When we reached the edge of town, I started rubbing my temples. "Oh," I said, "my head is killing me. Does anybody have any aspirin?" My classmates checked their pockets and purses, but no one could find any little bottles of pills (probably because I'd stolen them all the night before).
"You guys go on without me," I said, when we reached the square. "I'm gonna run to the pharmacy." Not a lie.
"The movie's gonna start in ten minutes," Bex reminded me, but I was already walking away, calling after them, "I'll meet you in there."
As plans go, it was a pretty good one. I could spend two hours with Josh, then sneak into the back of the theater, say something about the movie on the way home, and they'd never know I hadn't been there all along.
The door dinged when I pushed inside. I'd never been to the pharmacy with Josh. It had always seemed better not to see him there. But he'd told me his dad was making him work on Saturdays, and having permission to be in town was too good an opportunity to pass up.
I walked to the counter and spoke to the woman behind it. "Hi. Is Josh here?"
"Well, hello, Cammie," a man said behind me. I turned to see Mr. Abrams walking my way. He was wearing a white smock with his name embroidered above the pocket. I felt like I was getting ready to have my teeth cleaned. "This is a nice surprise."
"Oh, hello, Mr. Abrams."
"Is this your first trip to our little store?"
"Yes, it is. It's …" I looked around at the long rows of cough syrups and greeting cards and bandages for every occasion. "…nice."
Mr. Abrams beamed. "Well, Josh just ran out to make a delivery. Ought to be right back, though. In the meantime, I want you to go over to the counter and order up any kind of ice cream you want—on the house. How's that sound?"
I glanced behind me to see an old-fashioned soda fountain stretching across the far wall. "That sounds great!" Totally not a lie.
Mr. Abrams smiled at me and started toward a set of narrow stairs, but before climbing, he turned and said, "Cammie, you come back any time."
He disappeared around a corner. I was almost sad to watch him go.
The ice-cream counter was smooth against my hands as I walked in front of the huge mirror that hung behind the bar. The woman from the counter followed me over and slipped on an apron as I climbed onto one of the old metal stools.
A sign above the bar read "Proudly serving Coca-Cola since 1942." There was a tall glass jar full of straws. The woman didn't bat an eye when I ordered a double chocolate sundae, and for the first time in weeks I felt almost normal. Outside it was November and cold, but the sun was beaming through the glass storefront, warming my skin as I ate my ice cream and fell into a dreamy, sugar-induced trance.
Then, I heard the jingling of the little brass bells above the door.
I didn't turn around. I didn't have to. The woman who'd been helping me pulled off her apron and headed toward the counter as I paused with a spoon halfway to my mouth and saw Anna Fetterman's reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
"Can you help me?" Anna said, once the clerk drew near. "I need to have my inhaler refilled."
"Sure, honey." The woman took the slip of paper from Anna's hand. "Let me go check on this. It'll just be a minute."
I was already off my stool and crouching behind an adult diapers display, when I realized that all I was really guilty of was eating a hot fudge sundae so soon after lunch, and let me tell you—Anna has seen me eat way more than that (a certain incident involving Doritos, squirty cheese, and the winter Olympics comes to mind), so I was just getting ready to go say hi, when I heard something that made me freeze.
The bells rang again, and I glanced through the shelves to see Dillon and a bunch of boys from the barn dance walk in. But they didn't walk down the aisles. No. They'd already found what they were looking for.
"Hey, don't I know you?" Dillon asked, but he wasn't talking to me. It was worse. He was talking to Anna, and he wasn't simply asking a question. His words were too sharp. His tone too predatory as he stepped closer to little Anna Fetterman and said, "No, wait, you don't go to my school." In the mirror above the bar I saw him crowd Anna against the shelves. "I bet you go to the Gallagher Academy."
Anna drew her purse to her chest as if he were going to grab it and run away. "What a nice purse," Dillon said. "Did your daddy buy you that purse?"
Anna's daddy is an eighth-grade biology teacher in Dayton, Ohio, but Dillon didn't know that and Anna couldn't tell him. She was clinging to her cover just as ardently as I was clinging to mine.
The boys around Dillon started to laugh. And just like that I remembered why Gallagher Girls and town boys aren't supposed to mix.
Anna stumbled backward, because, despite nearly three and a half years of P&E training, she could hardly swat a fly. The town was swarming with Gallagher Girls that afternoon, but Dillon and his friends had found Anna. It wasn't an accident. Anna was alone and weak, so obviously someone like Dillon would be there to try to thin her from the herd.
"I'm just here to …" Anna tried to speak, but her voice was barely more than a whisper.
"What's that?" Dillon asked. "I didn't hear you."
"I…" Anna stuttered.
I wanted to go to her, but I was frozen somehow— halfway between being her friend and being a homeschooled girl with a cat named Suzie. If I were one and not the other, I could have stopped it, but instead I told myself over and over, She'll be okay; she'll be okay; she'll be—
"What's the matter? Don't they teach you how to speak at the Gallagher Academy?" Dillon said, and I would have given anything for Anna to bite back in Arabic, or Japanese, or Farsi, but she just took another backward step. Her elbow knocked a box of Band-Aids, and it teetered on the edge of the shelf.
Anna inched toward the door and mumbled, "I'll come back for—"
But a couple of Dillon's friends stepped in front of her, surrounding her with a wall of crimson lettermen's jackets, and I couldn't see her anymore.
She'll be fine, I said again, willing it to be true. Which in a way it was, because just then the doorbells chimed, and in walked Macey McHenry.
"Hey, Anna." To my knowledge, Macey had never said more than two words to Anna Fetterman, but as she strolled through the door, her voice was light and free, and she sounded like the tiny girl's best friend in the world. "What's going on?"
The four boys parted around Anna, backing away; maybe because of the way Macey chomped her gum then blew a bubble that popped in Dillon's face; maybe because they'd never seen a girl so beautiful in person before. But Dillon didn't stray.
"Oh," he said smugly, looking Macey's amazing figure up and down. "She has a friend."
Anna looked at Macey as if she half suspected her classmate to say, Who me? I'm not her friend. But Macey only fingered the bottles on the shelves, handing Anna a bottle of vitamin C. "You should really take these."
Macey walked down the aisle, examining the shelves, ignoring Dillon and the gang, who kept looking at their leader for directions.
"I should have known the Gallagher Academy wouldn't let its precious darlings out on their own," Dillon mocked. But Macey only smiled one of her patently beautiful smiles.
"Yeah," she said, eyeing his buddies. "We're not brave like you."
"Is there a problem here?" I knew the voice, but the accent was one Bex only used on rare occasions. To this day, I don't know how she got through the front door without setting off the chimes, but there she was, strolling past the Cold and Flu section, coming to stand on Anna's other side. I didn't know why she wasn't at the movie. I didn't care.
It was three against four now, and Dillon didn't like those odds. Still, he managed to look at Bex and say, "What's the matter? Is your yacht broken or something?"
Dillon snickered. The friends snickered. It was an idiot snicker-a-thon until Macey said, "Not that I've heard."
"Did you boys come over here to flirt with Anna?" Bex said, laying on her faux charm. She pushed a petrified Anna toward the clan. "Anna, tell the boys a little something about yourself."
"I have a boyfriend!" she blurted in a way that told me it totally wasn't a lie. I was stunned. Bex was stunned. Even Macey took a second to recover. Anna has a boyfriend?
In all this time, I'd never thought that one of my classmates might have a boyfriend—especially not Anna. "His name is Carl," she added.
"Sorry, boys," Bex said, sliding her arm around Anna's shoulder. "Carl beat you to it."
"Oh, so they have boyfriends. Tell me, is Carl a townie?" Dillon asked, as if he wanted to be let in on a secret. "Do you girls like to go slumming?"
"It's probably Carl Rockefeller," Macey added, and Bex squeezed Anna harder until she said, "Yes. Carl Rockefeller. We know each other from the physics"—another hard squeeze—this time with fingernails—"um, yacht," Anna corrected, "club."
Two pats on Anna's shoulder told her she'd done well.
"Hey," Dillon said, stepping forward as if he were tired of beating around the bush. "I was wondering if you know someone I know…" His voice trailed off. He leaned forward, and I just knew—I mean KNEW—that he was on to me, but then he said, "The Queen of England."
Well, Bex actually has met the queen, but obviously she wasn't about to say so. She just stood quietly as Dillon and his buddies laughed far too hard at the joke, making it even less funny.
"Honey, I got your—" The woman behind the counter stopped abruptly when she saw four boys closing in on three girls. The only sound in the room was the white paper bag that held Anna's prescription as it crinkled in her hands.
"Thanks," Bex said, snatching the package. "Is this all you needed?" she asked Anna, who nodded, and the color slowly returned to her cheeks.
"How 'bout you?" Macey asked Dillon. "You get what you came for?"
But they didn't wait for his response. Instead, they walked together past a long shelf of magazines, where Macey's face stared out from the cover of Newsweek, along with the rest of the McHenry family, beneath a caption that read The Most Powerful Family in America?
Dillon looked at it, then at her. Macey cocked a hip. "We appreciate your vote."
A long time after they'd gone, I still couldn't turn away from the bells that were still ringing. I watched Anna stroll down the street with her saviors—with her friends. A hand circled my wrist, and Josh said, "Hey." I saw his reflection in the mirror from the corner of my eye, but there was something through that window I couldn't turn away from.
Liz was standing on the sidewalk, staring at me through the glass as if she didn't know me. As if she didn't want to.
"Hey, what's wrong?" Josh asked, finally turning me to face him. "What are you doing with those?" He gestured to the half dozen bottles of aspirin I must have subconsciously gathered in my arms to throw like snowballs at Dillon and his cronies if help hadn't come.
"Oh." I looked down. "I knocked them off and was picking them up."