I won’t spoil it for you, just in case, but I will say that sometimes somebody shows up in your life and throws everything out of whack. Or just happens to show up the moment the out-of-whackness starts.
I wasn’t thinking about The Birds when Rose Holland appeared at school though, the day after the Great Confiscation. At the time I was thinking about algebra. I had a quiz in second period—the dreaded Ms. Sheers—and had barely bothered to study. And then here comes the new girl, already six weeks into the semester. In two-plus years I had finally gotten comfortable with my surroundings. I knew who I could copy off of and who to avoid in the halls. I had the people I high-fived and the people I nodded to, and the people I slunk right by (which was still most of them). Then here comes this unknown. That’s what I saw when I looked at her: not the girl from the bird movie, but a variable. Person X.
Capital X, because if there was one thing you instantly noticed about Rose Holland, it’s that she was uppercase. Not big around, like Mr. Jackson or like Sean Forsett, who looked kind of like a beach ball with limbs glued to its sides. Not even overweight. Just big. More squared than rounded, like she had been constructed of cinder blocks. Of course this was middle school: I was used to taller girls. But most of the girls at Branton who were tall were also skinny, like stretched taffy. Rose Holland was tall and wide. Muscular, like Bench. I figured she was an athlete. Volleyball maybe. Or soccer. She’d make an excellent goalie. Practically impenetrable.
Yet she walked through the hall the same way all of us did on our first days, with her eyes on the tiles below her feet. Her frizzled brown hair, lighter than mine, hanging over her face like a veil. Dark jeans and a black sweater that could probably fit two of Deedee. You could hear the sound of her boots from a mile away.
“Who’s she?” Bench said, standing beside me.
“Who knows,” I replied.
“She looks like she can hit. Linebacker material.”
“Be careful,” I told him. “She might replace you.”
Bench didn’t have an answer to that. I glanced at the new girl again, noticing everyone step out of her way only to give her a long second look after her back was to them. You’d be tempted to tell them Take a picture, it’ll last longer, except, of course, nobody had their phone on them anymore. Already there were whispers trailing after her, though, and you could tell just by that brief walk down the hall that she was going to have a tough first day. I muttered a short prayer for her under my breath.
“I’d stay out of her way, if I were you,” Bench remarked.
I snickered, though it was really more of a grunt as I pictured this new girl bowling over everyone in the halls, leaving smashed Play-Doh versions of them stuck to the floors with only their eyes bugging out. It wasn’t really funny, but I’m a sucker for a good image. The new girl disappeared around a corner looking lost. I shut my locker and headed to first period with a promise to catch up to Bench later.
I met Wolf and Deedee outside the door to English. Wolf looked exhausted. “Long night?”
“George and Martha were at it again,” he said.
George and Martha were Wolf’s nicknames for his parents. He says he got the names from an old movie he saw once about this couple that is always arguing. His parents’ real names were Todd and Trina.
That’s something Wolf and I had in common: front-row seats to the failing-marriage show. Except where my parents mostly refused to talk to each other, his parents never shut up. His dad hadn’t moved out of the house yet. I figured it was only a matter of time, but Wolf said it would never happen. His parents would never split. That would require them to agree on something. Strange thing was, I actually kind of liked Wolf’s parents, from the little time I’d spent with them. They seemed like nice people and they seemed to like me. They just didn’t like each other. Made you wonder how they got stuck together in the first place.
“You want to talk about it?” I asked. I knew the answer already, but I asked anyway.
“What’s there to talk about?” Wolf said. “I just wish they’d let me move down into the basement. It’d be quieter at least.”
“But what about the piano?” I asked.
“Yeah. We’d have to move that too.”
We ducked into class and found our seats, Deedee on one side, me on the other, Wolf in the middle where he belonged, all of us ignoring the dirty looks from the three boys who sat behind us. Normally you’d get a comment from one of them, a completely unoriginal “here comes the dork patrol” kind of thing, but today we managed to slip by. Mr. Sword finished scrawling something on the whiteboard and humming loud enough for the whole class to hear. Wolf leaned over and told me it was classical. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I told him no self-respecting eighth grader should know that. Mr. Sword turned to us and started taking attendance.
He had just worked his way down the roster when the variable burst into the room.
“Sorry I’m late. Got turned around,” she said. Her face was red, flushed from running or embarrassment or both. Her eyes, I noticed, were deep blue, like her jeans. She filled the doorframe completely.
“It’s all right, Rose,” Mr. Sword replied. He turned to the rest of us. “I’d like to introduce our new student. Everyone, this is Rose Holland.”
The girl put up a hand self-consciously. It was that moment. That terrible, blood-freezing, ashy-mouthed moment when you suddenly realize that sixty eyeballs are fixed on you, deciding what to do about you, where you fit in. I gave the new girl a smile, just a small one, to let her know we weren’t so bad. She didn’t smile back.
“Rose comes to us all the way from the Windy City.”
“I’m surprised the wind could carry her,” somebody—probably Jason or one of his friends—whispered from the back of the room. Okay. Most of us weren’t so bad.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Sword said sharply. Whoever it was didn’t bother to repeat it. Mr. Sword turned back to the doorway. “You can take any open seat, Rose.”
I looked around. There were three empties. One of them was on the other side of me. She took the one closest to the door and I felt a twinge of relief. It would have meant something—her coming all the way across the room just to sit next to me. Maybe not to her, but to everybody else.
“This week,” Mr. Sword said, already moving on even though most eyes were still on the new girl, “we will be starting our unit on Elizabethan drama. Raise your hand if you are already an expert on drama.”
Half the students groaned and raised their hands, some of them pointing to each other. I nodded to Deedee, encouraging him to raise his hand too, but he just gave me a dirty look. I noticed Wolf was still looking at Rose. Her eyes were fixed on the front of the room.
“The rest of you are lying, then,” Mr. Sword told us. “I think most of you create more drama in one day than Shakespeare could imagine in a lifetime. But when he did it, at least, it was all in good fun.”
To prove his point, Mr. Sword launched into a lecture on Elizabethan theater, which was actually pretty boring until he described how actors would fill animal bladders with sheep’s blood and keep them beneath their stage clothes so that they would explode in a gruesome display during fight scenes. Sometimes, he said, if you were one of the lucky ones sitting up front you’d get some of the blood on your clothes too. He called it the sixteenth-century splash zone.
“Sheep’s blood?” Christina Morrow said with a grimace. “Gross.” She pronounced the word as three syllables. Guh-roh-ohss.
“I think it’s cool.”
I looked at the girl by the door, cheeks still pink, eyes still fixed on Mr. Sword. All the girls sitting near Rose Holland recoiled, wrinkling their faces. Beth Strands even scooted her desk over an inch. Mr. Sword made a motion for Rose to elaborate.
“No. I mean, it’s really creative. Like special effects,” Rose added. “Before there was even such a thing as special effects.”
“And the audience would agree with you, Ms. Holland,” Mr. Sword said, smili
ng. “All that gore helped to account for the theater’s popularity. It wasn’t a good drama if somebody didn’t get stabbed, hanged, or poisoned by the end. Preferably all three. The audience was always out for blood.”
People were still eying Rose. A couple of the girls in the back started whispering, no doubt about her—what she said, how she looked, her clothes, her hair. Deedee scrawled something on a yellow sticky note—he had a stack of them sitting on his desk. He handed it to Wolf and I leaned over to see.
Guess things haven’t changed much, the note said. Deedee glanced sideways at the new girl. I smiled. Wolf didn’t.
No blood yet, just dirty looks. If Rose noticed the reaction of the people around her, she didn’t seem to care. Or maybe she was just good at ignoring it. Not an easy thing to do.
I told myself to stop looking at her, just in case she got the wrong idea.
THE PROMISE
THE ROUND TABLES IN THE LUNCHROOM HAD SPACE FOR FIVE chairs—six, if you crammed, but most tables didn’t bother to cram. Only the tables with the most popular kids were crowded.
We only ever used four. We formed a perfect square, somehow meeting at the corners.
Deedee and Wolf met all the way back in elementary school—spending their recesses together, avoiding pickup kickball games and hiding behind the slides from bigger kids, trading Pokemon cards and splitting Oreos—but middle school jammed us together. Together we knew a little bit about just about everything. Bench had kissed a girl not on a dare. Deedee had visited Paris and India and had pictures of himself grinning in front of the Arc de Triomphe and the Taj Mahal. Wolf had hiked down into the Grand Canyon—though he said all he remembered was his parents arguing about who didn’t bring enough water. He’d also been stung by a jellyfish. I’d been to Disney World and already had my wisdom teeth pulled. Together we had already broken most major bones—legs, arms, fingers, toes, collar, ribs.
We filled in each other’s gaps. We sometimes completed each other’s sentences, but usually with burps and other gross sounds just to annoy each other. We spent most of our time together hanging out after school, playing video games, watching ridiculous videos, or seeing how many Sour Patch Kids Wolf could chew at once without drooling. Sometimes we’d grab a ball and play H-O-R-S-E in Bench’s driveway (he always won), or take our bikes and ride down to Mr. Twisty’s, our favorite soft-serve ice-cream place, where you could mix in whatever candy you wanted and where half of my summer allowance went. But most of the time, if we weren’t battling hordes of Deedee’s demonspawn, we just hung out and talked.
Not like, talked talked. Nothing serious. Just regular talk. About stuff. YouTube videos and homework and other kids. The lamest superpowers in the world (male Wondertwin’s bucket of water trick, hands down) and how to best make weapons out of rubber bands and paper clips. If you were having a thoroughly craptastic day, you’d be allowed to vent using all kinds of words that would never get back to your parents. But I wouldn’t say we really talked about feelings or whatever. It was okay to have feelings, just so long as you kept them mostly to yourself, which was fine by me.
Sometimes we talked about girls, but not often. More like how you talk about presidents and movie stars, with a kind of guarded detachment, careful never to admit too much. Not that we didn’t know any—girls, that is. Bench especially had a few he made a point of saying hi to in the halls and Deedee had several he admired from afar. Just that as far as our crew went, it was always just us boys. And there was kind of this unspoken promise that it would stay that way. Just us. Forever.
I know what I’m doing. I’m trying to justify what happened. How I acted. How we all acted, but me especially. You’re not going to buy it, though. Because it wasn’t just that Rose Holland was a girl, and that’s no excuse anyways.
It’s that she was who she was. And we were who we were.
And there had always, ever, only been four.
I didn’t see Rose in either of my next two classes. I heard her name whispered once or twice. I figured it was none of my business so I tried not to listen.
Right before heading to the cafeteria for lunch, I stopped by my locker to find another note from Deedee stuck to the door. The fourth one that morning, counting the one in English. All, presumably, from the same yellow pad. This one just said Breadsticks! Underneath was a smiley face, just in case the exclamation point didn’t give it away. Deedee only got school lunch on breadsticks day. He still showed up with his Lord of the Rings lunchbox, but he ignored the sandwich that was packed inside. He was a garlic fiend, and the butter the lunch ladies slathered those sticks in could slay a coven of vampires.
I stuck the note to Deedee’s forehead five minutes later as Bench and I sat down at our table. “If you leave me any more of these, I’m going to start demanding that you take my calls and fetch me coffee,” I said.
“He stuck one to my locker too,” Bench said.
Wolf held up six fingers.
“He wrote you six notes?”
“One of them just had a drawing of a whale on it,” Wolf said.
“It was an airplane. I was bored in math. Excuse me for sharing.” Deedee peeled the sticky note from his forehead. “I would text you, but . . . you know . . .” He held up empty, phoneless hands. Day Two of the Great Confiscation had gone only slightly better than Day One, with only one student—Becka Peachman—practicing a form of nonviolent protest and going limp in the hallway, having to be dragged to first period by her armpits. In his phone’s absence, Deedee was making do with what he had. “They make us buy four-packs of those stupid things at the start of every year and we don’t need them for any of our classes, so I figured why not put them to good use?”
“I think we need to define what qualifies as ‘good use,’” I said.
“And teach you how to draw,” Wolf added.
Bench elbowed me and I followed his eyes to the end of the lunch line. Rose Holland was standing there, tray in hand, surveying the landscape again. I felt bad for her. I’d been in that same spot. I watched as she approached the closest table of girls, then noticed Beth Strands from English—the one who’d scooted her chair away—look up. She must have had a nasty look on her face, because Rose immediately steered around and wandered toward the corner. That was Beth’s superpower—she could wither you with a glance. The Witherer. Some people were just like that. There were quite a few empty tables, though. Rose would find a place to sit. I turned back to Deedee, who was telling a story about a kid in band who got caught with his phone. He panicked when the teacher came in and tried to hide it in his tuba.
“Sounds like something you would do,” I teased.
Deedee pretended to be offended. “I play the trumpet, remember? A phone wouldn’t fit.” Deedee played in the school band mostly because his parents insisted on it. Wolf refused to play in the school band on the grounds that they sucked—though he would never tell Deedee that. Honestly, they sounded like a herd of dying giraffes being chased by a pack of howler monkeys.
Deedee wadded up his sticky note (Breadsticks!) and flicked it across the table. He was aiming for me. Instead it landed in my applesauce cup.
“Two points,” Wolf said.
“Actually, the other side of the table is three-point territory,” Bench corrected.
“It was a lucky shot,” I said, picking the dripping wadded yellow ball from the cup and flicking it back. This is what lunchtime usually looked like for us. Building towers out of milk cartons. Stuffing vegi-straws up our noses. Flicking things at each other. “You couldn’t do it again in a million tries,” I dared. It was a safe bet. Deedee made Bench look like Cam Newton most days.
“Fine. But if I do, I get your last breadstick,” he said, pointing at my tray. I agreed. Most of the time I ended up giving him one anyway.
Deedee lined up the wadded ball of paper, closed one eye, and gave it another flick. This time it sailed high and wide, up over my shoulder. I heard it hit something with a little wet slap.
“Yo
u got me.”
Deedee’s face went ash white, which was kind of remarkable, given his Indian heritage. I jerked around to see Rose Holland standing beside our table, looming over us, her tray sporting only a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers and a chocolate milk. There was a splotch of applesauce on her black sweater the size of a quarter, like a gunshot, just below her shoulder.
“Oh. Oh man. I am so, so sorry,” Deedee blathered, suddenly bug-eyed, trying to shrink behind his lunch box, probably afraid of that carton of milk being smashed over his head, which is exactly what somebody like Jason Baker or Cameron Cole would do. But Rose just looked at her sweater and shrugged, then rubbed the spot of sauce in with her thumb.
“Got it at a garage sale,” she said. “It’s seen worse.”
She was standing between me and Wolf and I could see now that the sweater was frayed at the bottom, her jeans worn at the knees, the laces of her boots equally ragged at the ends. She was even more imposing up close. Rose looked at the only empty chair at our table then back at her tray.
I flicked my eyes around the room, trying not to be obvious. There were still plenty of empty seats. In fact there was an empty table three down from us. That’s probably were she had been going when she got hit. Deedee and his terrible aim.
“You’re in my English class,” she said, looking at me first, holding her tray close. “Three of you, anyways. And you and I have history together.” She glanced at Bench. “It’s J.J., right?”
Bench nodded, lips tight. It was the face he used whenever other people’s parents tried to talk to him, a half smile barely hiding its phoniness. He looked over his shoulder at a cluster of tables full of other eighth graders twittering away. Deedee watched the pseudo-nacho-cheese congeal in his plastic cup. I looked at the empty chair. Don’t say anything, I thought to myself. That’s how it worked. Don’t say anything one way or another and you don’t have to take responsibility, one way or the other, and everything goes on like normal. She will just keep walking.
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