“Hey, Jill!” he’d yelled when they reached Mrs. Smith’s beach. “Wait up!”
The false note of brightness in his voice didn’t fool Jill. She pulled her towel tighter around her shoulders and kept walking.
“Don’t you want to hear what Aaron said about you?”
This gave Jill pause. She’d had a crush on Aaron from the moment he’d boarded the school bus last September. With his chiseled cheekbones and head full of soft coffee-brown curls, he looked like one of the Greek statues she’d seen on a field trip to the Met. And when he’d smiled at her, his eyes shining in the morning sunlight, her heart had somersaulted inside her chest.
Every time she saw him, she felt breathless. She could never think of anything to say to him, so she just stared at him when he wasn’t looking. At home, she wrote stories about him. In every story, he fell in love with a girl just like her.
She didn’t think Aaron had said a word about her to J.J., but there was a small chance her brother was telling the truth. Swinging around to face him, she said, “What’d he say?”
“That it was cool you made the team.”
Jill glowed with pleasure. She wanted to run to her room and shut the door so she could picture Aaron’s face from every angle as he talked to J.J. about her. She wanted to hear Aaron’s deep voice repeating the line over and over again, even if it was only in her head.
J.J. gave her a few seconds of happiness before sliding the dagger in. “Mike said something, too.Hesaid you should get a new suit because everyone can see your mosquito bite boobs through this one.”
Jill’s skin grew hot with embarrassment. She wrapped her towel around her torso, mortified by the thought that her suit was actually see-through.
Why didn’t you tell Mike to shut up?she wanted to shout atJ.J., but he wasn’t that kind of brother. He never defended her. He always joined in when other kids teased her, eager to see her taken down a peg or two.
“Mike’s an asshole, and so are you!” she spat.
J.J. feigned innocence. “Don’t get mad at me. I didn’t say it! ButIknow how you can get Aaron to like you back. All you have to do is pick a dandelion from Mrs. Smith’s lawn. I dared him to do it, but he was too scared. Ifyoudid it, he’d think you were totally awesome.”
Jill glanced from where her feet were safely planted on the sand to the scraggly grass shooting up behind Mrs. Smith’s boathouse and felt a frisson of fear.
Mrs. Smith’s property was off-limits. No Trespassing signs were nailed to dozens of trees bordering her property. Others hung from the high iron fence surrounding her house or were taped to the inside of the boathouse windows.
Kids were always daring their friends to invade her property. They tried to shame, cajole, or bribe one another into ignoring Mrs. Smith’s signs, but no one was dumb enough to try. A powerful sense of self-preservation held them back. The same kids who’d break into the yacht club’s snack bar or sneak into the planetarium without paying refused to see if the boathouse door was locked or pick blackberries from the thickets huddled against Mrs. Smith’s fence.
But last night, Jill had felt strangely invincible.
If I can make the team, I can make Aaron like me, too.
Now, as Una wound a hair tie around her second braid, Jill murmured, “I said I’d do it. I’d pick a dandelion.”
The kettle began to shriek, and Una moved it off the burner. She poured her tea and sat down across the table from Jill. A small crease appeared between her brows. “What happened?”
This was why Jill loved Una. She didn’t scold her for ignoring Mrs. Smith’s signs. She didn’t call her foolish or stupid. She didn’t get angry. She just waited for Jill’s story to unfold.
“I saw a dandelion. A big one. Right behind the boathouse. I figured I’d only be on the grass for, like, thirty seconds, but when I ran over to pick it, it was gone. There weren’tanyflowers in the grass, even though I saw tons of them when I was on the beach.”
Seeing Jill’s confusion, Una made an encouraging noise.
“I was about to give up when I saw a bud. I knew it was a dandelion because of the leaves, so I ripped it off the stem and ran back to the beach.”
Jill’s eyes were glassy. She was no longer sitting at the kitchen table. She was standing in the sand, her hand fisted around a flower bud.
“When I showed it to J.J., he said it didn’t count because it wasn’t a dandelion. It was yellow, but it wasn’t a flower. Heknewit was a dandelion. He was just being an idiot.” The anger she’d felt yesterday came bubbling back to the surface. “I hate him!”
Una shook her head. “No, you don’t. You’re mad at him, and you’ll be mad at him lots of times before you’re both grown. Now, finish your story.”
Jill’s eyes flashed. “I wanted to throw that stupid flower at his stupid face, but he walked away.”
“Lookgullibleup in the dictionary, Jill the Pill!” J.J. had shouted over his shoulder. “Your picture’s there!”
Under the table, Jill’s fingernails carved half-moons into her palms. She held on to her fury because it was hot and energizing and far better than the weird sensation the flower had given her. The moment she’d touched it, she’d felt fear slip under her skin like a needle, injecting something oily and cold into her veins.
