“Well, what do you think? Heavy armour?” By now, Sicilee has not even thought of smiling for at least two minutes. “Clothes, Loretta. Wear your clothes more than once.”

“Are you sick?” Loretta makes a series of strangled, hacking sounds. It is either ironic laughter or an attempt to cough up a piece of tuna salad that has gone down the wrong way. “Wear the same thing two days in a row? What’s that supposed to do for the planet? Make it die laughing?”

“Sweet Mary, why are you all being so difficult?” At the moment, it looks as though Sicilee may never smile again. “It doesn’t mean wear the same thing on Tuesday that you wore on Monday, for God’s sake. It just means don’t wash everything after you’ve only worn it once. You know, so you save on energy and water and everything.”

“Even if you’ve got mustard on it? Or dirt?” Ash’s face makes it clear to anyone who might be interested that you don’t have to be threatened by killer mummies armed with Uzis and machetes to know what true horror is. “Oh, I don’t think so, Sicilee. Some of us have standards.”

“Here’s another interesting item,” says Kristin with what can only be described as demented glee. “Don’t dry clean.” She looks over at Sicilee. “What are you supposed to do instead? Beat your clothes on rocks?”

“Waitwaitwaitwaitwait, this is even more gross!” screeches Loretta. “Buy used!” Apparently, Loretta, too, has discovered the essence of true horror. “Buy used what? Clothes? Are you saying that I should wear somebody’s smelly, cast-off clothes? Then what are all the poor people in the Third World supposed to wear?”

“Are you all being deliberately dense?” asks Sicilee.

“Well, excuse us for breathing,” says Ash.

Sicilee snatches up the unwanted pages of advice. “And excuse me for trying to educate you.” Her unsmile moves from Ash to Kristin to Loretta. “I’m obviously wasting my time.”

Kristin, Ash and Loretta all stare back at her with looks like barbed-wire fences.

“Just where do you get the nerve to tell us what to do?” Loretta would like to know. “Not only do you not walk to school, you are not wearing somebody else’s clothes. You are wearing your clothes. We were with you when you bought that outfit.”

“And let’s be totally honest here.” Kristin leans forward, in the earnest, I’m-only-saying-this-for-your-own-good way of a very best friend. “You’re not even really a vegetarian or a vegan or whatever you told that dumb club you are. You came to my house last week and ate steak. Rare.” She kicks Sicilee’s foot under the table. “And your boots aren’t vegan leather either – they’re the ones you bought in November.”

“Sweet Mary,” Sicilee cries in exasperation. “I can’t just throw out a hundred pairs of shoes, Kristin. We’re supposed to be living in a waste-not, want-not kind of way.”

“You don’t have to throw them out,” says Loretta with a smile. “You can give them away.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Late but not late enough

It’s Saturday, and on Saturday afternoons Maya and her friends always meet at Mojo’s coffee bar, a dimly lit and brick-walled room, where they sit at worn wooden tables, eat paninis and bagels, drink espressos, and listen to jazz and Latin funk. Hood up, head down, Maya hurries through the falling snow, watching her breath float in front of her in tiny, frozen clouds. Late again. Interestingly enough, however, the main thought in Maya’s mind isn’t that she’s late again, but that if, by some sadistic twist of fate, she should run into Cody Lightfoot, she will have no choice but to join a cloistered convent and spend the rest of her life behind a high brick wall. She could never face him again if he saw her like this.

The bell tinkles as Maya bursts through the door, stopping to shake the snow off her boots onto the newspapers spread across the entrance. She throws back her hood and squints into the room, adjusting her eyes to the atmospheric gloom after the brightness of the day outside.

The others are all gathered around their favourite table in the corner, already eating their lunches.

“Yo!” Maya calls as she sidles through the packed room. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Better late than never.” Jason waves a fry in greeting. “Which makes a nice change.”

Alice pats the seat beside her on the bench. “We were afraid you weren’t coming because of the weather.”

Maya sighs inwardly. Why didn’t she think of that? It’s not only a good excuse, it would have been more or less true.

“It’s damn cold out there,” says Finn. “I wouldn’t have come myself, only I knew my dad would volunteer me to shovel the driveway when the snow stops, so I decided to take my chances with frostbite.”

Maya slips out of her coat and hangs it on one of the hooks on the wall, throwing herself onto the bench next to Alice so quickly and with so much force that Alice drops her fork. But not quite quickly enough.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mallory leans around the table for a better view. “Are those your little sister’s clothes?”

“Of course they’re not Molly’s,” says Maya. “I was late, so I just put on the first thing I found.”

Which is true in the sense that she is wearing all she could find. What Maya is wearing are clothes she schleps around the house in that haven’t seen daylight in at least a year. Uncool clothes. Clothes she wouldn’t want to be buried in at night on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Atlantic.

“But those pants are way too small for you.” Mallory is now peering under the table. “They don’t even reach the top of your socks.”

“And that shirt!” Shayla’s face bunches up with distaste. “What’s all over it? Is that blood?”

“Of course it’s not blood. It’s henna.” Maya grabs a menu from the middle of the table, even though she has been here enough times to know that there are only three things on it that she can eat. “I had a little clothes crisis, that’s all.”

“What happened?” asks Alice. “The washing machine broke?”

Maya shakes her head.

“The dryer?” guesses Mallory.

“Not exactly.”

What exactly happened was that, having done her bi-monthly, environmentally friendly load of laundry yesterday, Maya was then filled with such a sense of goodwill towards every living thing on the planet that she decided she would hang her clothes on the line and dry them the way that Nature intended. She didn’t take the weather into consideration.

“They froze!” Shelby chokes on his coffee. “Are you serious? Your clothes froze?”

Maya glares at him. “And how was I supposed to know the temperature was going to drop?”

“It’s winter, Maya,” says Shayla. “What did you think the temperature would do? Hit ninety?”

“I guess the snow didn’t help either.” Brion laughs.

Jason, sitting across from Maya, leans his arms on the table. Maya’s outfit isn’t what’s bothering him. “So what’s your excuse for missing the movie last night? You were making your own bean curd and you forgot?”

“Oh, you are so droll.” Maya looks around for the waiter, but the waiter is busy with another table. “I just had stuff to do, that’s all.”

“More important than Friday night at the Multiplex?” Jason’s lopsided grin isn’t always as attractive as Maya sometimes thinks. “What stuff? Were you out wrapping blankets around trees with your pal Cody?”

Maya gives him a withering look. Lately, Jason has become almost as annoying as Sicilee Kewe.

“You didn’t miss much,” says Alice. “The movie wasn’t that great.”

“Bo-riiing!” agrees Mallory.

Shelby, whose choice it was, laughs. “Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad. Nobody fell asleep, did they?”

“I did,” says Finn. “But you couldn’t tell because I can sleep with my eyes open.”

Jason is still leaning towards Maya. “So what were you doing this time?” he persists. “What did you have to do that was more important than hanging out with your friends?” It isn’t even a smile, really. It’s more of a smirk. “Or were you just afraid that if you saw everybody else eating double-cheese pizza you’d cave in and renounce your holy vegan vows?”

Jason has become so annoying not only because he’s always making snide remarks about Cody Lightfoot, but also because he’s always on Maya’s case about something. He sniped at her for missing a couple of lunches. He rode her for not going skating last week. And today it would seem that he’s irritated because she’s not eating cheese.

“You can gorge yourself on double-cheese pizza till your eyes fall out for all I care,” Maya informs him with a sugary smile. “It doesn’t affect me at all.” She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a Manila envelope. “But since you’re so incredibly interested, here’s what I was doing last night. It’s my own special project to get ready for Earth Day. It’s about what’s in all the stuff we use all the time. You know, the hidden stuff.” She puts the envelope down on the table. “There are four copies in there. You guys can look it over while I get a coffee. See what you think.”

“Nerd Nation strikes again,” says Finn.

Jason reaches for the envelope. “I know that I speak for everyone here when I say that we can’t wait.”

Despite her outfit, Maya’s in a good enough mood to laugh with the others. She’s worked hard, and she’s pretty pleased with her efforts. There was a time, not so long ago, when Maya thought she was Green enough. She knew about climate change, recycling and eco-friendly light bulbs. She cared about pigs, polar bears and whales. It never occurred to her that she should put some extra effort into learning about the environment. Why learn what you already know? Only now that she has been putting in some extra effort she realizes that she didn’t know half as much as she thought. She was like someone adrift on a dark, cold sea, thinking the tips she could see were all there was of the icebergs.