She didn't seem to notice, was too busy grabbing more stuff out of the van while humming under her breath. When she turned around and saw me still standing there, she said, "You lost or something?"
Again I was stuck for an answer. But this time, it was for a different reason. Her face, which before had been shadowed in the van, was now in the full light, and my eyes were immediately drawn to two scars: one, faint and curving along her jaw line, like an underscore of her mouth, and the other by her right temple, snaking down to her ear. She also had bright blue eyes and rings on every finger, and smelled like watermelon bubble-gum, but these were things I noticed later. The scars, at first, were all I could see.
Stop staring, I told myself, horrified at my behavior. The girl, for her part, didn't even seem to notice, or be bothered. She was just waiting, patiently, for an answer.
"Urn," I said finally, forcing the words out, "I was looking for Delia?"
The front door of the van slammed shut, and a second later Monica, the slow girl from my mother's party, appeared. She was carrying a cutting board, which, by the expression of weariness on her face, must have weighed about a hundred pounds. She blew her long bangs out of her face as she shuffled along the curb, taking her time.
The blonde girl glanced at her. "Serving forks, too, Monotone, okay?"
Monica stopped, then turned herself around slowly—a sort of human three-point turn—and disappeared back behind the van at the same snail's pace.
"Delia's up at the house, in the kitchen," the girl said to me now, shifting the towels to her other arm. "It's at the top of the drive, around back."
"Oh," I said, as Monica reappeared, now carrying the cutting board and a few large forks. "Thanks."
I started over to the driveway, getting about five feet before she called after me.
"If you're headed up there anyway," she said, "would you please please please take something with you? We're running late—and it's kind of my fault, if you want the whole truth—so you'd be really helping me out. If you don't mind."
"Sure," I said. I came back down the driveway, passing Monica, who was muttering to herself, along the way. At the back of the van, the blonde girl had pulled out two of the wheeled carts and was piling foil pans onto them, one right after another. When she was done she stuck the towels on top of one, then rolled the other over to me.
"This way," she said, and I followed her, pushing my cart, to the bottom of the driveway. There we stopped, looking up. It was steep, really steep. We could see Monica still climbing it, about halfway up: it looked like she was walking into the wind.
The girl looked at me, then at the driveway again. I kept noticing her scars, then trying not to, which seemed to make it all that more obvious. "God," she said, sighing as she pushed her hair out of her face, "doesn't it seem, sometimes, that the whole damn world's uphill?"
"Yeah," I said, thinking about everything that had already happened to me that night. "It sure does."
She turned her head and looked at me, then smiled: it changed her whole face, like a spark lighting into a flame, everything brightening, and for a second I lost track of the scars altogether. "Oh well," she said, leaning over her cart and tightening her fingers around its handle. "At least we know the way back will be easy. Come on."
Her name was Kristy Palmetto.
We introduced ourselves about halfway up the hill, when we stopped, wheezing, to catch our breath. "Macy?" she'd said. "Like the store?"
"Yes," I replied. "It's a family name, actually."
"I like it," she said. "I intend to change my name as soon as I get to a place where nobody knows me, you know, where I can reinvent myself. I've always wanted to do that. I think I want to be a Veronique. Or maybe Blanca. Something with flair, you know. Anybody can be a Kristy."
Maybe, I thought, as she started to push her cart again. But even five minutes into our friendship, I knew that this Kristy was different.
As we came up to the side door it opened, and Delia stuck her head out. She had on a red Wish Catering apron and there was a spot of flour on her cheek. "Are those the ham biscuits? Or the shrimp and grits?"
"The biscuits," Kristy said, pushing her cart up against the side of house and gesturing for me to do the same. "Or the shrimp."
Delia just looked at her.
"It's definitely one or the other," Kristy said. "Definitely."
Delia sighed, then came out and started peering into the various pans on the carts.
Kristy leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. "That hill is a killer," she said to Delia. "We've got to get the van up here or we'll never get everything in on time."
"If we'd left when we were supposed to," Delia said, lifting the lid of one pan, "we could have."
"I said I was sorry!" Kristy said. To me she added, "I was having a fashion crisis. Nothing looked good. Nothing! Don't you hate it when that happens?"
"And anyway," Delia continued, ignoring this tangent, "they have strict rules about service vehicles up here by the garden. The grass is apparently very fragile."