Thirteen Plus One Read Online Free PDF Page B

it sounded as awful now as it had then. A disturbing question burbled up in my brain, one I hadn’t considered back when I was eleven. “Hey ... did you mean me outgrowing Amanda, or Amanda outgrowing me?”
    She answered immediately, and with a flip of her hand. “Well, Amanda outgrowing you. Duh.”
    I made an indignant noise.
    “But not in a bad way,” Sandra said. “Wouldn’t you rather be you than her?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “If the two of you could switch identities ... would you?”
    My bottom lip had a chapped spot on it, and my teeth found the flaking bit and tugged. Amanda was prettier than I was, and more popular—or used to be. These days, her status went back and forth. Sometimes she showed up all black-eyeliner-y doom-and-gloom and hung out with slouchy, scowly Aubrey. Other days I saw her in the cafeteria with superstars Gail and Malena, and she’d swish her Alice in Wonderland hair and be effortlessly fabulous in her slinky jeans and outfit-y tops that came from an entirely different planet than, say, my ratty-but-beloved Dr Pepper T-shirt.
    On those days, she outshone Gail and Malena without even trying, and I felt perversely proud of her.
    But did I want to be her?
    “She doesn’t really seem happy,” I confessed.
    Sandra tipped her cup so that the mangled end of her straw pointed at me. “See?”
    “Uh ... no.”
    “Well, don’t sweat it. Anyway, I might have been wrong.”
    “What?! ”
    “Shocking, I know. But it’s possible that when I gave you my whole ‘outgrowing’ advice, I might have been in a weird place personally. Or I might have been just plain wrong. So, um ... I take it back.”
    “Sandra!” I exclaimed. “You can’t take back advice. Not from three years ago. Not when I already followed it!”
    “Well, sorry. But now that I’m a senior, now that I’m about to graduate ... ” She turned up her palms. “I can’t help it, Win. It makes me realize how little time we have with each other.”
    “Who? You and me?”
    “ Every body,” she said. “Listen. I’m not saying go back and make things work with Amanda. Or do if you want to. Unless it’s impossible. Sometimes people go their own ways, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
    “Gee,” I said. “How ... uplifting.”
    “But if you can do something to save a friendship, then you have to. Like with Dinah and Cinnamon, because I know how much y’all love each other.”
    “True dat,” I murmured, unthinkingly echoing Cinnamon. Even when they bugged me, I loved them. I loved how Cinnamon was always willing to sacrifice her dignity for me, like Saturday at the mall when I was having pee issues. The ladies room was so crowded that when my turn finally came around, my pee wouldn’t come out. I froze, knowing that so many people were outside waiting ... and worse, listening . Cinnamon knew I was incapable of peeing in front of an audience. So what did she do? Out of nowhere and totally randomly, she belted out “All the Single Ladies” at the top of her voice, all three verses. How could I not love a friend with that kind of nerve?
    And Dinah, I loved how she always always always tried to be a good person. It was part of her very core. That same day at the mall? We were in Macy’s juniors department checking out swimsuits—summer was coming, after all—and all of a sudden, Cinnamon and I looked around and couldn’t find Dinah.
    “Where’d she go?” Cinnamon had asked, baffled.
    Turned out she’d spotted a little old lady in the accessories section, struggling to get down a purse that was out of her reach. So Dinah hurried over to help, of course. After that the little old lady wanted to take a peek at “that darling purple and green sequined clutch, you sweet girl,” and after that , there were multiple perfumes to be spritzed and sniffed, and somehow Dinah ended up serving as the little old lady’s personal shopper for the next half hour.
    “What?” she said to me and Cinnamon when we