The Inside of Out Page 3

  “O-kay, psycho,” she said, and turned her back.

  And all the other girls laughed and followed her across the playground.

  I still remember that feeling of being stuck to the asphalt, pulled down by more than gravity, the very breath sucked out of me. It was like when Lida went through the black hole in Swan Planet and came out a swan, except I wasn’t a swan. I was a psycho.

  And it must have been true, because the girls I didn’t like took it up as a chant—psycho—repeating it enough at recess, and whispering it enough behind cupped hands that by the end of that week, a lot of the boys, sensing a fight, had picked it up too. And if my remaining friends weren’t name-calling, they weren’t exactly leaping to my defense. It took two days for them to start saving seats at the lunch table so that I couldn’t sit with them. And it took until the day after that for me to gather enough courage to walk up to Natalie in the after-school pickup line. I was terrified, my hands shaking, my life unraveling, so I stumbled over the “mean,” saying, “Why are you being so m-mean to me?” and Natalie just blinked, empty-eyed and said, “I d-don’t kn-know, D-Daisy. W-why do you th-think?”

  That was as close to an answer as I ever got. My best friend had been replaced by this stranger who didn’t laugh at all, whose red hair was never tangled, who’d decided somewhere between Ibiza and Crete that she hated me.

  And for years, people teased me for a stammer I didn’t have. Still did—if you counted Pete Brandt as a person. The other taunts evolved. It took them more than a month to realize that Psycho Daisy didn’t rhyme but Crazy Daisy did, so that one was a big hit, along with the standard synonyms, freak, loser, weirdo. Occasionally I’d get a “Hey” in class from someone who felt sorry for me, but never much more.

  It wasn’t worth talking about. Talking meant thinking and that led to mulling and mourning and honestly, what was the point?

  The only day worth thinking about was the first day of sixth grade. As I was settling down to eat lunch in a hidden corner of the schoolyard, I glanced up to a dizzyingly unfamiliar sight: Someone was walking up to join me.

  She was new. She had long black hair clipped back with barrettes, warm green eyes. She’d just moved from Europe—Europe!—a place where that pretentious cow Natalie had only vacationed.

  And she was wearing a Giselle Chronicles backpack. In sixth grade. Apparently this was acceptable in Europe?

  “Can I eat with you?” she’d asked.

  It turned out we had a lot in common. We found this out astonishingly quickly.

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Von Linden. With a small v.” She flushed bright, electric, beautiful pink. “It’s a common name in Austria, but here I guess it’s long?”

  “My last name’s long too! Beaumont-Smith. With a dash. I always have to explain the dash.” I dared a smile. “You moved from Austria?”

  “Yeah, me and my mom. My dad’s still there, so . . .” She looked down, turning a baby carrot over and over. “I don’t know if I’m going to see him much.”

  “My dad lives at home,” I offered. “But I don’t see him much either. He stays in his office all day playing video games.” I peeked in her lunchbox, spying something that made my eyes water. “What’s that?”

  Hannah picked it up. “Um . . . I don’t know the words. In German, it’s kartoffelpuffer?”

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Potatoes. And fat. Is that the right words?” Hannah’s grin flickered. “My English is rusting.”

  “I love fat. Anything deep fried is my favorite.”

  “Me too!” She beamed. “Sometimes I daydream about, sort of, regular food and picture what it would taste like if you fried it. For example, salad and things.”

  I reeled, amazed. “I bet it would be better.”

  We talked about fried food all day. And then, when school let out, we exchanged numbers so we could keep talking about it after we got home. On the phone, back at school, back on the phone, we talked in sometimes halting English about ballet and black holes and whether ladybugs bit and our moms and our worst fears and how glad we were to have met. Within forty-eight hours, Hannah von Linden and I were best friends.

  It was enough to elevate me from Status: Pariah to Status: Other. As the years passed, Natalie was ever-present, the gnawing ulcer in my gut that made me feel like nothing I did would ever be right again, but with Hannah around, we’d at least stopped interacting.

  Until now.

  “Daisy . . .” Hannah had risen with me, dropping her Moleskine to reach out and steady me.

  “I’m not feeling so well,” I heard myself saying, barely managing to sidestep the waitress without knocking the tray from her hand. “Eat the . . . food. I’d better get home. You two crazy kids enjoy.”

  I was halfway across the diner when it hit me that I’d said “crazy kids”—and one millisecond later that a power cord hit my leg, sending me and something silvery careening to the floor with two sharp cracks.

  “What the hell!” Glasses guy jumped from his seat, spilling coffee on his leg. “Gaaah!”

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking!” I yelled from the ground, elbow throbbing. “Why are you plugged in halfway across the freaking room?”

  “Because my battery’s dead,” he yelled back, turning his laptop over and shaking it. “And now my computer is too.”

  After a moment of paralysis, Hannah was recovering—and approaching fast. Natalie sat in the booth with her eyes closed, like she was practicing a mantra, like I was something you needed happy thoughts to get through.

  The guy was offering me a hand. “Listen, I’m sorry—are you all right?”

  I pulled myself away using the back of his chair, knocking it over in the process, muttering, “Sorry-about-your-computer-I-really-don’t-have-time-to-talk.”

  Then I rushed out the door.

  Once the thick street air hit me, a current pulled me along the sidewalk, out of sight of the diner’s corner windows. After a few blocks, I realized I’d made a pointless circle, my brain stuck stuttering, “How? I . . . how? But how?” My backpack felt impossibly heavy. I put it down on the sidewalk. Sighed. I’d left my ride back at the diner. Along with her girlfriend.

  Get home, I thought. Figure the rest out later.

  I called Mom. She took three rings to pick up, then shouted, “I’m at your school!”

  “Why?” I asked carefully. She didn’t seem to hear.

  “Across the street. Can you see me? I’m with my CFOA group . . . I’m waving!”

  Rather than trying to decipher that, I shouted, “See you in a minute,” skirted the school’s parking lot, and headed across two lanes of sparse traffic to the neighboring field, where Mom and six other ladies were staggering around squinting at the ground, picking up pinches of scrub and soil and stuffing them into tiny canvas bags.

  This was possibly a new level of strange.

  Mom waved so excitedly that I knew she was misreading the reason I’d stopped by.

  “Just wanted to see what you were up to!”

  She threw her arm around me and squeezed, shouting to the others, “Activist in training here!”

  The ladies whooped, and I did a stealth check across the street to school to make sure nobody had overheard. What would my nickname be if QB or Natalie could see me in a vacant lot with a bunch of middle-aged eco-warriors?

  Natalie. She couldn’t say anything. Because she was dating my best friend. My brain whimpered How? one last time and short-circuited.

  I spent the ride home dimly registering Mom droning on about her eco group and how there was going to be a minor- league field across from Palmetto, but the deal to bring in the team fell through, and Community Farmers of America and some game app something-something to fund-raise and then she fell silent, which snapped me back just in time for her to say, “It was awfully br
ave of Hannah to come out.”

  “Yeah.” I blinked. “She’s a rock star.”

  Mom had a dangerous sparkle in her eye. “If you had something to tell me, I’d be very proud of you. And supportive. You know that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So . . .” She was watching me, not the road. “Is there anything you want to say?”

  “Yeah. Brake.” I pointed to the light ahead and she slammed the car to a stop just as it turned red. “Apart from that, no. Nice try.”

  “Okay,” Mom said, an irritating note of patience in her voice, as though in time, I’d come to know myself as well as she did.

  “When I realize I’m gay, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll wake you up and tell you the exact moment it occurs to me.”

  Mom rolled her eyes and turned into our driveway. “Just wanted you to know I’m here for you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  I did. Honestly. Even so, the moment we got into the house, I ran upstairs, locked my bedroom door, and tried my best to pretend nothing outside my walls was real.

  4

  I practiced a normal expression in the hall mirror before daring to step outside the next morning. Good thing too. As soon as I’d fastened my seat belt, Hannah squinted at me.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “Yep. Just lady trouble.”

  Our old-timey way of saying we had our period, but in this case, the lady and the trouble was Natalie.

  “Listen,” Hannah started. “We wanted to explain everything yesterday.”

  We. They were already a “we.”

  “We didn’t expect for it to happen. Us, I mean.”

  They were an “us.”

  I turned on the radio. Hannah glanced at me as she changed lanes.

  “It was just, spending all that time together on the team last spring . . .”

  Right. Natalie was the tennis captain and Hannah’s doubles partner. What a cliché. I turned the volume louder, gritting my teeth against the twang.

  “And then we did that retreat last month, and one day, it just . . . Can we turn this down?”

  Hannah’s fist slammed into the power button, silencing the speakers. Her nostrils flared. I’d seen her angry like this before, but at malfunctioning electronic equipment, uncrackable algebraic equations.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  She was quiet for a few blocks, the air in the car thickening, cementing my mouth shut while my mind scrambled for what to say next.

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought her. I should have just told you.”

  “I sort of had to see it for myself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I shrugged. If she didn’t already get what it meant—how ludicrous the entire situation was—I wasn’t going to spell it out for her.

  Hannah didn’t say anything until we pulled into the school lot. Then she cut the engine with a sigh. “I know you and Natalie have . . . a history.”

  You and Natalie. As if we were both to blame for it.

  “Things were awful for you,” she went on. “And I hate that it happened. Like, I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and give little-kid you a hug, tell you it gets better, except little-kid you wouldn’t know who this stranger was hugging you, so maybe more like a handshake or a high five . . .”

  Weird, I thought. But okay.

  “But you know that Winchaw Junction song? The longest road leads to the highest mountain, and you never—”

  “Yes,” I yapped, really not in the mood for inspirational country lyrics. “I know that song. Unfortunately.”

  “To me, it means that sometimes things happen the way they do to make you a stronger person. It was a long time ago and now . . .” She turned to grin stiffly at me, eyes manic-bright. “You’re you! And . . . you’re awesome!”

  She held on to her pose, still smiling like a pageant contestant.

  My eyes narrowed. Was Hannah seriously trying to argue that Natalie destroying my life was a good thing? I was speechless, but Hannah must have thought I was going to interrupt, because she put one jittery hand up to stop me.

  “Also? Okay, I have to say this. Natalie’s not who you think she is. I mean—people change, right? People are constantly evolving. Actually . . .” Her forehead scrunched. “That’s not really how natural selection works, but you know what I’m saying. I just . . .” She blinked quickly a couple of times, so I knew she was about to lie. “I think you might really like her now.”

  I stared at Hannah, numb with the realization of how candy-colored her view was of my “history” with Natalie. All I could spit out was a muffled “Maybe” while I tugged my backpack from her car.

  Hannah seemed to think that the conversation had gone swimmingly. She linked elbows with me as we turned toward school. “You know, you should learn to drive, Daisy. You’ve got a car. It’s getting ridiculous.”

  She bumped my hip to soften the blow. It didn’t work.

  I did, in fact, have an ancient Jaguar, a sixteenth birthday gift from my dad. After a trip to a used car lot, I’d selected a sleek green beauty because it looked like a car you’d drive along the French Riviera with a scarf holding your hair. Mom didn’t know how to drive stick shift, and Dad kept promising to teach me “next weekend,” once he’d finished whatever game he was working on, so I’d looked up some techniques online. I gave it a try—and never left the driveway. In my Hulk-rage at stalling out, I swore off driving altogether.

  While I was having my manual meltdown, Hannah was graduating from the driving course at school, taking the test, getting her license. She’d inherited the family Honda when her mom got a new car, and she’d never minded chauffeuring me around.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should try again.”

  “I’m going to get you driving gloves.” Hannah held up her hand as if to model one. “And I’m going to tell you they’re magic and that they’ll learn stick shift for you.”

  “That will definitely work,” I said.

  Hannah kept describing the gloves she’d get me, soft ivory with blue buttons on the wrists. It wasn’t until she got a few steps ahead that I allowed my oh-so-delighted smile to sputter out.

  One awkward non-argument, one lecture that rewrote my biography, and one loaded comment about “learning to drive myself.” Good morning to you too.

  We ate lunch together at least. It was rainy again, so we didn’t claim our usual spot on the steps between the cafeteria and the faculty parking lot, settling instead into a table in the corner with some random sophomores.

  Hannah peeled the paper from the gourmet sandwich her mother packed her every morning, and I went to get something unhealthy from the lunch line for us to share. When I came back, there were two seats open around Hannah.

  My stomach clenched. And it begins.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Hannah said, and I held my breath. “Am I a real photographer?”

  It took me a good three-count to realize this was our regular flavor of chitchat. “Of course you are. A good one.”

  “No, but . . . my camera.” She grabbed a chicken nugget from my plate.

  “Your birthday present?”

  “I love it,” she said quickly. “But it’s so easy to use. I was thinking maybe I need, like, a thirty-five millimeter. And a darkroom.”

  “Oh,” I said, leaning my chin on steepled fingers. “I see what you’re saying. Yes. But what you really need is a daguerreotype.”

  “I’m serious!” She tossed her napkin at me. “You’re the one who’s always saying that there’s no point in doing something—”

  “If you’re not going to do it awesomely. Exactly. Which is why you need a nineteenth-century camera and me posed as a Civil War soldier, otherwise no, you’re not a real photographer.”

  Hann
ah laughed. “Is it weird that this seems like a good—”

  She cut off midsentence, her face freezing into nothingness. I looked where she was looking. Natalie had just walked in. I braced myself. But instead of smiling or waving her over, Hannah crossed her legs to face me.

  Natalie surveyed the room in a slow Terminator scan. When she saw my raised eyebrows and Hannah’s back, she spun so quickly her ponytail slapped her in the face. Then, trailed by her usual coterie of sycophants, she selected a window-front table in the middle of the cafeteria—the same place she’d sat since freshman year.

  The football team had picked a new table clear across the room. The moment Natalie sat down, QB’s voice rose, cracking jokes, letting everyone in earshot know that his life was one big, raucous rodeo that no woman could possibly derail.

  She’d dumped him for Hannah. I wondered if he knew.

  When Hannah’s silence tipped from oppressive to maddening, I tossed a crinkle fry at her.

  “Aren’t you gonna say hi to your girlfriend?”

  Hannah didn’t react, didn’t seem to realize how hard I’d had to focus to say it. She glanced furtively at Natalie, then returned to picking at her watercress sandwich.

  “Hang on.” I grabbed Hannah’s arm. “Are you two a secret? Is Natalie not out?”

  “Keep your voice down.” Hannah’s own had slid into a whisper. “Her friends . . . they’re not like you. She needs to be careful with how she tells them.”

  “Because they’re assholes and I’m not. Got it.”

  Hannah smiled faintly. I gave her a couple minutes to relax, finish her artisanal lemongrass iced tea and the rest of my fries. Then I whispered, “I just think it’s lame that you’ve come out and she hasn’t. Are you sure she’s—”

  “Yes!” Hannah hissed, when even I didn’t know how that question was going to finish.

  Are you sure she’s fully committed to your relationship?

  Are you sure she’s human?