The Retake Read online

  ALSO BY JEN CALONITA

  Mirror, Mirror: A Twisted Tale

  Conceal, Don’t Feel: A Twisted Tale

  Misfits

  Outlaws

  Flunked

  Charmed

  Tricked

  Switched

  Wished

  Cursed

  Turn It Up!

  VIP: I’m with the Band

  VIP: Battle of the Bands

  Summer State of Mind

  Belles

  Winter White

  The Grass Is Always Greener

  Reality Check

  Sleepaway Girls

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life: On Location

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life: Family Affairs

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life: Paparazzi Princess

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life: Broadway Lights

  Secrets of My Hollywood Life: There’s No Place Like Home

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Jen Calonita

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Liz Dresner

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780593174142 (hc) — ebook ISBN 9780593174159

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jen Calonita

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR MY DAD, NICK CALONITA, FOR AGREEING TO BUY ME MY FAVORITE MOVIE (BACK TO THE FUTURE) ON VHS TAPE EVEN THOUGH IT COST $75 AT THE TIME. THANKS FOR THE ENDLESS INSPIRATION.

  Me: C U @ 5!!!!

  Laura: K

  I held my cell phone high in the air to get the optimal angle and snapped a photo of me sticking my tongue out. Then I sent it to my best friend, Laura, pleased that the picture was cropped so tight I wouldn’t give away my surprise.

  Goofy selfies were kind of our thing.

  So were creating weird popcorn flavors (jalapeño was a current favorite), putting glitter on everything we owned (including sneaker soles), competing on game nights (I dare anyone to stack a Jenga tower higher than me!), sleeping in my tree house (which we also glittered, but I’m hoping my dad doesn’t find out about that renovation), and creating one-of-a-kind birthday surprises for each other (which I was doing right now!). The point is, when you’re best friends with someone for six years, you have lots of things.

  I waited for Laura to send me a selfie back like she always did. Text bubbles appeared in our text message chain, then disappeared. Hmm….Maybe she was busy. I certainly was. Planning the best surprise party ever was hard.

  “Okay, I’ve got the sign up.” My older sister, Taryn, was balanced atop a chair barefoot, trying to hang a paper birthday banner for me, but something about it was off.

  “You hung it crooked,” I pointed out. “The left side is lower than the right.”

  “No, it’s not.” Taryn leaned back to admire her handiwork.

  “It is!” I took a step back to be sure. The left side was definitely too low. “We need to fix it or the sign will look crooked in all our pictures.”

  “Zooooeee.” Taryn deep-sighed.

  Whenever my sister exaggerated my name, I knew she’d had enough of me.

  Right then, she’d had enough of me.

  “Take your pictures on an angle, then.” Taryn jumped down from the chair and shot me a withering look as she adjusted the waistband on her favorite jeans. It was the pair that had just the right number of rips in the legs and that she’d never let me borrow. “I’m not rehanging it. It looks fine.”

  Fine?

  Tonight couldn’t be fine. Tonight needed to be epic. Unforgettable. The best celebration in history. You only turned twelve once, and I was determined to make sure Laura never forgot her birthday. Her party banner couldn’t be crooked.

  But I couldn’t tell Taryn that. She rarely hung out with me anymore, and the two of us never talked. She was always out with her friends or on her phone and couldn’t be interrupted. The only time I heard from her was when she butted in with a sarcastic comment from two rooms away on whatever conversation I was having. (Only you would think that, Zoe.)

  I kicked off my flip-flops and climbed onto a bench. “I’ll do it myself.”

  Taryn grabbed her phone off the table. “Knock yourself out, shorty.”

  I climbed up and stood on my tippy-toes, praying I wouldn’t fall. The bench was slightly slippery from the bleach scrubdown we’d given it earlier. I always associated the smell of bleach with the cabanas at Nickerson Beach. My family had shared a bungalow with Laura’s family for the past five summers. It wasn’t as fancy as it sounded. It was about as big as a shed, the showers were cold, and the one electrical outlet was used to power the minifridge and the toaster, leaving nowhere to charge your cell phone. But I still loved the place. Growing up fifteen minutes from the ocean was one of the perks of living on Long Island. In the summer months Laura and I spent every waking moment at the bungalow together.

  But that summer my parents decided we needed some “quality family time.” For three weeks they took Taryn and me to every Civil War–battle spot in the South while we lived off the fast-food chains along I-95. Meanwhile, Laura had been here, without me.

  Sure, we were still renting the bungalow with Laura’s family, but keeping best friends apart for three weeks was just wrong. Once we left, I kept up the texts and calls, but Laura was too busy most days to FaceTime or text me back. And I knew she was legitimately busy. She’d tried out for the
community production of Annie and scored the part of Molly. Every day while my family and I were on the road, I watched her Snapchats and Insta stories, and it looked like she’d had fun going to pool parties and sleepovers. Sometimes her life looked so amazing, I had to wonder if she was putting on a show for her followers (she had triple the amount I did), but I never brought it up.

  Now that I was back, I was determined for us to have real fun, even if it was the first week of August and it felt like summer was basically over. The pool had a weird film on top of it, people started wearing sweatshirts at the beach, and by eight p.m. it was already dark. It was depressing, but I promised to give August a shot. Laura and I still had four weeks, three days, seven hours, and forty-two minutes to make magic happen before seventh grade started. I had so much on my mind and so many questions I’d been storing up to ask her.

  Maybe Laura would know what kind of haircut looked good on someone with a round face. I once tried shaggy bangs, like Taylor Swift had at one time, but I didn’t wind up looking anything like Taylor. (Maybe part of the problem is that I have thick dark brown hair, not blond.) So I wasn’t doing that again.

  I also wasn’t going to attempt to pick out a first-day-of-school outfit on my own. What did you wear for the first day of seventh grade that looked good, but not like you were trying too hard? True, it was technically the second year of middle school, but sixth grade felt like a dress rehearsal because we only switched classes twice a day. Seventh grade was going to be the real deal, and I was panicked about everything! Like gym. Did people change for gym? Where did you change for gym? Did you have to change for gym? Last year we didn’t have to. We weren’t even allowed to try out for middle school sports. In seventh grade we could try out for any team we wanted and had gym three times a week, which made me wonder if we got lockers to keep deodorant in. I didn’t want to smell if I had gym first period.

  Speaking of lockers, did people decorate them? In sixth grade everyone decorated their lockers, but I wasn’t sure if that was the same for seventh grade. Mom showed me a Pinterest board about lockers, with pictures of ones with wallpaper, mirrors, frames, and even a chandelier! It looked cool, but I couldn’t decide if this was a mom-cool thing or a seventh-grade-cool thing. Plus, if my locker had all this extra stuff inside, where did I put my books and coat?

  And finally, now that we were switching classes every period, and leaving the sixth-grade wing, I felt like I needed a map of Fairview Middle School to navigate the place. Were there any shortcuts around school? What happened if I had first period on the first floor near the gym but second period on the opposite side of school on the second floor? Would I make it there in three minutes without having to barrel people down to get through the crowded halls?

  These were some of the fears I hoped Laura and I could figure out together.

  But first, we’d have birthday cake.

  I tightened the string holding up the left side of the banner, then leaned back to check if it was straight. “Now it’s perfect.” I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of it. I’d post it after the surprise, along with all the other sure-to-be awesome photos we would take. I just needed to come up with the right hashtag.

  Taryn shook her head. “You’re so ridiculous. Mom? I’m meeting Avery at the snack shack. Can I have five dollars for pizza?”

  “Pizza? We’re ordering pizza!” Mom yelled from somewhere inside the cabana. “Your dad is picking up pies on his way down at around six. Can’t you wait to eat?”

  Taryn deep-sighed again. “Mooooom, come on.”

  The two of them were off doing their perfected routine of Mom complaining that Taryn never helped out unless she wanted money, and Taryn whining about how Mom and Dad treated her like a baby when she was almost a sophomore. If this was what was going to happen to Mom and me, I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  I tuned them out and stared at my (now) perfectly straight banner. happy 12th birthday, oscar winner laura lancaster! said the red-and-black sign with little gold Oscar statues decorating the border. Even with a 40-percent-off coupon, the banner cost me an entire night’s babysitting haul. It was worth it. Laura would flip for the whole Academy Awards vibe I had going on. Red balloons hung from the awning; plastic Oscar statues held down the red tablecloth on the picnic table; and I’d bought Best Actress plates, napkins, and cups for the food and cake, which was also shaped like an Oscar dude. For the final touch, I tacked a Pin-the-Envelope-to-the-Oscar-Winner game on the wall. It was exactly the kind of stupid game Laura and I loved to play. I hoped the party would be a hit.

  It had to be, because lately something between Laura and me had felt off.

  If I was being completely honest with myself, we’d been off for a while now. I noticed it the last few months of sixth grade, after she joined the sixth-grade play, but it had gotten worse when summer started. We hadn’t been texting twenty-four seven like we always did when we were on vacation, and Laura’s Instagram was suddenly filled with pictures of girls I knew only by name. Meanwhile, my feed was all pictures of palm trees and Civil War memorabilia.

  When I thought about the way things were with Laura, my stomach felt like it did when my alarm clock didn’t go off and I overslept. I was determined to fix things at the party and get Laura and me back to our old selves again.

  “Mom, have you heard from Dianne?” I asked.

  Dianne is Laura’s mom. Some people might think it’s weird that I call her by her first name, but I’ve always called her that. Our moms met when Laura and I were seated at the same table in Ms. LaPolla’s first-grade class. Laura sat next to Evan Acker, who picked his nose, and I sat next to Jaden Hempler, who ate glue. Thankfully, Laura and I were across from each other. One day Laura’s purple marker ran out in the middle of her drawing a massive rainbow, and I gave her my grape-scented one. The rest is history. We became best friends, and our moms grew close too. They’d only gotten tighter since Laura’s parents divorced last winter.

  “Zoe, for the tenth time, she’s coming after work,” Mom said. “And Dianne said Laura is getting a ride down around the same time from some friend from theater camp.”

  Laura hadn’t mentioned who she was getting a ride from, but I guessed that girl would be coming to the party too. At least we had enough food.

  Mom dumped a bag of chips into a plastic bowl and placed it on the picnic table next to the other snacks. “Laura thinks you’re busy getting your braces on today, remember?”

  Yes, and that was a total lie! Dr. Shull, my orthodontist, was putting my braces on the last week of August. Meanwhile, Laura was getting hers off any day now. She’d start seventh grade with straight teeth, and I’d have a mouth full of metal, since my parents wouldn’t let me get Invisalign. (Just because Taryn had lost three sets of expensive trays didn’t mean I would.)

  “Okay. I’m just triple-checking you didn’t slip,” I stressed. “Because you and Dianne tell each other everything.”

  “Like you and Laura?” Mom gave me the same look Taryn had. Now I knew where Taryn got it from. “Your secret is safe—if you catch the other party guests at the gate before Laura arrives and sees them.”

  She had a point. “I’m off!” I zipped up my Montauk sweatshirt (Laura and I had bought matching ones when our families vacationed there last summer), slipped on my floral flip-flops, and headed for the west gate. I was halfway down the row of cabanas when I heard someone shouting.

  “Duck!”

  I did as I was told, just in time to see a fluorescent yellow lacrosse ball fly over my head and bounce off a seas the day sign on the cabana next to me.

  A boy scooped the ball up in his lacrosse stick. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  It was Jake Graser. The Jake Graser. The one Laura had been obsessed with ever since he stood up and read some heartfelt poem about sea air in sixth-grade English.

  “Didn’t mean to get your he
art pumping, even if a little adrenaline rush is good for the soul.” Jake grinned, showing off braces with blue and orange bands, which were not the kind of colors I’d want in my mouth. Laura thought it was a cute choice since those were his lacrosse team colors.

  “I prefer to get my adrenaline rushes from roller coasters,” I said. It was one thing Laura and I did not have in common. She hated most amusement park rides, while I lived for them.

  “Same.” Jake planted his stick in the sand, ball still in the pocket. “You ever been on Skyrush at Hersheypark? The first drop is killer.”

  “I know, right? I waited for a front car and—” I stopped midsentence. Shouldn’t I somehow have been turning this into a conversation about Laura? What better birthday gift could I give her than Jake Graser coming by the cabana for her party? But was it weird to invite a boy to a birthday party for a girl he didn’t really know? “Listen. It’s Laura Lancaster’s—”

  “Jake! Manhunt starting now!” someone shouted.

  “Coming!” he yelled, and picked up his stick. “I have to go. Bye, Zoe!”

  He knew my name? That meant he probably knew Laura’s, too. “Bye!” I yelled. “Hey! If you’re still here later, come by my cabana!” I wasn’t sure he heard me, though. He’d already rounded the corner. My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my pocket.

  Reagan: Drawbridge is up! Jada and I will be late. Sry!

  Unknown Number: Hey. It’s Clare. Drawbridge up. Will be late!

  For years Laura and I only hung out with each other. But a party with just two people is lame, which is why I invited Reagan Donahue, Jada Reddy, and Clare Stelton. We met Reagan and Jada in Future City, a STEM club we got involved with in sixth grade when our moms insisted we join something. We whined about it at first, but the truth was, I actually really liked it. Not only did you get to imagine, research, and design new cities, you got to come up with ways to solve real problems, like finding places for urban agriculture. Everyone had different ideas. Reagan, who spent all her time playing volleyball and lacrosse and running track, wanted to make sure there were a lot of green spaces for kids to get outside and move. And Jada, who was on a competition dance team, loved creating areas where people could congregate and come together for concerts. Even though Reagan and Jada seemed like opposites, they were actually best friends who did everything together, kind of like Laura and me.