Everybody's goin' off the deep end. Everybody needs a second chance.
Chapter 5: Everybody's Working for the Weekend
Saturday morning, I found Moms at the kitchen table with a pad and pen. She had the window over the sink open and a light breeze was ruffling the lace curtains. She’d been baking something and I breathed deeply, enjoying the warm, cinnamon scent. At first I thought she was writing up a grocery list, but she informed me she was making notes of everything she’d need to make not one, but two Homecoming mums.
“Two?” I said, confused. “Moms, I don’t need you to make me one. I know Jim already ordered me something. Honey let that slip.”
She smiled contently as she wrote something else on her pad and sent me a measured look. “Yes, dear. But these are for your brothers. Or rather, their dates.”
Now I was truly thrown. Brothers? Dates? As in plural? For real? “Brian has a date to Homecoming?” I squealed in delight, not caring at all that the Ghost of Trixie Past had put in an appearance and I was suddenly channeling my pre-teen middle school years.
“He does indeed. He asked Loyola Kevins.”
Holy moly. Brian actually asked a girl out. He’s usually so self-conscious around any girls except me and our cousin Hallie. I guess having Loyola as a lab partner let him get over that. I pulled out a chair and sat down next to my mother. “I want to help,” I told her. “Let’s make these the best Homecoming mums ever. Way better than whatever people are ordering from Stevie’s or The Friendly Florist. I heard Jane Morgan say they got a huge shipment of ribbons in at JoAnn’s last week.”
Moms got up and made herself a cup of coffee and brought me some freshly made oatmeal muffins and a glass of milk. Together, we sketched out both mums and what ribbons and charms we wanted to add. It was easier to design Di’s as we know her so well. Diana Lynch and I had been friends from the moment we met in kindergarten. It must’ve seemed strange to our teacher, how Tomboy Trixie and Future Beauty Queen Di were instantly an inseparable duo, but we never questioned it ourselves.
Loyola was more of an enigma, but I’d seen her around school enough to know she was definitely the quiet type. She wouldn’t want something too showy; that I was sure of.
Once we were finally satisfied with our designs, Moms folded up the papers and put them aside. “I’ll run out to JoAnn’s the afternoon,” she said. “Your dad can watch Bobby for awhile. What time are you girls planning to go to the mall?”
“Honey’s supposed to be picking me up at 1:00 and then we’ll get Di.”
“I know you said you were fine with wearing the dress you wore to Knute’s wedding, but are you sure you wouldn’t like to get something new?”
“No, Moms. I’m good. I promise. And really, I figure since we got that dress while we were in Waco, there’s way less of a chance that someone else will be wearing the exact same thing than if I bought something here in town, right?”
My mother gave me an odd look. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that you would genuinely care about that,” she told me.
I grinned impishly at her. “I don’t. At all. But I was thinking maybe it would help convince you that I don’t need something new.”
My cousin Knute’s wedding was about a month ago. I wasn’t a bridesmaid or anything, being from the groom’s side of the family, so I’d been free to wear a dress of my own choosing and I’d found a nice, deep red, tea-length gown with a full skirt and short, puffed sleeves. It would be perfect for the Homecoming dance.
“Well, how about some shoes?” Moms asked. “You might want something with a lower heel if you plan to dance all night, which I suspect you will.”
I agreed to shoe shop with Honey. It wasn’t so much that I really wanted new shoes as it was that I wanted to appease my poor mom, who was clearly once again despairing over her unnatural daughter.
Town and Country Mall was fairly crowded when we arrived a little after 1:30. Di made a beeline for Joske’s first and Honey and I followed at a slightly more sedate pace. We caught up with her in the Misses section where she was quickly looking over a rack of Izod polos.
“Are you planning to buck tradition?” I asked her, one brow raised. “I mean, I’m not going to be one to argue against it.”
She grinned at that and shook her head. “No. I just saw the sale sign and thought I’d see if there was anything I like,” she explained.
I had to give her credit. Even though her family was now one of the wealthiest in the county, Di still tended to shop like someone on a budget whenever she could. She eventually selected three dresses to try on and I accompanied her to the changing rooms while Honey wandered the shoe aisles. A girl I occasionally saw around school was there with her mother, arguing over whether or not a black lace dress was really appropriate for a Homecoming dance. I thought she looked all right, but I wasn’t always the best judge when it came to things like this.
Honey returned empty-handed as Di was studying herself from every angle possible before three long mirrors. She was wearing a dark green satin, off-the-shoulder gown with a giant bow across the front. I’d privately thought it silly and over-the-top when she first pulled it from the rack, but now that she had it on, she looked fantastic. Of course, Di looked fantastic in old warm-ups, so I supposed it was little wonder that she could even make a dress with a two-foot bow work.
“How adorable!” Honey exclaimed. “What do you think? Is that ‘The Dress’?”
Di bit her lip and twisted around again. “I’m not sure? I really like it, but it’s not at all like I had in mind and it’s not a color I normally go with.”
“Well, this is only our first stop,” I pointed out. “Do you want to keep looking?”
“I’m just afraid someone else may grab it if I pass it up,” Di replied with a sigh. “And this is the only one in my size.”
In the end, it took us about two and half hours and eight stores to find Di’s “perfect” dress – a violet taffeta number with straps that tied at the nape of her neck and a narrow skirt that stopped just below her knees.
She also bought the green one. Budgets were all good and fine, but this was Homecoming, after all.
Honey was satisfied with her shoes purchase and I had honored my mother’s wishes and bought a pair of low heels that would look good with my dress. With all that out of the way, I was happy that now we could maybe hit the Sam Goody’s or Waldenbooks. We stopped at the Orange Julius for a quick snack and it was Di who noticed Regan walking along carrying several shopping bags. She raised her hand in a wave and called to him, but he apparently didn’t hear her because he never looked our way and kept walking.
“Humph,” she muttered. “That was weird.”
“It’s pretty loud in here,” Honey observed. “I can barely hear us and we’re sitting across from one another at the same table.”
This was true. We were very close to the arcade entrance and between the heavy beat of a Bon Jovi song and the electronic beeps, bells, and clangs from all the games, it was very noisy where we were sitting. “The really weird thing is Regan shopping,” I said after a moment. “I happen to know he hates it. He told me last Christmas it’s just about his least favorite thing to do.”
Honey shrugged at that. “Well, hate it or not, everyone has to shop at least once in awhile to replace clothes and things that have worn out.”
This was also true. I nodded to acknowledge Honey’s sensible comment and turned my attention to people watching. The mall shoppers were the typical mix of affluent preppies, harried moms, preteens on group dates, and the Goths, who I think mostly hung out at the mall for lack of anything else to do. You never much saw them do any actual shopping, though it amused me to imagine them carefully looking over the available stock at Banana Republic.
My mind went back to Regan and Honey’s comment and I was suddenly worried all over again. What if Regan was shopping for new clothes not because his old ones were worn out, but because he was sick and losing weight? I vowed silently to pay more attention the next time I saw him. If he looked… smaller, I was going to consider that my proof that something was seriously wrong.
I was sipping my shake when I saw Dan walking along, his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his expression one that I couldn’t quite identify, but I thought might have been contempt? I guessed he probably thought shopping was only for rich kids, too, which, to be fair, I suppose it could be argued that he was mostly right on that score. I imagine your average teen can’t drop almost three hundred dollars on a couple of dresses and a pair of strappy sandals like Di had just done. I know I can’t, and my parents pay me a pretty decent allowance for my chores, which consist mostly of Bobby-sitting, plus some housecleaning and a bit of gardening - all three things that I would be doing the following afternoon once we got home from church. Moms was generally easy-going about how we Belden kids arranged our weekends, but she definitely expected us to have our work done before we climbed into our beds Sunday nights.
“Isn’t that Dan?” Honey asked, spotting him as well.
“Yep,” I replied. “Guess he has to shop, too.”
“Should we – should we ask him to join us and the guys tonight?”
I’m glad to report the look on Diana’s face was almost as “Are you kidding me right now?” as mine was.
“I think he made it clear he isn’t interested in our friendship when he turned down going to the game with us,” Di replied.
Honey frowned slightly. “Well, that might’ve just been because he really doesn’t like football. Maybe we should give him another chance?”
I nodded my head in Dan’s direction as he turned and strolled into Spenser’s. “If you wanna ask him, have at. I’ll wait here, though.”
Honey considered this for longer than I would’ve thought necessary before she finally sighed and slumped back in her seat. “No. I suppose not,” she murmured. “But I do feel sorry for him. Don’t you? At least a little?”
“A little,” I conceded. “But I don’t think we’re going to win him over as a group. I think it’ll probably take Mart or Jim befriending him first.”
We finished our drinks and our next stop was the bookstore. There was a new Lucy Radcliffe novel out. I picked it up and studied the cover. It was strange. I love the Lucy Radcliff series. It’s my absolute favorite, but lately, I don’t know. The quality seems to have diminished in the last few books. My brother tells me that’s because the original author passed away and now they’re being ghostwritten. Moms has suggested it might be more that I’ve outgrown them, with the target audience being several years younger than I am now. Whatever the case, I was still going to buy the book. I would buy them until the series ended, even if I was a little, gray-haired old lady by then. My collection would be complete.
Honey purchased a diary with neon bubbles all over the cover. As far as I know, she’s the only friend I have who keeps a diary with the amount of dedication she puts into it. She makes an entry every day, no matter what. Jim has joked that if something ever happened to his sister, he believes she’d come back as a ghost and insist he start recording entries for her.
The three of us pitched in to purchase two picture books and a learn-to-read book to donate to the new collection for the San Isidro kids.
“Should we find something in Spanish?” Di asked, looking a bit concerned by our selections.
“These are good,” Honey assured her. “Jim says they want books in Spanish and in English, because many of the students want to learn English along with their native language.”
We decided to hit the food court for dinner about half an hour before we were due to meet the boys. The three-screen theater sat at one end of a short corridor that bumped out from the center of the mall while the open dining area sat at the other. I kept my dinner to a single taco. It wasn’t that I was trying to watch my calories or anything. Just, I planned on a big bucket of popcorn and peanut M-n-Ms at the movie. Say what you will, but it is just not the same if you go see a movie and skip the popcorn and candy. If you were going do that, you might as well wait until the movie finally made it to Blockbuster or TV after a few years.
“Oh!” Di suddenly exclaimed and I swear she only just stopped herself from literally smacking her forehead. “I forgot!”
“Forgot…?” I prompted.
“My mother asked me to swing by Academy and see if they have skates Larry would like! She wants to buy him some for his birthday.”
Skates. In the north, I’m betting that means ice, but here in Texas, it means roller. Everyone in junior high has roller skates and the rink is where they all go on Saturday nights. “If you hurry, you could still make it there and back,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We’ll go put all the bags in Honey’s car and meet you outside the theater.”
We were almost to the door to the west parking lot when we came across Dan again. There was no way to pretend we hadn’t seen him or vice versa. We all came to a halt and silently regarded one another. Dan stared at us for a moment, then looked down at the multiple shopping bags we carried. There was a definite sneer on his face as his eyes tracked back up to mine.
“Good evening,” Honey offered quietly, and I could tell she was uncomfortable with the intensity of his glare.
He glanced over at her and for just the tiniest moment, I thought maybe I saw a slight softening of his expression. But then he was looking back at me and it was gone. “Must be nice to have so much dough to just drop on whatever you want,” he remarked with an unfriendly smirk.
It was on the tip of my tongue to fire back that all I’d bought for myself were a paperback book and one pair of shoes, but I snapped my mouth shut and gave him a look I intended to say, “I couldn’t really care less what you think about my shopping habits.” I don’t know if that was the message he actually received, but he pushed past us without another word.
“Wow.” Honey turned to watch him stalk off. “He really doesn’t like you, Trix.”
“He reminds me of someone,” I replied thoughtfully. “I just can’t place who. Something about his eyes.”
“Mr. Maypenny?” Honey suggested. “I don’t know about his eyes, but they have that same sort of sharp, stuck-out chin.”
“Oh. Yeah. I hadn’t really noticed that. Maybe he really is Maypenny’s grandson.” I shook my head and started walking again. “C’mon, Honey. Forget about him. We shouldn’t let Oscar the Grouch spoil our evening with his bad manners. Deal?”
She hesitated for a brief moment before answering, but then lifted her head and gave a quick nod. “Deal,” she agreed. “I’ll take an evening with John Cusack over worrying about Oscar the Grouch any time!”
“That’s the spirit,” I murmured with a chuckle. Let nothing get in between Honey and John Cusack!
“Two?” I said, confused. “Moms, I don’t need you to make me one. I know Jim already ordered me something. Honey let that slip.”
She smiled contently as she wrote something else on her pad and sent me a measured look. “Yes, dear. But these are for your brothers. Or rather, their dates.”
Now I was truly thrown. Brothers? Dates? As in plural? For real? “Brian has a date to Homecoming?” I squealed in delight, not caring at all that the Ghost of Trixie Past had put in an appearance and I was suddenly channeling my pre-teen middle school years.
“He does indeed. He asked Loyola Kevins.”
Holy moly. Brian actually asked a girl out. He’s usually so self-conscious around any girls except me and our cousin Hallie. I guess having Loyola as a lab partner let him get over that. I pulled out a chair and sat down next to my mother. “I want to help,” I told her. “Let’s make these the best Homecoming mums ever. Way better than whatever people are ordering from Stevie’s or The Friendly Florist. I heard Jane Morgan say they got a huge shipment of ribbons in at JoAnn’s last week.”
Moms got up and made herself a cup of coffee and brought me some freshly made oatmeal muffins and a glass of milk. Together, we sketched out both mums and what ribbons and charms we wanted to add. It was easier to design Di’s as we know her so well. Diana Lynch and I had been friends from the moment we met in kindergarten. It must’ve seemed strange to our teacher, how Tomboy Trixie and Future Beauty Queen Di were instantly an inseparable duo, but we never questioned it ourselves.
Loyola was more of an enigma, but I’d seen her around school enough to know she was definitely the quiet type. She wouldn’t want something too showy; that I was sure of.
Once we were finally satisfied with our designs, Moms folded up the papers and put them aside. “I’ll run out to JoAnn’s the afternoon,” she said. “Your dad can watch Bobby for awhile. What time are you girls planning to go to the mall?”
“Honey’s supposed to be picking me up at 1:00 and then we’ll get Di.”
“I know you said you were fine with wearing the dress you wore to Knute’s wedding, but are you sure you wouldn’t like to get something new?”
“No, Moms. I’m good. I promise. And really, I figure since we got that dress while we were in Waco, there’s way less of a chance that someone else will be wearing the exact same thing than if I bought something here in town, right?”
My mother gave me an odd look. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that you would genuinely care about that,” she told me.
I grinned impishly at her. “I don’t. At all. But I was thinking maybe it would help convince you that I don’t need something new.”
My cousin Knute’s wedding was about a month ago. I wasn’t a bridesmaid or anything, being from the groom’s side of the family, so I’d been free to wear a dress of my own choosing and I’d found a nice, deep red, tea-length gown with a full skirt and short, puffed sleeves. It would be perfect for the Homecoming dance.
“Well, how about some shoes?” Moms asked. “You might want something with a lower heel if you plan to dance all night, which I suspect you will.”
I agreed to shoe shop with Honey. It wasn’t so much that I really wanted new shoes as it was that I wanted to appease my poor mom, who was clearly once again despairing over her unnatural daughter.
Town and Country Mall was fairly crowded when we arrived a little after 1:30. Di made a beeline for Joske’s first and Honey and I followed at a slightly more sedate pace. We caught up with her in the Misses section where she was quickly looking over a rack of Izod polos.
“Are you planning to buck tradition?” I asked her, one brow raised. “I mean, I’m not going to be one to argue against it.”
She grinned at that and shook her head. “No. I just saw the sale sign and thought I’d see if there was anything I like,” she explained.
I had to give her credit. Even though her family was now one of the wealthiest in the county, Di still tended to shop like someone on a budget whenever she could. She eventually selected three dresses to try on and I accompanied her to the changing rooms while Honey wandered the shoe aisles. A girl I occasionally saw around school was there with her mother, arguing over whether or not a black lace dress was really appropriate for a Homecoming dance. I thought she looked all right, but I wasn’t always the best judge when it came to things like this.
Honey returned empty-handed as Di was studying herself from every angle possible before three long mirrors. She was wearing a dark green satin, off-the-shoulder gown with a giant bow across the front. I’d privately thought it silly and over-the-top when she first pulled it from the rack, but now that she had it on, she looked fantastic. Of course, Di looked fantastic in old warm-ups, so I supposed it was little wonder that she could even make a dress with a two-foot bow work.
“How adorable!” Honey exclaimed. “What do you think? Is that ‘The Dress’?”
Di bit her lip and twisted around again. “I’m not sure? I really like it, but it’s not at all like I had in mind and it’s not a color I normally go with.”
“Well, this is only our first stop,” I pointed out. “Do you want to keep looking?”
“I’m just afraid someone else may grab it if I pass it up,” Di replied with a sigh. “And this is the only one in my size.”
In the end, it took us about two and half hours and eight stores to find Di’s “perfect” dress – a violet taffeta number with straps that tied at the nape of her neck and a narrow skirt that stopped just below her knees.
She also bought the green one. Budgets were all good and fine, but this was Homecoming, after all.
Honey was satisfied with her shoes purchase and I had honored my mother’s wishes and bought a pair of low heels that would look good with my dress. With all that out of the way, I was happy that now we could maybe hit the Sam Goody’s or Waldenbooks. We stopped at the Orange Julius for a quick snack and it was Di who noticed Regan walking along carrying several shopping bags. She raised her hand in a wave and called to him, but he apparently didn’t hear her because he never looked our way and kept walking.
“Humph,” she muttered. “That was weird.”
“It’s pretty loud in here,” Honey observed. “I can barely hear us and we’re sitting across from one another at the same table.”
This was true. We were very close to the arcade entrance and between the heavy beat of a Bon Jovi song and the electronic beeps, bells, and clangs from all the games, it was very noisy where we were sitting. “The really weird thing is Regan shopping,” I said after a moment. “I happen to know he hates it. He told me last Christmas it’s just about his least favorite thing to do.”
Honey shrugged at that. “Well, hate it or not, everyone has to shop at least once in awhile to replace clothes and things that have worn out.”
This was also true. I nodded to acknowledge Honey’s sensible comment and turned my attention to people watching. The mall shoppers were the typical mix of affluent preppies, harried moms, preteens on group dates, and the Goths, who I think mostly hung out at the mall for lack of anything else to do. You never much saw them do any actual shopping, though it amused me to imagine them carefully looking over the available stock at Banana Republic.
My mind went back to Regan and Honey’s comment and I was suddenly worried all over again. What if Regan was shopping for new clothes not because his old ones were worn out, but because he was sick and losing weight? I vowed silently to pay more attention the next time I saw him. If he looked… smaller, I was going to consider that my proof that something was seriously wrong.
I was sipping my shake when I saw Dan walking along, his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his expression one that I couldn’t quite identify, but I thought might have been contempt? I guessed he probably thought shopping was only for rich kids, too, which, to be fair, I suppose it could be argued that he was mostly right on that score. I imagine your average teen can’t drop almost three hundred dollars on a couple of dresses and a pair of strappy sandals like Di had just done. I know I can’t, and my parents pay me a pretty decent allowance for my chores, which consist mostly of Bobby-sitting, plus some housecleaning and a bit of gardening - all three things that I would be doing the following afternoon once we got home from church. Moms was generally easy-going about how we Belden kids arranged our weekends, but she definitely expected us to have our work done before we climbed into our beds Sunday nights.
“Isn’t that Dan?” Honey asked, spotting him as well.
“Yep,” I replied. “Guess he has to shop, too.”
“Should we – should we ask him to join us and the guys tonight?”
I’m glad to report the look on Diana’s face was almost as “Are you kidding me right now?” as mine was.
“I think he made it clear he isn’t interested in our friendship when he turned down going to the game with us,” Di replied.
Honey frowned slightly. “Well, that might’ve just been because he really doesn’t like football. Maybe we should give him another chance?”
I nodded my head in Dan’s direction as he turned and strolled into Spenser’s. “If you wanna ask him, have at. I’ll wait here, though.”
Honey considered this for longer than I would’ve thought necessary before she finally sighed and slumped back in her seat. “No. I suppose not,” she murmured. “But I do feel sorry for him. Don’t you? At least a little?”
“A little,” I conceded. “But I don’t think we’re going to win him over as a group. I think it’ll probably take Mart or Jim befriending him first.”
We finished our drinks and our next stop was the bookstore. There was a new Lucy Radcliffe novel out. I picked it up and studied the cover. It was strange. I love the Lucy Radcliff series. It’s my absolute favorite, but lately, I don’t know. The quality seems to have diminished in the last few books. My brother tells me that’s because the original author passed away and now they’re being ghostwritten. Moms has suggested it might be more that I’ve outgrown them, with the target audience being several years younger than I am now. Whatever the case, I was still going to buy the book. I would buy them until the series ended, even if I was a little, gray-haired old lady by then. My collection would be complete.
Honey purchased a diary with neon bubbles all over the cover. As far as I know, she’s the only friend I have who keeps a diary with the amount of dedication she puts into it. She makes an entry every day, no matter what. Jim has joked that if something ever happened to his sister, he believes she’d come back as a ghost and insist he start recording entries for her.
The three of us pitched in to purchase two picture books and a learn-to-read book to donate to the new collection for the San Isidro kids.
“Should we find something in Spanish?” Di asked, looking a bit concerned by our selections.
“These are good,” Honey assured her. “Jim says they want books in Spanish and in English, because many of the students want to learn English along with their native language.”
We decided to hit the food court for dinner about half an hour before we were due to meet the boys. The three-screen theater sat at one end of a short corridor that bumped out from the center of the mall while the open dining area sat at the other. I kept my dinner to a single taco. It wasn’t that I was trying to watch my calories or anything. Just, I planned on a big bucket of popcorn and peanut M-n-Ms at the movie. Say what you will, but it is just not the same if you go see a movie and skip the popcorn and candy. If you were going do that, you might as well wait until the movie finally made it to Blockbuster or TV after a few years.
“Oh!” Di suddenly exclaimed and I swear she only just stopped herself from literally smacking her forehead. “I forgot!”
“Forgot…?” I prompted.
“My mother asked me to swing by Academy and see if they have skates Larry would like! She wants to buy him some for his birthday.”
Skates. In the north, I’m betting that means ice, but here in Texas, it means roller. Everyone in junior high has roller skates and the rink is where they all go on Saturday nights. “If you hurry, you could still make it there and back,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We’ll go put all the bags in Honey’s car and meet you outside the theater.”
We were almost to the door to the west parking lot when we came across Dan again. There was no way to pretend we hadn’t seen him or vice versa. We all came to a halt and silently regarded one another. Dan stared at us for a moment, then looked down at the multiple shopping bags we carried. There was a definite sneer on his face as his eyes tracked back up to mine.
“Good evening,” Honey offered quietly, and I could tell she was uncomfortable with the intensity of his glare.
He glanced over at her and for just the tiniest moment, I thought maybe I saw a slight softening of his expression. But then he was looking back at me and it was gone. “Must be nice to have so much dough to just drop on whatever you want,” he remarked with an unfriendly smirk.
It was on the tip of my tongue to fire back that all I’d bought for myself were a paperback book and one pair of shoes, but I snapped my mouth shut and gave him a look I intended to say, “I couldn’t really care less what you think about my shopping habits.” I don’t know if that was the message he actually received, but he pushed past us without another word.
“Wow.” Honey turned to watch him stalk off. “He really doesn’t like you, Trix.”
“He reminds me of someone,” I replied thoughtfully. “I just can’t place who. Something about his eyes.”
“Mr. Maypenny?” Honey suggested. “I don’t know about his eyes, but they have that same sort of sharp, stuck-out chin.”
“Oh. Yeah. I hadn’t really noticed that. Maybe he really is Maypenny’s grandson.” I shook my head and started walking again. “C’mon, Honey. Forget about him. We shouldn’t let Oscar the Grouch spoil our evening with his bad manners. Deal?”
She hesitated for a brief moment before answering, but then lifted her head and gave a quick nod. “Deal,” she agreed. “I’ll take an evening with John Cusack over worrying about Oscar the Grouch any time!”
“That’s the spirit,” I murmured with a chuckle. Let nothing get in between Honey and John Cusack!