Into the Wild(3)

“Luck at band,” Julie said.

Gillian held out her pinky, and Julie shook it with her pinky. Julie wished (not for the first time) that her locker was next to Gillian’s. So not fair. Mom could have chosen any last name she wanted after she escaped the Wild Wood—and yet Julie Marchen was stuck with a locker near the likes of Kristen March.

There was no way Kristen wasn’t going to notice the flip-flops. If the school had had fashion police, Kristen would have been their captain. Leaving Gillian, Julie slunk toward her locker. Why should she care if Kristen noticed? I don’t care, she told herself. No one was going to be able to guess their secret from a single pair of shoes.

Switching her homework books with her books for the first three periods, she risked a glance across the hall. Kristen tossed her hair—her infamous reversible part. Even with a mother who owned a hair salon, Julie couldn’t get her frizz to do that flip. I don’t care, she repeated, but she eavesdropped anyway.

“I was going to be a princess,” Kristen said to her gaggle of friends. “I had a tiara and the whole bit.” Of course she was, Julie thought. She didn’t have to worry about accidentally completing a fairy-tale event.

Her flock said, “Ooh.”

“It’s all Dad’s fault,” Kristen said. “He’s impossible. Of all the weekends to want to go to Vermont, he picks this one. It’s so unfair.”

Julie sucked in a breath. Any other day Kristen’s words might not have hit her so hard, but today . . . She felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. Unfair? Spending a weekend with a dad was unfair? Kristen had no idea what unfair meant.

Turning her back on Kristen, Julie faced her locker. She was okay with Kristen being beautiful and thin and having tons of friends who worshiped her, but Julie would have given anything to have a dad to spend a weekend with. Or even to know what he looked like. She smoothed the collage of illustrations on the inside of her locker door. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, each prince said. She didn’t even know if he looked like any of them.

She closed the locker with a sigh—loud enough, apparently, to be heard across the hall, because she heard giggling from Kristen’s friends. “Isn’t it a little late for the beach?” Kristen called. Her voice seemed super-loud, and Julie felt dozens of eyes looking at her and her feet. “Or are you just early for the Halloween dance?” Kristen’s flock of friends burst into peals of laughter, and Julie hunched her shoulders as if she could plug her ears with them.

Too bad she couldn’t crawl under a rock and hibernate until middle school passed. Would anyone really mind if she opted out of the whole junior high experience? Mom hadn’t had to go through it. Maybe, Julie thought as she trudged to class, I can find a nice, doorless tower.





Chapter Two

The Hair Salon

Goldie plopped down in the hairdresser chair. “Look at me!” she wailed. “Oh, just look at me!” Zel peered at her friend’s flawless baby-doll face and crown of golden ringlets and said a silent prayer for patience. Once a month, Goldie was in Zel’s salon moaning as if she’d suddenly turned green and bald, when in truth, she was the picture of perfection. But it was no use telling her that. And it was no use telling her to make an appointment first. Goldie waved an issue of Glamour in the air in front of Zel. “I’m unfashionable!”

Before Zel could respond, she heard a sheep baa outside. She winced: her 10:30 was here early, and she hadn’t come alone. “Excuse me,” she said to both Goldie and her other customer, Linda. She hurried around the reception desk to the door. “Mary, please, leave it outside. Board of Health regulations.”

“I’m trying, Zel,” Mary called as she wrestled to tie the sheep’s leash to a bike rack. The lamb fought her as if it were rabid. Mary thwapped its head. “Behave.”

The lamb bit her.

Zel felt a headache forming, but she tried to be sympathetic. After all, she wasn’t the one with the obsessed sheep. “Fine. Bring it in. But it has to stay in the manicure room.” The lamb baa-ed triumphantly, and Zel gave it her best steely look. “But no poop on the floor. You use the toilet or you don’t go at all.”

“Baa?”

“And flush this time,” Zel said.

Meekly, the lamb followed Mary inside.

Pausing at the reception desk, Zel marked Mary Hadda in her appointment book and scanned the rest of her schedule. She had a double load today with Gretel out. (Gretel had broken her new sugar-free diet again, and it had disagreed with her.) Zel glanced at the clock: 10:05. So far, the salon had three customers: Goldie, Mary, and one of the town librarians, Linda. Not to mention the lamb.