New readers will benefit from reading Miss Emily: 1 for background and foundations.
Monday evening turned into one of those “work on your project with your little friend” nights that parents always seemed weirdly excited about. Cassie’s mom called before dinner and the whole thing got arranged over our heads before either of us could object properly.
So there we were at the dining room table with blue pens, unlined paper, Mom’s old Better Homes cookbook, two encyclopedias from 1983, Cassie’s backpack, and my Subway cup sitting in the middle of everything like a tiny orange monument to poor decisions. Cassie’s research materials consisted of a contraband copy of Cosmo and a large bag of barbeque chips. The hot kind. Both were secured, out of sight, in her pink pack.
She had five bullet points written at the top of her page in bubble letters.
“How to Talk to Boys Without Feeling Stupid,” she read aloud, then immediately groaned and covered her face with both hands. “I sound stupid already.”
I was supposed to be writing about strawberries but had somehow spent fifteen minutes drawing a bowl of shortcake in the corner of my paper instead. “You should’ve picked something easier.”
“I thought it was easy. Boys are everywhere.”
“That hasn’t helped you much so far.”
She kicked me under the table.
“What does your Cosmo say? Anything juicy?”
“SHHHH!” She looked around like we had just robbed the ice cream store of profits and moose tracks. “Nobody’s supposed to know about that. I’ve been reading it in the bathroom.”
“Well?” I may have whispered while joining in the cautious scanning of corners for parental ears.
“It’s, uh, not really helping for this part. I think it’s for later. After…. you know.”
While I didn’t “know”, I let it pass to preserve my aura of worldly experience. For a bit we mostly worked in silence, except for paper sounds and Cassie sighing every forty-five seconds like a widow in an old movie. I could hear the dryer thumping in the laundry room and Dad coughing at the television in the living room. Every now and then Mom passed by on a domestic mission of some sort.
My strawberry cup sat near the middle of the table under a fluorescent lamp. The clay had dried into hard orange chunks with little white streaks from the fertilizer. Digging with a pen revealed the strawberry had collapsed inward and looked tired from participating.
I poked it. Goo stuck to the tip of my pen. I may have made a face as I dropped it into the trash.
Cassie glanced over. “It looks worse.”
“It’s adjusting.” I pulled a new pen out of the packet.
“That berry is dead, Millie.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know dead when I see it.”
I ignored her and went back to my draft. I made a series of little spirals to get the pen working, and then got serious.
Strawberries require patience and proper soil conditions…
That sounded fake. I scratched it out.
Strawberries are important because they become shortcake.
“I should have chosen ‘How to eat Shortcake with a Spoon’.”
Across from me Cassie was chewing on her pen cap so hard the plastic had turned white around the edges.
“What do boys even talk about when they’re alone?” she asked suddenly.
“Sports? Armpits? Car crashes?”
She nodded thoughtfully like I might actually be onto something. “Ryan likes baseball.”
“There you go. Write about baseball.”
“I don’t know anything about baseball.”
“It’s like softball, only easier.”
“I don’t know that much about softball.”
“You don’t know anything about boys either and that didn’t stop you choosing them for this assignment.”
That earned me another kick.
Mom drifted through on one of her patrols and stopped beside the table long enough to narrow her eyes at us.
“If I find barbecue chip dust ground into my tablecloth again, you’re both cleaning the entire house.”
Neither of us said anything. Our eyes tracked directly to our guilty stash before returning to authority.
She walked away and we waited, listening. The laundry room door shut down the hall with a soft clump.
Cassie slowly reached into her backpack and pulled the chip bag back out.
“We’re dead anyway,” she whispered as I took a sip from my can. She made a face and smooshed a dozen chips into her mouth at once with a loud crackling crunch.
I laughed hard enough to snort Coke out my nose. The burn redirected my thoughts onto more important issues as Cassie laughed at me, freshly distributed chip particles now decorating the table and our papers.
For a while the essays disappeared entirely as we chattered about things that mattered, like whether kissing probably felt disgusting and whether high school girls naturally learned eyeliner or were taught by older cousins in secret classes somewhere. I wanted to hear more about her Cosmo research, but was afraid I’d blow my cover of being “experienced”.
Cassie absentmindedly wrote “Cassie Swan” in cursive on the corner of her notebook and then nearly tore the page trying to scribble it out.
“Oh my God,” she hissed. “If somebody found this I would have to move away.”
“You could fake your death. Leave your bike a corner somewhere downtown, with a note saying you were going to London or something.”
“That would be less embarrassing.”
I looked down at my own paper and realized I had written a paragraph about whipped cream without noticing. The lines angled downward like a ski slope and my cursive writing skills hadn’t improved from third grade.
None of this had anything to do with growing strawberries.
Outside, the backyard had gone dim blue with evening. The patio light flicked on automatically with a hollow click against the window glass. My stupid Subway cup sat there in the center of the table looking dirtier and sadder by the minute under the blue-white light of the lamp.
Cassie followed my eyes toward it.
“You really thought that thing would grow by Wednesday?”
“Nobody said it takes months to grow them. You could have stopped me.”
“Me? How would I know?”
We both stared at it quietly for a second.
Then Cassie asked, whispering, “Do you think boys can tell when you like them?”
I remember looking at her then — really looking — pink cheeks, freckles, pen cap marks on her lips, trying to sound casual and failing completely. She looked left and right to make sure we were still alone.
I thought about Ryan Swan smiling at her in the hallway sometimes. I thought about how Cassie suddenly cared about brushing her hair before school this year.
And because I was twelve and mean in the way best friends are sometimes mean, I said, “I think Ryan probably does. You stare at him like you’re tracking a fly ball.”
Mom appeared in the doorway just as Cassie threw a wadded-up paper ball at my head so hard it bounced off my forehead. It boomeranged through the air and landed in Mom’s iced tea with a little ‘sploosh’.
Everything stopped.
Mom looked at the floating paper wad.
Cassie looked like she was preparing for a heart attack.
I started laughing first, which turned out to be the wrong choice.
“Millie.”
That was all Mom said. At least it wasn’t Millory. Or worse, Millory Angelica.
She wasn’t loud. I cataloged it as serious, but not deadly.
Cassie slid lower into her chair trying to disappear while Mom fished the soggy paper out of her glass and dropped it into the sink.
Then she looked at the table.
At the chips.
At the papers.
At the orange dirt crumbs.
At the dying strawberry in its cup.
“You girls have spent two hours in here and somehow accomplished negative schoolwork.”
“We have rough drafts,” I offered weakly.
Mom picked up one of my pages.
She read the first sentence.
Strawberries are important because they become shortcake.
Her eyes closed, and I saw her lips moving as she counted — a classic mom tell.
Cassie made a tiny choking noise beside me.
Mom set the paper back down very carefully. “I’m going to pretend I did not see this tonight. But tomorrow after dinner we are fixing whatever this situation is. And before you’re done, clean all this up.” Her index finger circled in the air above our work zone.
Then she walked out, shoulders hunched and carrying her tea like she’d survived a minor natural disaster, but expecting a bigger one any second.
Cassie waited until she disappeared completely before whispering, “I knew it. We’re dead.”
I looked down at my papers, the chips, the orange clay dust, and the little collapsed strawberry in its filthy Subway cup.
In the bottom of the fifth inning, Miss Emily seemed to be running up the score just for fun. And the umpire seemed to be on her side.
