real life? I had no idea how to do that. I wondered if being “comfortable in my skin” was just another area in which I was doomed to fall short of my sisters.
The moment we showed up at the dock that night, just after sunset, we knew we’d wasted all that time primping.
Not that we didn’t look kind of fabulous, with our fresh, color-correct mani-pedis, our summery makeup, and our bare shoulders dusted with shimmery powder. (Hannah had read about that in a magazine that was not, for the record, National Geographic.)
As Abbie had directed, I’d chosen a white sundress with skinny straps. It also had a tight bodice and a flared, knee-length skirt. The salesgirl at the vintage store where I’d bought it had told me it was made in the early 1960s.
To match my headband I’d borrowed Hannah’s flat, royal blue sandals. Between those and my turquoise toes, my feet had never been so colorful. I hoped they would draw attention away from my voluminous hair.
But as it turned out, looking good at a lantern party didn’t seem to be the point. At all. Most of the kids milling around the dock—which was a big square wood plank platform surrounded by anchored speedboats—looked happily disheveled in shorts and T-shirts. They had paint smears on their arms and arts-and-crafts glitter in their hair. And every one of them held an elaborate homemade lantern. Even though they weren’t lit yet, presumably because there was still a bit of dusky light left, the lanterns were dazzlingly creative. There was a lantern that looked like a Japanese temple and one that looked like a fairy-tale mushroom, the kind with the white-dotted red cap. One lantern was an elaborate geometric shape that even Hannah might not have been able to identify. And there were side-by-side lanterns that looked like Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Hannah walked over to a nearby girl who was bobbing her head to the music. Her lantern dangled from the end of a long stick. It was a cylinder made of flowery paper. Cut into the lantern was a window of waxed paper, which contained a funny silhouette of a dog.
“Love your lantern!” Hannah said as Abbie and I stood behind her. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Thanks!” the girl said, crinkling her nose happily at her lantern. “It was a hard one. It took me the whole pre-party. I guess you guys weren’t there?”
“Pre-party?” Abbie said, closing in on the girl. “When was that?”
“Oh, it started around noon,” the girl said. “We do it every year—get together and make our lanterns. We order in fried chicken and get all gluey. It’s pretty goofy, but we’ve all been doing it since, like, middle school, so you know—it’s a tradition now. At the end of the night there’s a lantern contest.”
“Wow, that sounds awesome,” Abbie said flatly. If there was anything she hated more than being left out of the loop, it was losing a contest. “Where was this pre-party?”
“It was at Jason’s house,” the girl said, cheerfully pointing to a far corner of the dock. There stood Abbie’s J-boy, flanked by two laughing girls. He was holding up his lantern like it was a trophy. It was a very lumpy papier-mâché sculpture of Darth Vader’s head. Presumably, once it was lit up, the eyes would glow.
Abbie’s face darkened, but she kept her voice light as she answered, “Oh, it was at Jason’s house. That’s cool. Well, good luck in the contest.”
“Thanks!” the girl chirped as Abbie drifted away.
Hannah and I gave each other a look.
“Let’s see if there are any potato chips on the refreshment table,” I whispered.
“She’s already on her way,” she said, pointing at Abbie as she made a beeline for the junk-food-laden table. Luckily, it was on the opposite side of the dock from Jason.
I arrived at Abbie’s side just as she scooped a handful of chips out of a big bowl and stuffed at least four of them into her mouth.
“Well,” I said brightly. I sounded just like our mom, who always got annoyingly chipper when the going got rough. “The good news is, now we know your guy’s name! J-boy is Jason.”
“The bad news,” Abbie said grimly, “is he blew me off for someone else—two someone elses—before I even got here.”
“Wait a minute,” Hannah said as she poured soda into plastic cups for us. “You don’t know that. You heard what that girl said. These people have all known each other forever. Those girls are probably just