My Tiki Girl Read Online Free

nothing about how we got our ears pierced together at this very mall, drooled over magazines full of boy band pictures, and made friendship bracelets out of braided embroidery floss.
    I’m afraid that if I told Dahlia all of this, she wouldn’t get it. She’d think less of me and say there was no way a girl like that could ever be LaSamba. She hates the popular girls so much, and to know that I was one of them, even back then, might tarnish me in this totally unfixable way.
    Sukie was in The Wizard of Oz , too. She was Glinda, Good Witch of the North. She wore this beautiful silver gown and carried a wand my mother had made with a huge star on the end covered in silver glitter. She spent downtime during rehearsals waving it over me, saying, Poof! You’re in Oz. Poof! You’re going to get an A on your history test. Poof! We’re going to the movies Friday night.
    My mother did the sets for the play. She was an artist. She made her living designing greeting cards: Happy Birthday, Thinking of You, Get Well Soon. I have a stack of them in a cardboard box under my bed. She made sympathy cards, too. After she died, we got a card from my dad’s second cousin saying how sorry he was, we were in his thoughts and prayers and all that. He wrote it all down in a card my mom had designed, covered in watercolor lilies. He’d picked it out in the drugstore and had no idea. Life is full of these strange little coincidences. The thing is, some of them come at you like the right hook of a boxer, knocking you down for the count.
    Sometimes, when something exceptional happens, I pull out that box of cards and pick one that suits the occasion. I imagine my mom has sent it to me from all the way up in heaven. It’s dumb, I know. When school started, I got a Good Luck card. The day I met Dahlia and she asked me to be in her band, I got a card with a picture of a shooting star that said, An unmade wish will never come true.
    But just what was I wishing for?
    Did my mother up in heaven know something I didn’t?

    Jonah is the first one back to the ice rink and I find him there, waiting alone in his robe, watching the skaters. It’s a small ice rink in the middle of the mall. Families come to rent skates and soar around in circles, always going the same way, never changing direction, poor dumb birds. I used to skate here with Sukie. One time in eighth grade, just before the accident, we went on this double date—her and Troy and me and Albert. We held hands while we skated like couples do in movies. Sukie and I had matching purple laces on our white figure skates. The world was ours then and we didn’t even know it; we didn’t know how easy we had it down there on the stupid skating rink as we moved beside the boys with their sweaty hands and rough wool sweaters, the purple laces on our skates proudly proclaiming that we were best friends forever. What a crock.

    Jonah’s favorite part of watching the skaters is the machine that cleans the ice: the Zamboni, which is where he got his wizard name. He thinks it’s magic the way it makes the cut-up, scarred ice smooth as glass again, always has.
    I want to ask Jonah what he’s chosen to be his one thing, but we’ll have to wait for Leah and Dahlia. The mall smells like popcorn and plastic, leather and perfume. The noise around us is a steady hum of elevator music, shoppers’ chatter, skaters’ laughter.
    “If it was really the end of the world, I would have my wand,” says Jonah, never taking his eyes off the skaters. He’s left his wand in the car, so he can’t turn any of them to mice or toads. He can’t say a spell to make them fall or to turn the ice to quicksand. Jonah believes he has some powers without the wand, but he needs it to pull off the really big stuff. Sometimes I want to say to him, “You know you can’t really do that, right? You know it’s just a game?” But that’s clearly against the rules, and Dahlia, who loves her little brother more than anything, would