But I never did that. As much as Marcy annoyed me, I was never very good at saying no to her (even in a less dramatic way), so we wound up beside each other at a lot of lunches and slumber parties, and on a lot of field-trip buses. Her family was going to be away in Nova Scotia for most of the summer, and I was relieved to be getting a break from her.
On the last day of fifth grade, Marcy had told me we had to “strategize” for the first day of middle school. She said she’d call me when she got back from her vacation so we could coordinate our outfits, transportation, and arrival time for the first day. I was a little surprised when I never heard from her, but mostly I felt like I’d dodged a clingy bullet. For all I knew, she’d moved to Canada for good.
So on the first day of school, when a kid hollered “Marcy,” the last person I expected to respond was the tall, lipstick-wearing, hoop-earringed girl talking to Addison. But sure enough, it was her. I could see it now. Under the makeup and between the hoop earrings, her face was a longer, narrower version of the Marcy who’d plunked her lunch box down beside mine every day in the cafeteria last year.
“Hey, girl!” Marcy yelled to the kid who’d called her name, raising skyward an arm full of bangle bracelets that were only a little bigger than her giant hoop earrings.
She noticed me standing there as her arm came back down and said, “Oh—hey, Augusta,” in a voice that was suddenly way less enthusiastic.
Before I could even say hi back, Addison grabbed Marcy’s arm and inspected one of the bangle bracelets. “Ooh!” she squealed. “Is this the one you got the day we went whale-watching?”
“You guys went whale-watching together?” I asked.
“Yes!” Addison squealed again. “This year Marcy’s family summered in the same spot where my family always summers. We went on a whale-and-dolphin watch together.”
“You summered there, huh?” Louie, I know you (and Mom, and Dad) always hate my sarcastic tone, but this was ridiculous. Who uses “summer” as a verb? And twice in the same sentence?
“Yes. We spent the summer there. Summered,” Marcy explained, like I was an idiot. “My parents say we can go back every year now.”
“We summered here in Meridian,” a voice behind me said. “My parents say we’ll do that every year too.” I turned and saw Nick Zambrano spinning a Frisbee on his index finger. Marcy rolled her eyes and turned back around.
“Hey, Gus,” Nick said. “Thought I was gonna be late this morning. My parents didn’t read the email and I went to the front door.”
I said hi back to Nick, but I was too distracted to really pay attention to him. With her new long legs and made-up face and “summering” in Nova Scotia, Marcy looked like a different kind of creature from the rest of us. Do I seem any different from last year? I wondered. This was something I couldn’t really get a handle on: how I came off to other people. (That was another thing I was sometimes wondering about when I felt like I needed space: What kind of person did I seem like?) I tried quickly glancing down at myself to see if I looked that different from last year. I had new sneakers. My hair was a little longer. That was about it. Nothing like the new-and-improved Marcy.
I know what you’re thinking, Louie: That couldn’t happen to any of my friends! Trust me. It will. In fact, from your crew of kids, my money’s on Isabella. Look how much she’s changed already since kindergarten, when she used to cry at drop-off every morning. Now she plays travel lacrosse, and she spent the summer at cheerleading camp. Mark my words: On the first day of sixth grade, you may not know who she is.
Here’s what you should know about homeroom: There’s not much homey about it. Since it’s the first place you go in the morning, I think I imagined it was going to be where we had morning meetings, the way you do in elementary school. Everyone would gather on the rug or circle their chairs and talk about current events, plans we had for the weekend, or anything at all that was on our minds. And last year, since my fifth-grade teacher was Mr. Singer and he filled his classroom with a cozy sofa and a soft rug and string lights across the tops of the windows and everyone thought he was pretty much the greatest teacher ever…well, our class really did feel like home sometimes. (Which was especially good last year when life in our actual home started getting pretty weird.)
But in sixth grade…no. In middle school, homeroom is all business. Or at least it is for me, maybe because my homeroom teacher is also the actual business teacher, Mr. Smeed. As the year has gone on, we’ve learned that Mr. Smeed has a small collection of light brown, light green, and light yellow short-sleeved button-down shirts that he wears with ties in corresponding shades. Mr. Smeed also seems to be really worried about having bad breath. This we know because he keeps a little container of breath spray in his shirt pocket. The breath spray is called Binaca, and he sprays it into his mouth at least three times during every homeroom session.
On the first day of school, Mr. Smeed assigned us all office-type jobs like “accountant” (collects money for school events), “parliamentarian” (makes sure Mr. Smeed’s not forgetting anything he’s supposed to do), “recording secretary” (writes down any questions Mr. Smeed needs to research the answers to), and “file clerk.” I got file clerk. (I would soon find out that that was a big job the first week of school, because we all had to bring back a bunch of signed forms from our parents, and I had to file them in just the right way in Mr. Smeed’s color-coded folders. If anything was garbage, he’d point to the recycling bin and say “put that one in file thirteen” and chuckle, like calling the trash can file thirteen was the funniest joke ever.)
Nick Zambrano was parliamentarian. “I don’t know what that means,” he said when Mr. Smeed gave him the assignment.
“It means you keep us on schedule and in order!” Mr. Smeed explained (before spraying Binaca into his mouth). “And don’t assume I’m always going to do things the right way; I’ve been known to make mistakes on purpose just to make sure my parliamentarian is paying attention!”
“Okaaaay,” Nick said. He turned to me and whispered, “What’s up with this guy?”
I shrugged. “I think he thinks this is his business.”
“So we’re his employees?”
“Something like that.”
“Mr. Zambrano and Ms. Reynolds!” Suddenly Mr. Smeed was standing between our desks, consulting a desk chart on his clipboard to make sure he had our names right. “Is there a matter of business between the parliamentarian and the file clerk that I should be aware of?”
“No,” Nick said.
“No, what?” Mr. Smeed asked.
“No…there isn’t?” Nick answered.
Oh boy. “No, Mr. Smeed,” I said. “We’re fine.”
“Well, next time you two have to have a conversation, do it on your own time. This is my time,” Mr. Smeed said, then took another hit of Binaca.
I guess he expected some kind of response from us because when we didn’t say anything, he said, “Is that understood?” in an even louder voice than he’d used before.
“Yes,” we both answered. Then, when he kept staring at us, we added, “Mr. Smeed.”
The bell rang for us to go to first period, so I scooped up all the papers Mr. Smeed had handed out and stuffed them in my backpack.
“That’s not very organized procedure for a file clerk, Ms. Reynolds,” Mr. Smeed said, watching me. “I will expect much more careful handling of the files in this classroom.” (Spray spray.)
I nodded at him, but he seemed to expect more. Did he want me to reorganize the papers right then and there? I had to get to my first-period class.
“Okay,” I said. “I will work on, um, organizing my procedures. Mr. Smeed.” I guess that wasn’t exactly the response he wanted either, because he just squinted at me as I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder. And I think Mr. Smeed heard the same thing I did: Nick stifling a laugh as we headed out the door t
o first period.
Remember when we were little and Mom and Dad used to take us to feed the ducks at the pond in Orchard Park and we always looked for turtles? After all the bread scraps were gone, we’d go to the end of the pond that was thick with lily pads and stare and stare until we spotted a turtle. It wasn’t easy because of the way they blended in with the lily pads. But eventually, we’d make out little dark green turtle shells and heads bobbing up through the light green of the lily-pad stew.
Do you remember that whoever spotted a turtle first would yell “Turtle Top”? (I’m not sure why we said that…I guess it was because we could only see the top of the turtle?) Anyway, I remember it was always a big competition, seeing who could yell “Turtle Top” first. And Iris would bark and bark if she saw the turtle too. And then whoever didn’t spot the turtle first would get mad at the person who did, then we’d get in a big fight about who had really seen it first, and then Mom and Dad would get exasperated and suggest that we go for ice cream just to distract us and make us stop fighting. And it always worked. That was a really long time ago, huh? I think the last couple of times all four of us went, Mom and Dad were on their phones the whole time. And then, eventually, they started taking us separately. Maybe we stopped playing Turtle Top because we were getting older, or maybe it’s because it wasn’t nearly as much fun without all four of us there.
Anyway, the first day of middle school reminded me of trying to spot turtles in the pond. Because I was walking through this big crowd of kids I didn’t recognize, and their faces all blended together the way the lily pads did. But then, once in a while, a familiar face would bob up out of the crowd, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from shouting “Turtle Top!” I wanted to, though. I also wished that you were there with me to fight about who’d seen the turtle first, and that Mom and Dad were about to take us for ice cream.
Well, the “turtle” I saw in the hall after homeroom that day was Natalie Daniels, as I was walking to my first-period class, science. She wasn’t exactly first on the list of turtles I would have wanted to see, considering how she’d spent most of fifth grade doodling Dance Girls Rule! on all her notebooks, but still, she was a familiar face.
“Hey, Natalie!” I said with way more excitement than I usually had for her. “Where’s your first class?”
“It’s science. So I think it’s in the science wing. I don’t know. Are all science classes in the science wing? Where is the science wing? My first class is science.”
“Riiight…you said that,” I reminded her. She seemed a little manic. “I’m going to science too. Who’s your teacher?”
She looked at her schedule. “Warren. It says Warren. Do you think that’s a man or a woman? Who’s yours?”
“Mine is McCabe,” I answered, starting to feel a little relieved that we’d be in different classes.
“Oh no,” Natalie said, as though I’d just told her she’d never dance again. “What’s your room number?”
I checked my schedule again. “128.”
“Okay, I’m 126,” she said. “126! They must be near each other. We can walk together! Make sure you talk to me the whole time, okay? I don’t want people to think we don’t have anything to talk about.”
So for the next five minutes I half listened as Natalie babbled nervously about finding her classes, decorating her locker, and, of course, going to dance-team auditions. When we got to the science wing and found our classes, I saw a couple of kids give us weird looks after she gave my hand a squeeze and said “Okay! Good luck in science!” a little too loudly.
I guess the moral of this story is, be wary of familiar faces on the first day of middle school. If you grab on to a tiny turtle to stay afloat, you’ll probably just wind up sinking to the bottom.
Natalie would be okay, by the way. I saw her run on tiptoe to one of her dance friends after she walked into Mr. Warren’s classroom.
As for me, I was facing a brand-new sea of lily pads in room 128.
I know you don’t think you need me to tell you about scary teachers, Lou. I know you think Ms. Chesser, who you had in second grade, was scary because she only let kids go to the bathroom once a day. (I know this because you’d come home every day and tell Mom and Dad all the bathroom details we didn’t need to know. Like whether you went number one or number two, and how you had to hold it in forever and ever because of mean Ms. Chesser, and once you even wet your pants a little. You’ve always told Mom and Dad way more than I have about things like that. Bathroom information. Body-ailment information. Crush information. Friend-drama information. Too much information.)
Anyway, I also know you’ll hear stories about scary middle-school teachers from other kids before you get to Meridian. Those stories spread like crazy; I know because I’d heard them too. The gym teacher who was in the Mafia. The history teacher who’d been arrested during a botched toy-store robbery. The science teacher who slams a wooden bat onto the desks of kids who aren’t paying attention.
Well, I can tell you that at least one of these is true. I don’t know much about any Meridian teachers with lives in organized (or disorganized) crime, but I can tell you that Mr. McCabe patrols the aisles of his classroom with a bat perched on his shoulder, kind of like a cartoon caveman with a club. And he does bring the bat down when kids least expect it. Oh, and the bat has a name. It’s Lorenzo.
He was holding it on the first day of school as he stood in the doorway of his classroom. He and the bat had matching name tags (HELLO, MY NAME IS MR. MCCABE and HELLO, MY NAME IS LORENZO). He told each of us to find our own name tag on a table by the front door. I started looking for AUGUSTA until I realized the name tags just had last names on them, so finally I found my REYNOLDS name tag and sat down in the fourth row of desks.
I watched as a stream of kids I didn’t know (I guess they’d gone to Minter Elementary) walked in and looked for their name tags. Eventually a few kids from Starling walked in, but no one that interesting: Sharla Yingst, David Martin, and—again—Nick Zambrano, who sat across from me and immediately asked to borrow a pencil.
Mr. McCabe used to be a Marine. I think that’s why he calls us all by our last names. He also says things like “If a good Marine has only ten minutes to rest, he can fall asleep in one minute and get nine good minutes of shut-eye.” The first time he told us that, Nick of course yelled, “How about we try that now!” which earned his desk a visit from Lorenzo.
Mr. McCabe has traveled all over the world, and as the year has gone on, we’ve learned that if we play our cards right, we can distract him and get him to tell us all about eating roast guinea pig in Peru or riding an elephant in Kenya. Not only are the stories fascinating, but the more time he spends telling them, the less time we have to discuss amoebas or the periodic table of elements.
We were in Mr. McCabe’s class the day in September when Principal Olin made an announcement over the intercom asking for volunteers for the social committee, whose first job would be to plan the November dance. (She said it was going to be a Sadie Hawkins dance, which meant that girls were supposed to invite boys as dates or invite the boys to dance once we got there. More on that later, but in a nutshell: no thank you.)
Mr. McCabe had thoughts about the Sadie Hawkins dance. Not about the girls-inviting-boys aspect, but about the dancing.
“I don’t know why they even call it dancing anymore,” he said with a sigh. “In my day, we danced. What you kids do is shadowboxing.” (I had to google “shadowboxing” when I got home. It means “practice fighting with an invisible opponent.” I’m not sure I got Mr. McCabe’s point, but it was an interesting metaphor for a middle-school dance.)
I’ll tell you who wasn’t shadowboxing, though. Three girls from Minter who were all in Mr. McCabe’s first-period science class too. They seemed to be having the time of their lives.
Okay, so technically this is three people, not one person. But they function
as a unit, so I’m counting them as one. As I sat and watched kids file into Mr. McCabe’s room that first day, I noticed that some (like me) walked in alone and quickly found a name tag and a seat. Others walked in with one friend, or said a quiet “hey” to someone they recognized.
And then there were the Huggers.
Three girls from Minter were among the last to arrive to science, and when they saw each other in line at the name-tag table, they squealed, actually yelled “HUG!” and then hugged each other.
Then, get this: they did it again at the end of class when they got out of their seats. Later I’d notice them doing it in the lunchroom, at the end of the school day, and in the morning too.
Their names are Hannah, Una, and Gabby. I learned this on the first day of school when Mr. McCabe, tapping Lorenzo on his desk in an agitated rhythm, asked, “When was the last time you ladies saw each other?” as they hugged goodbye.
“We had a sleepover last night!” one of the Huggers said.
“Hmm,” Mr. McCabe snorted. “I thought perhaps one of you had just returned from war.”
Another Hugger laughed. “No! We’ve just been best friends forever and our initials are H-U-G, so we always have to hug when we say hello or goodbye!” To clarify, she pointed to herself and said, “Hannah,” then went down the line and introduced Una and Gabby.
Mr. McCabe looked at them blankly for a second, then said, “Well. The only one who goes by a first name in my classroom is Lorenzo.” And he tapped Lorenzo’s head on his desk once more, a little louder this time.
If that bothered the Huggers, they didn’t show it. They laughed and squeezed through the doorway arm in arm, hugging once more before going their separate ways for second period.
The 47 People You'll Meet in Middle School Page 2