The Crazy Things Girls Do for Love by Dyan Sheldon Page B

Kimodo.
    And so, against all the odds, Maya Baraberra and Sicilee Kewe ended up leaving the school side-by-side.
    “You know, you really are incredible,” Maya says as they cross the main hall. She puts on an exaggerated, shrill and girly voice. “ Ooh, I’ve been doing the Green thing for, like, ever now … the bottles … the light bulbs … the whole vegan scene! ”
    “Oh, listen who’s talking!” Sicilee fumes. “You made it sound like you and Cody were virtual twins.”
    Maya’s laugh will later be described by Sicilee as sounding like the squeal of a panicked pig. “At least everything I said was true!”
    Naturally, Sicilee had been prepared to embroider the truth a little – to claim she turned off lights and things like that – but how could she with Maya standing there looking like the cat that had swallowed every pigeon in the park? She had no choice. What was she supposed to say? That her mother gives her old clothes to the church thrift store and, every time he gets the electric bill, her father stomps around the house turning off lights? She had to lie. Boldly. Baldly. The worst thing was that once she got started, she couldn’t seem to stop. By the time she was done, she’d altered the truth so much that it wouldn’t have been able to recognize itself.
    Sicilee yanks open one side of the glass doors. “Are you saying that you don’t believe me?” she asks as she sails through.
    “Oh, heavens to Betsy! I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.” Right behind her, Maya catches the closing door with her hip, her expression sour as she pushes through. “I am so sure you’re Greener than grass.” She leans her mouth close to Sicilee’s ear. “Like not !” If the planet thought it had to count on Sicilee to save it, it would shoot itself now. “If there was one word of truth in anything you said, it was the word ‘I’.”
    “That just shows how much you know.” Sicilee strides on, hair swinging, heels clicking against the pavement. “It just so happens that I am not a liar, Baraberra. I leave that kind of thing to people like you.”
    Maya’s laugh pops like a blister. “Oh, please. Spare me the self-righteous crap. I bet you don’t even know what a vegan is.”
    “Of course I do.” Sicilee doesn’t. She thinks that vegan is short for vegetarian. She slows down so that Maya can catch up with her and see the scornful edge to her smile. “Just because I don’t go around drooling cool the way you do, Baraberra – shaking your stupid badges in everybody’s face and thinking you’re so great because you wear somebody else’s old clothes – doesn’t mean that I don’t know what’s going on in the big picture. I know what’s going on.”
    Maya sneers. Yeah, sure you do. “Sicilee,” says Maya with exaggerated sweetness, “we’re alone now – you don’t have to pretend. You don’t have a clue what’s going on in ‘the big picture’. Gott im Himmel , you think you’re the big picture. If you can’t wear it, drive it, watch it, listen to it, or eat it, it doesn’t exist.”
    “What? Unlike you, Miss Sacrifice-and-self-denial? Like you’ve dedicated your life to protecting chipmunks and drawing on the walls of the cave you live in?” Sicilee’s laughter splutters like machine-gun fire. “You are such a total phoney. You know, you don’t look like you’re doing without much to me. Your parents have two cars, just like everybody else. And you have all the stuff everybody else has.” Sicilee’s smile shrinks contemptuously. “Your cell phone does everything but fly.”
    They aren’t walking any more. They’ve stopped a little way down the drive, where they are squaring off like boxers.
    “Sicilee,” says Maya, “the point isn’t whether or not I and ten billion other people have a cell phone. The point is that besides everything else you aren’t – you know, like human – you are so definitely not the animal-rights type.”
    “And when did I say I was?”