The Humiliations of Pipi McGee

by Beth Vrabel

  Sarah meant business with this poetry club thing. “Okay, so I’ve been canvassing other schools in the area on what clubs they offer—most have poetry or creative writing clubs in high school, but almost none that are student-led in middle school. Kicking off new clubs this year could give us an edge in carrying them over to high school, making that service project a breeze.” She opened her notebook, where she had written down details. “With poetry, starting a club in middle school will be an advantage when we go to open mics. Less competition. And we’ll be a step ahead when we enter high school.”

  “Right,” Jackson said.

  “You were really serious about the open mic thing?” I asked.

  Both of them looked at me. “Yeah, that’s the ultimate goal, right?” Jackson said. “Any chance that we have to perform before the school talent show, the better.”

  “Talent show? Like in front of everyone?” I squirmed.

  “There’s an open mic in Collinsville,” Sarah said. “It’s held the first Tuesday of the month, but it’s not until eight at night.”

  “Have you been to one?” Jackson asked. “What if they’re weird about kids showing up?”

  Sarah nodded. “I went the last couple months. Told Mom I was studying.” Her face flushed. She took a deep breath and when she spoke it was in a gush. “The openness—the way everyone just spills their heart out there for everyone—it’s amazing. Everyone just listens to everyone else. They cheer each other on, no one interrupting or changing what anyone says. Just a person and a microphone, and everyone else listening to hard stuff, stuff that others would rather ignore. It’s—”

  “Wait.” I sat up super straight, my momentum sending the exercise ball shooting from behind me. “Isn’t poetry, like, just writing? Why would we need a microphone?”

  Sarah shrugged. “It depends on your style.” She smiled toward Jackson, who was muttering to himself across the room, chewing on his pencil, and then scratching out words in his notebook and writing down new ones. “His is, I guess, more traditional. Mine is way different.”

  I fought the grin tugging at my mouth. Jackson’s mutterings had been about sunsets that shined as brightly as “tremendous basketballs in a sky filled with hope” and “golden opportunity as unchecked as the net during a game against the West York Raiders.”

  Sarah asked, “Is there Wi-Fi here?”

  Soon I was watching the dozens of YouTube videos of spoken word poets Sarah pulled up on my phone. A lot of it I couldn’t access because of Mom’s filtering system on my phone, but what I could see was nothing like what I had thought of as poetry—it was raw and real. And the performers, standing up there in front of the mic? Maybe the poetry thing was getting to me, but it felt like they were grabbing their ribcages, ripping them open, and letting words fly out.

  I could make Sarah and Jackson think I was all into poetry by nodding along with them when they talked about it, but no way could I fool anyone on stage. All other humiliations would pale next to being in front of a microphone and having nothing to say.

  “I can’t do this,” I told Sarah. “I mean, listening to that? I don’t have anything that makes me feel that much.”

  Sarah smiled. “I saw you writing in that notebook.”

  Jackson’s head flipped up from his own writing at those words.

  I sighed. “Not that notebook, Jackson.” He nodded and went back to his writing.

  Sarah’s gaze on me didn’t waver. “Anyone who writes with the intensity you had that day has a lot to say.”

  “Yeah, but nothing I’d want to share in front of an audience.”

  Something flickered across Sarah’s face. “You might be surprised,” she said. “After you think about it, I mean. A stage, a microphone. Everyone in the audience. You can say whatever you want, whatever you need, and they’ll hear you. They’ll have to hear you.”

  I looked at her, remembering the overheard fight with Kara in the locker room. Remembering all of the references to secrets. “Do you have a lot to say?” I asked. “I mean…”

  Sarah glanced at Jackson, who was still muttering to himself, and then ducked her head. “I don’t know that I have a lot to say, but…” She took a deep breath, then glanced up at me. Her cheeks had red circles in the middle. “Maybe what I want to say is hard to hear.”

  “Because it’s sad?” I asked. An unwelcome rush of something—sympathy, I guess—gushed through me. For Sarah Stinking Trickle. This was totally not helpful to The Plan.

  She shook her head. “No, hard to hear because no one… it kind of… needs a bigger…”

  “What you need,” said Jackson, his voice slicing through Sarah’s pause, “are more metaphors. That’s key. The key that unlocks the heart.” He mimed unlocking his heart. “Like this.” He straightened his spine and threw out his right arm. In his left hand, he held his notebook. “I sat on a chair of air, a bubble of space encased in plastic.” He stretched the word plastic, somehow making the first syllable rhyme with space.

  I squinted at him. “But,” I pointed out, “that’s not a metaphor. You’re literally sitting on a chair of air.”

  “Yes!” Jackson said, now thrusting his arm into the air. “You get it!”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said slowly. “I think I do. Like you’re literally sitting on an inflatable chair, encased in plastic, but we’re metaphorically sitting on past events—memories as light as air—that we’ve wrapped in something artificial to make solid beneath us.”

  Jackson’s eyes widened. He nodded to himself. “Wow. Yeah. I mean, right. Exactly. That’s exactly what I was thinking.” He lowered his arms and wrote in the notebook. I heard his low mutterings, “wrapped in something artificial. Make solid… ”

  “Huh,” I said. Was that really what Jackson had meant? “You’re super good at this,” I told her.

  “Thanks,” Jackson said. Sarah just smiled. “Don’t worry,” he added. “You’ll get there. Just pay attention to what I do.”

  We left soon after that, when Mom said it was time to head home for dinner. Sarah texted me a list of other spoken word poets to check out.

  Jackson texted me one of his poems. And then another.

  And another.

  I had really thought texts from Jackson would be more thrilling.

  Saturday morning, Eliza had to go to work, so Mom was going to drop off Annie at the birthday party. I was in my bedroom, finishing up another bird. This one was small, only about the size of my thumb. I had my iPad open to a page on mountain bluebirds and was using that as I added a final touch—a dark brown feather down its cobalt blue back. Already, I had tucked a shiny rhinestone in the secret compartment under its wing. Bluebirds are supposed to mean good luck and, from what I was overhearing between Eliza and Annie, Eliza could definitely use some bluebirds right about then.

  She was trying to convince Annie to wear a headband to the party.

  “Those are to keep hair out of people’s eyes,” Annie said. “My hair doesn’t even reach my eyebrowns.” When Annie stopped calling eyebrows eyebrowns, I’d wear all black and cry for days on end.

  “But it looks pretty,” Eliza said.

  “Looks aren’t important, Eliza,” she said.

  “Annie,” Eliza said, “would you call me Mom? Or Mama?”

  I peeked out of my bedroom and down the hall to where they stood in the bathroom, silhouetted in light. Annie was standing, Eliza kneeling in front of her. Annie touched Eliza’s cheek. “Is this because MomMom is having a new baby?”

  Eliza shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It’s because you’re my baby.”

  Annie dropped her hand. She took such a deep breath that I saw her shoulders peak. Then she said, “I’ll think about it if I don’t have to wear the headband.”

  “That’s called blackmail,” Eliza said, “and it’s not very nice.”

  “Neither are headbands.”

  “I thought you loved headbands,” Eliza said. “Mom said you picked out a bunch of them as Tabitha�
��s present!”

  Annie shifted, hand on her hip. “Exactly.”

  Eliza laughed, a quick chuckle that soon was joined by Annie’s giggle. “Okay, you don’t have to wear the headband.” She swept it off Annie’s head and smoothed the hair back into place with her palm.

  “Thank you, Eliza,” Annie said.

  Eliza sighed. “Have a good time at the party. Try to make some friends, okay?”

  Annie skipped from the bathroom down the hall. She pushed open my bedroom door. “MomMom says you’re supposed to come, too.”

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  Annie put one hand at her side and gestured outward with her other hand, suddenly looking just like Mom. “‘I don’t know what Pipi’s up to lately, but she’s been secretive and moody. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.’”

  “She said that to you?” I gasped.

  “No,” Annie said. “She said that to Alec. But I heard. And then Alec said…”—now Annie lowered her arms, stood up straight, and deepened her voice—“‘You should spend some time with her. One on one.’” She crossed her arms. “And then MomMom said that she was going to come up with an excuse for you to come along today.”

  “You shouldn’t spy on people, Annie.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Spying is definitely not your job.”

  “I’m training.” Annie skipped down the rest of the hall. A few minutes later, Mom told me she needed my help running errands.

  I grabbed the bluebird, made sure the brown paint had set, and shoved it in my pocket. A little luck wouldn’t hurt me or Annie, either.

  The birthday party was where every little squirt in town celebrated—P. Art Tee’s Pizza.

  It was a giant room with a million video games whirring and blaring, laser lights whipping around from the ceiling, a giant ball pit in the middle, ride-on animals stationed throughout, and buckets of popcorn and cotton candy next to slowly rotating pizzas on buffet tables along the sides. Amid all of it were a trillion small kids going absolutely bananas, running, jumping, screaming, laughing. A couple dozen parents sat at long tables along the sides with bouquets of balloons, piles of presents, and sheet cakes. The parents seemed to be in two factions—a group who followed kids around, snapping pictures, and a second that sat wincing and rubbing at their temples.

  “So, okay,” Mom said to Annie as we stood by the entrance. She had always been a wince-and-rub-temples P. Art Tee parent. “You just go straight through there and find Tabitha’s table.”

  Annie clutched my arm with both hands. “You can’t leave me here.”

  “Look how much fun everyone’s having!” I said. Annie slowly raised a hand and pointed to a corner where a kid was puking into a trash can.

  Mom glanced around. “Let’s just find Tabitha’s table, okay?”

  Annie’s grip on my arm didn’t loosen. We walked past a half dozen party tables looking for Tabitha’s party. “There she is!” Mom pointed across the cavernous room. I shifted Annie’s grip from my arm to Mom’s. A conga line of kids streamed between us.

  “I’ll wait here,” I said, as more and more kids joined the conga line. Mom and Annie disappeared behind them. I sank onto an empty bench seat at one of the party tables. After a second, something poked me in the knee. I peeked under the table. Big brown eyes gazed back at me.

  “Piper?” I asked.

  The kindergartener was crouched under the table, blinking like an owl. “Hi,” she said.

  “What are you doing under there?”

  Slowly Piper wormed out and sat across from me. She pulled a paper cup of Coke closer, wrapping her hand around it. She rested her chin on her other hand and then leveled me with a weary look. “It’s like this, Pipi,” she said. “I got the Pink Eye.”

  I squinted at her. “Your eyes look fine.”

  “No.” She sighed. “I mean I had the Pink Eye.” She shook her head, then took a swig of Coke. “And then so did everyone else.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Remember the pirate dress up?” Piper said.

  I squirmed. “Eyepatch?”

  Piper sighed. She took another gulp of soda. “All the girls got crusty eyed. Thanks to me.”

  “That was a few days ago. They’ve all got to be better now, right?”

  Piper shrugged. “I don’t think so. No one’s here. ’Cept you.”

  I looked down the long table, noticing the unicorn placemats and a unicorn cake. Happy 5th Birthday Piper was iced in pink and purple across the top of the cake. “It’s your birthday?” I asked.

  Piper scrunched her eyebrows together. “That’s why you’re here, right?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh, yeah. Of course. Happy birthday!” I gulped. “Who did you invite? I bet they’re just running late.”

  Piper pushed away the cup. “The whole class. They were supposed to be here at one o’clock. What time is it now?”

  I glanced at the wall clock. It was one thirty-seven. “Oh, just about that time.”

  “Mom said she’s going to make sure they all didn’t go to the other P. Art Tee’s.” Piper pointed to a woman standing by the entrance with a phone to her ear. I could just make out a loud, “It’s Piper’s birthday and no one is here. How could everyone in the class suddenly have plans? What do you mean your daughter changed her mind?”

  Piper slouched in her seat, the fist holding up her face smooshing it. “They said they don’t want to be friends with Pink Eye Piper.”

  “Who said that?” I asked, feeling the same cold rush as when I overheard someone talking about the Pipi Touch.

  “Everyone,” Piper said. “Guess they’re not coming to my party. At least I’ll get one present.” She then looked at me straight on.

  “Uh…” I glanced around. Mom headed in my direction with Annie wrapped around her leg.

  Mom’s face was red and her mouth set in a hard, white line as she hissed, “You have to stay at the party! Play with your friends!” Annie didn’t say a word, just clung to Mom’s leg like a spider monkey.

  “Wait here a sec, okay, Piper?” I weaved through the crowd of kids to Mom and Annie. “Listen,” I said to them, “I’m going to stay.”

  “What?” Mom and Annie said in unison.

  “That little girl, Piper, she’s one of the kindergarteners I volunteer with. No one came to her party.”

  Mom’s face softened.

  “And it’s kind of my fault,” I whispered, thinking about how I had ignored Piper’s swollen eye.

  “Penelope!” Mom’s mouth was a white line again.

  “I’m going to fix it!” I held out my hand to Annie. “Annie, do you want to meet my friend Piper?”

  Annie stared at my hand a second, then glanced over her shoulder to where Tabitha’s party was in full swing. I could tell who Tabitha was because she wore a giant fluffy tutu and a rhinestone crown. She was twirling, her mouth in a see-all-my-teeth smile. “Does Piper smile like this?” Annie bared her teeth.

  “No,” I said, “but she does think she’s going to be a unicorn someday.”

  “Okay.” Annie grabbed my hand and let me pull her to stand beside me.

  Mom glanced from me to Annie and over our shoulders at Piper. “Can you at least get Annie to circle back to Tabitha at some point?”

  I nodded. “Absolutely.”

  Mom patted Annie’s head. “Okay. Guess I’ll have to spend the afternoon alone.” She rubbed at her temples as the P. Art Tee DJ pumped out another techno song. “See you ladies in two hours.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill and whistled as she walked away.

  “I’m not going back to Tabitha,” Annie said as soon as Mom was by the door. “I think she’s a robot.” She made the all-teeth smile face again. Tabitha rushed by in a crowd of other tutu-ed girls, making the same overly smiling face.

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “Listen,” I said, kneeling next to Annie. “How about you just run over to Tabitha’s table while no one’s there, grab the present you brought, and
sneak it back over to Piper? Then you’ll technically have circled back, right?”

  Annie nodded. “Spy training,” she whispered to herself. Then Annie darted ahead, ducking when she got to a video game machine, then dropping to all fours to crawl to Tabitha’s table. Her little hand stretched up to the table, searching for the present she had brought and knocking it to the ground. Then she scurried back, clutching the gift, in the same secret agent style.

  “You really have been training to be a spy,” I told her.

  “Mostly at home.” Annie leaned toward me. “I’ve seen a lot.”

  I tried not to think about what that meant and concentrated on the fact that we were seriously low on party guests for Piper. I grabbed my phone, firing out a text. SOS. Piper. At P. Art Tee’s. No one came to her bday party. Can you come?

  Ricky wrote back in seconds. Be there in five.

  It only took him four minutes to show up with a half dozen little kids. Three of them were literally hanging on to his legs the way Annie had been earlier with Mom. All of them had Ricky’s thick, dark swoop of hair and huge brown eyes.

  “You came!” I said.

  “I have five little brothers and a sister, and this is an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet a block from our house.” He shook one of the kids off his leg. The little boy fell back, laughed, and jump tackled his leg again. “I say P. Art Tee’s and they assemble faster than the Avengers.”

  I filled in Ricky on what had happened. Then he rounded up his siblings. “Birthday party time, guys.”

  “Woot woot!” the six of them said together and marched forward like, well, the Avengers.

  Two hours and four pizzas later, Piper was beaming. She bounced up and down, throwing invisible unicorn treats to Ricky’s brothers and sister, who jumped to gobble them up. Even Annie joined in; I hadn’t seen her smile so much ever. The cake was demolished, and though Ricky’s siblings hadn’t come with gifts, they did give her mountains of tickets they had won in the games, which she used to buy everyone whoopie cushions.

  Annie handed Piper the gift she had bought for Tabitha, who didn’t seem to notice that Annie was at a different party. Piper tore open the card first. Annie had made it herself. It was a robot with a tutu. The gift was a bunch of headbands. Piper put them all on at once, making Annie giggle.