The Supremely Silly Summers of Maggie Rose Porter

Chapter Five: Isabella's Makeover

CHAPTER FIVE: Isabella’s Makeover

One day, I was sitting on Isabella’s bed, watching her get ready for another date with Johnny. It’d been about a week and a half since our first meeting at the clubhouse, and I hadn’t seen Jake for a while, as he had been consumed with baseball, baseball, baseball day in and day out. Personally, my tolerance for the game was very low and surely not growing.

      “What do you do that for?” I questioned as Jessica snapped open a circular plastic case, dusting the pink powder all over her cheeks. It looked like strawberry pink fairy dust, if you ask me.

      “It’s makeup, silly.” Isabella gave me a quick glance to where she was hard to work at applying it in the mirror.

      “Oh.” I pouted. “Why do you wear it?”

      “Because it’s fuuuuuun!” she sang in sing-songy voice, dropping her makeup on the counter, grabbing me by the hands, and spinning me around the room in circles. Like Sheila, Isabella also had one of those high-pitched girlish voices, although it wasn’t as pretty.

      Sometimes before her dates, Isabella could be kind of crazy.

      Finally she let me go, and I went sailing into the cushion fort of pink and purple pillows piled onto her bed. I landed with a satisfying thlunk! I watched the still whirling world of dizzying Technicolors around me slowly come to a stop.

      She continued applying makeup in her vanity mirror as I babbled on about how baseball wasn’t nearly as fun as going on one of Grampa’s old adventures and how losing a tooth wasn’t probably that big a deal after all. Besides, from the looks of Jake’s experiences, it sure seemed to involve its fair share of pain and bloody mouths. The only promising factor of losing a tooth, well, besides obtaining bragging rights, was that rare and bonafide encounter with the mythical Tooth Fairy. Although none of my friends had ever actually witnessed the actual fairy herself, many of them claimed to have a sense of what she looked like.

      “She has dark curly hair, with bright blue eyes, bright like a Robin’s egg,” Lindsay explained to me with fascination one sunny day on the playground swings. “And bright blue wings to match her beautiful eyes.”

      “No, no, no, she’s got it all wrong.” Jessica announced at Kelly’s birthday slumber party two weeks later. “The Tooth Fairy has pink wings tipped with a silvery gold outline. And her hair is also pink, with streaks of blue and yellow and purple and orange.”

      Others, like Jake, didn’t even consider her to be a her at all. “No way, Mags.” Jake shook his head adamantly at me as we walked home one day from a long hot day in the outfield sun. “First of all, the Tooth Fairy is a he. And he wears blue and white striped pajama pants, a gray Red Sox T-shirt, and has the same hair as my dad.”

      Well he or she, I was determined to come face to face with this magical creature someday. And when I finally did, I would clear up all the misunderstandings and set the truth back to order.

      I was explaining all of this to Isabella, although I could tell she wasn’t really listening, as she just kept nodding with an occasional “uh, huh” and “cool” muttered between lip-gloss applications. Then suddenly her face brightened, and her eyes lit up, all big and excited. She turned to me slowly, until she was fully facing me in her pink swivel chair, and then interrupted me halfway through my discussion of banana bread muffins and are they a banana or a bread or a muffin?

      “Margaret, Margaret, Margaret!” she squealed, clasping her hands together with her face all aglow. That was another different thing about Isabella: she was one of the only people who still called me by my whole first name. Practically, everyone called me Maggie or Maggie Rose, with exceptions like Junior and Magster and Wonder Child and Ginger and Cupcake. But no one ever seemed to call my Margaret, other than Mama who would always use my full first-middle-last combo when I was in trouble, which was pretty rare.