“So. . .” Sarah drew out the syllable. She was rubbing her barefoot absently across the newly mown grass, and she kept her eyes on the ground. “Abby, you said her name was—is she, like, your girlfriend?”
“Abby?” I was so surprised by the question that I couldn’t answer for a minute. “No! No, she’s my friend. One of my best friends. I don’t have a girlfriend. And Abby’s not like that anyway, she’s not interested in that kind of thing.” Even as I said it, I wondered. I hadn’t ever asked Ab anything like that, but she was the least girly-girl I knew. She never said she liked a boy or even paid attention to anyone but Nat and me. None of us was interested in that kind of thing. At least, not until now.
“Well, I guess with all of us starting junior high in a few weeks, we’re going to get interested in it!” Sarah said brightly. “They have dances and everything. . .I can’t wait. I think it’ll be fun.”
“I guess so.” My tone was doubtful. I couldn’t imagine what a dance would be like, and trying to picture the people I knew dancing with each other was really kind of funny. I decided it would be safer to change the subject.
“I’m going to play football this fall,” I announced. “It’s going to be awesome.”
“Football? Really?” Sarah’s smile widened. “I’m going out for cheerleading. So I guess I’ll see you at the games!”
“Yeah, I guess so—“ Whatever I might have said next was lost in a torrent of water as the sprinklers under our feet suddenly turned on. Within seconds I was drenched, and Sarah was shrieking and trying to get away from the spray.
“Oh my gosh!” She was wringing her blonde hair and giggling. “I thought they only went on at night and in the morning! Something must have messed up the timer.” She looked at me, standing there dripping, and her giggles turned to full-blown laughter. “Well, you were pretty hot, weren’t you?”
I managed a smile. “Yeah, I guess I’m cooled off now.”
Sarah cocked an eyebrow at me. “Want a towel? We’ve got them around back by the pool.”
“Nah. I’ll just run home and change.” And I would be literally running home; my brother usually picked me up from this job and took me to the next one. Since he could drive and I couldn’t, I had to depend on him for the houses where we used our own equipment. But if he saw me soaking wet, I’d never hear the end of it.
“Listen, Sarah, can I push the mower over my your house? I’ll just go get changed and come back to finish up. My brother is supposed to take me to the next client in about forty-five minutes. I think I can make it.”
Sarah helped me move the mower and then I booked for home. My mother just shook her head as I grabbed a dry set of clothes and ran back to Sarah’s house. I had just finished the last strip of grass when Simon pulled up.
“That one took you long enough,” he grumbled after we loaded the equipment. “What happen?”
“Sprinklers turned on,” I told him. “Had to wait until they could turn them off until I could finish.” I knew my mom wouldn’t say anything; she was cool that way. I made it to the next client and got back to work. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah and how she had looked when the water soaked her shorts and t-shirt.
I didn’t see her again until the first day of school, when she came over to me in line. Nat and I had been there for a little bit before Ab got to school. The whole thing was weird. First when Nat got there, he asked right away if I’d seen Ab. Well, that wasn’t weird—Nat always wants to know where she is, but there was something different about it that day. He tried to brush it off and said he hasn’t seen her since he got home from vacation and wondered if she had had a good time at the shore, but I swear he turned red when he said her name.
And then to make things even more bizarre, when Ab did show up, she was wearing, like, a dress. I hadn’t seen Ab in anything but jeans or shorts since we were in kindergarten and her mom made her wear a dress on picture day. I was shocked.
But when I said something to tease her, to make her feel better about having to wear a dress—just so she understood that I knew her mom must’ve made her wear it—she got mad. She shot me a snappy comeback, but I could tell she was really annoyed. Who knows why? Nat told her looked pretty, and that seemed to make her feel a little better.
And then before I could really check out what was happening, why Nat was acting so off, I saw Sarah. She was wearing some kind of dress, too, but it just kind of floated around her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her for a minute, and then Ab made some kind of snarky comment about Sarah and how she was dressed. I realized as I stood there, too, that Sarah looked a lot older than Ab did. I wondered if she thought I looked a lot younger than the boys in her class.