Chrissa Stands Strong Read online

  For my daughter, Kate, who continues to inspire and teach me

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Back-to-School Shopping

  Chapter 2: New Beginnings

  Chapter 3: Repairs

  Chapter 4: Tryouts

  Chapter 5: Shifting Breezes

  Chapter 6: Taking Sides

  Chapter 7: Tangles

  Chapter 8: Dark, Dreary, Dismal Day

  Chapter 9: Teamwork

  Chapter 10: Ugly Messages

  Chapter 11: Over the Edge

  Chapter 12: Hospital Worries

  Chapter 13: Brain Scan

  Chapter 14: Techno Trouble

  Chapter 15: Looking Ahead

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Letter from American Girl

  Real Girls, Real Letters

  Discussion Questions

  Preview of Tenney

  Copyright

  Lake Chandler called to me. Though I usually love shopping with Mom for back-to-school clothes, all I wanted to do this Saturday morning was to get back to the lake. Tryouts for the Edgewater Swim Club were on Monday—only two days away—and I wanted to keep practicing my dives from our swim raft.

  As music blared overhead, I pulled on another outfit and then stepped out of the dressing room. In front of a three-panel mirror, I turned this way and that.

  “Hey, I tried on that outfit and it looked awful.”

  The voice sent a twinge from the ends of my hair to the tips of my toes. I didn’t turn around, but I glanced at the reflection behind my own. It was Tara James—the biggest bully in last year’s fourth-grade class.

  “But it looks really great on you!” Tara nodded at my reflection.

  I smoothed the top across my waist. Tara being nice? I doubted it.

  “Honest,” she continued, “it’s cute.”

  I forced myself to turn around. Petite and with flashing eyes, Tara wore her usual nothing-can-stop-me attitude. In a flash, the second half of fourth grade played over in my head. From the moment I’d arrived as a new student in Mr. Beck’s class the day before Valentine’s Day, Tara had been unfriendly. More than unfriendly—she’d been mean. She and two other girls, sometimes called the Queen Bees and sometimes called the Mean Bees, had played tricks on me and on Gwen, another fourth-grader who had plenty of troubles of her own. And then, when one of the Mean Bees—Sonali—finally left their group because she was tired of their mean pranks, Tara had been furious at me and accused me of stealing Sonali. Now the Mean Bees were down from three to two: just Tara and Jadyn.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” Tara asked with a teasing smile.

  In only a few seconds, my stomach had managed to get as tangled as a ball of yarn after my grandmother’s cat has attacked it. But at least Nana’s cat attacks only out of playfulness! It’s different with Tara. I couldn’t be too careful.

  “Hi, Tara,” I finally said. “And, um, thanks, I guess.”

  I turned back to the mirror. “So where’s Jadyn?” I said to her reflection. It somehow felt safer than talking to her face-to-face.

  “She’s meeting me here in a little while.” Tara turned into a different dressing room and returned with a dress. “Hey, you should try this one. It didn’t work on me, but I bet that it’ll look great on you.”

  I hesitated, then accepted the dress. I slipped into my dressing room but in seconds was standing back at the mirror. I was surprised how much I liked it.

  “You have to get it. It’s totally you,” Tara said.

  Just then, Mom walked back into the dressing room corridor. She had a few more outfits draped across her arm. In the reflection, I saw her shoot a questioning glance at Tara. She knew how hurt I’d been and probably wondered why I would come within a mile of Tara if I didn’t have to. Then her gaze shifted to me and my reflection. Her face cleared and she smiled.

  “That’s adorable on you, Chrissa! I would never have guessed. Let’s get that one for sure.”

  “Um, it wasn’t my first choice, but then Tara suggested it. Uh, Mom, you remember Tara?” Mom nodded. “And Tara, this is my mom, Dr. Maxwell.”

  “Well, Tara,” Mom said, studying my reflection again. “It’s clear you have an eye for fashion.”

  “I know.” Tara looked pleased. “That’s what everybody tells me.”

  Mom’s right eyebrow flicked ever-so-slightly upward at Tara’s outright boastfulness. It made me think of one of Nana’s rules: Don’t boast. Clearly, no one had drilled Tara on that one.

  I took one last glance at the dress, which I loved, and headed to my dressing room. “Mom, I think I have enough now. We can go.”

  “Enough?” Tara mimicked. Then she said in a silly queenly voice, “But a girl can never have enough clothes!”

  Mom laughed, and I giggled, too.

  After checking out, I followed Mom past racks of shirts and skirts, pants and dresses. Just as we were leaving the store, someone touched my elbow. “Before you leave,” Tara said.

  I stopped and pivoted.

  “We’re going to be competing for spots on the swim team,” she began.

  I braced myself. If I knew Tara, she was probably going to tell me that I didn’t have a chance or that I shouldn’t even try out, just to give herself an advantage. She had been the best fourth-grade girl swimmer and diver until last year, when I arrived at Edgewater Elementary. It turned out that we were pretty well matched.

  “I know things didn’t go well last year,” she said. “But this year, things could be different…Maybe we could be friends this year.”

  There was something soft in her eyes and the way she angled her head. She seemed, well…sincere.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, cautiously. “That would be good.”

  As I pushed through the mall doors into the steamy outside air, I passed Jadyn—the other Mean Bee—with her mother a few steps behind her. “Meet you at the Food Court in five,” she said into her pink cell phone, then clicked it shut with a snap. I was apparently invisible to her, which was fine with me. A conversation with one Bee was enough for the day.

  I still couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. I glanced at my shopping bag. In it were not just one—but two—outfits that had come with Tara’s compliments. I never would have guessed.

  Gwen and Sonali were not going to believe this!

  “Hey, Tyler, watch this!”

  Perched on the edge of the swim raft, I prepared for another back dive. With my weight on the balls of my feet, I brought my arms down, bent my knees, and pushed off. Clasping my hands in a V over my head, I sliced through the warm air and then disappeared into Lake Chandler.

  Yes! The dive felt perfect! I surfaced, wiped water from my eyes, and beamed at my brother. “So, how was that?”

  Tyler sat cross-legged on the raft, his eyes hidden beneath his hair, almost like our mini llamas, Cosmos and Checkers, before shearing. “Not bad, Chrissa,” he said, “but your feet were three zillion miles apart!”

  His words stung. Over the summer, I’d worked on back dives. At first I only back-flopped, but I’d made progress. I swam to the raft’s ladder and climbed up. “How can you say that? Maybe you need a haircut so you can see better.”

  “I can see fine,” he said. “And so will the coach. On a scale of ten, you’d be lucky to get a two.”

  “A two?” I slumped down beside him. “C’mon!”

  A light breeze rippled the bay’s surface and nudged a half-dozen sailboats in the distance.

  Tyler stood. “Remember how you used to pretend you were a mermaid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Next time,” he said, “think of your feet as a mermaid’s tail. Keep them
glued together like this.” He strode to the edge and somersaulted into a forward one-and-a-half.

  As he surfaced, he dared me to score him. “That was a ten, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe a one,” I said, lying. Mom was right. My being eleven months younger than Tyler made us too close in age. I hated to always be outdone by my brother.

  “It was good and you know it, Chrissa! You’re just jealous!”

  “And you’re boasting,” I said.

  As I stood up and prepared to do another dive, he glanced toward shore. “Here comes trouble.”

  I turned. “Oh, good!” Gwen and Sonali were walking down the dock that jutted out from Nana’s big lawn. When we’d moved here in February to live with Nana, I’d had a tough time starting at a new school in the middle of the year, but now that I’d made new friends, I rarely missed my old school anymore.

  Sonali walked to the end, pulled her silky hair back into a ponytail, dived, and swam for the raft. Gwen, however, sat and dangled her feet in the water. Her long blonde hair and bangs were pulled back. Despite Tara’s friendliness earlier today in the dressing room, I couldn’t forget that one of her meanest tricks was when she’d cut off Gwen’s bangs in the girls’ restroom last March.

  “C’mon, Gwen!” I called. “Come join us!”

  When Gwen finally jumped in, she did the breaststroke toward us. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she’d improved a lot over the summer.

  Once we were all sitting on the raft, Tyler showed off with another forward one-and-a-half, this time adding a few inches of air to his rotation.

  “Wow!” Gwen exclaimed.

  “That was awesome!” Sonali added as he surfaced.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Cannonball!” I yelled. Sonali, Gwen, and I jumped off the raft at the same time, arms tucked around our legs, and bombarded Tyler.

  When the water calmed down again, he hand-slapped the water and sent droplets flying into my face. “Like I said, you’re just jealous!” yelled Tyler.

  When it turned into a splashing war of three against one, Tyler headed for shore and called back, “Mission Outta-Here!”

  I was ready for some girl time. Besides, I was bursting to tell Sonali and Gwen my news. As we stretched in the sun, I began, “You won’t believe what happened this morning!”

  “What?” Gwen asked, turning to her stomach and rising on her elbows.

  “This morning when I was shopping with my mom,” I began, “I stepped out of the changing room and you won’t believe who was there.”

  “Who?” Sonali asked.

  “Tara,” I said, and added “and she was actually nice to me—and funny, too.”

  Sonali said, “Yeah, that’s Tara. She can be funny—and even nice, too—when she wants something.” Her eyebrows scrunched together as if she was doing serious detective thinking. “So, I wonder…what does she want?”

  “She said she wants to be friends.”

  “Whoa,” Gwen said, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. “You didn’t fall for that, did you?”

  “Well, I—um—I think she might have meant it.”

  My friends looked at me as if I’d lost all my brain cells. I tried to explain exactly what had happened. Then I added, “And she nearly knocked me over when she admitted things didn’t go so well last year.”

  “Huh,” Gwen said, crossing her arms across her swim top. “Now that almost makes me laugh.”

  I pressed on. “She sounded really sincere when she said she’d like to be friends.”

  Sonali piped up. “I know her. She’s still mad that I’m friends with you two and not her anymore. Don’t trust her.”

  I was smart enough to be wary about Tara, but I remembered another of my grandmother’s sayings and repeated it to my friends. “Hey, everyone deserves a second chance.”

  Sonali and Gwen just shook their heads. “Everyone except Tara,” Sonali said.

  I looked away toward shore. A female mallard and her brood of nine growing ducklings bobbed in and out around the dock. As they dipped their bills underwater, their white rump feathers and webbed feet pointed skyward. Maybe my friends were right. Tara being nice was like turning everything upside down. I probably shouldn’t give her a second thought, let alone a second chance. I shouldn’t trust her, I decided.

  I rose, stepped to the edge of the dock, and dove. But I forgot to keep my feet together, and they hit the water with a stinging slap.

  Later, Nana called, “Girls! Cookies and lemonade!”

  We wasted no time getting out of the water. Wrapped in beach towels and comparing our wrinkled fingertips, we crossed under the willow tree to the screened gazebo, where a plate of Nana’s homemade sugar cookies and a pitcher of lemonade waited atop a floral tablecloth.

  “Teatime,” Nana said. “Thought you girls might be ready for something to eat by now.”

  “Thank you, Nana,” I said. Sonali and Gwen chimed in their thanks, too.

  As we wolfed down cookies, Nana headed out the screen door of the gazebo. “I’m going to leave you young ladies to yourselves. I need to get back to my spinning. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as turning a mound of raw fleece into yarn.” Then she headed back toward the house, where Mom was working in one of the flower beds and tossing weeds into a mound on the lawn.

  While we sat there, Dad and Tyler drove up in the pickup and parked near Dad’s pottery studio. Gwen and Sonali looked questioningly at the truck, its box filled with lumber.

  “Oh, more stuff for the llama barn,” I said. “We’re still replacing rotten boards and rebuilding the stalls.”

  “How long until Cosmos has her baby?” asked Sonali.

  “About two weeks,” I said. “About the time school starts, so we’re trying to finish up fast.”

  Bling! Bling! Sonali’s cell phone sang from her backpack. She rummaged around, found her phone, and flipped it open.

  “Text message,” she said.

  “Who from?” I asked.

  She showed us and it read, “Private Number.”

  Then her eyebrows scrunched up as she scrolled. “Weird,” she said and read the message aloud. “It says, ‘Watch out for Chrissa, the Llama-Faced Girl!’”

  “Oh, it does not,” I said with a laugh.

  Then, to prove it, she showed us the text.

  If the message hadn’t been about me, I might have thought it was funny. “Huh. I’ll bet it’s from Tyler. He’s trying to get back at me.”

  “For what?” Gwen asked. “For cannonballs?”

  I told them about our rivalry and my teasing. ”It isn’t nice, but he’s been bugging me. I mean, he’s getting better and better at diving—and he knows it.”

  “But,” Sonali said, studying her cell phone, “if Tyler did this, wouldn’t it show your family’s name and number? I’d bet this is from Tara.”

  Gwen fingered her hair. “Sounds like something she might do,” she said, reaching for another cookie.

  I replayed this morning and how Tara had said she’d like to be friends. My insides twisted around like a giant pretzel. What if this was from Tara and it had all been a show? Was it another mean game of hers? When school started, would she mock the clothes that she’d encouraged me to buy? I chewed on my lower lip. “But she seemed so sincere.”

  “Tara can act nice when she wants to.” Sonali wound strands of her long hair around her finger. “You don’t know her like I do, Chrissa. I’m not falling for her games, and you shouldn’t either. She just doesn’t want me to be friends with you.”

  Mom hammered the last board in place, stepped back, and examined the new stall. “With Cosmos so close to her due date, it feels good to get the barn finished and ready for our little newcomer.”

  It was Sunday afternoon, and the llama barn was nearly done. With a new roof and inside walls, it was basically brand-new. Tyler and I had done a little bit of everything: We had used levels to make sure things were straight. We had handed up electric drills, hammers, measuring tapes, and sh
ingles. We had even painted the exterior siding with red stain until our arms ached. Now the barn was ready with four clean and sturdy stalls—one for tack and hay, one for Checkers, one for Cosmos, and one for Cosmos’ baby-to-be, after it was weaned.

  “I can’t wait! And even Gwen and Sonali are excited,” I said, leaning on a stall’s half door. “Our very own cria!” I liked the word for a baby llama. And no matter what color it would turn out to be, it would be adorable because mini llamas are beyond cute.

  Then I remembered the mean text message that had been sent to Sonali’s cell phone:

  Watch out for Chrissa, the Llama-Faced Girl! I bit down on my lip. As much as I wanted to forget the message, it kept popping into my mind. Who’d sent it? And what had I done to deserve it? I tried for the umpteenth time to push it out of my head.

  “Okay, gang,” Dad said. “Next we need to replace old posts and fence boards.”

  “Now?” Tyler groaned. “Can’t we take a break first? Tryouts are tomorrow and I need to practice.” I nodded in agreement.

  Mom gave Dad a look that meant that she sided with us.

  Dad laughed. “Okay, Tyler. You and Chrissa have been great. You are officially awarded the rest of the day off. We’ll take it from here.”

  “Woo-hoo!” Tyler exclaimed. “I’m calling Joel!” During our first week at our new school, he and Joel had started arguing at recess about what would happen to a spaceship if it got too close to a black hole. When Joel brought in computer searches and various science articles to prove his theory, their friendship was sealed. Since then, Tyler and Joel had been inseparable.

  “Well, I’m calling Gwen and Sonali! If we get to the raft first, it’s ours.”

  “Yeah, right,” Tyler replied, racing off to the house. “We’ll see about that!”

  When the boys claimed the raft first, Sonali, Gwen, and I set off on the paddleboat. The sun sizzled on my shoulders, but they were well-coated with sunscreen under my life vest. Exploring the shoreline, we meandered past our neighbors’ docks and under the bridge that separated our bay from a riverbed. Then we turned and pedaled back.