Amandine by Adele Griffin

Author:Adele Griffin [Griffin, Adele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9733-9
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-01-02T23:26:00+00:00

What made it bad was that it was so good.

“You’re smiling.” Mary snatched the paper.

“No.”

“It’s not anything to smile about.”

“No, I know.”

“Why did you?”

“I didn’t. I mean, all I did was the eyeballs,” I explained. “That’s why I signed my name. She did all the rest. She made the rest of you out of the eyeballs.” It sounded like a lie. I could hear my breath, shallow as a dog’s. Why couldn’t I ever say the right thing?

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I promise, I really didn’t have anything to do with this picture of you, Mary.”

“That picture is not me,” said Mary.

“No, of course not, all I meant was … Please, I promise we can clear this up.” My voice whined, begging her. “We’ll go find Amandine. She can’t … she’ll answer for it. She’ll have to. She’ll have to apologize.”

It was lunch or never. I pushed through the rest of my morning’s classes in a fog. It had taken some convincing, but Mary had agreed to meet me in the cafeteria so that we could brave Amandine together.

Fury and fear squeezed into a knot inside me. I just hoped that Amandine would be reasonable. That she would see how her joke had struck too hard. That she would understand how she had not thought all the way through the consequences. When she realized she had hurt both of us, she would back down. She would apologize. Amandine was tricky, sly. But she was no monster.

Spying her across the lunchroom, I relaxed. She was eating alone at our usual table in the back, her musty movie star dress flowing onto the floor under her chair, her back and shoulders ballerina straight. She looked almost pretty, certainly harmless. A water sprite, Mom had called her. Yes, I saw that.

“Hey,” I began, forcing a false brightness into my voice as we approached. “Tell Mary that I didn’t do any of that drawing.”

Amandine looked up, startled, and her face tightened. When she spoke, though, she sounded only puzzled, and not at all defensive.

“Of course you did, Delia. The whole thing was your idea.”

“Come on, Amandine. That’s just a huge lie and you know it.”

Amandine sighed patiently. Her eyes moved from me to Mary and back again. She pushed away her lunch and clasped her hands together to her chest as if in prayer.

“Mary,” she began seriously, “I know it’s not nice for me to repeat what other people say behind your back, but in this case, I have to. When I showed her the note, Delia said, and I quote, ‘That stupid prissy preacher girl only has to take a look in the mirror to find an Ugliest Thing.’ See, and that’s how the whole idea got started. The reason Delia’s mad now is cause I actually showed it to you. The original plan was that we were just going to draw it for ourselves. I stuck it in your locker because she dared me for five dollars, and now I am sorry.

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