by Beth Vrabel
“What about them?”
“Well, like, why are they Legos?” He blinked.
I blinked.
Okay, so maybe he’s not my little McGee.
Pigtails slipped her hand into mine, making me jump. Her hand was hot and sticky, and I tried not to think about why that might be. Ricky leaned back on his elbows and smiled at the girl.
“What kind of dog?”
Pigtails turned back to Ricky. “A cute dog,” she said. “Not an ugly dog with ugly little spots all over its ugly little body.”
“What are you going to name your dog?” Ricky asked Pigtails.
“Spot, probably.”
Ricky erupted in laughter so loud his statue kids toppled over behind him. “Looks like the future Pipi McGee found you.”
Pigtails glowered at him, her mouth twisted and eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” we said at the same time.
My moment had arrived!
Art class. When Miss Gonzalez called us back inside following recess in the courtyard, bins of crayons sat on all the tables and a sheet of white paper waited at each seat.
“Find a chair, children,” she called. “We’re going to kick off a Northbrook Primary tradition—creating self-portraits! What do you think self-portraits are?”
Lego Boy raised his hand. You would not be surprised by what he thought self-portraits might be.
“No, David,” Miss Gonzalez responded. “Self-portraits are not Legos. Anyone else?”
A surprising number of students felt very confident about entirely guessing what self-portraits might be, including Pigtails, who said, kind of hopefully, that they were a type of cake. Finally, Miss Gonzalez explained that the kids would be drawing pictures of themselves. “Yes, your own selves.”
All of the twenty-four kindergarteners looked down at their bodies in surprise. Two clapped. They were the future Sarah Trickle and Jackson Thorpe. Pigtails raised her hand.
“You will be drawing pictures of yourself when you are older, like our helpers today! Think about what you will look like and what you will be doing when you are big kids like they are.
“Yes, Piper?”
Ricky shot me a look. Yeah, I know. Piper sounds a bit like Pipi. I rolled my eyes and his shoulders shook.
“But what if you’re not a kid when you’re bigger?” Piper asked.
“We’re just thinking about when you’re an eighth grader—thirteen or fourteen years old, Piper. So, you will be a kid.”
“No. By then, I’ll be a unicorn.”
The rest of the class laughed, some of them even pointing at Piper, whose face turned redder and redder. “I will!” she bellowed. “I will! I will! I will! And then I’ll poke all of you with my—”
“Now, class!” Miss Gonzalez clapped her hands hard three times. Though it was just day three, the class knew to copy her claps and quiet down. “We do not laugh at each other in this room.” She turned to Piper and quietly added, “Nor do we threaten to poke each other with one’s unicorn horns.”
“Horn,” said Piper, crossing her arms, face still red.
“Excuse me?”
“Horn. Unicorns only have one horn. I’m going to poke them with my horn.” Her eyes narrowed, and she glared around at each kid looking back at her. Quietly, she growled, “Someday.”
“That’s enough, Piper.” Miss Gonzalez turned back to the class. “I want you to draw yourself as a human.” She ignored Piper’s groan and my slow clap. “And I want you to draw yourself carefully and with detail. That means choosing the right colors, taking your time to draw yourself very well, and filling in with color. No peek-a-boos of white spots in your drawing! We’re going to work on this until snack time, so stretch out your work.” Miss Gonzalez couldn’t seem to get through a sentence without emphasizing a particular word.
“May we take the drawing home when we finish so our parents can see it?” Future Sarah Trickle asked while actual Sarah Trickle leaned down and whispered that she was so smart for using may instead of can. I rolled my eyes. Or at least, I would’ve, had I not noticed Piper doing the same thing.
“These are very special drawings,” Miss Gonzalez said, “and will stay in our classroom in a very special binder for the remainder of the year. Your parents will be able to see them at parent-teacher conference in November. But they’ll stay here in the binder, and then at the end of the school year, they’ll be given to the guidance counselor, who will put them in your permanent file. But don’t worry.” She glanced toward Sarah, Jackson, Ricky, and me and winked. “You will see them again.”
My cheeks burned. Mom and Dad had seen my Bacon Boob drawing and just left it there, in my very special permanent file without ripping it from the binder? How could they?
Piper yanked on my hand. Her brown eyes were serious. “I’m going to add the horn somewhere no one will think to look.”
And I’m going to erase it, Little McGee. I looked around the room. Lego Boy was already at his seat, sketching himself in little rectangles with knobs on the top of a rounded head. Narrator Boy from the bus drew himself with his head tilted like a hinge. Piper sank into the seat in front of me, plotting where to hide her horn. I’d fix them all, the moment I had a chance. I’d sneak into the binders, round out Lego Boy’s body and erase his knobs. I’d straighten Narrator’s head. And I’d eliminate Piper’s horn, wherever she hid it.
I glanced over at Future Sarah Trickle, who drew herself in a lovely little dress with a big red bow in the middle of her hair. She carefully sketched out her face, fringing her eye with long eyelashes. Oops. She forgot to draw a second eye. I’d skip her binder.
Ricky elbowed my side. I hadn’t even heard him move across the room. “What are you up to?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, smoothing my hair with my hands.
“Creepy smile on your face, your head nodding like you’re in the middle of a deep conversation. What are you plotting?”
“Why would I be plotting anything?”
Ricky raised an eyebrow. He was super good at that. “I don’t know. You’ve been up to something today. Tasha even said something about it.”
“Tasha?” I pulled my eyes away from Future Jackson Thorpe’s paper, in which he was catching a football in the air, a huge smile stretching from ear to ear. Something about learning that Ricky and Tasha had been talking without me felt strange, like two pieces of bread calling themselves a sandwich without the peanut butter holding them together. I guess it was also kind of odd to think of yourself as peanut butter.
“Earth to Penelope!” Ricky said.
“You called me by my name,” I said, surprise coloring my voice. My eyes locked with Ricky’s. His eyebrow lowered and his face stilled, that sideways grin going soft for a moment.
He nodded. “Penelope,” he said softly. “I like your name.”
For some reason, my cheeks flushed. I nodded. “Me, too,” I whispered.
“So…” Ricky said as I worked to get my face back into a neutral expression. Geez, how desperate was I to be a regular person if someone calling me by my actual name was enough to make my face practically explode into flames? “You’re up to something…” Ricky prodded.
I bit my lip, eyes gliding around the room to make sure Jackson and Sarah weren’t within earshot. I nodded. “I’m going to make up for everything.”
“Everything?” Ricky asked.
“Yeah, everything that has happened to me. Before we get to high school, I’m going to redeem myself for all of my humiliations.”
Ricky tilted his head, looking like Narrator Boy for a brief second.
“Things like the bacon drawing of myself,” I whispered. “I’m going to redeem myself by making sure these twerps don’t do the same stuff I did.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
I fixed my gaze on a little pail of palm-sized erasers. “I’ll do what I have to.”
Ricky crossed his arms.
“What?” I asked. Miss Gonz
alez glanced over at us and then gestured toward the kids. Ricky started to walk away, but I grabbed his arm. “What?” I asked again.
Still not looking at me, he said, “Do you remember kindergarten?”
“Of course, I remember kindergarten. Why do you think I’m here? This is where it all started, where everything began to fall apart.”
He shook his head, his dark hair falling across his forehead. “Do you remember anything else about kindergarten?”
I shrugged, ignoring the urge to rub my nose. “I remember everyone laughing at me. I remember crying.”
Ricky looked at me then.
“What?” I asked.
“Do you remember anything about anyone else?”
I shook my head, feeling like I was missing something important. “Like what?”
Ricky huffed from his nose. “Like Sarah?”
My turn to huff. “You mean like how everyone chased her around at recess and begged to go to her sleepovers and wormed their way into the seats next to her on the rug? Yeah, I remember.”
“I was thinking more about how she cried under the table when we all had to count to one hundred. You marched up to the teacher and demanded to go next, even though you couldn’t do it either.”
“I could so!” I yelped.
Ricky laughed, all the stoniness falling from his face. “Yeah, you said, ‘I count it my way. You count it yours.’ First and only time Miss Simpson ever got mad.”
“I forgot all about that.” I laughed. “I was pretty fierce, wasn’t I?”
“You scared me. But I dunno. She could have you beat.” He pointed to Piper, who was drawing her picture so hard the pencil point broke. Ricky’s chin jerked toward Jackson, who was posing with an imaginary football, acting like a model for Future Jackson Thorpe. “What about him? Remember when he thought he could fly?”
I gasped. “That’s right! He jumped off the top of the monkey bars and got stitches on his chin.”
“And Miss Simpson made him show everyone what happens when—”
“Kindergarteners don’t think through their actions,” we finished in unison.
“I forgot all about how she used to say that.” I snorted. “It was so annoying.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ricky said, but I didn’t know if he meant that he knew it had been annoying or that I had forgotten all about it.
A moment of quiet felt thick between us. “What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?” Ricky knelt down and helped Lego Boy sort through the bucket of skin color crayons for the perfect brown.
When he stood up, I asked again, “What did you do in kindergarten?”
He flashed a smile, gone as quickly as it had appeared. “I was with you. The whole time, Penelope. But you don’t remember that, do you?”
I tried to nod or laugh or do anything with my face aside from showing my surprise but totally failed. Ricky huffed again. “All you remember is the drawing.”
I sighed. “That’s why I have to redeem myself. So I can move on.”
“And then what?” Ricky asked.
“And then I can be myself!”
“And who’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
Miss Gonzalez stood from where she was kneeling next to a student and narrowed her eyes at us. I plastered a smile on my face and replaced Piper’s broken pencil with a new one. Slowly, Miss Gonzalez lowered herself down again.
Ricky looked at me, both eyebrows raised. I knew he was waiting for an answer.
“Maybe,” I started, choosing my words carefully, “if none of the embarrassing things had happened to me, I’d be like her.” I pointed to Sarah. “I mean, look at her!” Sarah glided around the classroom. The little kids’ heads turned everywhere she went, watching her with huge smiles, like she was an angel or something. “What’s so great about her aside from her never accidentally drawing herself as breakfast meat, throwing up all over everyone, peeing her pants, removing an eyebrow—”
“I get it. I get it!” Ricky cut in as Future Sarah Trickle brought her perfect little drawing to the front of the room and placed it on the table. First one done, but her drawing was completely perfect—she even caught the missing eye. The drawing showed a little girl with long brown hair, a triangle dress, sun shining with a big smile on its yellow face, green grass growing all around. “Sarah’s like that drawing. So perfect it doesn’t seem real.”
“I know.” I groaned.
“But, you?” He sort of laughed. He nodded toward Piper’s drawing. It was full of stuff—rainbows and clouds and toys and a bicycle and something that kind of looked like a tree with marshmallow blossoms. In the middle stood a giant dog, totally brown without a single spot. On top of the dog’s head was a teeny tiny little girl with a tiny horn sticking straight out of her stomach.
“You are like that,” Ricky finished. “You’re authentic. You’re a spotless dog named Spot.”
“Did you just call me a dog?”
Ricky sighed and went to help Lego Boy finish his drawing.
Chapter Six
“Tell me again,” Tasha said, her elbows nearly touching mine as she leaned across the counter at Mom’s gym. I was on the opposite side, sitting on a stool, making sure customers flashed their membership card as they streamed into the gym. You’d be shocked how many people tried to use other gym passes to get into Mom’s gym. I kept telling Mom to invest in one of those scanners like they have at Starbucks, but she said I’m the only scanner she needs. In other words, the only one she doesn’t have to pay.
I rolled my eyes at my best friend. “He was reading Crow Reaper.”
Tasha squealed and clapped her hands, making her earrings swing. She was wearing some of my birds as earrings. I had given them to her for her birthday; they were super tiny blue parrots, like a bird we had seen at the zoo on a field trip. She had fastened them to giant hoops. I overheard someone asking her once where she got them, and Tasha just winked at me and said, “A local artist.” I liked that she had called me an artist, but it kind of bothered me that she didn’t say I made them, though later she told me that was because I was so secretive about my art. (After kindergarten, who could blame me?)
“Ricky likes CR,” Tasha whispered. “Who would’ve thought!”
“Well, the books are pretty popular, aren’t they?”
Tasha ignored me.
I glanced around for Mom. She was getting ready for her next class—spin. It’s where a bunch of people pedal superfast for an hour while my mom yells at them at the top of her lungs. Class starts off slow and easy. Then, bam! Mom hits you with nineties music and screams at you to move, move, move like it’s the end of the world. I kept telling her to vary the music and work with the giant projection screen—so many missed opportunities to show awesome backgrounds. I even took her through a routine I made up myself, but she said she didn’t want to mess with the graphics. Everyone left class feeling endorphin-rushed happy and so sweaty that I had to open the doors to the gym for about fifteen minutes to get rid of the condensation and funky odor.
Now Mom was standing by her main bike, flipping through her phone, probably adding more boy band songs to her dated soundtrack.
“And,” I added, now that I knew Mom wasn’t in earshot, “I made progress on The Plan.”
“What?” asked Tasha, her thumbs brushing the blue bird hanging from her ear.
“The Plan,” I repeated. “In kindergarten volunteering. They just started making self-portraits and I’m going to make sure no one, you know…”
“Pulls a McGee?” Tasha finished.
I winced. “I wish people would stop calling it that.”
“How are you going to do it?” asked Tasha, giving me her full attention at last.
“This one kid—Piper—she wants to be a unicorn when she grows up.” I opened the drawer behind the desk and pulled out a couple strands of cherry licorice. Mom kept the sugar hidden, but not well hidden.
Tasha snagged her piece. “So, Piper d
rew herself with a horn?”
“A hidden horn,” I said around a bite, “so Miss Gonzalez wouldn’t see it. She put it coming out of her stomach.”
“Aww! That’s not so bad,” Tasha said. “I bet it’s kind of cute.”
“It’s adorable. Now. But I’m looking out for the kid.” I leaned toward Tasha and lowered my voice as a group of gym-goers streamed in. “If she’s following in my less-than-esteemed footsteps, who knows what damage her spike-belly could do by eighth grade?”
Tasha considered what I said. “So, you erase the horn and then scratch kindergarten off your list? Seems like a fair plan.”
I nodded. “Yeah, technically, it’ll be time to move on…”
“But?” Tasha prompted.
“But I’m going to keep an eye on this kid.”
Tasha smiled. “You like her.”
I nodded. “I do. I’m going to look out for her. Make sure she ends up with the right kind of friends. That sort of thing.”
“Are you sure—” Tasha opened her mouth to say something more just as the door opened again, but then she quickly snapped it shut. Her eyes widened as she took in the newcomer’s reflection in the mirror behind the desk. Her hand darted out and curled around my elbow. “Pipi—”
I looked up. All the sweetness from the candy left my mouth. My breath sucked inward as my lungs cowered. My heart, on the other hand, thrummed like it was the middle of Mom’s spin class.
In front of me stood the reason I don’t speak about seventh grade. Ever.
Frau Jacobs.
“Ah, Miss McGee.” Frau Jacobs’s thick lips pulled back in what was supposed to be, I think, a smile but which really looked like two slugs stretching out in the sun. White specks of spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth. “Whatever are you doing behind that desk?”
I stared at her, my heart slamming away in my chest. Its message was clear—Get away! Get away! But I couldn’t, wouldn’t, move. We don’t leave in the middle of the class Frau’s sugary sweet voice echoed in my head.
How could someone who looked so much like everyone’s favorite grandma—spittle aside—actually be evil? A five-foot-two-inch-tall, sugar-smelling goblin. Frau Jacobs was decked out in what looked like kite material—super loose-fitting windbreaker pants and jacket, all of it smattered in bright red and orange starbursts.