Chasing Orion

by Kathryn Lasky

  “Hey, sit down, back there!” the bus driver yelled. One girl had stood up to join the huddle.

  We got to school way too quickly. All the girls rushed forward before I could even get out of my seat. I knew as soon as I got to school that I would hate it. I didn’t like the school building, which was dark and old-looking, and all the Mustard Seeds were in my class.

  Evelyn was in my class, too, however. Her bus had arrived before ours, and there she was in Room 22 standing by her desk in the same laundry-bag dress she had worn the first day I met her at the library. It had these huge patch pockets on the front that she claimed she liked because she could put stuff in them. She could have gone camping and had a week’s worth of provisions in those pockets. And as if the dress wasn’t bad enough, she had added a beret! I guess to cover up the perm that still had several inches to go before the last frizzy traces would be history. “Wanna sit next to me?” she asked. “I saved you a place. Teacher said we could sit wherever we want.”

  “Sure,” I said. I knew right then that my fate had been sealed. My destiny fixed. I would remain on the fringes, if that, of the popular kids. But I felt a certain defiant pleasure at the same time. I didn’t want to be with those Mustard Seed girls. They weren’t nearly as neat as my old friends anyhow.

  We each had to stand up and say our names and one thing about ourselves that no one would know just by looking at us. For instance you couldn’t stand up and say, ‘My name is Carole and I have straight blond hair.’ The teacher, who had a face like a prune — dried, not canned — began with the Mustard Seeds.

  “My name is Amy Moncton, and I like fashion.”

  “My name is Patty Werthheimer, and”— giggle, giggle —“I like fashion, too.” By the time it came to the fourth Mustard Seed, the Prune said, “No more fashion. Think of something original.”

  “My name is Linda Dorf.”

  “Dwarf?” one of the boys said. There was a roar of laughter. This did not faze Linda. She spun around and glared at him. “No, the name is Dorf, D-o-r-f.” If that had been me, I would have vaporized on the spot. But these Mustard Seeds were something else. Then she cocked her head almost flirtatiously and said, “In addition to liking fashion, I think Grace Kelly is the most beautiful woman in the world.” I dreaded when my turn would come. I frantically tried to think of something I could say about myself. Evelyn was next, then me. She stood up, engulfed by her dress. She had taken off the beret because you were not permitted to wear hats in class. Her hair, though somewhat improved, still looked pretty bad. It was as if the electrified frizzle was hooked up to a lower voltage. “My name is . . .” But she spoke so low that even though I was sitting next to her, I could hardly hear a word. I suddenly felt terribly sorry for her. I realized that Evelyn, who was so confident about a lot of things, was absolutely terrified now. This was a new school for her as well.

  “Speak up, dear,” the Prune said. As soon as a teacher calls you “dear,” you know you’re in trouble. You become an instant object of pity in the eyes of everyone else in the classroom. “My name is Evelyn Winkler, and I like reading books.” She sat down very quickly. I couldn’t help but look at her now. Everything was wrong with Evelyn Winkler. She wore glasses that belonged on the face of a grandmother, not even a mother. Her name was an old-lady name. Who named a baby Evelyn? And her dress looked like it had belonged to some very dowdy grown-up woman. The kind of woman that maybe works in a city office inspecting records. I once had to go to the department of motor vehicles with my mother, and there was the grayest bunch of little old ladies with gray hair and bad permanents behind the high counters shoving forms through little slotted windows. I mean, even my grandmother dressed more fashionably than Evelyn.

  But now it was my turn. “My name is Georgia Louise Mason. But people call me Georgie.” I began to sit down.

  “One minute, Georgie,” the Prune said. “Don’t you want to tell us something about yourself that we wouldn’t otherwise know?”

  “I just did.”

  The Prune blinked. “What did you tell us?”

  I was halfway between standing and sitting. “I told you that people call me Georgie. You didn’t know that before.” There were some giggles from the back of the class.

  Then I heard someone whisper, “Her name, is that all there is to her? Wow!”

  “No, triple wow. She has three names!”

  There was a ripple of giggles from the back of the room. I felt something begin to wither inside me. Then to add insult to injury, the Prune sank me with the d word. “That’s true, dear, but could you tell us something more?”

  So I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. “My next-door neighbor is in an iron lung and she’s very beautiful and fashionable!” I plopped down in my seat. There was a collective gasp that swept through the room like a rogue wind and then giggling shrieks.

  “Quiet! Quiet! Class!” The Prune slammed her palm on the desk. “There is nothing funny about being in an iron lung. Nothing at all.”

  Oh, Lord, what had I done? Why had I ever said that? I just closed my eyes. I wanted to dissolve. I wanted to vanish.

  Arithmetic was our first class. The Prune was trying to figure out what we knew. So she put some fractions up on the board and then wrote them as decimal points and wanted to know if we knew how to do that. So she put up another fraction. No one raised a hand. I knew, but I wasn’t going to raise my hand. I looked over at Evelyn. She knew too. I could see her writing it on a piece of paper, but she wasn’t going to raise her hand either. Safety in silence.

  Things did not improve at recess. The Mustard Seeds had brought jump ropes. They were very good. They knew all the jump-rope rhymes.

  “Cinderella, dressed in yellow,

  went upstairs to kiss a fellow,

  made a mistake

  and kissed a snake.

  How many doctors

  did it take?”

  Then they all started counting. Amy Moncton was jumping as her mustard seed glinted in the sun and flopped rhythmically against her chest. Evelyn and I just watched.

  “Aren’t you broiling in that outfit of yours?” a Mustard Seed asked me as we lined up to go back into school.

  “I’m fine.”

  She turned to the other girls clustered around her and began giggling.

  The second day of school was just as awful. A girl named Charlene pointed at my feet and said, “Oh, look, she’s wearing those socks again — anklets!” All of them had thick socks that rolled over, making a nice cuff at the top of their brand-new saddle shoes. I did not have saddle shoes. I wore sneakers because they were more comfortable, and thin socks. I was simply mortified. When I got home that day no one was there because Mom had an after-school meeting.

  I decided to call Phyllis. “Phyllis?” I felt this huge lump swelling in my throat.”

  “What’s wrong, Georgie?”

  “Everything. Can I come over?”

  “Sure.”

  She was in the sunroom. The tears were leaking down my face.

  “What is it, Georgie?”

  “Phyllis, school is so awful. I tried, I really did. I know it’s only been two days, but these girls are mean and horrible. They think they are so great. They all dress a certain way and they think I’m weird. And they all wear mustard seeds and saddle shoes with thick socks and I . . . I . . . d-d-d-don’t even own saddle shoes.” Then I felt so terrible. I mean, here was poor Phyllis who two weeks before had had some sort of seizure when they tried to wean her. Imagine crying to a young beautiful teenage girl in an iron lung about not having a mustard seed and saddle shoes and thick socks.

  “Oh, Georgie.” There was the hollow sound she made when she sighed.

  At that moment, Emmett came in.

  “Emmett, take this girl out and buy her some saddle shoes, thick socks, and a mustard-seed pendant.”

  “Huh?” Emmett said. He looked at me

  Sally had come in and said that she knew there was a sale going on at
L.S. Ayres department store.

  “You mean, all the way downtown?” Emmett said.

  “Yes!” Phyllis said. “Come on, Emmett. This is important.”

  I was still snuffling wetly, hiccuping and stuttering out rags of sentences. It was fairly ridiculous to think that a mustard seed and saddle shoes could have enhanced my appearance that much, or my dignity in the eyes of my Crooked Creek peers.

  “OK,” Emmett said. So we were off.

  “Oh, yes,” the saleslady was saying. “All the girls want to wear mustard seeds. How they ever get that little tiny seed into the glass ball, I’ll never know.” Emmett and I were standing at the jewelry counter in the department store, looking at the display of the mustard seeds trapped in what appeared to be solid spheres of glass. “I’ve sold over fifty of these in the last week alone. They are the rage.”

  “So which one do you want, Georgie?”

  “There’s quite a price range,” the lady offered. “It depends on the quality of the glass and the size of the seed, and of course if you want a gold or silver-plated chain.”

  “We better go for one of the less expensive ones,” Emmett said. I stood staring at them. I certainly couldn’t tell the difference. But suddenly I didn’t even care. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Come on, decide,” Emmett urged.

  “I can’t.”

  “Look, this is not an earthshaking decision.” The saleslady walked away.

  “Yeah, that’s just the point,” I muttered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that I don’t think that me buying this is going to change anything.”

  “Whoever said it was?” Emmett asked. He looked confused.

  “Look, never mind. I don’t want it. The saddle shoes you got me are fine. Enough.”

  I didn’t want to explain it all to Emmett, but all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be included with the mustard-seed girls. As a matter of fact, coming home in the car, I thought I might wait a day or two to wear my new saddle shoes. I could just start with the socks tomorrow and my old sneakers.

  By the end of the second week of school, one good thing had happened. They changed the bus route a little bit. So now Evelyn was on my bus. At least I had someone to talk to. We avoided the Mustard Seeds as much as possible. During recess we discovered this big anthill at the edge of the playground, and this was where we had our longest talks, just looking at this anthill. It sounds dumb, I know, but Evelyn made it all very interesting. She knew a lot about ants, it turned out, because her grandfather was an ant specialist and taught at Indiana University in the ant department or something like that. There was a big word for what he did. One of those “ology” words. But it was just easier to think of it as ants. So we would sit there and poke T sticks into the holes, just to disturb them a little bit, not to wreck their houses or whatever it was under there, but just to stir them up a bit. Then a few would come trailing out. Evelyn started saying things like —“That’s a minor worker,” or “That’s a major worker,” or “Those over there are soldiers.”

  “They all look the same to me.”

  “Nope — all different castes.”

  “What do you mean by castes?”

  “Just different groups in the one big group. They all do different things in the anthill. Some work; some fight. Some just sit around and make babies. Well, really only one — the queen. She’s got the biggest ovaries. So that’s why she’s the queen.”

  “Ovaries?”

  Evelyn looked at me. “You surely know what ovaries are?”

  “Sort of, but not exactly.”

  “Women have them. They have the eggs. Do you get your period yet?”

  “The curse?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, do you?”

  “No.”

  I was so relieved! Evelyn continued talking. “You start to get it when your ovaries start sending out those eggs.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess I knew that. But how come this ant is the queen? Aren’t there other girl ants with ovaries?”

  “Not as big as hers. Anatomy is destiny.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just a saying. I don’t really believe it. At least not with people. Probably it’s true with ants.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This, of course, was what I liked about Evelyn. I could be completely honest with her.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “That thing you just said anatomy is.”

  “Destiny. It just means that some people think that if you are born with a penis”— I tried not to look surprised but I had never in my life heard this word spoken out loud —“that you can do certain things, get paid more, be a soldier. Do what is thought of as man kind of things, and if you are born with a vagina”— holy smoke! I could not believe this —“that you stay home, have kids, and cook. But it’s not true, of course, because my mother is a doctor and she has a —” At that moment, the whistle blew for the end of recess. But as we got up to leave, Evelyn took the stick and bent over so that one or two of the ants crawled on to it. “See what I mean?” I prayed she wouldn’t say the v or the p word again, because once a day was enough for me. “See this ant. He’s a soldier. It’s because he has huge jaws — sharp, too. They call them mandibles.”

  Mandibles, I thought. That’s such a nice, decent-sounding word, unlike you-know-what and you-know-what.

  “Would you have taken Evelyn and me to the drive-in if Phyllis hadn’t pressured you, Emmett?”

  “What are you talking about?” We had just dropped Evelyn off at her house. It was a Friday afternoon, and Emmett had agreed to take us after school to a drive-in restaurant for a hamburger and a Coke.

  “Well, would you have taken us if Phyllis hadn’t asked you to?”

  “That’s not fair, Georgie. Phyllis doesn’t pressure me to do anything.”

  “Hmmm.” That was all I said, but he looked at me real funny.

  There was a pretty long silence, and then Emmett said, “Look, Georgie, I think you should butt out of Phyllis’s and my business.”

  “What business?” I said.

  “Georgie! I just told you to butt out, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You shouldn’t use swears. Especially Jesus ones. Grandma would be very mad at you.”

  “Grandma is not here. Besides, I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “Does Phyllis believe in God?” I suddenly asked.

  “That’s a non sequitur,” Emmett said.

  “What’s a non seckyturd?” I giggled.

  “The word is non sequitur. And it’s Latin for ‘does not follow logically,’ and it’s not nice for little girls to talk about turds.”

  This ticked me off. “I don’t know Latin. Remember I’m just in the sixth grade, Mr. Smarty-Big-Guy-Center. And I wasn’t talking about turds, and besides, in my opinion, talking about turds is less evil than saying Jesus-swears.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is this any way to treat your brother who has just so kindly agreed to take you and your very strange friend Evelyn Sinkler to a drive-in for a hamburger?”

  “Winkler. The name is Winkler.”

  “Whatever. As I was saying — who so kindly agreed to take you to the drive-in on a Friday afternoon.”

  “I know you’re embarrassed to be seen in our company. We’re little twerps, and everybody there is a big-deal teenager — cheerleaders, basketball players, football players.”

  “I didn’t say you were twerps. Yes, you are shorter than high-school kids. But I didn’t say you were twerps.”

  “You said Evelyn was weird.”

  “Well, she is.”

  “Not when you get to know her.”

  “I guess I could say the same thing about Phyllis,” he replied.

  “What, she’s not weird once you get to know her?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. But she doesn’t pressure me at all, and if you really kne
w her, you would understand that.”

  I just shut up.

  “Do stars make noise, Emmett?” Phyllis asked one evening. I was sitting not more than five feet away, but I might as well have been five hundred feet away for all the notice they took of me.

  “No, not in space.”

  “Not even when they’re born and when they die, like you were explaining about all that fire and explosion, the popping and the sizzling?”

  “It’s a vacuum out there,” I piped up. But no one paid any attention to me.

  “Sound needs air to transmit it.”

  “That’s what I just said! It’s a vacuum. No air, no sound.” Still no response.

  Phyllis waited awhile before she said anything. Then she smiled. “Well, you know how easy it is for me to see colors; I think I can hear stars — music.”

  “Star music?” Emmett asked. Both he and I were completely bewildered.

  “Yeah, think of it like whales singing.”

  “Whales singing? I don’t get it,” Emmett said.

  “They say whales sing, you know,” Phyllis replied.

  “Well, water transmits.”

  “But no one ever thought they did until someone listened with whatever they use to listen with underwater.”

  “Hmmm,” Emmett said. “It’s the old tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.”

  “Not exactly.” The mirrors flashed now, and the only reflections were those of Phyllis and my brother. “I am there to hear it in my place. Our beautiful place.”

  A strange conversation. One that made me feel not simply excluded but a little scared. Why did she have to say our. But this actually was the way it had been for a while now, ever since an evening a few days before school started when they were looking at the colors in Cygnus — the Rumpelstiltskin gold — and started talking about the Beautiful Place. I sensed that Emmett and Phyllis had crossed some invisible line. They were someplace else. If I asked him a question about Phyllis, he’d just snap sometimes as if it were not just a simple question but more like an invasion. I was invading that precious space, crossing into some forbidden zone.