It was a whimsical thought but didn’t distract me from my distraction. I stayed so distracted that on the rail ride home Shania asked me if anything was wrong and, walking up the quiet tree-lined street I almost missed our front door to go up the steps to my place. Using my alien sense to find Mom, I trooped upstairs to her home office to report in. In my own room, changing out of my school clothes I plopped onto my bed in shorts and t-shirt and stared at the ceiling for what felt like ages. Finally I grabbed my phone and texted Pinky.
My phone chimed and I answered it.
“What’s going on?”
“We need to meet Daphne tonight.”
“. . . Why?”
I took a deep breath. “Vice told us she has the information packet, but she didn’t get the ‘Welcome to Hadley Upper’ speech and she’s meeting her sisters just one hour before class starts and she’s thrown into everything more than a week behind. It’s like she just got recruited out of the blue by a corporate headhunter and her first day at the office, her first time meeting her new team she’s going to work with all day every day, is her first day of work. That’s not the best way to do it. I’ll bet right now she’s totally obsessing about tomorrow, not eating, probably won’t get much sleep. Not a good start. We can do better.”
“Hemingway, where are you getting this? You’re homeschooled.”
No, I was a Ross of Ross Enterprises, with more than thirty years’ experience dealing with human resources issues, and this stuff I knew about. “Summer internship, one of Aunt Sophia’s business management books, I was bored.”
“. . . So, what should we do? Day’s mostly over.”
I thought hard. This was all so sub-optimal it wasn’t funny, but I had one golden resource.
“We’ve got her contact numbers, I’ll have Mom call her parents, she can talk anyone around to anything. She gets the address and permission for us to do a drop-by tonight. The stores are still open, we put together a Welcome to Hadley bag. If Hadley Uniforms is open, we grab Daphne her own Hadley bear. We go over there tonight after their dinnertime, say hi, at least introduce ourselves so she knows two faces when she walks into school tomorrow. And tomorrow we meet her at the gates, escort her to her locker and her homeroom.”
“My spawn point can’t drive us. She’s working late tonight.”
“Mine can, she’s her own boss. Well, Steph is sort of the boss, but yeah.”
Pinky was quiet for a moment and then, “You’re right and we’re doing this. I’ll call the store, make sure they’ve got a bear for us. I made your card myself on our home printer, I can whip one up right now, everything else we need will be at the store or really any good office-supply store. Come and get me as soon as you can.” She hung up.
I stared at the phone for a moment, not quite believing she’d listened and it was happening, then got up and went back down the hall to lightly knock on Mom’s office door. “Mom? Do you have a minute? I need a favor.”
*******************************
Two hours later, Carl parked the family van outside a suburban home not actually that far from Hadley; Daphne’d probably be walking to school every day. Larger than Pinky’s place but smaller than our townhouse, it wasn’t on a big lot but the lawn and shrubbery we could see in the evening light was very well maintained.
After I’d told Mom what was going on and asked for her help, she’d taken me back to my room and picked out my outfit—the summer dress I’d worn my first day over a month ago, with an open light sweater to make it evening-appropriate—and made calls while I changed. (One of the calls was to Pinky, she took and sent my picture and told my big sister to match styles.) Then she changed while I loaded Steph’s stuff up so we were all ready to go when Carl got home. Going right back out the door, we’d driven to Pinky’s to grab her, hit Hadley Uniforms to grab the bear they’d pulled off the shelf for us, along with some Hadley pens and a nice faux-leather school portfolio folder with the Hadley seal impressed on it, that Pinky said would fit her school-issued pad.
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One more stop to purchase a gift-bag to put everything in, and then we’d hit a street-taco place for a quick bite (eating carefully with lots of napkins) before it was time to go over.
“Alright, girls,” Mom said now. “April, you have the bag? Good. Let us do the introductions, girls. Carl, make sure to shake hands with her father and—”
“Find some common ground with him while the womenfolk are talking, yes ma’am, I know the drill.”
She laughed and kissed him. “Yes, you do. Let’s go.”
We all climbed out, me passing the bag to Pinky long enough to get the little goblin out of her seat and hand her off to Mom, and we trooped up the walk. Carl rang the doorbell and I took a deep breath. They’re new prospective business partners. We need to make them comfortable so we can get the best synergy possible out of them. I can do this.
A man a bit older than Carl answered the door with a “You must be the Seevers! Come on in.” And then we were in a comfortable living room with five new people; Mr. Porter (not as tall as Carl and with a bit of a dad bod), a woman obviously Mrs. Porter (attractive brunette, taller than Mom), a nervous brunette teen who had to be Daphne, and behind her two much younger boys.
Carl had led us all in and he stuck out his hand to shake Mr. Porter’s. “Thank you for having us. I’m Carl and this is my wife, May.”
Mom smiled with dimples as Mrs. Porter stepped right up to her, eyes on Steph. “Yes, thank you for having us on such short notice. This is my daughter April, your girl’s new Hadley sister, and Elizabeth, her Hadley sister. And this little goblin, as her big sister calls her, is Stephanie.”
“She’s beautiful,” said the other woman, one mom to the other and not talking about me, before remembering herself. “I’m Emily, this is Robert, and this is our daughter Daphne and our two boys, Rob and Bart.” As nervous as I was, I suppressed a snort; someone in this family had a sense of humor with names and my guess was Mr. Porter. I’d bet he’d played the long game with You name the girls, I’ll name the boys.
And Mom had nailed it. I’d wondered at her dressing us up as if for a trip to the museum but the Porters matched us, dressed nicely for informal company. Even the boys looked unstained and well-scrubbed, and Daphne wore a dress too.
Given our start I expected us all to sit uncomfortably on the nice furniture and stare at each other, but they surprised me. “Boys, disappear,” Mr. Porter said with a chuckle, showing a great deal of common sense.
“Mom?” Daphne said as they did, and Mrs. Porter nodded.
“Yes, dear, why don’t you show them your room?” Go away and let the adults talk. “It’s very nice to meet you both,” she said to me and Pinky as Daphne looked so relieved I almost laughed. Afraid of parental embarrassment if we all stayed together? I so sympathized. Leading us upstairs, she opened a door with a red stop sign-shaped sign that read NO BOYS. ON PAIN OF PAIN, and we stepped into science.
Literally, it covered her walls. The Periodic Table. A map of the Solar System. Einstein. Hawking. Madam Curie. Faces I didn’t recognize. Her computer desk sported three monitors and I was willing to bet anything she didn’t play endless MMORPGs on them. “Wow,” Pinky said. “I know your Hadley nickname already.”
Daphne flinched and what? Oh. “You got picked on for all this?” She was fourteen and that was not happening at Hadley. She flushed and maybe I needed to dial it down.
“I— Sometimes? It wasn’t bad.”
“Pinky here wants to be a Supreme Court Justice,” I said. “I don’t know about me yet, but if you want to make the next big physics breakthrough, we’re your huckleberries.”
Now she just looked perplexed. “What does that even mean?”
Right, probably not a fan of westerns. “It’s from Tombstone. It means we’re the right people for the job. We’ve got your back, whatever you need. Hemingway.” I held out my hand, remembered I had the bag in the other, and handed it to her. “You’d have gotten the Welcome to Hadley speech and tour and met your sisters before school started, so we thought, well . . .” I was running out of steam.
“Hemingway here thought you should at least meet us before everything tomorrow,” Pinky finished. “And I agreed. Go on.” She waved at the bag.
“Oh.” Daphne sat at her computer desk to look inside, realized we were still standing, stood, realized there was only the one chair, and Pinky laughed and sat on her bed. I followed to sit beside her and Daphne sat again with a nervous laugh.
Pinky had put the card on top, above the stuffing tissue, and Daphne pulled it out first. It was the same Welcome to Hadley! card I’d found stuck to my locker the first day and I knew from when I signed it that it had a doodle of three girls with arms around each other’s shoulders inside—Pinky was either a very good artist or she’d found a perfect image online to print on the card stock. Pulling out the tissue, she found the portfolio folder next and then the bear, and sat there holding them.
“Hemingway named hers Hads,” Pinky said to fill the silence and Daphne looked up at me, clearing her throat.
“Hemingway’s your nickname?”
“Yeah. There’s a story. Later. She’s Pinky because . . .”
Pinky held up her shortened finger. “I picked my name. And you get to pick yours, or at least agree to it.” She looked around the room. “And I know just what it should be.”
“What?”
“Brain. Because this is all so cool. You should not hide your light.”
I could have hugged Pinky.
**************************************
My big sister took charge of things after that, dropping information about Daphne’s homeroom teacher (who she assured her was great), telling her about Hadley’s serious science classes and clubs (which I was pretty sure she already knew about but the point was probably to make her feel more confident of her welcome), and orchestrating an exchange of numbers so she had ours. She was sharing the story of how I became Hemingway, making the younger girl laugh, when there came a knock on the bedroom door. “Dear?” Mrs. Porter said through it. “April’s parents have decided it’s time to go.”
“Okay, Mom!” Daphne yelped, standing so fast she almost hopped. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked, turning to us and then flushing with mortification at sounding less than brilliant because of course she would, we were going to the same school.
“At the gates,” Pinky said cheerfully as I kept down a laugh in sympathetic embarrassment which would not have gone over well. “Before the bell. We’ll get you sorted out and then you’ll be sitting with us at lunch.”
“Lunch doesn’t have to be an everyday thing,” I clarified. “Not if you don’t want it—you might find a squad of science-types you want to share a table with. Or make new homeroom friends?”
“What she said,” Pinky seconded. “After tomorrow we’ll let you fly and be free, but we’re your sisters.”
And then we were trooping back downstairs, shaking hands with Daphne’s parents, and, after a start-stop on her part, getting in quick hugs with Daphne herself. “Hey,” I said to the girl. “It’s an adventure, right?”
She nodded hard and we said our goodbyes. Back outside and halfway down the walk to the street, Mom side-hugged me, arm tight around my shoulders to pull me in.
“What was that for?”
“For you, darling girl. You did good tonight. And you, too, Pinky, I’m proud of you both.”
“Thanks Mrs. S!”