Claire Read online

  After the third pair—William Rast, dark wash—Claire began walking like the Tin Man. “Hey, guys, watch this!” But as she reached for a metallic gold scarf that was hanging off her desk chair, she lost her balance and crashed into Amandy.

  “Ahhhhh!” The two toppled to the ground in fits of hysterics.

  “Look out below!” Sarah and Sari began piling heaps of clothes on top of them like kindling on a bonfire.

  “Man down! I’m trapped!” Claire’s stomach ached as she lay beneath Amandy, laughing hysterically, her face smashed between the white shag rug and a Pucci tank. After several minutes of trying to wiggle free, Claire finally managed to extract herself from the Chanel-scented couture cave.

  Right when she popped her head out, Sarah and Sari stopped giggling and “Pocketful of Sunshine” ended abruptly in the middle of the third chorus. Just like the frogs in the creek behind Claire’s house stopped croaking when a larger animal was approaching, SAS became eerily silent.

  “What’s going on?” Claire turned her head and found herself face-to-leg with a pair of tanned, stubble-free, oil-slicked shins that were practically pressed up against her blond lashes. Suddenly, Claire’s mouth tasted like pennies.

  It was the Wicked Witch of Westchester. And her little dog too.

  But judging by the burning rage behind Massie’s amber eyes, this house call was about more than a stolen pair of ruby slippers.

  CLAIRE’S BEDROOM

  KISSIMMEE, FL

  Saturday, August 8 4:18 P.M.

  Aside from the flared nostrils and hate-filled squint, Massie looked incredible. Dressed in silver lamé shorts, a skinny red crocodile belt, and a blousy ivory silk tank, she looked like a magazine cutout come to life. She was glossier than the rest of the girls in the room. Her coloring was richer, her textures more pronounced.

  The whole thing seemed unnatural. Massie holding Bean against a backdrop of faded Hello Kitty stickers and girly home furnishings? It was like she was standing against one of those special-effects green screens, her edges more defined than the corny background’s.

  “Ohmygawsh, there she is!” Sarah speed-waved, then raced across the white shag toward Massie. “What an incredible surprise!”

  Bean barked twice and Massie lowered her to the ground. She hurried under the bed to avoid getting trampled.

  Claire forced herself to stand but couldn’t move beyond that.

  “You look exactly like you do in your pictures, except you’re taller, obviously, and three-dimensional and totally nice and generous,” Sari shouted, approaching from the left. “It’s so nice to meet you. Gosh.” Sari turned to Amandy. “Doesn’t she look just like her pictures?”

  “Better! I love your blond highlights. And that edgy purple streak behind your ear.” Amandy hug-lifted the alpha.

  Massie’s arms clung stiffly to her sides. Her expression was cold and rigid.

  “I knew it was a Westchester thang!” Sari declared as they wobble-placed her back down on the rug. “No one hugs up there, do they?”

  Without a word, Massie quickly pulled a tube of Mango-MaGawd Glossip Girl out of her shorts and applied with life-and-death urgency. Her amber eyes darted back and forth, in synch with the lip wand, silently surveying the damage.

  Why won’t you speak?What are you thinking? Are you mad? How mad? If mad was a ten and not mad was a one, what would you be? Wait!Why are you even HERE???? Claire wanted to ask these questions and a billion more. But her tonsils held back the words like thick, protective arms, urging her to stand back and assess the danger before jumping in.

  “You’re shocked, right?” Sarah playfully knocked Massie on the arm. Her tanned skin flashed white for a second where Sarah had hit her. “You didn’t think we’d like the EW clothes you sent us, did you?” She unzipped a lavender cashmere hoodie, revealing the black sheer blouse she’d stuffed underneath. “But we dooooo!” Tossing the hoodie on the floor like a used tissue, Sarah spun, lost her balance, then crashed onto the bed, creasing the front of the delicate black blouse.

  SAS cracked up. Claire bit her thumbnail.

  “It was super supportive of you to send clothes for Miss Kiss.” Sari smiled, her top lip curling inward toward her gums.

  SAS nodded in agreement. Claire gripped her stomach.

  “I can’t believe we ever thought you were mean.” Amandy shimmied out of a True Religion miniskirt, revealing a pair of Massie’s red and orange Cosabella boy shorts.

  “I dunno if Claire told you this.” Sari put her arm on Amandy’s shoulder. “But her name used to be Mandy before she changed it to Ah-mandy. And Mandy sounds like Massie, which is kind of funny because you both have the same best friend and the same taste in clothes. I bet she could totally change it back if you wanted. So you could be more the same. Right?”

  Amandy eagerly nodded yes.

  SAS beam-grinned at Massie.

  Slowly, Massie parted her high-glossed lips. Then she inhaled with a long, deep rattle that sounded like she was having an asthma attack. Unwittingly, Claire lifted her shoulders toward her ears. She clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself against the force that was building inside of Massie. Preparing herself to face the eye of the storm. Hoping to—

  “KUUUUHHHH-LAAAAAIRE!” Massie bellowed.

  The pictures on the headboard fluttered. A Hello Kitty pencil rolled off the desk. SAS piled onto the bed and covered themselves with Claire’s collection of DIY T-shirt pillows. Bean whimpered.

  “So, um.” Claire fanned her burning face and tried to smile. “What brings you to Orlando?” She giggled nervously.

  “There’s a cold front in the Hamptons.” Massie sneered.

  Suddenly, Claire remembered hearing something about the Blocks taking a three-week luxury cruise in the Mediterranean and wondered if Massie had nowhere else to go. A teeny-tiny sympathy tingle, the size of a baby sea monkey, fluttered in her belly. She couldn’t imagine her parents going away for three weeks and leaving her behind. But still. It was hard to feel 100 percent sorry for someone who made you feel unwelcome in your own bedroom.

  “So if your FLBR friends wouldn’t mind returning my stolen luggage and—”

  “This is your luggage?” Amandy put her hand on her heart. “As in, the stuff you packed for vacation?”

  Massie glared at her in an of-course-what-did-you-think-it-was? sort of way.

  “Wow.” Sarah pulled a candy necklace out of her back pocket and stretched it over her massive head of hair. “How long are you staying?”

  Too long! Claire thought.

  “What’s an FLBR?” Sari asked, her voice slightly elevated by a hopeful lilt. “No, wait, lemme guess. Friends Love Bunny Rabbits.” She turned to Massie. “Am I close?”

  Massie stomped over to the bed, placed her hands on her hips, and glared down at the trembling SAS cluster. “It means you’re a—”

  “It means you’re from Florida,” Claire interrupted. “You know. Like you’re my Florida friends.” She sat on the edge of the bed, between Massie and SAS.

  “What’s the LBR part?” Sarah pulled her candy necklace toward her mouth and bit down.

  Massie rolled her eyes. “Um, Claire, are you a locksmith?”

  She shook her head no, desperately wishing she could mute the next five seconds of her life. Because someone was about to get insulted—probably her—and the last thing Claire wanted was for her Florida friends to see what Westchester was really like. Not that it was bad—just occasionally humiliating. And why make them worry?

  “I asked, are you a locksmith?”

  “No.” Claire laughed, like this was a fun inside joke they shared.

  “Then why are you hanging with these dorkys?”

  Claire lowered her eyes in shame. Did Massie really think her friends were so bad? And if so why wasn’t Claire rushing to their defense?

  “Door keys?” Sarah scratched her head. “Why are we door keys?” She giggled.

  “Maybe she means the Florida K
eys,” Sari tried. Then she turned to Massie with a compassionate smile. “Do you mean the Florida Keys? Because technically Orlando is part of the mainland. But the Keys are cool. Key West is super fun around the holidays.”

  Massie ignored her while she rearranged the headboard photos so that the shots of her were in the center.

  Claire, feeling more in the middle than Malcolm, had the sensation that a giant gummy worm was wrapping itself around her heart. Either that or she was about to blow an artery. Like a superhero with the ability to read minds, she knew exactly what everyone was thinking. And the more tuned-in she became, the harder the gummy worm squeezed.

  Undoubtedly, Massie was wondering why Claire was friends with these simple, unsophisticated girls. Girls who looked their age and saved their allowances for weeks just to buy one new thing at A&F. She probably assumed Claire was holding on to them for the summer because she had no one else. But now that she had arrived, it was okay to treat SAS like last season’s flats.

  And then there was SAS. They were probably thinking that Massie’s icy attitude was just a New York thing, and that she would warm to them when she realized they had been officially accepted in the Miss Kiss pageant.

  “We may be door keys.” Amandy lifted herself up onto her knees on the edge of the bed and giggle-mumbled. “Whatever that means. But we are grateful door keys. Lending us your luggage for our pageant is—”

  Claire braced herself for another storm.

  “Pageant?” Massie practically spat. “Don’t even say that word in front of my clothes. The sound alone is enough to make the fabric pill.”

  SAS’s smiles faded to frowns. They finally got it.

  “But”—Sari pout-glanced at Claire—“I thought you said these were gifts?”

  “The only gift you’re getting is a bill from my dry cleaner,” Massie barked. “Now remove my clothes from your fruit-scented bodies before I—”

  “Surprise!” Judi elbow-pushed the bedroom door open. Her arms were shaking under the weight of an enormous peanut-butter ice cream cake in the shape of giant lips. “Everyone downstairs. We have a lot to celebrate!”

  Suddenly Claire thought of the orchestra on the -Titanic and how they started playing while the ship was sinking. Because celebrating, under the current circumstances, seemed just as pointless.

  THE LYONSES’ KITCHEN

  KISSIMMEE, FL

  Saturday, August 8 5:03 P.M.

  “Cake, cake, cake!” Todd chant-shouted as he bolted down the peach-carpeted stairs to the kitchen.

  Jay Lyons was already seated at the head of the diner-style booth, anxiously slapping a pink plastic fork against the Minnie Mouse paper plate that was left over from Claire’s eighth birthday party. Judi leaned over him, poking the frozen desert with letter candles that spelled W-E-L-C-O-M-E on the top lip for Massie and M-I-S-S K-I-S-S on the bottom for everyone else.

  SAS slid in on one side of the booth, while Massie and Claire tucked into the other. Everyone pretended to be fascinated with Todd and his ability to run tight circles around the cooking island while screaming the word cake so they wouldn’t have to look at one another.

  Until today, the kitchen had been Claire’s favorite room in the house. The booth, with its red sparkly vinyl padding and matching Formica tabletop, was not something most families were lucky enough to have. But Jay had won it at a church charity casino night and had decided to commit the entire kitchen to the 1950s soda shop theme.

  The floor was covered in black-and-white tiles, and the appliances were the same ones that had belonged to Claire’s grandparents. The blender was turquoise, and the Mixmaster was cupcake yellow. Pictures of old Cadillacs hung on the walls next to drawings of doting housewives pulling roasts from the oven. Two pairs of gray Reebok Rollerblades—ones her parents had been wearing when they first met—were preserved in a plastic shadow box beside the pantry. The room had more charm than Juno.

  But now, Claire couldn’t help seeing it all through Massie’s amber eyes. And suddenly the whole theme thing seemed childish.

  Just like her friends.

  Claire wanted to hate Massie for making her feel this way. But couldn’t. She had no one to blame for her insecurity tsunami but herself. Before Massie had arrived, she’d been proud of her hometown. Proud of its people. Proud of its pageants. Gawsh! Why did she always assume she had to be like Massie to be liked by Massie?

  Claire grin-glanced at her FBFFs and made a silent promise: She was not going to let Massie Block influence her behavior toward them. Start-innnnnnnnnnnnnnnng . . .

  . . . now!

  “Remember the time we tried to set a world record by seeing how long we could sit under this table?” Claire giggled at the memory.

  SAS smiled but did not lift their eyes.

  “How long did you last?” Jay chuckled. “An hour?”

  “More like two, Mr. L,” Amandy giggled. “And it would have been longer if he hadn’t thrown fire ants at us.”

  Todd proudly patted himself on the back, then sat on his father’s lap. “You should have heard the screams!”

  “We did!” Jay and Judi laugh-blurted at the same time.

  “I started dialing nine-one-one before I even knew what happened,” Judi reminded them.

  Soon, everyone was cracking up. Claire’s teeth chattered with joy.

  “Sounds like a real YouTube moment,” Massie mumbled, then flipped her hair. The pure essence of plants that was Aveda’s signature scent temporarily eclipsed the peanut buttery smell of the cake.

  Claire felt her smile wane. She was about to roll her eyes to show Massie that she too thought the whole ants-under-the-table thing was goofy. But wait! If Massie didn’t like their idea of fun, she could leave.

  “Hold on a minute, you’re not going to spread this, are you?” Amandy quickly sobered.

  “Huh?” Claire asked while her mother searched the kitchen drawer for matches.

  “You know, you won’t tell the other judges embarrassing stories about us, right?”

  Claire knit her blond brows in confusion.

  “Why aren’t you denying anything?” Sarah leaned forward and covered her mouth in shock. “Is it because you already spilled?” She gasped and turned to SA. “She already spilled!”

  “What are you talking about? I haven’t even met the other judges yet.”

  “Aha! You said ‘yet.’” Sari pointed her finger in Claire’s face. “But you’re planning on it.”

  “Planning on what? On meeting them or telling them?” Claire looked at her father, hoping for a witness to the insanity. But he waved his hands like someone who didn’t want to get involved.

  Out of desperation, she glanced at Massie, but surprisingly, the alpha didn’t have a single trace of an I-told-you-they-were-crazy-FLBRs expression on her face. Instead she was rubbing Chanel cuticle cream on her thumbnail. All traces of anger seemed to be gone. She looked serene—as if she hadn’t just gotten abandoned by her parents and then sent to another state only to walk into a roomful of strangers parading around in her clothes.

  “So, who are you gonna vote for?” Amandy fanned her face with the Minnie Mouse paper plate.

  Claire opened her mouth to answer, then paused. She hadn’t really thought about it.

  “I met her first,” Sari insisted. “’Member, Claire? We were gymnastics partners. I spotted you on the balance beam. I caught you when you started to wobble. It’s almost like I saved your life.”

  “Yeah, but I was the first one to sleep at her house,” Sarah insisted.

  “Only because I had the chicken pox.” Amandy pounded her fist on the Formica tabletop. “Thanks to you!” She pointed at Sari.

  “Me?” Sari squealed. “I caught them from y—”

  “What are they fighting about?” Massie asked quietly. “What voting?”

  “Tell ya later,” Claire mumbled back.

  “Who wants cake?” Judi shouted over the shouting.

  “Meeee!” Todd and Jay shouted.
/>   “Here it comes,” Judi announced as she placed the flaming ice cream cake in the center of the table. The letter-candles burned with the pride of an Olympic torch.

  “On the count of three, I want Claire, Sarah, Sari, and Amandy to blow out the part that says MISS KISS. And Massie, you get the WELCOME part. Ready? One . . . two . . .”

  “What do I get?” Todd whined.

  “This.” Claire slid her finger along the edge of the rectangular cake tray. She hooked a chunk of white icing and flicked it at her brother’s face. It landed right on his nose.

  “Claire!” Judi huffed, trying to look angry. But her pinched smirk gave her away.

  Massie burst out laughing while Jay playfully licked it off his son’s nose.

  “Ew, Dad!” Todd giggled.

  “Can I keep the MISS KISS candles, Mrs. L?” Amandy asked, completely ignoring the giddiness on the Lyonses’ side of the table.

  “No fair!” Sarah rubbed her curly blond hair. “I was going to ask.”

  “No, I was!”

  “Why don’t you blow them out first?” Judi tried to sound like she wasn’t annoyed. “Before the ice cream melts.”

  “Fine,” Amandy snapped. Then she leaned forward and blew.

  “What happened to our three count?” Massie looked up at Judi, her amber eyes wide with innocence.

  Judi shrugged while SAS began fight-pulling the candles.

  “Um, is this full fat or low fat?” Massie smacked the lower lip of the cake with the back of her spoon.

  “Is she serious?” Amandy asked, stuffing the M, K, and two S candles under her butt.

  “Yeah, I’m serious,” Massie huffed.

  “Exactly how lame do you think we are?”