So Pearl had directed Lexie down Northfield Road, past the racetrack, to the thrift store, where women on break from the Taco Bell down the street, or getting ready for the night shift, browsed alongside them. She had been in dozens of thrift stores in dozens of cities in her life and somehow every single one had the exact same smell—dusty and sweet—and she had always been sure that the other kids could smell it on her clothes, even after double washings, as if the scent had soaked right into her skin. This one, where she and her mother had rummaged through the bins for old sheets to use as curtains, was no different. But now, hearing Lexie’s delighted squeal, she saw the store through new eyes: a place where you could find cocktail dresses from the sixties for Homecoming, surgical scrubs for lounging on sleepy days, a wide assortment of old concert tees, and, if you were lucky, bells, real bell-bottoms, not the back-again retro ones from the Delia’s catalog but the actual thing, with wide flares, the denim tissue-thin at the knees from decades of wear.
“Vintage.” Lexie sighed and set upon the rack with reverence. Instead of the blouses and hippie skirts Mia always selected for her, Pearl found herself with an armful of quirky T-shirts, a skirt made from an old pair of Levi’s, a navy zip-up hoodie. She showed Lexie how to read the price tags—on Tuesdays anything with a green tag was half off, on Wednesdays, it was yellow—and, when Lexie found a pair of jeans that fit, Pearl expertly pried off the orange price tag and replaced it with a green one from an ugly eighties polyester blazer. Under Pearl’s guidance, the jeans came to $4, Pearl’s entire bag to $13.75, and Lexie was so pleased that she pulled into the Wendy’s drive-through and treated them to a Frosty apiece. “Those jeans fit you like they were made for you,” Pearl told her in return. “You were destined to have them.”
Lexie let a spoonful of chocolate melt against her tongue. “You know what?” she said, half closing her eyes, as if to put Pearl in sharper focus. “That skirt would go great with a striped button-down. I’ve got an old one you can have.” When they got back to her house, she pulled a half dozen shirts from the closet. “See?” she said, smoothing the collar around Pearl’s neck, carefully buttoning a single button between her breasts for the minimum of modesty, the way all the senior girls were wearing them that year. She swiveled Pearl toward the mirror and nodded approvingly. “You can take those,” she said. “They look cute on you. I’ve got too many clothes as it is.”
Pearl had bundled the shirts into her bag. If her mother noticed, she decided, she would say she got them at the thrift store with everything else. She wasn’t sure why but she felt sure her mother would not approve of her taking Lexie’s old things, even if Lexie didn’t want them. Mia, putting the clothes to wash, noticed that the shirts smelled of Tide and perfume rather than dust, that they were crisp, as if they’d been ironed. But she said nothing, and the following evening all of Pearl’s new clothes appeared in a neat pile at the foot of her bed, and Pearl breathed a sigh of relief.
A few days later, in the Richardsons’ kitchen and clad in one of Lexie’s shirts, she noticed Trip looking at her again and again out of the corner of his eye and adjusted her collar with a smug little smile. Trip himself was not even aware of why he was glancing at her, but he could not help noticing the little hourglass of skin her shirt revealed: the bare triangle framed by her collarbones; the bare triangle of midriff, with the delicate indent of her navel; the intermittent flash of navy blue bra above and below that single fastened button.
“You look nice today,” he said, as if he were noticing her for the first time, and Pearl turned a deep pink, right down to the roots of her hair. He seemed embarrassed, too, as if he had just revealed a fondness for a very uncool TV show.
Moody could not let this pass. “She always looks nice,” he said. “Shut up, Trip.”
As usual, however, Trip did not notice his brother’s irritation. “I mean extra nice,” he said. “That shirt suits you. Brings out the color of your eyes.”
“It’s Lexie’s,” Pearl blurted out, and Trip grinned. “Looks better on you,” he said, almost shyly, and headed outside.
The next day, Moody raided his savings and presented Pearl with a notebook, a slim black Moleskine held shut with an elastic garter. “Hemingway used this exact same kind,” he told her, and Pearl thanked him and zipped it into her bookbag. She would copy her poems into it, he thought, instead of that ratty old spiral notebook, and it gave him some comfort—when she smiled at Trip or blushed at his compliments—to know that he’d given her the notebook that was holding her favorite words and thoughts.
The following week, Mrs. Richardson decided to have the carpet steamed, and all the children were told to stay out of the house until dinnertime. “If I see one boot print—Izzy—or one cleat mark—Trip—on those carpets, you will lose your allowance for a year. Understood?” Trip had an away soccer game, and Izzy had a violin lesson, but Lexie, it happened, had nothing to do. Serena Wong had cross-country practice and all her other friends were occupied one way or another. After tenth period, she tracked Pearl down at her locker.
“Whatcha up to?” Lexie asked, popping a white tablet of gum into Pearl’s hand. “Nothing? Let’s go to your place.”
In all her previous years, Pearl had been reluctant to invite friends to her home: their apartments had always been crowded and cluttered, often in run-down sections of town, and odds were high that on any given day Mia might be working on one of her projects—which, to an outsider’s eye, meant doing something odd and inexplicable. But Lexie appearing at her elbow, Lexie asking to come over to her house, Lexie asking to spend time with her—she felt like Cinderella looking up to see the prince’s outstretched hand.
“Sure,” she said.
To Pearl’s delight—and Moody’s great irritation—the three of them climbed into Lexie’s Explorer and they headed down Parkland Drive toward the house on Winslow, TLC blasting from the rolled-down windows. When they pulled up in front of the house, Mia, who was outside watering the azaleas, fought the sudden but overpowering urge to drop the hose and run inside and lock the door behind her. Just as Pearl had never asked friends over, Mia never invited outsiders either. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? For Pearl to have friends. By the time the doors of the Explorer opened and the three teenagers piled out, she had turned off the water and greeted them with a smile.