Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along) by Erin Downing Page B

looking stupid.”
    I thought this was a very profound statement, but Bailey and Ava both laughed. “What?” I demanded. “What’s funny about that?”
    â€œUm,” Bailey mumbled through a mouthful of Oreo cookie, “you and everyone else. Do you think you’re the only person in the history of seventh grade that’s worried about her reputation?”
    I held out my hand for a cookie and shook my head. “No, it’s just—I don’t know. I feel like I have more to lose if I really embarrass myself.”
    â€œThat is so self-centered,” Ava said, lifting her eyebrows. She rarely put things so bluntly, so it caught me off guard. My cookie tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and I kind of wanted to spit it out.
    Bailey nodded. “You’re more popular than ninety-nine percent of our class, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bigger deal when you do something stupid. It’s just a bigger deal to you .”
    â€œBut it is a bigger deal,” I pressed on, though my face was getting hot, and I was a little queasy. I hated when Bailey and Ava confronted me about saying selfish things. They didn’t understand what it was like for me, how it felt like everyone was always watching me, waiting for me to screw up, just so they could laugh at me. It was like I was more visible than most people at school. Most of the time, I liked it that way, but sometimes I felt like I had to be extra cautious. “I just mean, when I do something that makes melook stupid, it seems like the whole school is watching.”
    â€œThey’re not,” Ava said. “You just think they are.”
    â€œBut they are,” I argued. “If I did something completely embarrassing—like fall on my face during dance tryouts—everyone in school would know about it.”
    â€œYeah,” Bailey admitted. “I guess you have a point. But the thing is, if you just laughed it off, you could probably make people forget about it in two days. If one of us humiliated ourselves in front of the whole school, it would probably get blown up into this huge deal and whatever it was would follow us around until we graduated from high school. Like Susannah Green! Everyone called her Crybaby Green all last year because someone spread a rumor that she started crying about missing her favorite stuffed animal during Spanish. Remember that?”
    The look on my face must have made it obvious that I was the one who had spread around the rumor about Susannah. She really had cried about something stupid and babyish, like missing her stuffed animal. I think. I wasn’t actually in the same class with her when it happened, but Heidi had given me the details and, of course, we’d laughed about it all week.
    Who does that in sixth grade? Susannah really hadn’tlived it down, but I’d never really thought about it much after that day. It didn’t affect me on a daily basis, so I’d never really considered that the story had never gone away. It trailed her all year. Because of me. “Wow,” I said finally. “Poor Susannah.”
    â€œYeah,” Bailey sighed. “The thing you maybe don’t realize is, most people care a lot less about what you and your friends are doing all the time than I bet you think they do. Mostly, I think people just kind of try to stay out of your way and hope you don’t even notice them.”
    I began to pick at my pinkie nail for the first time in over a week. Bailey saw me and said, “Hey! You’re going to ruin my hard work.”
    â€œOh,” I said, stuffing my hands under my thighs. “Sorry.” After a moment’s pause, I said, “Do you guys avoid me at school?”
    â€œPretty much, yeah,” Bailey said, smiling sheepishly. “But it’s a whole different world here at the lake, isn’t it?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. And you guys are so different than I thought you would