"You have weird hair."
Emma lifted her head from her story about the hungry caterpillar to see the little blonde girl in the bright yellow dress staring at her. She looks around a couple of times to make sure she's talking to her, and then she raises her eyebrows. "What, you never seen pigtails before?"
The little girl's eyes get squinty, and Emma lifts her nose up defiantly. "Not ones quite so… poufy."
The teacher interrupts them before Emma can retort, telling them to get back to their reading. Emma spends the day feeling self conscious about her curly pigtails, glancing over at the popular girl with the perfect hair to make sure she's not staring.
That night, she cries to her mother about having stupid poufy hair, and she teaches herself how to use her older sister's straightener so her hair never looks poufy again.
"Nice pajama's."
Gia looks around for the source of the veiled compliment, and finds Emma standing behind her, looking disapproving. "My mom say's they're cute," Gia says, looking down at the bunny rabbits all over her two piece pajamas.
Emma nods, looking unimpressed, and Gia frowns. Why is Emma being mean?
"Yours aren't great, either," Gia retorts meanly, crossing her arms. In truth, Emma's pink skort pajamas are super trendy, but Gia feels defensive now. Who knew slumber parties were all about fashion?
"Yeah," Emma shrugs, and then flips her hair over her shoulder and walks away, "But my hair looks fantastic."
They get sent to detention together in the third grade for "malicious mischief". Gia had started it, of course, but she was pretty and popular and of course she'd get away with it. Emma had only poured the glue in her mouth because she'd dared her to.
"Why are you so mean?" Gia wants to know, sitting next to her while they wait for the principle to finish with the older boys who were fighting. There's still some glue around the corner of her mouth.
"Why am I mean?" Emma asks incredulously, and she gets annoyed when Gia just nods innocently. "I'm not! You're mean."
"I am not mean," Gia objects immediately, putting her hands on her hips.
"You are so mean," Emma says, and she turns her head away, annoyed.
"You're meaner," Gia says, her voice sounding deflated.
Some time goes by before either of them says anything. Emma thinks that she's hurt Gia's feelings by calling her mean, but she is! She's always been mean. Emma is just defending herself.
"Meany," Gia says after a while, kicking her feet on the floor and pouting.
"Your face is mean," Emma grumbles, and then the principle comes out to scold them.
They take environmental science for a week in fifth grade, and go on a bunch of field trips. The planetarium had been Gia's favorite, even though Emma had claimed it was just because Gia had found something as big as her own ego to love. They sit across from each other on the bus, and Gia makes faces at Emma when she thinks she isn't looking.
Emma seems to get a real kick out of the nature hike they take, and even Gia laughs when the geeky boy in their class freaks out over the salamander that crawls across his shoe.
"Look!" Emma says, and she points upward. Gia looks and see's a bunch of butterflies flitting around. "Those are monarch butterflies. They're migrating."
"Very good, Emma," their teachers says, and he starts telling them all about butterflies.
"I love the planet," Emma sighs to no one in particular, and Gia looks over at her.
"Really," she wonders casually, "Is that-"
"No, it's not because it's as big as my own ego," Emma sassily snaps back, and Gia glares. "Get your own jokes."
"SNAKE!" Someone shouts, and Gia jumps. She feels a hand grab her arm, and she instinctively moves close to it.
"Jake!" The teacher scolds, as the boy with the rubber snake is brought up to the front by his ear.
Gia lets out a sigh of relief at the same time Emma does, and Gia looks down to see Emma's hand gripping her arm.
Emma drops her arm just as she says, "I wasn't scared. I was making sure you weren't scared."
"You were totally scared," Gia laughs, shoving Emma in the arm. "You should have seen your face!"
"You should have seen your face!" Emma retorts, and they make faces at each other for the rest of the day.
But they stop being mean after that.
Gia makes the honor roll ever quarter in middle school, and the school always has a big assembly to award the bumper stickers, where the honor roll students get donuts for their hard work.
Only she can't eat donuts because of her gluten allergy, so she always gives them to Emma, who sits right next to her in the class line up.
"You should still try to get on the honor roll," Gia tells her as Emma scarfs down the donut before the bell rings, dismissing them back to class.
"Yeah," Emma laughs, licking her fingers. "Then I'd get two donuts!"
Emma blows up the chemistry classroom in eighth grade, and gets the whole school sent home while the school is aired out from the toxic chemicals.
At first, she's a hero. But then the school announces that they'll have to make up the day over winter break, and then the name calling starts.
"Hey look, it's the Em-spolsion!"
"Clear the area, Disaster Girl coming through!"
Gia doesn't take part in any of it, but she does feel sort of bad for Emma. Especially one day when she sees Emma booking it down the hallway to get away from a group of name callers.
"Hey Jerkoffs!" Gia calls, distracting them so that Emma can take a sharp turn into the Choir room and get out of sight. "Maybe you should be less concerned with the extra day of this semester you'll have to make up and more concerned with the entire summer you'll miss in summer school."
They make some unimpressed noises, but Gia stares them down until they wave her off and amble down the hallway to make fun of someone else.
She contemplates for a long time going into the choir room and seeing if Emma is alright. When she finally makes up her mind, she finds Emma sitting on the floor inside the door, her head in her hands.
"Hey, are you okay?" Gia asks, crouching down beside her.
"I'm fine," Emma says without lifting her head, "You can go."
"Hey, those jerks will get over it. Someone else will do something in a week and they'll move on," Gia assures.
Emma lifts her head, her eyes red and her cheeks tear stained. "Wait, are you really defending me?"
Gia shrugs. "Hey, it's not like I'm hurt about missing a day of winter break. I like school, remember?"
Emma laughs, wipes at her eyes. She sniffs, and then buries her head in her hands again. "I can't believe I started crying. That just gives them more ammo!"
"Hey, we can fix that," Gia says, and she reaches into her backpack and pulls out a couple of tissues and hands them to Emma. Emma dabs at her face and her eyes, and then Gia pulls out some make up. "I think I even have your color."
Emma gives her a small smile, let's Gia smudge some eye shadow onto her eyes with her finger and put some eyeliner on, and she manages to cover some of the tear stains on her cheeks, too. "You're being really nice to me," Emma says as she finishes, like she's suspicious.
"Contrary to popular belief, I'm a really nice person," Gia says flippantly as she closes up the makeup.
Emma grins. "Yeah, that is pretty contrary," she jokes, and Gia rolls her eyes at her.
The bell rings, and they go back out of the choir room to try and make it to their separate classes on time.
Before they part, Emma calls over her shoulder, "Thanks, Gia."
They end up at the same after party their freshman homecoming. It's being held by a bunch of seniors, and Emma's older sister is dating the football captain, so she gets to tag along. She isn't sure how Gia ends up there, but she is sure that when she catches her twirling under the ceiling fan that something is not right.
"What is she doing?" She asks one of the guys watching.
He shrugs, laughing. "She said she was chasing butterflies," he snickers, and then he picks up a brownie and takes a bite.
Emma eyes the brownie and stops it halfway to his mouth, looking incredulous. "Oh my god, did you guys-" she looks around at the other jocks there, and they all look amused. "Did you guys get her high?"
The guy next to her giggles again. "She said she could only eat special brownies," he says.
Emma sighs, looking at Gia in her bright yellow poufy dress, still spinning under the fan and now laughing madly. "She meant gluten free brownies," she says, and then she smacks each of the guys in the arm, hard, before going to stop Gia from spinning.
"Emma, hey!" Gia says happily when Emma manages to catcher her hands and stop her from spinning. "Look, there are so many butterflies here!"
"Yeah, okay," Emma says, and she can't help but smile a little at her dilated pupils, "Come on, I'm taking you home."
"Okay," Gia says, letting Emma lead her out of the popular kid's living room, "Bye nice senior guys!"
Emma finds their coats, struggles to get Gia into hers, and then asks her sister to give them a ride home.
"What?" Her sister says, holding a big red cup up. "No way!"
So they walk instead.
It's not horribly far, and it's a nice summer night out still. Besides, watching Gia trip is pretty amusing, and Emma figures they have a good hour or so before she gets sick from the gluten in the brownies. That's plenty of time.
"Did you know that there are like, so many billions of solar systems up there that we can't even conceive of a number to count them?" Gia tells her, pointing up at the stars. "Do you have any idea what the percentage of aliens existing is with that many planets?"
"Really?" Emma wonders, amused. "You're still this intelligent when you're high?"
Gia laughs, probably because Emma sounds a lot funnier than she usually does to her, and then she does a little spin. "Oh, wow, the world is spinning!" She says, and then plops down on the sidewalk. "Maybe I can make it stop."
Emma cracks up, thinking that this is probably the first time Gia's ever had anything stronger than cough syrup. She sits down too, let's Gia mellow out for a minute.
"Hey, Emma?" Gia says, her voice sounding funny.
"Yeah?" Emma answers, and see's Gia turn to her.
"Why aren't we friends?" Gia wonders, her face looking genuinely confused.
Emma considers for a long moment. What the hell, she thinks. Gia probably won't remember anyway. "When we were in first grade, I used to wear my hair in these big poufy pom-pom pigtails, and you called them weird."
Gia's eyes go funny, like she's trying really, really hard to remember this, and can't. "But, you don't have poufy hair now."
"Yeah," Emma agrees, leaning away when Gia attempts to reach over and touch her hair. "I've been straightening it ever since."
Gia does end up picking up some of her hair and petting it. "You have such pretty hair," Gia says sadly, and then she looks up at Emma with heartfelt eyes. "I shouldn't have made fun of it. I'm sorry. Can we be friends now?"
Emma is both amused and stunned, because, again, Gia probably won't remember any of this in the morning, and because apparently, Gia wants to be her friend. "I guess we'd better be," Emma says thoughtfully, watching her high classmate, "I mean, I don't see how you're going to survive high school without me."
Gia laughs, drops Emma's hair and reaches over to give her a big hug.
"Okay, trippy," Emma says, patting Gia's back with a smile, "Time to get walking again."
"I'm gonna get sick, huh?" Gia says, sounding rather lucid.
"Oh yeah," Emma agrees.
"Crud," Gia says dejectedly, and Emma laughs.
"Hey," Gia catches up to Emma at her locker on Monday after the dance. "Thanks for rescuing me the other night," she says breathlessly.
Emma looks a bit like a dear in headlights. "Uh, you're welcome. Are you feeling better?"
"Oh, I puked my guts out all of yesterday," Gia waves it off, "but I'm good now."
Emma nods, like that was too much information. "Glad to hear it."
They stand awkwardly for a few minutes at Emma's locker, and Gia is trying to come up with something else to say when Gia speaks up.
"You know," Emma says thoughtfully, "When you were flying, you said that we should maybe try to be friends."
"Did I?" Gia asks, grinning, because she mostly remembers that part.
"Yes you did," Emma nods, and then she shrugs, "And it doesn't sound like a terrible idea."
"Are you saying that because friends help each other with their ridiculously difficult calculus homework?" Gia wonders, and Emma grins.
"Well," she looks a little guilty, "the other friend totally pays for the first friend's gluten free smoothie at Ernie's, so that seems fair."
Gia laughs, and she and Emma head for Ernie's together for the first time.