by Beth Vrabel
This time, as soon as the sugar hit her tongue, her fitness-instructor self turned into someone just interested in fittin’ sugar into her mouth.
Alec, my stepdad, smiled at the back of Mom’s head from where he leaned against the counter. Alec’s always doing that, smiling at Mom like everything she does is wonderful, even shoving a brownie into her mouth. He saw me looking at him and winked. I tried to smile back, but it was wobbly. Then Alec wasn’t smiling but looking at me with concern.
While Mom was all spandex and lipstick, Alec was suits and polish. He was about six feet tall, almost always either in a suit or a white button-down shirt. He worked as a financial adviser; that’s how he and Mom met, back when she was finalizing details for opening her gym.
They were so in love it was disgusting.
Alec pushed off the counter and planted a kiss on the top of Mom’s head. She handed him a brownie, and he shook his head. Mom shoved it into her own mouth without a second glance, then pushed the tray toward me.
It was kind of funny—Alec was pretty much the exact opposite of my dad, who was a soft, pale Irishman with thinning red hair and a potbelly, and who was more than ten years older than Mom. Meanwhile, Alec was a tall, broad black man with abs that rivalled Mom’s. He was also about ten years younger than Mom, which was a topic she never wanted to discuss.
Speaking of my dad, he stretched out his hand to pat my arm. “Was it that bad, Penelope?” (Yeah, he was there, too. The divorce happened about five years ago, and honestly it wasn’t all that traumatic. So much had been happening then at our house that Dad going from sleeping on the couch like he had since I could remember to sleeping in his own apartment didn’t seem like a big deal. He and Mom might not have stayed in love, but they still loved each other and loved us. Dad even seemed to really like Alec; they played racquetball together in Mom’s gym a couple afternoons a week.)
Dad was a newspaper reporter and had a way of asking questions that made you start blabbing even if you didn’t want to. I nodded. “I think it ranks about third on The List.”
“The List?” Alec asked.
“The List of Humiliations of Pipi McGee,” supplied my older sister, Eliza. She placed a brownie on a little plate and handed it to Annie. “It’s long and pathetic.”
I nodded.
Annie glanced at Mom, who smiled, and then Annie dug in. Eliza’s mouth set into a hard line at the silent exchange, but she didn’t say anything.
I should probably explain this a little more before moving on with my story. Annie is actually Eliza’s daughter—my sister had her when she was sixteen years old. It really messed Eliza up for a long time. Now, Annie was four and a half, and Eliza was a lot stronger as a person—she is about to graduate college (mostly through taking online courses at a local university) and has a job at a makeup shop next to Mom’s gym. But for the first few years after Annie was born, Eliza was in pretty bad shape emotionally. Mom was the one who really took care of Annie, getting up in the middle of the night to feed her, singing her silly songs, and teaching her how to use the bathroom. You know, mom stuff. Annie even calls Mom “MomMom” and Eliza, well, “Eliza,” even though Eliza does most of the mom stuff now.
“Remember my humiliations when you have to do your self-portrait,” I said to Annie.
“How was your first day of preschool?” Dad asked Annie to try to change the subject.
She shrugged. “We had to eat Joe’s slop for lunch.”
“Sloppy Joes,” Eliza corrected. Annie sighed.
Annie was what a lot of people called an old soul. She had wide green eyes and my hair color, but hers was styled in a little pixie cut after an incident where she played barber in the bathroom with a pair of cuticle scissors. (Amazing how much damage cuticle scissors could do, especially if you cut your hair straight down the middle.) I had a pixie cut once, thanks to Vile Kara Samson, but Annie’s hairstyle was much cuter. She had Eliza’s perfect heart-shaped face. Picture a delicate angel—blue eyes, blond hair, pretty little nose, and dainty little features. That’s Eliza. Like, so pretty that people bumped into each other on the street when she walked by, hoping she’d bless them with a smile or something. Or, at least, that’s how she used to be. Now the first thing you’d see when Eliza walked by was her stop-sign scowl. Think, I don’t know, of an avenging angel who might smite you for no reason at all.
Turning back to me, Alec said, “It can’t be that bad, Pipi.” Dad turned to the side and raised his eyebrow. Mom eyed another brownie. “Come on!” Alec glanced at all of us.
“Pipi pees her pants,” Annie said.
“That is not true!” I slammed my hands on the counter. “I peed my pants. Once.” I looked to Alec. “That’s the fourth-grade entry.” His eyes widened and I knew he was doing the math, figuring out that fourth graders are at least nine years old and definitely shouldn’t be peeing their pants. “And ever since, everyone—even my own family—has called me Pipi.”
“It’s catchy,” Dad said. Eliza nodded.
I sighed.
“Okay,” Alec said. “So, you had an accident in fourth grade and in kindergarten, you drew yourself as a breakfast meat—”
“With boobs,” I added.
Alec continued, “How bad could the rest be?”
“Bad,” Eliza said.
“Real bad,” Mom added.
Alec crossed his arms. He and Mom had been married only a year, and apparently the courtship didn’t include a rundown of her daughter’s pathetic nature. Mom sighed. “It’s like this: every year, something happens to Pipi. Something awful. And then that event is like the sun—everything else that happens to her that year revolves around the event.”
Alec nodded. “Sounds a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think something bad will happen, so as soon as something bad happens, it becomes that thing.”
I blinked at him.
“So, maybe,” he continued, his eyes drifting toward Dad and back, “it’s not that whatever happened is all that bad. You’re just so prepped for it to be awful that no matter what it is, it’s inflated to feel that much worse.”
“Eh.” Dad cleared his throat. I used to go with him on story assignments when I was a little kid. Reporters don’t make a lot of money, and neither do fitness instructors, so I’d tag along if my grandparents couldn’t watch me. This “eh” wasn’t just a casual throat-clearing thing. This was a reporter tactic of Dad’s. It was questioning someone’s comment without straight-out casting doubt.
Sure enough, Dad pulled his reporter’s notebook from his back pocket. “Let’s go over the facts.”
I grabbed the notebook and a pen from him and flipped to a blank page. I spoke as I wrote. “Kindergarten, drew myself as bacon with boobs, thanks to poor instructions from Miss Simpson.”
“Another thing you’ll notice,” Eliza piped in, “is that it’s never Pipi’s fault, whatever happened. It’s always someone else’s.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. Annie giggled.
“First grade.” I scrawled a number one on the page and wrote class picture next to it. “My nose itched on the inside during the class picture. It was just an itch!” It itched again, just thinking about it, but I ignored it.
Mom was the one giggling now. She reached into a kitchen cabinet, way to the back, and pulled out a mug with my picture on it—one of those gifts you can order along with school pictures. And there I was, forever immortalized with my finger up my nose.
“Must’ve been quite an itch.” Alec laughed. “Your finger’s up to the knuckle.”
My chin popped up. “Vile Kara Samson had a lot of hairspray in her hair. A lot. It irritated my nasal passage. Anyway, I was not a nose picker. I swear! But all of first grade, no one would invite me to sleep over or to play after school because I had ‘boogie fingers.’” For months after that, I’d fall asleep rubbing my nose like I could somehow smudge it right off my face. Now, I never touched my nose if at all possible. It didn’t help, of course, that my nose was
long and wide.
I drew a number two for second grade. Next to it, I wrote vomit-a-thon. Eliza shuddered.
“Do I want to know?” asked Alec, reading the paper upside down.
“It was the second week of school. My allergies—again!—were bothering me on the bus. I coughed, and it led to a little throw-up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Sarah Trickle hadn’t turned around to hand me a tissue. I sprayed her with Eggo.”
“It was like dominos,” said Dad, his mustache awfully twitchy for discussing something traumatic. “The bus driver called the office and said all the parents had to pick up their kids. Sarah Trickle must’ve let loose on the kid next to her. The next person puked on the person in front of him, on and on. Only one kid—Ricky Salindo—was vomitless. Steel stomach, that kid.”
“And,” I said, “every time Kara Samson so much as looked at me that year, she’d make gagging sounds. Like my face was a finger down her throat. She wasn’t even on the bus! And since she’s Vile Kara Samson that meant everyone else followed her lead. Can you imagine that? Everyone gagging when they see you? Even Sarah Trickle gagged around me.”
Vile Kara Samson. Ugh. Picture a tall, curvy girl with long brown hair. A smile with full lips and perfectly straight white teeth. Blue eyes that always look mean, even while blinding a person with that perfect smile. The girl no one actually likes but whom everyone desperately wants to like them. She’s paper-cut mean—leaving a sting that seems to go away, but brings tears to your eyes all over again as soon as it’s reopened.
And joined at her hip was Sarah Trickle. Kara and Sarah, don’t you just want to puke? (Don’t—it has lifelong social ramifications.) They’re cousins, and their moms are twins, so they practically are twins, too. But no one would mistake them as being identical. Sarah was everything Kara wasn’t—quiet and kind, like a little doll with a tiny little smile. She wore her long red hair in braids down the sides. Everyone wanted to be Sarah nearly as much as they wanted Kara’s approval. And Sarah was constantly trying to show that Kara wasn’t as vile as she made everyone think. “She didn’t mean it like that” and “She’s just joking around” and “That’s just Kara, just how she is” were phrases constantly dripping from Sarah’s lips.
Mom pushed the brownie tray toward Annie and Eliza. “Well, when it comes to Sarah, it really wasn’t her fault, lovey.”
“Yeah,” Dad said, “you should’ve seen her get off the bus. Head to toe covered in vomit. You really sprayed her.”
Annie pushed the brownie tray back. “That’s disgusting.”
“Second grade also led to,” I lowered my voice, “The Touch.”
“The Touch?” Alec echoed.
Mom handed Annie a napkin. “Sort of like tag, but Pipi’s always ‘It.’ If anyone touches her, they have to pass The Touch on to someone else.”
Alec whistled low. “That’s awful.”
“Moving on. Third grade.” I wrote basketball mistake next to the number.
Eliza snorted. “Pipi made the first basket of her entire life. For the wrong team.”
“That’s not that big of a deal,” Alec mused.
I crossed my arms. “It was the boys versus girls match. Girls were ahead. I’m the reason they lost. Even the principal heckled me. I’m still picked last every gym class. Whenever someone makes a ridiculous sports mistake, it’s called making a McGee. It was a big deal.”
Alec grabbed a brownie.
Fourth grade. I wrote peepee beside it.
Mom patted my hand.
Without looking up, I said, “My zipper was stuck. And Kara Samson refused to get me help.”
“For months, they called her PeePee McGee,” Eliza added. “Now it’s just Pipi.”
“Penelope. This year, I’m going back to Penelope,” I said. I wrote Jackson Thorpe on the paper next to the number five. My voice was super light as I said, “Some of the girls played a trick on me. I thought Jackson liked me. He didn’t.” I ran my hand along my neck, feeling how long my hair had grown since fifth grade. Dad sighed. His mouth was set in a line, but he didn’t say anything. Alec didn’t either. Mom muttered a nasty word under her breath.
“Sixth grade. Makeover issues,” I mumbled.
Eliza laughed, and Mom stomped on her foot. To Alec, Mom said, “Turns out eyebrows take a long, long time to grow back.”
“Eyebrow,” I corrected as I wrote a seven on the next line.
Mom and Dad stiffened. Even Eliza didn’t say a word.
Alec said, “Wh—”
“We don’t talk about seventh grade,” Mom cut him off.
Alec closed his mouth, realization dawning on him as he remembered. After a moment, he said, “But, Pipi, everyone has things like this happen to them. All of us have. I went to class once with two different shoes on, totally different pairs of sneaks. People busted me for weeks. But we move on.”
“My list isn’t like that,” I insisted.
“The thing is,” Dad said, still in his reporter’s voice, “this is your last year in middle school. Next year, you’ll be in high school. There are how many middle schools that funnel into that one building?”
“Five,” I answered.
“Right, and each of those schools has about two to two hundred fifty kids. So most of the kids you’re going to meet next year won’t know Pipi McGee as the girl who picks her nose, pees her pants, pukes on her friends, and draws herself as bacon with… you know. You get a fresh start. A clean slate.”
I slumped over in my seat with a groan. “No, instead I’ll get… like…” I wish I could do math in my head like Tasha. Instead, I guesstimated. “A thousand people who can jump in on the fun of humiliating Pipi McGee.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Alec muttered. Mom coughed on her bite of brownie.
“Someone tripped getting off the bus this morning,” I said. “He recovered, straightened himself up, and said, ‘Nearly pulled a McGee there.’ My name is a synonym for doing ridiculous stuff. It’s that bad.” I swiped a fingerful of frosting from the pan and shoved it into my mouth in despair. “I’m going to be a laughingstock for the rest of my life.”
Alec put his elbows on the counter next to Dad. “Or,” he said slowly, “you can do things differently. Make a change.”
Dad nodded. “This thing today that happened? That’s, eh, not a new embarrassment. It’s an old one you’re just feeling again. So, nothing really happened this year, right?”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you don’t like the way things are, change them,” Eliza snapped. “Make it better.”
Mom nodded.
“You guys act like changing is easy. That’s not the way it works.”
Everyone in the room except for Annie stood up. Each of them crossed their arms. Mom raised her eyebrow. “Look around, Pipi.”
I scanned the kitchen. My plump dad was standing next to a much younger, much hotter stepdad in the same kitchen with Mom, who went from teaching classes at the YMCA to owning her own gym, across from my sister who had a baby at age sixteen and was soon going to be a college graduate. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to get a lot of sympathy from this crowd on how hard it was to make some changes.
But the thing was, while their hurdles might have been a lot bigger than mine, that didn’t mean mine weren’t steep.
How do you stop being a joke? I was a literal joke in my school. Except for Tasha and maybe sometimes Ricky, no one saw me when they saw me. They saw Pipi McGee and waited for me to do something ridiculous so they could keep right on laughing. I didn’t even know what I could be known for aside from a social virus.
I ripped out the sheet from the reporter’s notebook, folded it in half, and put it in my pocket.
I paced around my bedroom, trying to get my thoughts to flow in a steady current instead of in thousands of ripples.
My room wasn’t exactly a sanctuary for clear thinking. It used to be Eliza’s, but after Annie was born, we switched bedrooms. While her room (now my room) was bigger,
my old room had a door that opened to the smaller guest room. Mom had turned that smaller room into Annie’s. When Eliza had this room, she had painted the ceiling a light blue and had darker blue walls. I added big white fluffy clouds across the ceiling when I moved in. Hanging down, attached by clear fishing line, were birds. My birds. I started making them in fifth grade, I think. I molded them with papier-mâché and painted them in super bright colors like teal, orange, and purple. Each one took a super long time to make, which is probably why I started doing it. When I’m making them, I’m not thinking about what everyone else is doing without me or saying about me.
Here’s something no one knew: when you lifted the wings of each bird, no matter how small they were, you’d find a little compartment. I hid beads or pretty stones in there like a secret. I liked the idea that there was more to them than people thought.
Mom, Dad, and Alec were always on me to make the birds for art class. Alec even said he’d rent a stand at the arts festival for me to sell them, but I liked having my little flock around me. I was running out of ceiling space, though. Near the end of the first semester, Northbrook Middle School held a talent show. A little bit of me—small enough to fit into one of the bird’s hidden compartments—thought about showing one of my creations at the show as my official talent.
Today, though, I ignored the birds, not even glancing at them as I closed the door to my room. People would only laugh at them so long as I was Pipi McGee, aka middle school laughingstock. I stopped in front of the giant corkboard over my desk. I ripped off the scraps of paper about last year’s assignments, pictures of me and Tasha, and participation certificates from field day. Once everything was off the board, I reached into my pocket, smoothed out the sheet of paper, and tacked The List of Humiliations right in the center.
Dad was right. Alec was right. Mom was right. Even Eliza was right.