reading

Best Friend Thief

A Between Best Friends™ Book

www.betweenbestfriends.com

By Laurel-Ann Dooley

Published by WordWorks Publishing, LLC

ISBN 978-0-9831557-1-3

Cover design and illustration by Jade Nellans

www.jadefrolics.com

Huge thanks to editor extraordinaire Megan Stine, Jade Nellans for her perfect illustration, and most of all, Amanda Bolin, the best editorial assistant ever.

* 1 *

“STOP DRINKING IT ALL!”

I dropped the cup of lemonade I was filling and spun around, like I’d been caught stealing.

“I’m not! I’ve only had --”

“You’ve had like ten cups.” My best friend Reagan was scowling at me with her hands on her hips. “How are we supposed to sell anything if we don’t have anything to sell? She continued to glare and then burst out laughing. “Gotcha!! You really thought I was mad, didn’t you?” She smiled triumphantly.

“I did not!” I retorted -- even though I really had. I hate to admit it, but Reagan can really fake me out. You’d think that by now, after being best friends for three whole years, I’d know a fake-out when I saw one. But no, I pretty much always fall right into the fake-out trap. If she wasn’t my best friend, it would be annoying, but since she is my best friend, I don’t mind. Well, maybe a little. But it’s just one of those best friend things I have to put up with.

This was our third lemonade stand of the summer. We kept trying new locations to see if we could sell more than a few cups, but it seems that people just don’t pull over to buy lemonade, no matter how much of a discount you put on your sign. Or maybe it was our jumping up and down and waving our arms like maniacs that scared customers off. “This lemonade rocks, people!” I’d yell at each approaching car. “Only fifty cents! Buy one, get two free!”

Reagan got really mad at the cars that didn’t stop, which was pretty much all of them. “HEY, WHAT”S THE MATTER WITH YOU? DO YOU HATE KIDS OR SOMETHING?” she’d yell. Come to think of it, maybe we should revise our customer relations strategy.

Reagan peered down the street and sighed. “Can you believe school starts in like two weeks?” she asked.

“Yeah, I know. I can’t believe we’re going back already.”

“I know, right.” She said it like “riiiiiiiight,” really dragging out the “i” sound. The “riiiiiiight” was another trademark Reagan thing, just like the fake-out.

“Do you think we’ll all be in the same class again?” I asked.

“All of us? You mean me, you, Catherine, and Isabel? I doubt it. We’ve been together for two years in a row -- there’s no way it’ll happen again,” she said.

You’re probably wondering who the heck Catherine and Isabel are, so let me explain. They’re best friends just like Reagan and me, and together, we make one big best friend group.

Catherine and Isabel live next door to each other and have known each other their whole lives. The two of them make a funny pair -- Catherine is tall, thin, and has a serious, quiet, way about her. She’s into math and science and is very logical. Isabel is basically the total opposite. She is super-energetic and gets excited over just about everything. Catherine wears jeans whenever possible; Isabel wears skirts and owns about a million sparkly headbands and jewel-y hair clips.

So, that’s our Best Friends Club: quiet Catherine, bubbly Isabel, flighty, scatter-brained Reagan, who is all into music and fashion, and me. I’m Nathalie. What can I say about me? Let’s see. I like to read, write, and draw. Clothes? Love ’em. People tell me I’m funny (and I do crack myself up sometimes). My mother says I have a unique take on things and a very active mind. No idea what that means.

Anyway, the four of us do tons of stuff together, like having sleepovers and going to movies and making friendship bracelets and creating secret codes. We always email and text each other’s cell phones (well, our moms’ cell phones -- until we get our own for Christmas. That’s our plan anyway, even if our parents disagree). But the way it works with us being four friends is that whenever it’s one of those things where it can only be two people -- like the buddy system or sitting together on the bus during field trips -- then it’s always me and Reagan, Catherine and Isabel.

It was perfect. I didn’t want it to change. “But it’s possible we could be together,” I said.

“Yeah, anything’s possible. Just don’t get your hopes up,” Reagan replied.

We were both silent for a moment. Then I had a flashback. “Remember Kayla Kremmins?”

Reagan looked at me. “Yeah,” she said, somberly. Suddenly, the sunny, lemonade-y mood of the day was gone. We were both silent, lost in thought about poor Kayla Kremmins who’d been separated from all her friends last year in fourth grade. At first, Kayla had hung around with the Serena and Emma crowd, but they were more math and science clubby than she was. So then she kept to herself for awhile. Finally, she’d made friends with someone in chorus. What if that happened to us?

“Anyway!” Reagan said, tossing her black hair back over her shoulders. (She wasn’t one to stay sad for too long.) “We get to do the costume contest this year. What country should we be?”

She was talking about the International Day costume contest. Each grade does a different project for International Day, and this year it was our turn to do the costume contest. That meant every fifth grader had to find a partner, pick a country, and put together outfits that had something to do with the country -- like kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or flamenco dancers for Spain. Last year, the kids who got first prize were dressed as marble statues of ancient Greek gods -- Zeus and that god of the sea one -- who is that again? Oh yeah, Poseidon. Anyway, we could basically do anything we wanted so long as it was connected to our country in some way.

Then, on International Day, we would put on this big fashion show in front of the whole school in the auditorium, and all the other grades would vote for the best costumes. The winners would be announced the next day over the P.A. system. It’s like that reality show -- Project Runway.

So the country we picked really mattered. It had to be a place with cool clothes, so we could have shot at winning. No, not a shot -- we wanted to be the absolute, way-better-than-everyone-else, first-place winners!

“How about France?” I suggested. “We could wear those little hat thing-ys.”

“Berets? Yeah, but what else? Berets won’t be enough to get first prize,” Reagan said. She had a point. I thought some more.

Reagan jumped up. “I know! We could be Antarctica! No one’s ever done that. We could get fake fur and glue it on our coats -- we could use hot pink fun fur!”

“Okay, first of all, I don’t think a native Antarctica costume would have hot pink fur. Do people even live there? And we’d never be allowed to glue pink fur on our coats anyway. Plus, I don’t think Antarctica is even a country. Isn’t it a whole continent?”

“Country, continent -- same thing,” Reagan muttered. “You always worry too much about little details that don’t matter.” She turned away and looked down the street.

I felt bad. I probably shouldn’t have rattled off so many reasons why I thought hot pink Antarctica costumes were a bad idea. “Well, we could maybe be . . . Iceland . . . or Greenland . . . ”

“Just forget it.”

An SUV with a blue school bumper sticker drove by. “Hey, that was someone from our school and they didn’t stop!” Reagan cried. She ran into the street and yelled after the disappearing SUV. “We know who you are! We wrote down your license plate number!” (We hadn’t really but she was caught up in the moment.) She turned back towards me. “Can you believe that?”

I was as mad as she was. Everyone knows that parents are required to buy lemonade any time they see a kid selling some. It’s the law of lemonade stands.

“That was really lame,” I said.

“Yeah, totally.” Okay, we were good again. Back on track.

“Hey, I’ve got it!” Reagan jumped up again. I know who we can be! India! We can make awesome costumes if we’re India! We can use those scarves you have --”

“YES!” I said, holding my hand up to high five. “India is perfect! And the scarves will totally work. Plus we can put bindis on our foreheads.” (Bindis are the red dots some Indian women have on their foreheads -- I’d learned the right word for them last International Day from Mrs. Parashar who was serving garlic nam bread at the lunch.)

Reagan beamed. “We are sooooo going to win!” she said happily.

I was even more excited than she was. I loved putting outfits together and was known for my fashion ideas at school. I had a reputation to maintain! Plus, I’d never won anything before. Everyone had won a ribbon for something, or at least it seemed that way. But not me. All I’d ever gotten were certificates for participation and those don’t count as anything. This was my big chance. If I didn’t win at something I was actually good at, then what chance did I have for ever winning at anything? This was it.

* 2 *

We couldn’t wait to get started on our costumes.

“So, do you want to keep doing this?” Reagan asked unenthusiastically, dragging her finger through a puddle of spilled lemonade on the plastic tablecloth.

“No, not really. We’re not selling anything anyway.”

Reagan grabbed the tower of paper cups and the empty money box. “C’mon, let’s go!” We both knew exactly where we were headed without saying another word. Straight to my room to get my silky scarf collection.

Reagan pawed through the plastic storage box I kept under my bed. She plucked scarf after scarf from the box and tossed them over her shoulder. A long, purple one, a silky square one with yellow butterflies . . . “So what else do you have?” she asked when she got to the bottom of the box.

“I have a ton of scarves!” I said defensively.

“Yeah, I know, the scarves are great, but we need more than that. We can’t just wear scarves.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” (I said it the regular way -- the plain old r-i-g-h-t right way.)

Reagan leapt to her feet and grabbed the purple scarf. Giggling, she wrapped it around her T-shirt and shorts and then draped a gold glitter-y one over her head. “I’m on the catwalk, oh yeah, the catwalk,” she sang, strutting across the floor doing a supermodel walk.

I reached into the pile of scarves and made my own wrap dress with a long turquoise one. “Waahh la waahh la,” I hummed, trying to make Indian music sounds, even though I had no idea what Indian music sounded like. Twirling and moving my arms in circles above my head, I was completely absorbed in my performance when I heard Reagan squeal with laughter.

“Oh my gosh! Your dress is falling off! You’re going to be totally naked in front of the whole school!”

I stopped twirling and saw that my turquoise wrap had unraveled and was around my knees. I looked at Reagan. “We need to go to the mall,” I said. “We seriously need to go to the mall.”

We’d been planning to go Northway Mall to get new outfits for the first day of school. Now it would be a dual-purpose trip -- first day stuff plus India stuff.

“Let’s call Catherine and Izzy and see if they can come,” Reagan suggested.

“Catherine’s still at sports camp, and I don’t think Izzy’s back from visiting her grandmother yet,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Riiiiiiight.”

“C’mon, let’s go ask my mom if she’ll take us.”

We clomped down the stairs to find my mom in her office and, by some miracle, she agreed to take us right then, which never happens.

On the way to the mall, we talked about getting matching shirts for the first day from Harmony, which is basically everyone’s favorite store, but Reagan wasn’t that into it. (She wasn’t into the matching shirts, that is -- she was always into Harmony.) “”“’’‘’got’”“’”