The Inside of Out (3 page)

I loved every one of Hannah's quirks. Even her nail biting, although we were working on that. More than anything, I loved that she let me get close enough to witness them.

All I wanted was to stay that close. I didn't need anything else. But apparently, she did.

I beat her to the diner on foot and peeled apart the edge of a plastic menu while I waited. True to form, the only people in
the place were the somnolent staff and one other customer—some kid with glasses who was either in college or in high school trying to
look
like he was in college.

He glanced up from his laptop and raised his eyebrows, like he'd caught me gawking or something. Whatever, buddy. I was only looking because he was blocking my view to the door Hannah was due to walk through any second. But now that he'd clocked me, I stared more brazenly.

He had dark, messy hair, sharp eyes behind black hipster frames, and he was typing on his MacBook with such loud clicks that I began to form theories.
Angry email to an ex? Slasher screenplay? Shocking exposé for a newspaper?

He looked up again, but this time, I had the menu ready to block my face. Not that I needed to read it. Hannah and I always got the same combination of items to share: mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, side salad that we would pick at so we didn't feel too guilty about the other selections.

I'd just ordered when the door dinged, and of course, that kid with the laptop glanced up expecting me to look at him, and
of course
I did, stupidly, so it took me a second to break eye contact and peer over his shoulder to see Hannah walking in.

With someone.

Not just anyone.

Natalie Beck's copper blade of a ponytail was swinging back and forth with OCD precision as she trailed Han through the door. I mentally
ughed
. Possibly audibly. What were the odds of that vulture turning up here—our secret hideout—the one place that the plebs of Palmetto didn't invade as soon as the last bell rang?

I was shooting Hannah a sympathetic wince when I saw it. Her hand. Doing something strange.

It was holding Natalie's.

The booth pinned me in like a carnival ride. I couldn't move. Not until Hannah led Natalie over like a show pony, ushered her into the booth, and said:

“Daisy, this is Natalie.”

“I know her.” I laughed, because it was such a weird thing for Hannah to say. Of course I knew Natalie. I'd known her since pre-K.

Hated her since fourth grade.

Hannah knew the entire sordid history, but now she flushed her trademark neon, and Natalie—
Natalie—
ran her fingers along Hannah's shoulder to, like, calm her down.

What was happening?

“Right. Of course.” Hannah shook her head. “What you
don't
know is . . .”

Natalie smiled encouragingly, insipidly.

No no no holy no
 . . .

“She's my girlfriend.”

My earliest memory is one I'd rather forget.

I'm lumbering through a maze of clothespinned sheets, like an outtake from a detergent commercial, and she's calling, “You can't get me!” But then there's her hand, and once I've grabbed it, she smacks her head into my shoulder and we fall down hard and giggle until we can't breathe, watching the sun flash between the leaves of the big oak above. Then she rests her arm on my face and says, “Oscar's not my best friend anymore. You are.”

Oscar was her stuffed bunny. And she was Natalie Beck.

Natalie, back then Nat-Nat, who didn't care what anybody thought, who once wore a pasta strainer as a hat for an entire school day because I'd dared her, who had the loudest laugh in South Carolina, who wasn't, you know, evil.

I can't remember when we met or how, just that we did everything together from preschool on. We forced our parents to watch our terrible living room musical performances— our version of
The Wizard of Oz
was longer than the film itself—signed up for the same horseback-riding/berry-picking/hand-loom-weaving summer camps. We were so close that our mothers pretended to like each other, a marvel of
social engineering that I still can't wrap my brain around.

It seemed at the time to come out of nowhere, but looking back, it must have all kicked off the summer after third grade, with the Giselle Chronicles. TGC was a book series about ballerinas in space. Ridiculous? Yes. Awesome? Hell to the yeah. Every weekend, Nat and I dressed up as the main characters and acted out each book's plot from beginning to end in a continuous loop.

Our dream for the summer after third grade was to stage elaborate space-ballet productions all over the greater Charleston area. But Natalie's family had other plans. Hours before she left for an eight-week Mediterranean cruise, we forged a pact: On the first day of school, we would dress in character, Nat as poofy-haired Xippie and me as rosy-cheeked Lida. To while away the empty hours alone, I spent the summer perfecting my
grands jetés
and my costume—a new dress, short and metallic green, with slippers that crisscrossed to my knees.

The moment I walked into Mrs. Morris's fourth-grade classroom, I sensed trouble—a vestigial instinct—my eyes, bones, skin prickling like a tiger was stalking me. No tigers here, though. Just Natalie. She was sitting in the back, which we never did, and she was dressed . . . not even normally,
stylishly,
in a striped top and pleated skirt with a matching headband, like she was pretending to be a French fifteen-year-old. And when I said hi, she mumbled it back but wouldn't look at me.

At recess, she was talking to other girls, including a few she'd declared “stuck-up” the year before. When I came up and did a
grand jeté
, Nat got the strangest look on her face.
I'd only ever seen it when we were playing pretend. She was sneering.

“O-
kay,
psycho,” she said, and turned her back.

And all the other girls laughed and followed her across the playground.

I still remember that feeling of being stuck to the asphalt, pulled down by more than gravity, the very breath sucked out of me. It was like when Lida went through the black hole in
Swan Planet
and came out a swan, except I wasn't a swan. I was a psycho.

And it must have been true, because the girls I didn't like took it up as a chant—
psycho—
repeating it enough at recess, and whispering it enough behind cupped hands that by the end of that week, a lot of the boys, sensing a fight, had picked it up too. And if my remaining friends weren't name-calling, they weren't exactly leaping to my defense. It took two days for them to start saving seats at the lunch table so that I couldn't sit with them. And it took until the day after that for me to gather enough courage to walk up to Natalie in the after-school pickup line. I was terrified, my hands shaking, my life unraveling, so I stumbled over the “mean,” saying, “Why are you being so m-mean to me?” and Natalie just blinked, empty-eyed and said, “I d-don't kn-know, D-Daisy. W-why do you th-think?”

That was as close to an answer as I ever got. My best friend had been replaced by this stranger who didn't laugh at all, whose red hair was never tangled, who'd decided somewhere between Ibiza and Crete that she hated me.

And for years, people teased me for a stammer I didn't
have. Still did—if you counted Pete Brandt as a person. The other taunts evolved. It took them more than a month to realize that Psycho Daisy didn't rhyme but
Crazy Daisy
did, so that one was a big hit, along with the standard synonyms,
freak, loser, weirdo
. Occasionally I'd get a “Hey” in class from someone who felt sorry for me, but never much more.

It wasn't worth talking about. Talking meant thinking and that led to mulling and mourning and honestly, what was the point?

The only day worth thinking about was the first day of sixth grade. As I was settling down to eat lunch in a hidden corner of the schoolyard, I glanced up to a dizzyingly unfamiliar sight: Someone was walking up to join me.

She was new. She had long black hair clipped back with barrettes, warm green eyes. She'd just moved from Europe—
Europe!—
a place where that pretentious cow Natalie had only vacationed.

And she was wearing a Giselle Chronicles backpack.
In sixth grade
. Apparently this was acceptable in Europe?

“Can I eat with you?” she'd asked.

It turned out we had a lot in common. We found this out astonishingly quickly.

“What's your last name?”

“Von Linden. With a small
v
.” She flushed bright, electric, beautiful pink. “It's a common name in Austria, but here I guess it's long?”

“My last name's long too! Beaumont-Smith. With a dash. I always have to explain the dash.” I dared a smile. “You moved from Austria?”

“Yeah, me and my mom. My dad's still there, so . . .” She looked down, turning a baby carrot over and over. “I don't know if I'm going to see him much.”

“My dad lives at home,” I offered. “But I don't see him much either. He stays in his office all day playing video games.” I peeked in her lunchbox, spying something that made my eyes water. “What's
that
?”

Hannah picked it up. “Um . . . I don't know the words. In German, it's
kartoffelpuffer
?”

“What's it made of?”

“Potatoes. And fat. Is that the right words?” Hannah's grin flickered. “My English is rusting.”

“I
love
fat. Anything deep fried is my favorite.”

“
Me too!
” She beamed. “Sometimes I daydream about, sort of, regular food and picture what it would taste like if you fried it. For example, salad and things.”

I reeled, amazed. “I bet it would be better.”

We talked about fried food all day. And then, when school let out, we exchanged numbers so we could keep talking about it after we got home. On the phone, back at school, back on the phone, we talked in sometimes halting English about ballet and black holes and whether ladybugs bit and our moms and our worst fears and how glad we were to have met. Within forty-eight hours, Hannah von Linden and I were best friends.

It was enough to elevate me from
Status: Pariah
to
Status: Other
. As the years passed, Natalie was ever-present, the gnawing ulcer in my gut that made me feel like nothing I did would ever be right again, but with Hannah around, we'd at least stopped interacting.

Until now.

“Daisy . . .” Hannah had risen with me, dropping her Moleskine to reach out and steady me.

“I'm not feeling so well,” I heard myself saying, barely managing to sidestep the waitress without knocking the tray from her hand. “Eat the . . . food. I'd better get home. You two crazy kids enjoy.”

I was halfway across the diner when it hit me that I'd said “crazy kids”—and one millisecond later that a power cord hit my leg, sending me and something silvery careening to the floor with two sharp cracks.

“What the hell!” Glasses guy jumped from his seat, spilling coffee on his leg. “Gaaah!”

“I'm fine, thanks for asking!”
I yelled from the ground, elbow throbbing. “Why are you plugged in halfway across the freaking room?”

“Because my battery's dead,” he yelled back, turning his laptop over and shaking it. “And now my computer is too.”

After a moment of paralysis, Hannah was recovering—and approaching fast. Natalie sat in the booth with her eyes closed, like she was practicing a mantra, like I was something you needed happy thoughts to get through.

The guy was offering me a hand. “Listen, I'm sorry—
are
you all right?”

I pulled myself away using the back of his chair, knocking it over in the process, muttering, “Sorry-about-your-computer-I-really-don't-have-time-to-talk.”

Then I rushed out the door.

Once the thick street air hit me, a current pulled me
along the sidewalk, out of sight of the diner's corner windows. After a few blocks, I realized I'd made a pointless circle, my brain stuck stuttering, “How? I . . . how? But
how
?” My backpack felt impossibly heavy. I put it down on the sidewalk. Sighed. I'd left my ride back at the diner. Along with her girlfriend.

Get home,
I thought.
Figure the rest out later.

I called Mom. She took three rings to pick up, then shouted, “I'm at your school!”

“Why?” I asked carefully. She didn't seem to hear.

“Across the street. Can you see me? I'm with my CFOA group . . . I'm waving!”

Rather than trying to decipher that, I shouted, “See you in a minute,” skirted the school's parking lot, and headed across two lanes of sparse traffic to the neighboring field, where Mom and six other ladies were staggering around squinting at the ground, picking up pinches of scrub and soil and stuffing them into tiny canvas bags.

This was possibly a new level of strange.

Mom waved so excitedly that I knew she was misreading the reason I'd stopped by.

“Just wanted to see what you were up to!”

She threw her arm around me and squeezed, shouting to the others, “Activist in training here!”

The ladies whooped, and I did a stealth check across the street to school to make sure nobody had overheard. What would my nickname be if QB or Natalie could see me in a vacant lot with a bunch of middle-aged eco-warriors?

Natalie. She couldn't say anything. Because she was
dating
my best friend
. My brain whimpered
How?
one last time and short-circuited.

I spent the ride home dimly registering Mom droning on about her eco group and how there was going to be a minor- league field across from Palmetto, but the deal to bring in the team fell through, and Community Farmers of America and some game app something-something to fund-raise and then she fell silent, which snapped me back just in time for her to say, “It was awfully brave of Hannah to come out.”

“Yeah.” I blinked. “She's a rock star.”

Mom had a dangerous sparkle in her eye. “If you had something to tell me, I'd be very proud of
you
. And supportive. You know that, right?”

“Sure.”

“So . . .” She was watching me, not the road. “Is there anything you want to say?”

“Yeah.
Brake
.” I pointed to the light ahead and she slammed the car to a stop just as it turned red. “Apart from that, no. Nice try.”

“Okay,” Mom said, an irritating note of patience in her voice, as though in time, I'd come to know myself as well as she did.

“When I realize I'm gay, you'll be the first to know. I'll wake you up and tell you the exact moment it occurs to me.”

Mom rolled her eyes and turned into our driveway. “Just wanted you to know I'm here for you.”

“I appreciate that.”

I did. Honestly. Even so, the moment we got into the house, I ran upstairs, locked my bedroom door, and tried my best to pretend nothing outside my walls was real.