Calling Maggie May Read online

  “I . . . ,” I said, hesitating for a moment on the edge of this new me. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  We took the bus. I kept expecting someone to stop us and ask us what we were doing out of school in the middle of the day, but no one did. Maybe it was the lipstick. I don’t know if it made me look more grown-up, but it made me feel more in control. Like I was wearing a mask, almost.

  Ada’s house wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Based on her clothes and her phone and how she carried herself, I just assumed her house would be some big mansion with a pool and a housekeeper and a badminton court in the yard. But we got off in front of a small, shabby ranch house covered in pale yellow aluminum siding, with a big hole sliced through the screen door. Ada unlocked the door and let me in. The rooms inside were cramped and dark, with junk mail and celebrity gossip magazines strewn over every surface. I’ve never thought of myself as one of the rich kids, but it made my house seem like a palace. I mean, at least we’ve got two floors and a piano and the beautiful garden Mom works so hard on. Ada’s house looked like no one really cared about it at all.

  Ada showed me down a hallway to her bedroom. Clothes were heaped on every surface, as well as scarves and shoes and a pile of coats in the corner.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually have people over.”

  I hovered between the desk and the bed, still not sure what I was doing there. Ada stayed on the other side of the room, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands behind her back. She looked nervous. “It’s kind of a dump, I know.”

  “No,” I said, thinking of my room back at home. It was clean and neat, with every little piece of my life squared away into its proper place, wallpaper and bedding chosen without consulting me. It felt like a prison. “I like it. Is it okay if I . . . ?” I indicated the bed.

  “Go ahead.” She nodded. “You can just dump all that stuff on the floor.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to do that, so I just pushed some of the clothes toward the other side of the bed and perched myself on the edge. She tugged out her desk chair. On the seat was a rat’s-nest tangle of jewelry.

  “Right, the lipstick,” said Ada mysteriously. “Let’s see what we have.”

  She pulled a shoe box out from under the desk and opened it. It was cluttered with all kinds of makeup, from samples to cheap drug-store tubes to stuff that looked really fancy.

  “Hmm, purple could be dramatic,” she said, “but maybe too gothy. Coral . . . No, all wrong for your skin tone. Maybe something with some brown?”

  “Brown?” I said dubiously.

  “It sounds like it would be ugly, but it’s very sophisticated. I promise. Here.” She held up the tube she had been seeking, uncapped it, and twisted it to reveal a deep, earthy russet. “This will be great on you.”

  She grabbed a tissue from a box on the dresser and carefully wiped the other color away, then replaced it with the darker hue. She sat back to examine her handiwork. “Beautiful.”

  “That might be an exaggeration,” I mumbled.

  She leaned closer to me, and I could smell her perfume again.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, brushing the bangs off my face. “You don’t know it, but you could break a lot a hearts with those cheekbones.”

  “Very funny.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get the joke.”

  “Sure you do,” I said, feeling frustrated. “It’s me. I’m the joke, and you’re the one laughing. I can’t have a guy like Tyler any more than I can have a diamond bracelet or a . . . a unicorn.”

  Ada laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh, and it was a jagged sound, like a machine that hadn’t been used in a while.

  “I don’t know about the unicorn, but you could have Tyler if you wanted him, and the diamond bracelet too. But you’re too smart for that, right?” I didn’t answer. “Right? You saw what he was like. And now that you’ve seen, you know better than to think that’s a prize worth fighting for.”

  I think I managed to nod. In any case, she gave me a brief smile.

  “Here,” she said, pressing the tube of lipstick into my palm. “You should take this. It looks awful on me. Now you just need some clothes to go with that pretty face.”

  Her long legs took her from the bed to the closet in two strides. She started going through the piles of clothes all over her room and tossing things at me. It seemed crazy at first. . . . She’s tall and skinny and I’m short and dumpy, but she said not to worry.

  “It’ll look different on you, but good.” And she was right. I put on a dress I’ve seen her wear—a clinging navy knit with small brass buttons—and a part of me had a fantasy that it would magically turn me into her. It didn’t, but when I stood in front of the mirror, it didn’t look bad. I looked curvy, not dumpy.

  “There you are . . . all dolled up for a night out on the town.”

  I laughed. “Not like I have anywhere to go.”

  That’s when it hit me. It was two thirty, almost the end of the school day, and Mom would be expecting me home soon. Plus, I needed to figure out an unfamiliar bus route. “I need to get going,” I said, heading for the door to her room. Then I remembered I was still wearing her dress. I went to take it off, but she stopped me. “Keep it,” she said. “It looks better on you.”

  That was definitely the lie of the century, but I appreciated it. Even if it didn’t look better on me than on her, it definitely looked better than any of the clothes I currently owned. I stuffed my school clothes into my swim bag and hurried off.

  On the bus home, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. I felt like I had finally figured out what friends were. Technically, Jenny and Eiko and the other geeks were my friends, but I didn’t much enjoy the time I spent with them, and if we got together, it was only to study or work on a project. With Ada, it wasn’t like that at all.

  All afternoon I had been on an adrenaline high from skipping school and hanging out with the bad girl, but on that bus, my normal self caught up with me and I started panicking about what would happen when I got home. Would my mom know? Well, obviously, if I walked in with makeup on and someone else’s clothes, that wasn’t going to help my case.

  I dug a tissue out of my bag and carefully swiped off all traces of the lipstick. Then I got off the bus a few blocks from home and changed into my usual clothes in a restaurant bathroom. By the time I got to my house, I was back to my normal self, and only a few minutes later than usual. Still, as I opened the door, my heart was in my throat, not knowing what might await me. I heard Mom call me as the door swung shut behind me. I found her in the den, playing mah-jongg on the computer.

  “Someone called this afternoon,” she said in Chinese. The school. They called to let her know I ditched class. My heart pounded in my chest so hard I was sure she could hear it. “Check the voice mail,” she said without looking up from her game.

  That’s when it hit me. Mom never answered the phone unless it was a familiar number—someone from our family or the Chinese community. She didn’t trust her English on the phone with strangers, so she let the voice mail get it and had me or my dad listen to it when we got home. This was perfect! I nodded meekly, obediently, and went off to listen to the message. It was the school, reporting me absent for my third- through sixth-period classes. I pressed delete.

  Thurs, Nov 13

  Oh God, I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life. I’m such an idiot! Why did I ever get it into my head that I could be like Ada? Ada . . . she’s from a different planet from me. We’re not the same species. As if a dress and some lipstick could change that!

  All right, might as well record my foolishness, so I can read it over every day for the rest of my life as a reminder not to ever do anything risky again.

  We had a swim meet. Remember when this journal was for tracking my success at things like swim meets? Yeah, well,
forget it. I did terribly. I just couldn’t focus at all. I don’t know why; it just all seemed so unimportant.

  Anyway, after my terrible swim, I was sitting there watching the boys get ready for the next event, dealing with pitying looks from the coach and a couple people on the team, and there was Tyler and . . . I know what Ada said. I know he’s a creep, but he’s just so incredibly perfect-looking. I haven’t seen the whole world yet, but I swear there is no more beautiful physical specimen of masculinity to be found anywhere.

  And that’s when it came into my head . . . the most terrible idea in the universe. I remembered then and there that I still had Ada’s dress and the lipstick she gave me in my gym bag, and I just thought, what if? What if I put it on? What if I got on the bus home tonight looking like . . . like . . . well, not like Ada, obviously, but like a person. Like a girl, instead of some invisible nothing, like I usually am. Ada said it. She said I could get Tyler if I wanted him. Well, goddammit, I want him, and if willpower and lipstick are all it takes, I have both of those.

  So after the meet we were all getting changed, and I did it. I slipped on Ada’s dress instead of my usual track pants and T-shirt. And I lined up with some of the other girls at the mirror to apply my lipstick. I made a mess of it, of course, because I’d never really done it before, and my hands were shaking with nerves. But eventually, by copying what I’d seen and felt Ada do, I managed a reasonable, not sloppy-looking mouth. Eiko, of course, gave me a hard time about it. She could not have acted more shocked and appalled to see me in a dress. I guess it was more than just a dress. I mean, it doesn’t have a whole lot in common with my recital dress. She was all, “What are you doing?” I didn’t know what to say, so I thought about what Ada would do in that situation, and I ignored her.

  When we got on the bus, I was so scared my knees were shaking. But I took a deep breath and got a grip on myself, and I walked right by Eiko and the empty seat next to her and went to the back of the bus. Obviously, it would have been ideal if I could have approached him alone, but I couldn’t think of any way to do that, so I just kept moving forward, deeper and deeper into this terrible plan, letting the momentum of it carry me through.

  Tyler was sitting at the back of the bus, surrounded by all his friends. They were laughing and talking and not paying any attention to me at all. At first. One by one, they started to notice me . . . the friends, that is. Not Tyler. Some of them just looked at me in confusion or surprise, but at least a couple of them were looking at me in a particular way. A way I’d only ever seen boys look at other girls. Girls who aren’t me. But I wasn’t interested in them.

  I thought about saying something to get Tyler’s attention, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything that didn’t make me sound like an idiot. And Ada didn’t need to do a bunch of talking to get people to notice her. If there’s one skill she has mastered, it’s smoldering silently until every eye in the room is drawn to her. So that’s what I did: I tried to smolder.

  It probably looked pretty ridiculous.

  Eventually, Tyler took note of his friends not paying attention to him anymore, and he looked in my direction. Plan on target! Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought the plan through at all beyond this point.

  “What?” he said at last. Which, all things considered, is not an unreasonable thing to say to someone who is staring at you. But it wasn’t exactly the conversational opener I was hoping for.

  So I just kept staring at him. Smoldering. In silence. Like a complete idiot.

  He stared back. I kept staring. He raised his eyebrows. I stood like a statue. Finally, he said, “Could you, uh, leave? You’re kind of creeping me out.”

  That broke the spell. I turned around and went back to my seat. Eiko, of course, asked me what the hell was going on, but I just stared ahead of me the whole ride back and tried not to cry. What the heck has gotten into me? I definitely won’t be trying that again.

  Fri, Nov 14

  I saw Ada again today. Well, that makes it seem like I just ran into her, like I did the other times. This time was a little different. I went looking for her. I found her pretty easily, not surprising, given how well I’d committed her habits to memory back when I was basically stalking her. At lunch she was lurking in one of her usual corners with a cigarette and her phone, wearing a closely fitted dress with a subtle golden shimmer.

  “Hey,” she said as I approached, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if we were actually friends. It threw me off a bit. But then I remembered how angry I was.

  “You lied to me,” I said without preamble. I had to get it out before I lost my nerve.

  Ada looked up from her phone, surprised. Then she narrowed her eyes. I got the impression that she was willing to accept she had probably lied to me at some point and was just trying to figure out what particular untruth I might be referring to.

  “You said,” I went on, building steam. “You said that if I really tried, if I wore your clothes and your lipstick and did everything just like you, I could have him. Did you really think it would work? Or did you know all along exactly how hopeless it was and set me up so you could have a good laugh?”

  Ada gave me a puzzled look. “I’m pretty sure I never said any of that.”

  I opened my mouth to object, then closed it again. I guess it was true that she hadn’t said precisely that.

  “What I told you,” she said pointedly, “is that boys like Tyler are interchangeable. You don’t need Tyler—you need someone else to put him out of your head.” Ada’s eyes moved back down to her phone, and I seemed to have been dismissed from the conversation. But just as I was turning to leave, she looked up again and caught me in her gaze.

  “Hey,” she said without elaboration. She cocked her head and looked me carefully up and down, as if considering something. Whatever she saw must have made up her mind. “What would you say to a date tonight?”

  “With you?”

  Ada gave me a strange look—surprised or amused, maybe. “A date with a man, not a boy.”

  I shook my head. “I really don’t . . .”

  “You’d be doing me a favor. I double-booked by accident.”

  My mouth went dry, and I had a feeling in my stomach like I get before a test.

  “I don’t think anyone in the world would confuse me for you,” I said.

  “It won’t make any difference. He’s a nice guy, and he’ll like you. I promise. I wouldn’t set you up with a jerk.”

  A million objections ran through my head. The last real date I had been on was more than a year ago, with a boy from the swim team, and Mom drove us to the movie and home again. There was no way she was going to let me go out with a total stranger who was out of high school. It was a completely insane idea. But what came out of my mouth was, “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  Ada smiled. “I’ll take care of that.”

  Fri, Nov 14, later

  Writing this while I wait. What am I even waiting for? I don’t know exactly, but Ada says not to worry. I don’t know why I trust her, but I do.

  I am sitting in a hotel bar at the convention center downtown, with a Coke in front of me. They put a lemon in it, but I fished it out. Sorry. That was a stupid detail. I’m just nervous, I guess. But writing calms me down.

  I told Mom I was going to sleep over at Jenny’s so we could work on our Science Olympiad project, and I went home with Ada after school. She found an outfit for me—a minidress with a fun geometric print—then fixed my hair and did my makeup. Not much, though. Too much would make me look older, she said.

  “Isn’t that good?”

  “Don’t be in such a rush,” she said.

  She took me to the convention center and went in with me. She ordered this Coke for me, in fact, and said something to the bartender before she brought it over to the table. This is all so mysterious.

  Then she said she had
to go.

  “You’re not going to stay and introduce me?”

  “I told you, I double-booked. I really have to run.”

  “How will he know who I am?”

  She smiled. “He’ll know.”

  Then she gave me her cell number and told me to call her if I needed anything, or if I wanted to get out of the date, and she’d take care of it. “We have to look out for each other,” she said, just like the other day. She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  Oh, someone just walked in! Is it him?

  Sat, Nov 15

  Wow. I kinda can’t believe where I am right now. Or what I’ve done. Or how much I can’t wait to do it again.

  Last night . . . I’m not sure I even have the words. It was the most incredible night I’ve ever had. I’ve never been on a date like that with a boy . . . with a man before. I didn’t even know dates like that were real. It was like something out of a movie.

  I was so nervous in the beginning, looking around at every person who walked in, trying to figure out if they were looking for me, because I totally didn’t believe Ada that the guy would just know. I mean, how could he know? But then, just as I was craning over my shoulder to look at a dude in a baseball cap leaning against the bar, a man slid into the seat across from me. I jumped a little when I realized what had happened.

  “Um,” was my opening conversational gambit.

  “Hi,” he said. He put out his hand to shake mine and he introduced himself as Damon. By that time, I had caught my breath enough to take in what he looked like. And he looked good. Really good. He was older, definitely not in high school, or probably college even. Maybe twenty-five? And he had dark curly hair and friendly brown eyes, and his smile . . . When he smiled it made me feel like I was the most important thing in the whole world.

  He asked if I wanted to get out of there and suggested we go for a walk in Myrtle Edwards Park. We walked and looked at the ocean. I told him about how I’ve lived in Seattle my whole life but I’ve hardly ever seen the ocean even though I know it’s nearby. It always seems to be a touristy thing to do, to go down to the waterfront, and I just never bothered. He told me he was kind of a tourist, though he’s been to Seattle before, and he loves coming here.