“Are you going by Missed-teeth this year?”
Missed-teeth?
Oh. Missed. Teeth.
There is a roar of laughter from the other two boys. Of course, they have nice, straight teeth. Maybe our new names were supposed to be a secret and I just embarrassed him. Maybe he’s joking with me.
“I’ll save you a seat,” I say. And then I remember, I’m not supposed to talk to him. Too late.
“What for?” Anibal replies.
They disappear into the lunch line. Which is what hipsters must do, I suppose.
Here is a girl standing stupefied, her brown lunch bag with heart-shaped PB and J a sad companion to her misery.
Time stops. Whole seconds pass before I realize I’ve been hurt. Rejected. I tell myself it’s just an experiment. He told me not to talk to him. I knew that. I’m just being a girl. Overthinking. Swayed by the heavy half of my life at home. This is nothing. Just go sit down and let the experiment play out. Let Sandy Showalter notice that Anibal doesn’t talk to or notice any other girl on the planet except her. She is it for him. The supreme girlfriend. Then she can instantly fall in love with him, update her Facebook status to “In a Relationship,” and go to the social. Hypothesis confirmed. Done. The End.
Well, even I know that is a fairy tale.
I tell myself to just go sit down and wait for the potential miracle to happen. But I don’t know where to sit. Where you sit on the first day of school is where you will sit for eternity, otherwise known as the rest of the school year. It’s important to know where to sit. Who to sit with. Plus, I sort of hate the cafeteria. It’s the scene of the awful talent-show debacle from last year. And it’s clear I’m not the only one who remembers our lame performance.
Here comes Joe Busby, knocking into my shoulder.
Joe Busby who started the fake applause last year.
“There’s the crazy poem girl,” he says.
Man, I hate this cafeteria with a red-hot passion. But a person’s got to eat.
Across the lunchroom, Anibal Gomez and his two new friends emerge from the lunch line with cheeseburgers and bad attitudes. One of them shoves a petite girl wearing a French Ultramarine Blue scarf. Like a frame is to a painting, the scarf is to her face. Girl with Scarf spills her milk. Boy Who Shoves shouts “Sand Girl” at her until Principal Blakely says, “Have a little respect, sir!”
I look at the boy’s shirt. Boy with Tag Sticking Out.
I hope no one tells him all day. I hope he wears that tag like a dork flag.
I watch as Girl with Scarf’s eyes sweep the cafeteria for a place to sit. This marks her as an obvious sixth grader. There’s a whole mess of new sixth graders wandering around, trying not to look so new. Girl with Scarf is failing at this. At least we are united in our first-day distress.
Or what I’m going to call the Social Abyss.
Which I seem to have fallen into.
It is a long, deep well.
“Find a seat, please,” Principal Blakely says as he walks past me.
I’m forced to find a seat at the loser tables, a lonely place where dreams of popularity go to die. The Loser Island is an area completely separate from the rows of lunch tables spread across the cafeteria. It’s where guests and parents come to eat with students, but since guests and parents hardly ever show up, it’s usually occupied by students with no place to sit.
Like me.
And a hot mess of science geeks like Wayne Kovok, the third-tallest guy in the seventh grade.
About Wayne. When I first met him in the fourth grade, he liked to tell everyone that his last name was a palindrome.
Did you know my name is a palindrome, a word that reads the same backward and forward?
Wayne Kovok has never started a sentence without “Did you know.” People call him Boy with Palindrome Name or Palindrome Gnome or just Wayne Dorkvok. Kids are stupid that way, but Wayne sort of brought it on himself.
I’m not hungry anymore, but I open my lunch anyway. Inside, there’s a tiny painted note from Mama.
Have Fun! It is painted in Hopeful Pink.
Girl with Scarf finally makes her way to the Island.
“That’s a pretty scarf,” I say, because I’m hoping I won’t be the only girl on Loser Island, even if that means she’s a lowly sixth grader.
In return for my compliment, do you know what I receive from Girl with Scarf? A scowl that would melt butter.
Two more boys sit down at the Island and put their faces right into their books, too. That’s what you do to survive at this table. No eye contact. All business. Let’s just get our lunches eaten and get out of here alive.
Wayne Kovok takes a bite of his sandwich and says of my lunch, “Did you know that the largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever made was forty feet long and had one hundred fifty pounds of peanut butter?”
“No, I didn’t know that, Wayne. Cool.”
“Hey, what’s that you’re reading?” I ask Girl with Scarf, because I must at least look like I’m having fun when Anibal walks by.
No problem. Your insult didn’t sting at all. Having fun over here on the Island!
“It’s called a book,” she snaps.
Well. Clearly she’s not conducting interviews for a lasting friendship. If she were my little sister, she’d be sleeping on marbles tonight, that is certain.
I guess I’m staring out blankly at her because she quips, “I’m just going to eat my lunch and not talk. I’m here for the education.”
“Yeah, because being nice is not a life skill you are going to need in the world,” I say. Wayne Kovok looks at me and gives me a thumbs-up.
“I’m going to be a surgeon, so I don’t need to be chatty,” she says. “My patients will be anesthetized.”
“Lucky for them.”
Then I eat my lousy homegrown carrots in silence. Anibal Gomez and his new friends laugh so loud across the room, you just know they are having a great time. In a strange way, this annoys me even more. Those are supposed to be my laughs. My jokes. My new and improved seventh-grade year.
I’m stuck on the Loser Island.
And now this is where I’ll have to sit all year. Because of my stupid name and because Anibal Gomez is pretending to be mean as thunder. I’ll have to sit here and watch all the Beatty Middle School life going on around me. Life and people and cute clothes and laughter and girls who get shoved or just text like maniacs or have nice, driving parents bring them Subway sandwiches on the first day of school. Teachers trolling the aisles for misbehavior and litterers. A sea of kids who, with the exception of Loser Island, all appear to have someone to talk to and something to talk about. All that noise and distraction of the lunchroom didn’t matter last year because I was part of a set. Mysti and Anibal. Not exactly a set of hugging salt and pepper shakers, but two friends who looked out for each other and laughed about tuna sandwiches. And now one part of my set is gone and I feel all exposed and naked. Like a turtle without a shell.
“Wayne?”
Wayne looks at me over the rims of his glasses.
“Can turtles live without their shells?”
“No, a turtle cannot exist without its shell because its spine is attached to the outer shell. Did you know that Russian turtles orbited the moon before any astronauts ever did?”
“No.”
“It’s true. In 1968—”
“Oh my gosh,” Girl with Scarf interrupts. She rolls her eyes to high heaven, picks up her tray, and paddles away from Loser Island, the folds of her scarf practically flying in her wake. If I didn’t dislike her, I would admire her.
Change is coming for you, Dad had said.
Change is going to kill me.
This is going to be a long year.
chapter 9
Here is a girl who wishes she’d hidden a piece of chocolate birthday cake.
After school.
I feed Larry and look for a snack.
Just a box of dry crackers. No milk. Two bananas on the verge of doom. Whatever else
we have is probably in the deep freeze or highly pickled on the shelves in the garage or in the pantry and needs a lot of pots and pans to cook. No one wants a can of soup when they feel blue. You want something that’s just right there in front of you, that you don’t have to pick raw from the garden.
Which I could do.
Laura Ingalls probably did that in Little House on the Prairie.
Well, Dad and I were supposed to do our grocery shopping. The list is still taped to the fridge. I pull it down. It’s just a reminder of what we don’t have.
Milk
Dog food
Apples
Eggs
Bananas
Hair color (French Roast Brown)
And on and on.
Mama comes out of her room and makes a cup of tea. We ask each other questions about our days. Apparently, we were both “fine” all day.
“What about our food supply?” I ask.
“Really, Mysti, you make it sound as if we’re trapped on an island,” she says, ruffling my hair like, say, you might do to a dog. “Food supply, ha! Is that on your list of jokes?”
News flash: If an island is an isolated area from which you need some type of vehicle to depart, then yes, 4520 Fargo Drive qualifies as an island.
Mama slips off into her room so that she can wear her worried face behind closed doors.
Yeah, we are all fine.
The thing to do is to stop thinking about food, like a fresh, crunchy apple or an eggy doodle sandwich or a piece of chocolate cake. Stop thinking about anything out of my reach, like achieving the right look to gain popularity. Stop wishing for the magical powers to either heal injured fathers or transport myself to the empty vinyl chair in Dad’s empty hospital room.
So far, seventh grade will not go down in the story of my life as a year to remember.
It is time to pretend I’m in a story far, far away. I picture myself diving into a story the same way a person dives into a swimming pool. Headfirst and quickly submerged. Today’s story is one where I will be in Paris and go buy a buttery croissant anytime I choose. To get the story rolling, I go and gaze at that wonderful, glittery tower that is always there for me, night and day. In our home office, the Eiffel Tower cam is one click away on our computer. I swivel around in Dad’s office chair and wait for the image to load. A stupid advertisement finally finishes and I am looking at a live view of the City of Lights. It’s night in Paris and my beautiful tower is illuminated against a rich Indigo Blue sky. There is a light rain in Paris right now. Little droplets of water cover the camera lens that films the Eiffel Tower. I close my eyes and imagine what French rain might feel like on my face. Doing this in front of a computer screen is stupid, but it is my story so who cares.
Anibal Gomez would think I was a mushy girl if he knew how much I loved this picture of Paris. Do you know when I will tell him? The twelfth of never.
Bonne nuit, I say, which is French for “good night.”
After, I go out on the hot front step and wait for mystery to walk by. Woman Who Goes Somewhere might appear at any minute. She’s been walking later in the afternoons now, which is lucky for me. I sit for a long time. Girl Who Has Nothing to Do but Wait. Then I’m rewarded for my patience.
Here she comes, Woman Who Goes Somewhere, with long gray pants that don’t look washed and yellow open-toe pumps. Her hair is all tied up in a messy bun. And it looks like she’s carrying a small, round metal object in one of her hands. Quickly, I snap her picture as she is in full stride toward some adventurous destination. Today, there are not enough parents around for me to even get in trouble for infringing on other people’s rights. So I take a picture of a car driving past, too. So what. Who’s going to care?
I’m getting teary now. Mushy. I switch the channels on my brain.
I land on the Pick on Your Sister channel, one of my favorites.
Today’s show: Tricking Seven-Year-Olds into Eating Dog Food.
Here we see the girl placing five bits of kibble in a shiny green bowl with the desired goal of sibling aggravation.
What I did was put about five pieces of Larry’s kibble in one of Mama’s pretty bowls and pretended I was chewing. Yum. Yum. Larry came running at the sound of snacks, but I had to shoo him away.
“It tastes like salty crackers,” I told Laura while she was watching Animal Planet. “And also, Oprah says it will make your hair glossy and manageable.”
“Will not.”
“Fine, have dull, dry hair. See if I care.”
Laura was convinced that I really did eat it because I already have one Oprah habit. I change my bedsheets every two days because I read that Oprah does this, too. Why can’t I have at least one thing in common with a billionaire, you know?
If I see ten thousand faces in my life, I will never forget Laura’s face when she began chewing. I chewed the inside of my mouth and tried not to laugh, but you know, I couldn’t help it.
I am not a hateful person, but I do consider it my duty to play tricks on her. I’ve seen this in movies. I know.
After she swallowed that first dog food nugget, I laughed until I almost peed my pants. Seriously. Then I chased her through the house for the rest of the afternoon and told her she was going to wake up tomorrow barking. I only asked forgiveness after she went into her room and cried.
“Get out of here,” Laura shouted.
“It was just a joke.”
“You’re horrible. You’re a horrible, evil sister.” She picked up a ratty old stuffed animal and threw it at my head.
“Didn’t it take your mind off things? Aren’t you tired of being cooped up in fourteen hundred square feet?” I threw myself onto her bed. Laura tried to push me out of her green room.
“Get out, Mysti.”
“Well, don’t you miss Dad?”
“Stop!”
“Wouldn’t you want to be a dog for a day?”
“Get out!”
She said it so loud that I thought it might wake up Mama from her rest. I went into my room and changed my sheets like a billionaire. Clean-sheet day is the best. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. All it takes is soap and water and a small amount of effort. You want a little luxury, you make it for yourself.
When I’m done torturing Laura, my phone rings and sucks some of the luxury out of my night.
chapter 10
Here is a girl realizing that nefariousness travels across phone lines and crawls right into your ear.
“Hello?”
“I did good!” It’s Anibal, wanting a report card for his horrible hipster performance.
“You can’t be serious,” I say. “You were awful. And I have a question.”
“What?”
“How exactly is not being friendly with me helping you? Am I that horrid?”
I heard Girl Who Likes Horses use horrid in a sentence this morning, and it seems to be the new gross.
“No, I just need to be seen without any girls. I told you. It’s an experiment. Nothing personal.”
“I still don’t get you.”
“I think it’s working. Sandy Showalter is in Texas History, dude!”
Anibal and I are in last-period Texas History together. Sandy and Wayne, too.
So Anibal strutted into class talking to Girl Who Plays in Orchestra, and they’re all grinning like they visit Dr. Smile every week. Well, I couldn’t help wanting to stare at him. That’s how good and different he looks.
“You know what I think,” I say to Anibal. “I think that hipster cap you bought is blocking blood flow to your brain.”
“Your opinion.”
“So cut it out.”
“It’ll work, trust me,” Anibal says. “So don’t talk to me tomorrow and I won’t have to be, you know, a jerk. But that did help my reputation as a hipster, so…”
I don’t say anything. There is a long pause until Anibal finally says, “Are you still there?”
“You don’t even know about my dad.”
“What?�
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“You won’t care anyway.”
“What?”
“My dad’s in the hospital.”
“Are you kidding around?”
“No, I’m not!”
“Sorry, then. What happened?”
“He fell from this tree and smashed his head.”
“Oh, man. I always thought your dad was cool. He let us smell his armpits for our science project. My dad wouldn’t go for it.”
“My dad is still cool. Don’t talk about him like he’s not around!”
“Geez, sorry. So, take my picture tomorrow so I can see what I look like in my hat.” Anibal is not sorry.
“I don’t like this at all.”
“All experiments have their variables and controls, Mysti. You are the variable. You’ll see that I’m right and will win.”
“With Sandy Showalter as your prize?”
“If you want to look at it that way, yes.”
“Sandy is cool and all and you are cool, but you’re cool on different planets. Sandy is not really in your gravitational pull, with or without your hat.”
“Says you.”
“Anibal, face it, all the guys like Sandy. I mean, I have more of a chance of going to the social with her than you do.” The words come out without time for me to think what I’m saying. I’d issued a challenge. Anibal Gomez loves a challenge.
“Are you betting me?” Anibal quizzes, proving how right I am.
“Well, not exactly.” My brain is all confused. I don’t know how fast I can backpedal and undo this.
“Betting me that you can visit Sandy’s planet before I can?”
“This is redonk.”
“So you can’t?”
“No, I mean, yes.”
“Then what? Take the bet! It will make this experiment so much more fun for me.”
“Okay, I will take the bet only because it’s not going to happen and at the fall social, we’ll all be pretty much in our own orbits like always.” I say this hoping that it will calm Anibal down and he’ll see how tragically unrealistic it is to aim for the affections of Sandy. I hope.
It doesn’t work. Anibal goes on about the terms of our bet. The official win would be proof of an actual text to and from Sandy.
Courage for Beginners Page 4