"I have a lots of Barbies," the girl offered, "and we can play dress up."

"Okay," I agreed — but not because of what she said! I was going to go along with her anyway.

---

 
The Top Of The Tree
 

"Eddie, I need your help with something," Hayley muttered in an undertone. "Come with me." And with that, she darted up the stairs, two at a time, shouting a hello to my parents as she ran. I quickly followed her.

Hayley was was wearing what I wished *I* was wearing: shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers — simple, easy clothes. She looked as much a boy as me. Although at the moment, I was wearing something a bit more complicated: nice "slacks" (as my mother called them), a blue polo shirt, and a pair of uncomfortable dress shoes that I had to be careful not to scuff.

I followed her into her room, where she gestured to three sundresses laid out across her bed.

"This is it," she told me. "My mother and I had a huge fight, and as punishment, I can't go to dinner or the fireworks if I don't wear a dress."

"Huh," I said. "I've never seen you wear a dress."

"Yeah," she agreed. "I never wear one except in cases of force majeure."

I didn't know what force majeure meant, but I got the idea: she had to be compelled to wear a dress. A couple of times when Hayley and I were small, her mother and mine thought they could physically force her into a dress, but the two of them were no match for a struggling, desperate girl who wanted "pants or nothing."

Recalling that, and knowing my cousin, I looked from her to the clothes on the bed, but there was no way I could guess what she wanted. There were two things I was sure about: *she* didn't want to wear a dress, and *I* would never wear one. So why was I here?

"Look," she said, waving at the clothes as if they were so much trash. "These are the three choices my mother laid out. I want you to pick the one I have to wear."

I frowned. "What? Why? What does this have to do with me?"

She huffed in exasperation. "Because I'm not going to say that I picked a dress, or that I chose a dress. It's bad enough I have to wear one; I'm NOT going to go downstairs and hear my mother say, Oh, is that what you decided to wear, honey? So, YOU pick it. Then it will be obvious that I had no choice."

"Okay," I said. "But what if I pick wrong? What if I pick one that you don't like?"

"I don't like any of them," Hayley retorted. "So I don't care which one you pick. They're all ugly and stupid and wrong."

"Okay," I said, and examined the choices.

The first was mostly white, with lime-green paisley tear-drops on it. It was definitely the prettiest, but also (no doubt) the hardest to keep clean. Hayley was a super-active tomboy, and I knew she'd have that dress as black as an old shoe-rag in no time. So the white one was out.

The second was also mostly white with little blue diamonds that resembled tiny woodblock prints. Around the hem were dark red woodblocked flowers. All of that was fine, but it was ruined by its two big, fat shoulder straps. It looked like something a six-year-old would wear, and it would look asinine on Hayley. So that eliminated number two.

The third one was actually pretty nice. It was dark: it had three shades of purple arranged in horizontal stripes. The material was cotton, and the skirt flared just enough to give it some interesting waves.

And since this dress was a sundress, it left the shoulders bare, but it had two spaghetti straps that tied above each shoulder.

Hayley grunted at my selection. I took it simply as an acknowledgment that the choice had been made; she had zero interest in making any sort of fashion statement.

"Okay," she said, and began pushing me out of her room. "Give me a minute to throw this stupid thing on, and then we can go outside and do something."

"No, wait!" I said. "My mother won't let me go out in these clothes. We're all going out to dinner tonight, so she says I have to keep them nice."

Without missing a beat, Hayley said, "That's alright. Just tell them I have something you can wear."
 

---

 

"Just as long as it isn't a dress," my father laughed.

"I don't want you running around in girls clothes," my mother added, a concerned look on her face.

"Don't worry," Aunt Daphne told them, and she reddened a bit as she spoke. "To tell the truth, almost all the clothes Hayley owns are boys clothes. She insists on shopping in the boys department."

I went back upstairs and found Hayley in the purple sundress. Instinctively, I wanted to tell her that she looked nice, although it wasn't true. She looked like a boy in a dress. In any case, she wouldn't have wanted to hear me say it, even if it were so.

"You can wear those," she told me, gesturing to the shorts and t-shirt that she'd just taken off. They were lying on the floor, still warm. It actually disgusted me a little to put on clothes she'd just been wearing, but I did want to get out of the house, so I carefully laid my dressier things on her bed, put on her clothes and then...

"Hey," I called to her through the door. "Do you have some sneakers I can wear?" When she came back in, I realized to my surprise that she was still wearing the battered running shoes she'd had on earlier. With a odd expression on her face, she pulled a shoe box from the back of her closet and told me, "Sorry, but this is all I can give you."

I took a surprised breath when she pulled off the lid. "Pink sneakers!" I exclaimed.

"Yep," she replied.

"Girls shoes," I said. She shrugged.

"No way," I said.

"Then wear your own shoes," she said. "This is all I've got."
 

---

 

We made it out of the house without the adults seeing us. Aunt Daphne wanted to "see how lovely Hayley looked" and my mother wanted to make sure I wasn't wearing my nice clothes, so the two of us burst out the kitchen door and tore across the backyard into the trees before our mothers could have that satisfaction.

Once we were out of sight we stopped to laugh and catch our breath. I loved being with Hayley when she was this way: I mean when she wasn't giving me a hard time. Usually she's a terrible tease and sometimes she's aggressive and mean. You have to understand: I'm not saying that she doesn't like me. Last summer, when we were on vacation, a bully was picking on me, every day. He'd push me around, call me names, and take my stuff. He was so much bigger and stronger than me that all I could do was take it and wait for him to stop. One day Hayley was with me, and she was acting like a jerk. Then the bully came up. He knocked my hat off and gave me a shove. Hayley shouted "Hey!" and told him to leave me alone. He laughed at her and started calling her names. She walked right up and smacked him in the face. Then she hit him again and gave him a black eye. He was so astonished and hurt that he sat on the ground and cried like a baby. She told him, "Don't ever touch my cousin again or I'll REALLY give you something to cry about! Do you understand?" Afterward, we were alone, I thanked her, but she slapped me on the back of the head and called me an idiot. She said, "You should have stuck up for yourself!" I guess she figures it's okay for *her* to pick on me, but nobody else can.

In other words, she has a weird way of expressing her affection.

That's why times like these, when she includes me in her conspiracies, are so welcome.

We tramped through the woods, twigs snapping underfoot, and I asked where we were going.

"To Charlene's house," she replied. "She's got this perfect tree in her backyard, but her parents never let me climb it. It's my Mount Everest."

"And so...?"

"They went away. They always go to Philly for the Fourth of July."

"Uh, okay," I responded, but I was still confused. "But won't you ruin the dress?" I pictured Hayley energetically pulling herself onto a tree limb, tearing the front of her dress — and neither noticing nor caring.

"No," she replied, "the dress will be fine."

And so, to cut to the chase (if you haven't already guessed), once we got to Charlene's house, Hayley pulled me into their garage and told me that we were trading outfits.

"No way!" I said. "No way I'm wearing a dress!"

"Hey," she retorted, "I don't like wearing a dress any more than you do!"

"But you're a girl!" I protested. At that, her eyes caught fire and her right hand cocked back into a fist aimed directly at my face.

But she caught herself, shook out her fist, and swallowed her anger.

"Listen," she said, "This tree is amazing. It's the highest tree in the neighborhood, and I have to climb it. Do you understand? Charlotte's parents are idiots who worry about insurance and liability and stuff, and they go on and on about my being a girl. But I'm telling you: I will die if I can't climb that tree.

"I'm asking you to do me a favor. I understand that you don't want to. I know that dresses are stupid, and if my mother wasn't so hung up on them, I'd already be up the tree. But here we are, and I'm asking you. Eddie, I will owe you one. A big one. I don't know what I can do for you, but some day when you ask me for something that's important to you..." She gestured helplessly. "Eddie, if you do this for me, I..." and there her words failed her. I almost thought she was going to cry. But she didn't.
 

---

 

Anyway, she convinced me. I didn't want to wear the dress, but I took a look at the tree and I understood. It was a pine tree, and probably not too hard to climb, but it was high, impossibly high. It was so high that the top swayed a couple of feet in the wind, and it wasn't even that windy.

"No one will see you," Hayley assured me. "Nobody is home."

Switching clothes took a matter of seconds. I took off the shorts and t-shirt and draped them over a lawnmower handle. She pulled the dress over her head and handed it to me. By the time I'd pulled it over my head and straightened it on my body, she was already dressed.

"You look like a girl," she assured me.

"Oh, goody," I said, full of sarcasm. "I always dreamed—"

She didn't let me finish. She pushed me out of the way. Not roughly, but like someone who had a mission and knew that the clock was ticking.

We left the garage and approached the tree. An old swing hung from it, so I brushed off the seat and sat down. As I half-heartedly began to swing, Hayley took a leap and grabbed a branch. She pulled herself onto it and began ascending. Pretty soon she was out of sight, and a few moments later I couldn't even hear the sound of her rustling the branches as she climbed.

A few minutes more, and the silence began to worry me. There I was, alone in a strange town, in a stranger's backyard, wearing a dress. Add to that the fact that I wasn't 100% sure of the way back to Hayley's house. I found myself wondering whether Hayley was still in the tree: Could she have jumped off without my seeing? I stood up to look for her, but couldn't make out anything but branches and pine needles. I walked around to see whether a branch hung over a garage or another yard, where Hayley might have made her getaway, but it didn't look likely at all.

I wanted to call out to Hayley, to ask her to come down, but I doubted that she'd hear me. Besides, I definitely didn't want to draw the neighbors' attention.

Of course, I couldn't climb the tree myself to look for her. Aside from ruining the dress, there was the matter of reaching the lowest branch. Hayley can jump higher than I can, and even for her, it was a stretch to jump and grab it. I tried it anyway, but my jumps didn't come close at all. And even though no one could see, I was embarrassed by having the dress sail up to my armpits.

I began to wonder whether I could find my way back to Hayley's house alone. I hadn't paid attention when we walked over. I didn't even know the general direction. And even if I did get back, would I be able to get into the house without being seen? The two of us had slipped out quickly so our mothers wouldn't see us, so they'd be likely to be on the lookout for our return.

Every step of the way was uncertain: Could I find my way back? Could I get in the house without being seen? Once inside, could I get upstairs before someone saw me? If only I could change back into my own clothes, everything else would be fine. Problem was, I didn't see how it could happen.

I got so engrossed with various scenarios of how I'd get my clothes back — or somehow find some boys clothes that fit, that I didn't hear a pair of kids come walking up. It was a boy about my age and a girl a few years younger. The boy was maybe two inches taller than me. And the girl, though younger, was about my height. She looked at me quizzically.

"Who are you?" she asked. "I've never seen you before." The boy just grinned. He clearly could not have cared less.

"I'm ah... I'm ah...," I stammered, taken completely by surprise.

"Her name is Ima," the boy joked. The girl frowned.

Just then, there was a noise — a racket — somewhere in the tree above us. It sounded like a rock, a huge rock, was hurtling to earth, striking every branch as it fell. In reality it was Hayley, who was simply in a hurry to get down as fast as she could. We all looked up, waiting, and in a few moments, Hayley appeared and dropped to earth, landing on her feet, grinning, obviously and immensely pleased with herself.

"I went all the way to the top!" she announced. The boy nodded in quiet approval. He was impressed. The girl, on the other hand, looked Hayley up and down with a judgmental expression, seeing every smudge, every smear of pine resin. But she didn't say anything.

"This is my cousin Melanie," she told the two newcomers, pointing at me with her chin. I opened my mouth to protest, but before a word came out, the boy said to Hayley, "I'm going to Jackson's house for some b-ball. Trey will be there. If you come, we can play two-on-two. Are you in?"

"Hell, yeah!" Hayley exclaimed, and the two of them ran off, leaving me with my mouth hanging open and an angry little girl.

"He does this all the time," she told me, disgusted. "He's supposed to watch me, but he always runs off."

"Do you know how to get to Jackson's house?" I asked her.

She looked at me as though I'd asked her to fly to the moon. "I have to go home," she said as if it were obvious. She waited to hear what I was going to do, expecting me to say the same thing she'd just said.

"I don't know what to do!" I exclaimed, more to myself than to her.

"Can't you go home by yourself?" she asked.

"I don't know the way," I replied, reddening.

She considered that for a moment, then asked, "Do you want to come to my house?"

"I don't know," I repeated. "I need to find Hayley."

"I'm going home," she repeated. "You can come if you want. My mother can call your mother."

Oh, that's the last thing I need, I told myself, and I considered the possibilities: if I stayed by the tree, there was no telling whether Hayley would come back. She might go to this girl's house. Still, neither option seemed more likely than the other. In any case, if I got tired of waiting, I could try to head back to Hayley's house alone — if I could find my way — and try to get in without being seen. If someone did see me, I was pretty sure that Hayley would get into more trouble than me. And that fact ought to make Hayley want to find me.

"I have a lots of Barbies," the girl offered, "and we can play dress up."

"Okay," I agreed — but not because of what she said! I was going to go along with her anyway.
 

---

 

And that's how I ended up spending two solid hours with Adria, dressing Barbies and acting out scenes of Barbies shopping at the mall or Barbies visiting friends. It turns out that to make a Barbie talk, you need to speak her lines in a soft, high-pitched voice and bounce the doll as if you were making ink spots with a pen. I also learned that Barbie's clothes don't fit every Barbie. Some are different enough — a slightly longer leg or wider hips or what have you — that they can't always share clothes with each other.

Adria's mother was understandably quite curious about who I was and whether my mother knew that I was out by myself. I told her that I was Hayley's cousin Melanie. That seemed safe enough, but it didn't stop the cross-examination, and soon she settled the fact that my mother was Hayley's Aunt Darcy.

"But then you would be..." she began to say — but she stopped herself and said instead, "Oh no, my mistake," and that was the end of the questions. It was quite a relief.

She gave me and Adria lunch and left the two of us to play undisturbed while she talked on the phone. She came in once or twice to look in on us, and while she did, she stared at me as if she was trying to read some small print written on my face, but then she'd say, "No, it's fine" (to the phone, not to me) and leave the room.

When it got to be two o'clock, I'd had my fill of playing Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, and Apples to Apples, so I decided it was time for me to go. Of course, at just that moment, Hayley arrived. She couldn't stop smirking at me, and after we left, she wanted to hear every detail of my time as a girl. She'd ask a question and roar with laughter at my answer. Then after promising not to laugh, she'd ask me for more and set off laughing again.

After I'd told her everything, she stopped and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She drew a huge sigh and thanked me. "I'm sorry for laughing at you," she said, "and I didn't mean to run off and leave you. You really did me a big favor by wearing that stupid outfit, and I won't forget it."

We went back to Charlene's garage to change clothes once again.

Unfortunately, their next-door neighbor caught us, gave us an earful, and chased us off before we were able to make the switch.

That left us to do a risky exchange in the woods behind Hayley's house, but thankfully no one saw us.

"I hate putting this damn thing back on again," Hayley protested as she pulled the dress back over her head.

It was a good thing I hadn't tried to get back in by myself, because our mothers were both lying in wait in the kitchen. They were obviously there to catch us, to see what we were wearing. Hayley got off easy, in spite of the pine resin on her arms, legs, and hands, because the dress was still perfectly clean.

I, on the other hand, got a good and proper grilling.

"Is that what you were wearing?" my mother demanded.

I boldly lied. "Yes," I told her. "Why do you ask?"

"You didn't... change your clothes while you were out?"

I frowned and asked her, "How would I do that?"

She examined my face, looking at me from several angles, and I knew she was looking for the lie. "When you said Hayley had something for you to wear, I was... a little concerned."

I laughed, and I dare say it came off pretty natural. It didn't sound like a nervous laugh to me. "Did you think I'd wear a dress?" I asked her in a scoffing tone.

"I didn't know what to think," she said, and after a moment in which neither of us knew what to say, I ran upstairs and put my nice clothes back on.
 

---

 

Hayley lives in a small town, so their Fourth of July celebration isn't big or elaborate, but it's pretty nice. Families spread their blankets on the hill in the park. Local bands play and people dance. Once it gets dark, the fireworks start, and once the fireworks are done, everyone goes home.

Hayley and I shared a blanket, and as we lay on our backs watching the colorful explosions and flaming designs high in the air, I said, "This is a good spot to see the show."

"Yeah," she agreed, "But do you know where I'd rather be watching it from?"

"No, where?" I asked.

"From the top of the tree," she replied. Then she gave my hand a strong, painful squeeze, and let it go.

© 2013 by Kaleigh Way