Wolf thought differently, though. He gestured to the empty chair.
“Wanna sit with us?”
Deedee coughed. Or choked. I couldn’t tell which. I suddenly became aware of all the sounds in the lunchroom. The cling-clang from the kitchen. The scrape of chairs along the floor. The constant buzzing of a hundred voices talking at once. I held my breath, waiting for the new girl to realize that Wolf was just being polite—because that’s the kind of person he is—and to do the equally polite thing and decline the offer. A casual No thanks, some other time maybe.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Rose said.
She set down her tray and pulled out the chair.
Suddenly we weren’t square anymore.
The strangeness of it hit me. Like how sometimes you’re on the bus taking the same exact route that you’ve taken a hundred times before, with every coffee shop and neighborhood sign memorized, but you look up and you are certain that the bus has taken a wrong turn because everything seems unfamiliar, and it takes you a moment to get your bearings. Bench and I looked at each other. For two years we’d sat at the same table together. Never once had a girl sat down next to us. But Rose Holland didn’t seem to care. She settled into her seat and proceeded to unwrap her crackers, the crinkle of the package much louder than it should have been. I tried to read Wolf’s face, to see if he thought he’d miscalculated, if his plan to do the right thing had backfired, but he didn’t give anything away, just went back to eating his lunch, maybe even smiling a little.
Deedee, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring.
“Um . . . you know it’s breadstick day?” he mumbled after ten seconds of awkward silence, as if confirming that there was something abnormal about a girl who didn’t like garlic-butter-soaked lumps of bread stretched to look like some grandmother’s gnarly fingers.
“I’m on a strict diet,” Rose Holland explained. She had a raspy sort of voice. It seemed to fit her.
“Of peanut butter crackers?” Deedee asked.
“Of foods that stick to the roof of your mouth,” she replied, stuffing in the first of the crackers. She chewed in slow motion, it seemed, as if she were afraid of making too much noise, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Maybe she was nervous too. We all watched silently, like a girl eating crackers was the most fascinating thing we’d ever seen. Finally Rose cleared her throat and leaned across the table, the package in her hand.
“If you want one, all you have to do is ask.” She thrust the crackers at each of us in turn.
I blushed and looked down. Bench looked away as well, taking an interest in conversations at other tables that he couldn’t even hear. Deedee fiddled with his milk carton. Only Wolf managed to find the words “No thanks.” But even he could sense it. I could tell. The disruption to the natural order of the universe. After another twenty seconds of awkward-as-walking-in-on-your-dad-shaving-naked-in-the-bathroom quiet, Rose set her crackers down, leaned back in her chair, and let out a sigh.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re all new to this ‘girl at the table’ thing. How about this: I promise that I won’t bite or give you cooties or whatever else it is that you all are flipping out over. I won’t talk about my hair or blather on and on about celebrity heartthrobs or all the girls I hate, because, frankly, I’ve only been here for three hours, which isn’t quite enough time to hate anybody yet. I won’t discuss brands of moisturizers or lip gloss or use the word ‘crush’ in any kind of nondestructive capacity. And in return, you can stop looking at me like I’m some deranged lunatic. How does that sound?”
Rose Holland smiled and I noticed the freckles on her nose, so light and small, not like the constellations on Wolf’s cheeks. Her eyes really were kind of pretty. Not that I would ever say such a thing out loud. To anyone. Especially not her.
Surprisingly, Deedee was the first to speak up.
“We don’t really talk to girls,” he admitted. “I mean, we can talk to them. Just not . . . you know . . . about them to them . . . not that we do . . . talk to them. Not usually . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Don’t listen to Deedee,” Wolf said. “He lives in his own little fantasy world. We are perfectly capable of talking to girls.”
Then he proceeded to not say anything else.
I fiddled with my last breadstick.
“It’s really not that hard,” Rose said. “We’re just like you, only smarter.”
It was a joke. At least I was pretty sure it was a joke. But I was too nervous to laugh.
“You know, just talk about whatever you normally talk about. Stuff you’re interested in. Like, what do you do? What’s your thing?” She looked at me when she said it.
Our thing? Our thing was sitting here by ourselves. Being goofy and not self-conscious. Our thing was not having anyone ask us what our thing was, because, frankly, nobody else cared what our thing was, so we could do it, our thing—whatever it was—without worrying about it. “Um . . . ,” I said.
“Er . . . ,” Deedee added.
“Well,” Wolf said finally, “Bench here plays, like, fifty-seven different sports.”
“Three,” Bench said curtly, finally snapping back to attention.
“And he doesn’t really play them so much as encourage others to play them,” I added, which earned me the sharpest sideways glance from Bench.
“So you’re a cheerleader?” Rose prodded.
“He’s a looking-at athlete,” Deedee said.
Bench started ripping off little pieces of breadstick, squeezing the grease between his fingers then dropping the mangled nubs to his tray.
“It’s cool,” Rose said. “I happen to like male cheerleaders.”
This seemed to embarrass Bench even more. He pointed his finger across the table. “Deedee here thinks he’s the lord of the ring.”
Deedee wrapped his arms around his lunch box, drawing it close to his chest.
Rose’s eyebrows shot up. “You like Tolkien?” she asked.
“Yeah?” Deedee ventured. “I mean, kind of but not really . . . all that much . . . maybe?”
I laughed, only because I knew he had a shelf full of Lord of the Rings action figures and a replica of Sting hanging above his bed. But no—not all that much. Rose leaned closer to him. “Who’s your favorite character?”
Deedee looked down at his lunch box, at the picture on the lid. “Aragorn, probably. You know. If I had one. If I was, like, really into it. Which I’m not . . . really . . . into it.”
He also had a giant framed map of Middle Earth on his wall.
Rose nodded. “Yeah, Aragorn’s cool. Reluctant, brooding king and all that. But personally, I like Gollum.”
“Wait . . . the weird slimy guy who eats fish guts?” Bench dropped what was left of his breadstick, looking disgusted.
Rose shrugged. “What can I say? I have a soft spot for the tortured and misunderstood.” She smiled at Bench—a genuine smile, not a sarcastic one. He didn’t return it. “And what about you two?” She looked back and forth from Wolf to me.
“I like short hairy men,” I said. “So it’s Gimli for me all the way.”
Rose laughed, coughing cracker crumbs across the back of her hand. It was the first time I’d made a girl laugh that I could remember. It felt weird. “I meant what are you interested in. J.J. here plays sports. . . .”
“It’s Bench,” Bench said irritably.
“Right. Sorry. And . . . Deedee, is it?” Deedee nodded. “He’s all about the swords and sorcery. So what about you? What’s your deal?”
Wolf spoke before I could beat him to it. “Frosty here is a poet.”
“I’m not a poet,” I insisted. “I wrote one poem. Wolf here is an actual piano prodigy. He’s won, like, a million competitions.”
“Only eleven,” Wolf corrected.
I looked at him, impressed. I didn’t know it was that many. Seems like something I should have known, though.
“Frosty . . . like the snowman?” Ros
e asked, eyeing me.
“It’s just Frost,” Bench corrected again.
“Frosty’s better,” she said. She stared at me as if she expected me to agree with her. Or was challenging me not to. I felt warm all over, but uncomfortably so. For a moment I was afraid she could read my mind.
Bench pushed his tray toward the middle of the table and leaned over on his elbows. I could tell he was irritated. “What about you? What do you do? What’s your thing?”
Rose didn’t flinch. “What do you think I do?” she shot back.
We all glanced around the table.
“Softball?” I said with a shrug. It was either that or wrestling.
“Lacrosse?” Deedee guessed. Rose shook her head at each of us.
Wolf snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. Professional turkey wrangling.”
Rose snapped her thick fingers right back at him. “So close. It’s wombats, actually. And I don’t wrangle them. I groom them for professional wombat breeding competitions.”
“Really?” Deedee asked, eyes wide. It took him a moment. It sometimes does with him. “Oh.”
“No, seriously. You have to play some sport,” Bench insisted. “Or work out or something. I mean . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
I held my breath, waiting for Rose to take offense. To grab her tray and excuse herself, go sit down at one of the empty tables, but she shrugged it off.
“Nope. No sports. Though now that you mention it, I’ve recently considered taking up ballet.”
Silence.
Were we supposed to laugh? You couldn’t tell by her sudden stone-faced expression, taking each of us in, maybe even daring us to. I tried to imagine her on the stage, doing a pirouette or a pas de bourrée, but instead I got an image of her lifting Deedee up and twirling him above her head, then dropping him across her knee, snapping him in two WWE style.
“I’m totally kidding,” Rose said at last, breaking the silence. “Seriously? I mean, could you even imagine me in a tutu?”
Wolf shrugged. Deedee giggled nervously. I shook my head—a little too emphatically, maybe—then looked at the clock on the wall and calculated how many more minutes until the bell rang.
“Ballet,” Bench snorted.
Rose Holland polished off another cracker in one bite and brushed the orange crumbs from her sweater. “To each their own,” she said.
And for probably the third time since she sat down I became conscious of all the other students in the cafeteria who seemed to be looking our way, almost certainly getting the wrong idea.
After lunch Rose said she’d see us around. Her tone was casual, like she hadn’t just contributed to twenty of the most uncomfortable middle school lunch minutes in human history. Or more like she knew she had and she just expected us to get over it.
“That girl is funny,” Wolf said after she’d left.
“Yeah,” Deedee agreed, though he didn’t seem too sure. I looked at Bench.
“She’s different,” he said.
I couldn’t begin to get a handle on what all he meant by that. It was impossible to disagree with, though. There was something extraordinary about Rose Holland. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but Deedee gave it a shot.
“I mean, who doesn’t like breadsticks?” he wondered out loud.
“To each their own,” Wolf echoed. I wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking either.
“Not really into it?” Bench said, eyeing Deedee. He was probably picturing that map of Middle Earth too.
Deedee reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thin stack of sticky notes. He quickly sketched out a stick figure wearing a football helmet and holding a set of pom-poms and handed it to Bench. On the top he’d written Go Team!!! Bench promptly crumpled it up and stuffed it down the back of Deedee’s shirt, then threatened to find some real pom-poms and stuff them somewhere else. They tussled a little, until Bench got Deedee in a headlock and noogied him into submission.
They were just horsing around, I knew, same as always, but part of me wondered if it stung a bit, us teasing Bench in front of her. For a moment I considered the possibility that maybe he liked her—this new girl—and that’s why he’d gotten embarrassed.
I’d find out soon enough.
THE NUDGE
OKAY. I LIED. THAT DAY AT LUNCH, WHEN ROSE HOLLAND ASKED me what my thing was. I told her I’d only written one poem, which isn’t true.
One poem earned me my nickname. But I’ve actually written hundreds.
I keep them in a notebook under my bed, like Deedee and his box of dice. It’s nothing special, just your regular spiral-bound notebook, college-ruled, with a navy blue cover. I fill the pages late at night when I’m supposed to be asleep. The real Frost supposedly wrote his poems in an overstuffed blue chair. I write mine by flashlight, belly down on my bed with my feet in the air.
I don’t bring the notebook with me to school because there are certain people—certain types of people—who would take one look at it and find a way to use it against me. I realize most kids wouldn’t care. Some of them would even think it’s cool. It’s the few who don’t—who read way too much into a thing—those are the ones who will make your life miserable. Kids who wouldn’t know a heroic couplet if it was tattooed on their forehead but who would take writing poetry as an excuse to be mean. Kids who would steal it, tear out the pages, and read them out loud in class. Tape them to the bathroom mirrors. Use them to stop up the toilets.
They would come up with other nicknames for me. Names worse than Frost. Names that start with P, and “poet” wouldn’t be one of them.
Some things are better kept to yourself. I don’t share my poems with anyone. Not even Bench or Wolf or Deedee. Not because I’m afraid of what they would think. I mean, we play Dungeons & Dragons. It’s hard to be embarrassed when it’s the four of us. I just prefer not to share. We all need something that’s ours. A thing that we know absolutely about ourselves that others can only guess at.
One day, I think, when I’m good enough, I will pull the notebook from its hiding spot beneath the mattress and open it up for others to see. I will sound my barbaric yawp, as Mr. Sword calls it, over the rooftops of the world. But I’m sure as sushi not doing it while I’m in middle school. I’m not an idiot.
I know what words can do.
Deedee broke out the sticky notes again in art class later that afternoon. We were sketching still lifes of plastic fruit that had been set on the front table—taking the fake perfection of the glossy apple and golden-tinged banana and making them imperfect again through our rough, wobbling lines. It struck me as odd, making a copy of these copies, but real fruit would have rotted before we ever got around to finishing our drawings. Sometimes it’s better to fake it, I guess.
I was sketching the bunch of rubber grapes when Deedee peeled off the top note from his pad and gave it to me. Passing notes had nearly gone extinct back when everybody snuck their phones into class. But only two days into the ban, the furtive art of note passing had experienced a resurgence, and teachers were probably wondering if it wasn’t better before when it was just screens being tapped and not elaborately folded sheets of paper being shuffled under desks like some gossipy game of telephone.
Deedee stuck his Post-it to my sketch when Mr. Stilton, the art teacher, wasn’t looking.
What was that all about? the note said.
I knew what he meant. He meant Rose Holland crashing our lunch.
Guess she just needed somewhere to sit, I wrote back. It was the simplest explanation. It obviously wasn’t the one Deedee was looking for, though. As soon as I handed the sticky note back to him he began to scrawl across it.
Yeah, but why us?
That was the better question. Because she has a soft spot for the tortured and misunderstood? Because she knew somehow, instinctively, that Wolf would ask her to? Because I smiled at her in first period, even though I tried to keep it just a polite kind of thing, like how you smile at your waiter when he
refills your glass, and not a hey-just-feel-free-to-come-plop-right-down-at-our-lunch-table-if-you-feel-lonely kind of thing.
Or maybe she thought we were the cool kids and she was looking to score popularity points by being seen with us.
Yeah. That had to be it.
I pointed to Deedee’s pack of sticky notes and snapped my fingers until he pulled a few off for me. I had no idea where mine were, probably stuffed in my locker somewhere. There was absolutely no talking allowed in art; Mr. Stilton said it “disrupted the creative energy flows that emanated from each artist’s soul.” We weren’t even allowed to whisper. I used my charcoal pencil, filling the top yellow square. Maybe if you hadn’t shot her with an applesauce wad, I wrote.
Deedee scrawled something quickly. He just held his note up for me to see.
Not my fault. I didn’t ask her to sit.
I wrote just as quickly.
I didn’t ask her either.
Deedee scribbled and flashed another note.
Do you like her?
I shook my head vehemently. Gut reaction. He shook his head back and continued writing.
No. Not like that. I mean, would you want her to sit with us again?
Again? Like tomorrow? I hadn’t really thought about it. I assumed it was a one-time-only thing. Rose Holland was getting her bearings. Window shopping. Tomorrow she would sit somewhere else. Then somewhere different the third day, and so on, until she found her people. Because that’s how it worked.
We weren’t her people. She had to see that. We were at maximum capacity. Once was fine, but I couldn’t imagine her really fitting in. She was funny, sort of, and you kind of had to admire the gutsy way she just inserted herself, but she stuck out. She drew attention to herself, and that was a problem. Because who you sat with mattered. Who nodded to you in the halls. Who saved your seat on the bus. Who signed the back of your yearbook. It all meant something.
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