could hate anything as beautiful as snow and frost, but there are those people who manage it. I tried not to let it bother me, instead choosing to just be my normal upbeat self.

            “Who’s excited about the frost?” I sang as I climbed into the car.

            “I am,” Cal answered slowly, rubbing his palms together. “I like winter.”

            “You are exiled from this family.” Anne said promptly, casting him a dark glare. She wore such heavy dark makeup. I didn’t understand where she got it from, because Dawn certainly wasn’t employing any eye shadow, but it did look good on her.

            “Aww, Anne, cheer up. It’s almost Christmas now!”

            She gave me a half grin and then went back to staring out the window. Way to be, Debbie Downer.

            “No, it’s almost Thanksgiving,” Dawn corrected. “First one, then the other. It can’t be almost Christmas when it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”

            “Yes it can, otherwise you can’t say it’s almost Friday when it’s only Wednesday because Thursday hasn’t happened yet. And people call it “Hump Day” because it’s closer to Friday.”

            “No, they call it that because it’s the middle of the week. Like climbing a small hill, Wednesday is the climax and the rest of the week is the decline.”

            I laughed. “I have never heard Wednesday compared to ‘small hill’ before.”

            “Asia, what the hell do you think a ‘hump’ is?”

            Several definitions raced to mind, at least two of them being on the slightly dirty side. “Well, it depends on, like, the context, doesn’t it?”

            “It’s a bump, Asia; a tiny tiny little hill.”

            “It’s still almost Friday.”

            “Yes, but that’s only because they’re one day apart. Geez, if there was only one day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’d have no right to complain. But see, there’s a full month between them, so getting ahead of yourself like that is a little ridiculous.” She explained.

            I crossed my arms and sank into the seat. Sometimes she could be so cutting. “You’re ridiculous.” I shot back in a low voice.

            “Ah. I’m glad we’re being mature now. As long as we’re both acting our age; it would suck if one of us were perpetually five years behind,” Dawn said calmly, although her soothing “I’m a psychologist” voice was meant more to taunt and belittle than it was for any other more mature purpose.

            The little car pulled up outside Maple Creek to drop off Cal, and then continued over to Juniper. I opted not to talk anymore, at least not until we got inside and lost Anne. For some reason, I didn’t like arguing in front of Dawn’s little sister. I always felt one of two ways; either she was watching me, pitying me for being friends with her psychotic sister, or she was watching Dawn, pitying her for having such a stupid best friend. I didn’t like either feeling.

            But we didn’t get the chance to continue our conversation, because Andrew was waiting in the lobby and I decided to have a brighter discussion with him instead. We talked about how cool my sweatshirt was. Because everyone knows my sweatshirts automatically are better than everyone else’s, no matter how ratty and ugly they are.

 

            The day was going by so slow. I just kept staring out the window. By second period, the frost had thawed off the grass and it went back to being green, albeit a washed-out sort of shade. Even though the frost was gone, I couldn’t stop daydreaming about being outside. It was perfect weather for soccer. I played in the fall because the later games took place in the cold weather, which felt fabulous when you were chasing a ball up and down a field.

            It was a good thing to go to Study Hall, which was held in the cafeteria, because the table I sat at was too far away from the windows for staring. Instead, I actually took out my Astronomy book and flipped through it. Web Page Design had ended with the last marking period and I was onto Astronomy, which I assumed would be an easy A. What could you possibly learn about besides the order of the planets?

            “Are you actually studying?” Madison sat across from me, reading a magazine. She had just started Study Hall a few days ago, after dropping out of Statistics.

            “Just wondering what all we might learn in this class. There can’t be that much, right?” I asked.

            Madison eyed the text book. “I don’t know. That’s a pretty thick book.”

            “Yeah, but so are all text books, and we never read everything in it.” I remember having huge literature texts in middle school, and hardly using them at all. Why bother wasting money on the stupid book if you aren’t even going to read out of it?

            “Yeah. That’s true.”

            “I mean, I know there’s a lot you can learn about space and stuff, but I think most of it would be more advanced, like a college class. This is just a little elective. We’ll probably just be learning about planets, right?”

            “Maybe,” Madison shrugged. “That’ll be easy, right?”

            “Yeah, I have the planets down. We learned the order of them in third grade, so that should be easy enough.”

            “I hated learning that. That stupid little poem thing…what was it, something to do with your mom on a pizza?”

            I could just barely remember learning some kind of saying, but didn’t remember the words. “Yeah, something like that. But I mean, if you know it, you don’t need some little rhyme, right? And I know it.”

            Madison curled her lip at me. She hated it when people knew more than she did. She was like Dawn in that respect, except that Dawn would quietly rage in her head until they left and then vent out loud, and Madison would just keep on trying to prove someone wrong.

            “Well okay, Miss Smarty Pants. Let’s hear it.”

            “What, the planets?”

            “Yeah. I mean, since you know it so well.”

            And there she went trying to make me look dumb. Well, I wasn’t going to have it! I knew those planets, I knew I did.

            “Fine. Earth, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Venus…” I began, ticking them off on my fingers as I went. That was five, four more to go. There were nine, right?

            “Waaiiiit. Are you going in order?” Madison had her hands flat towards me like a traffic cop or something.

            “Yeah…”

            “No, you’re not.” She sounded so damn smug, her voice all smooth and suddenly deep, each word a note lower than the other. “Earth is not the first planet. Otherwise we wouldn’t be the third rock from the sun. Duh.”

            “Well excuse me, but this is what I learned.” I said back, equally sassy.

            She laughed briefly, a quick burst of braying, before glaring at me from under perfectly trimmed red eyebrows. “No school taught you that Earth was the first planet.”

            “Will you just let me finish?” I whined. “Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Saturn. There. Now what are you saying about school?”

            “That’s wrong, you idiot! I don’t think you named a single one in the right order!” Madison was laughing harder now, unable to stop long enough to be snobby. “Where did you learn that?”

            I sighed heavily. “I told you, we learned it in third grade.” Although, to be perfectly honest, I’d had a little review from a cartoon I used to watch when I was in sixth grade. “And there was some show I used to watch, it named the planets like every episode.”

            “Well, if it was naming them in order, it’s wrong.”

            “It can’t be wrong, it was by the Japanese and they know everything! Didn’t you ever see Sailor Moon? That’s all about space and stuff!”

            Madison fell across the table, completely out of control. It was a good minute before she sat back up, made to speak, and then cracked up again.

            “It’s really not that funny, either.” I said quietly.

            She wiped her eyes. “Asia, sweetie, it’s completely backward. I don’t know how you got them in that order, but it’s just wrong.”

            “So you name them, then. You do it right.”

            “I don’t know it. I just know that’s not it. Honey, I hope you’re not applying lessons learned from a cartoon to everyday life. Look at what happened to that coyote, no matter how hard he tried. I don’t want that to be you.” She was trying so hard not to laugh; all I wanted to do was slap her.

            I can usually laugh at myself. When I mess up, or make a huge fool of myself, the best thing to do is to just laugh it off. If you act embarrassed or try to cover it up, people just make fun of you. That’s the last thing anyone needs. Joking around is fine, but when they’re being mean, then you’re doing something wrong. So I’ve learned that instead of pretending you “meant to do that” or whatever, it’s best to just say “can you believe I did that?” and laugh about it with everyone else. They’ll probably still make jokes about it, but it will be friendlier and they’ll get over it faster. It’s like Danella’s custom jeans; if she hadn’t denied it, nobody would’ve cared. But she had to make a big deal about how it wasn’t true and it wasn’t fair to poke fun at her, and nobody stopped laughing about it for a good three months.

            This time, though, it wasn’t about embarrassment. I wasn’t embarrassed that I turned out to be wrong. I wasn’t going to deny it, either. Fine, I got it mixed up. It was the fact that Madison was being so darn sly about it, acting like she felt bad for me making a mistake. The fact that she got joy out of it. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Madison had always been the type to find pleasure in watching others fail. In ninth grade, it was between her, me, and this girl name Leigh for Freshman Princess. Leigh beat us both, which was fine by me because Leigh was this really sweet girl who was always kind of the underdog and deserved to win. But Madison threw a fit in the girls’ bathroom until she heard that Leigh had tripped over her own dress during the Prince and Princess dance and broke her nose in the fall. Madison crowed about it for a week, talking about how terrible it was that Leigh had to wear that awful bandage on her face, but she had this huge smile on whenever it was brought up. She can be a good ally to have, since she’s been behind seventy-five percent of all the rumors started at our high school; staying on her good side almost guarantees that nobody will be whispering anything bad about you. Sometimes, though, putting up with that blood-thirsty attitude of hers got to be a bit much.

            “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, although she was still giggling. “It’s stupid. Who cares what order the planets are in? It’s not like it affects us anyway.”

            I nodded shortly, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the silent treatment, really, because that would’ve included ignoring her comment altogether. That would’ve given away my tactic instantly, because Madison was no stranger to the silent treatment, and she would’ve just gotten pissed off and left. However, I’d found that if you still paid attention to someone and just didn’t talk, they got more desperate to make you talk back. Kind of like me and Dawn in eighth grade. Madison always fell right for it.

            “Forget about Astronomy. Let’s have a Christmas party, okay? You and me, we’ll throw it and invite everyone and it’ll be awesome!” she suggested, smiling an actual genuine smile.

            Well, I couldn’t resist parties. Especially Christmas parties.

            “Okay! At your house, though. My parents were kind of annoyed at how the Halloween party turned out.” I said.

            She nodded quickly. “Right, right. Understandable. My parents are going to some medical convention right before Christmas, do you want to have it then? It would be on, like, the 22^nd or something.”

            “That’s great. Who’s invited?” This part was crucial; all the right people had to show up, and I mean all of them. If only half of the right people came, they would just complain the whole time about how so many cool people weren’t there. Then, no matter how awesome the party really was, it would be remembered as a suck fest.

            “Everyone in the crowd, obviously,” Madison began scribbling names on a piece of paper. The “crowd” was my old gang of friends, consisting of about fifteen privileged teenagers. Not that they weren’t still my friends, but they weren’t who I hung out with as much anymore. Madison was still in pretty tight with them, and Stacy was friendly with them too. I still got invited to a lot of their parties, although I only went to about half of them, depending on who exactly was throwing it.

             “Okay, so that makes seventeen, with Andrew,” I tapped the paper and she added his name.

            “Who else, who else…Danella Monroe, she hangs out with everyone…”

            I scowled at the mention of her name. That little guppy. She sucked up to anyone of a higher station than her, and expected to be rewarded for it. I knew for a fact that most of my old friends didn’t even like her that much, just kind of tolerated her because she had a huge house with an indoor pool. Sometimes I almost felt pity for her, since she seemed to have no real friends and an ultra superficial life. Mostly, though, I despised her. She wasn’t even a senior; if I had known she was a year behind me when I first met her, I never would have bothered with her at all. It was only because she was hanging out with Madison and Hank when I met her that I put up with her introduction, and she wasted no time in pointing out that I was really skinny for my height. The little b***h. I’m sorry we can’t all be five feet and three hundred pounds no matter how much we throw up, but I guess only Danella is that lucky.

            “Do we have to invite her? Isn’t she too young to be out late with us?” I complained.

            Madison rolled her eyes at me. “Asia, I don’t know about you, but most of us have eleven o’clock curfews on our licenses. We can’t be out that late.”

            Bulls**t if I ever heard it, you hypocrite.

            “Besides, Danella’s our friend. We have to at least invite her, maybe she won’t even want to come.”

            Oh, she’d want to come all right. A leech like her never passed up an opportunity to hang out with people cooler than herself. At least she was going to be at Madison’s house instead of mine; I didn’t want to risk anything being stolen.

            “Fine, whatever. Don’t forget Stacy.”

            Madison was frantically scribbling. “Duh, she’s like, in the group.”

            “And Dawn and Maggie too, get them on there.”

            Madison’s hand slowed and she glanced over at me. “Dawn Chilingarian and Maggie Ironpride, at a party with everyone? Will they even want to come?”

            “We have to at least invite them, right? Come on, what’s wrong with Dawn and Maggie? They’re our friends too.” Well, they were really more my friends. It had taken Madison a long time to warm up to the idea of hanging out around the two of them, and even then it was only when no one else from the old crowd was around. It’s not like there was some negative stigma attached to them, as far as I knew there was nothing about Dawn or Maggie that would cause some social repercussion from being seen with them. Madison was just weird, that was all. It didn’t matter much, because I always got the feeling that Dawn especially was happier when Madison wasn’t with us. It’s just hard trying to juggle two separate groups of friends. Even though Madison is closer to the old group, she and I are still really close. It sucks that she can’t hang out with me and the girls that much.

            “Nothing’s wrong with them, they’re just…a little socially awkward, that’s all.” Madison said slowly. “Look, they’re nice girls, but have you ever actually seen Dawn at one of our parties? She looked totally miserable the whole time.”

            The last time Dawn had come to a party involving everyone on Madison’s current list was at my back-to-school bash just before junior year started, and it was true that she had been absolutely depressed during it. That was because her dog had been missing for the past two days and she was only at the party because her parents forced her to leave the house. Anyone would be a downer if they thought their dog was dead, but I guess I should’ve explained that to Madison.

            “Just put them on the list, and I’ll tell them to be friendlier while they’re there.” I commanded. Madison sighed and, like magic, the names appeared on the paper.

            “They just better not be wallflowers this time. It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d engage someone in conversation…” Madison muttered. I didn’t know if I should remind her or not that all of Madison’s parties involved drinking and there would most likely not be the kind of conversation that Dawn and Maggie enjoyed. I decided not to; it was hard to explain to someone who loved beer why anyone would be uncomfortable around drunks.

            The bell rang eventually and we herded into the hallway. It was Thursday, which meant Dawn had piano lessons, which meant I had to find another way home. Madison, perhaps? Except sometimes I could only take ninety minutes at a time with her, and as luck would have it, that’s how long Study Hall lasted.

            “I’ll mail out the invitations by Saturday, once I clear it with my parents. That won’t be a big deal. Just make sure you tell Dawn and Maggie, of course they’re welcomed to come, but I don’t want them to be all gloomy and whatever.” Madison said as we walked. She always jabbed a finger if she was in an on-the-go conversation, like she was repeatedly making a point. It was more distracting than anything else.

            “Don’t worry, I will,” I assured her. We rounded a corner and I saw Dawn halfway down the hall, digging through her purse as she ambled along the wall. I felt bad for her, her and Maggie. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t have fun at big parties. That just wasn’t their scene. And I really didn’t like Madison telling me to make them behave differently, as if I had any control over it. Maybe I could’ve pressured Maggie into being outgoing, if I worked at it long enough, but there was no controlling Dawn; she was immune to me. They probably wouldn’t go anyway, which made me sad because they were my best friends. I wanted them at the party.

            Almost as if she’d heard my thoughts, Dawn turned around and found me immediately. She seemed confused for a moment, but then smiled. A real Dawn smile, with her eyes and everything. I tossed a goodbye to Madison and crossed the hall, not just because Dawn was really the better friend, but also because I was feeling a little defensive of her.

            “I can give you a ride home if you need one,” she said by way of a greeting, going back to digging in her purse.

            “No piano today?” I was surprise; it was a rare Thursday that Dawn wasn’t behind that piano.

            “Nope. Apparently my instructor’s wife has this big art thing going on so he has to baby-sit all night. Can’t very easily teach piano with an infant on your lap.” She very nearly laughed, but being who she was, restrained.

            “Cool. What are you looking for?”

            “My keys. I know they’re here somewhere…”

            Her purse was no more than a small handbag for loose change and lip gloss, but Dawn had crammed in her phone, wads of cash, pocketfuls of coins, folded papers, her school ID, her license, her library card, a million other cards I didn’t recognize, and apparently her keys.

            “Oh Little Dawn, you need a bigger purse.”

            “No, I just need to organize. Any bigger will be too big.”

            So not true. “I’ll get you one for Christmas, probably just slightly larger than what you have now. How do you feel about Kate Spade? I saw a really cute one, but it doesn’t have a strap like that, you’d have to hold it in your hand instead…”

            “I won’t use it, don’t waste your money.”

            “You are in desperate need of a new purse. Now, I’m not talking about something you can stuff a little dog into, just something that will actually fit all that crap you carry around.” I insisted.

          Dawn yanked out her keys and somehow managed to avoid spilling the other contents all over the floor. “Found them. Forget the new purse. Let’s go, I still want to practice piano at home.” She began power walking towards the parking lot, leaving the conversation behind her. I could just imagine her doing that at Madison’s party; talking with someone, growing annoyed, storming off. She’d actually come close to fitting right in.

 

 

Author's Note

The part with Asia and Madison reviewing the planets is GONE as soon as I get around to rewriting - so please ignore how stupid it is.