Clara shook her head. When would Evil Lynn give up?
At lunch, the kid at the scanner remarked to her, “You used to be a friend of Kim’s,” and Clara heard herself say, “I am a friend of Kim’s,” and then caught sight of Kim, who had on a Mets jersey and turquoise harem pants, no doubt from Second Nature because no regular store had carried them in years. The old tug of their friendship pulled at her, the dumb things they’d done; in kindergarten they’d hidden in a storage closet during a fire drill, laughing their heads off. Their teacher got so mad when they were found, and got so much madder when Clara kept saying, “But it wasn’t a real fire.” Before she knew it she was putting her tray down and sitting opposite Kim and asking, “Okay if I sit with you?”
“Well, sure,” Kim said right away, flipping her braid behind her.
What was happening here? Last night, Clara had actually shed tears, just a few, at an old movie simply because a woman looked so alone and had no name. Clara never cried. Yesterday afternoon, she’d practically broken out in hives over a couple of dogs owned by an old lady she had, without effort, been able to ignore for years. Now she had joined Kim for lunch. She had no idea what to say.
Kim didn’t seem to mind; she shrugged her shoulders. “So . . . you want to do a crossword puzzle?”
What a great idea. Clara pulled out her phone and held it between them. A video for Bracelesses popped up, but she swiped it away.
“I’ve never really done one before,” Kim said.
Clara showed her how you started with the words moving across, or horizontally. The clue for one across: six-letter word for ache.
“Pain,” Clara said. “Wait, that’s only four letters. Anguish—that’s seven, too many, distress, also seven, what about agony? Oh, that’s five.”
“Desire,” Kim said.
Clara said the easy way to check if your word was correct was to take a quick look at an intersecting word—say, one down. The clue: Personal journal (five letters). That had to be diary, and the d confirmed that the first letter of one across was also d. Kim had gotten it right. Clara had been on the wrong track.
The puzzle was a tricky one—they got harder as the week went along—but it turned out Kim was a natural, as Clara told her while eating her poppy-seed bagel and chocolate chip cookies. Kim had something she’d brought from home, an avocado-and-turkey spiral. Together they finished the puzzle in less than fifteen minutes, faster than Clara had ever done a Thursday puzzle.
“Hey, I’ve been looking around for someone,” Kim said. “I wasn’t going to ask you, because, you know . . .” She paused. “But you’d be perfect, Clara. You have the best face.”
What was that?
“I want to put stage makeup on you—I need the practice, and this would really help. A girl in the cast got me to sign up to do the play this year, Into the Woods, and I want them all to look just right. Your face is so wide open, so inviting. I look at you and I see—so many possibilities. I could turn you into anything. With makeup, I mean. Please say yes.”
Clara thought about it—and found she had absolutely no thoughts about it whatsoever. “Okay.”
“Yay!” Kim actually clapped. “Can you come over today, after school?”
“Tomorrow,” Clara said quickly. “Today I have . . . plans.”
Hydro-buses were always way too crowded in Belle Heights, and it also took an extra-long time for passengers to get on and off. The ladder in the center slowed everything down, so most people bunched up toward the ramp at the front. That way you boarded the bus faster, but usually there were no seats to be had. Clara and Evil Lynn ended up standing up the whole way, people jostling them on either side, and there was a vague smell of something sour. The bus kept stalling, which upped the annoyance factor, all the way to Spruce Hills, which, contrary to its name, didn’t have a single hill (or any spruce trees, for that matter).
Inside the mall, Evil Lynn took her to Neuro Plus, which was between a tattoo parlor and a Bracelesses store. Selena probably came here for adjustments. Clara was grateful to see no sign of her.
Once inside, Clara sat in a waiting area that was really a long hall. She had Evil Lynn on one side and two women deep in conversation on the other. At one point the first one said, “Is that your new coat?”
“It’s one of my new coats,” said the other.
After a time a man stood before them. He had a thick mustache the color and texture of straw. “I am Dr. Stone,” he said.
Clara got up.
Dr. Stone looked somewhat alarmed. Sometimes her height threw people off.
“She’s fifteen,” Evil Lynn remarked.