On Wednesday, things get worse. In math class, Luke takes my pencil and won’t give it back. I’m trying to grab it from him when Mrs. Knell says, “Samantha and Luke, what is going on back there?” The entire class turns around to look at us.
On Thursday, I end up next to Luke at the lunch table, and he eats half of my French fries. Right off my plate. Without asking.
On Friday, I’m next to him again in the cafeteria, and when I push his hand away from my tray, he drops it onto my chair, so it’s almost brushing against my leg.
“Cut it out,” I say, pushing the hand off my chair, but he just grins at me.
I look to David, who’s sitting across from us, and wish he would tell Luke to stop being a jerk, but he doesn’t even notice what’s going on.
I don’t see David all weekend, again, because my family goes skiing, but on Monday, I somehow get stuck next to Luke, again, in the cafeteria. After lunch, as we walk to math class, he keeps bumping into me. Like he actually doesn’t know how to walk.
So today, I decide I’m not going to sit next to Luke no matter what. Even if it means pulling up a chair from another table. I push through the cafeteria doors, busy plotting how I’ll do it, when Haley steps in front of me. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, but no baseball cap today. And she’s wearing an oversized blue sweater, with no writing on it.
“Hey,” she says. “I saw you at the batting cages over MLK weekend.”
“Right,” I say. “I saw you too.”
“You were killing those pitches. Great swing.”
“Thanks,” I say, kind of embarrassed that she was watching me. I wouldn’t have even noticed her if Dad hadn’t been talking to Coach Wright.
Some girl walks by us and Haley nods and smiles, then looks back at me. “How long have you been playing?”
“Baseball? I’ve been in Little League since I was in kindergarten, but I’ve been playing my whole life. My dad says my first word was ‘ball.’”
“Me too,” Haley says, smiling. “Not the first word thing, but playing ball. My mom played college softball. Now she’s on a women’s league. She was hoping I’d become an athlete, and lucky for both of us I did. You going to the cages again anytime soon? I didn’t see you there this past weekend.”
I shrug. “I dunno. Going was my dad’s idea. To get ready for baseball season. I guess if he wants to go again . . .”
“We have time reserved every weekend until official practices start in March. Maybe you want to come practice with us?” She raises one eyebrow.
“Us who?”
“The girls’ softball team. You know, you can go out for softball this year. There’s a school team. You don’t have to play on a boys’ team.”
I laugh. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”
“Really? Why?” Haley asks, tipping her head to one side like she’s studying me.
“Because baseball’s challenging. It’s hard and it takes skill to play.”
“So does softball.”
“But softball is for girls.”
Haley crosses her arms. “What exactly are you?”
I start to answer, but there’s nothing I can say that will sound right. I shift from one foot to the other. I want to explain about being serious about playing, and not worrying about how I look and what I’m wearing. “I’m a baseball player,” I say. “It’s a real sport.”
Haley laughs. “So is softball. Have you ever even seen a girls’ softball game?”
I’m sure I have, but when I start to think about it, I can’t picture anything. Then I remember: cheering. “I heard a game once,” I say. “It was on the field below where I was playing. A bunch of girls were doing these chants and things. They sounded—”
“Like people having fun?” Haley finishes my sentence. “Like teammates cheering each other on?”
I wanted to say “like girls,” remembering the way Dad and I laughed about it in the car on the way home afterward. But I don’t. Instead I say, “Silly. They sounded silly.”
“Since when is cheering for your teammates silly?” Haley says, shaking her head like she can’t believe me. “That’s what being part of a team means—having a good time together. No wonder everyone says you’re stuck-up.”
Haley turns and walks away. I’m standing there like my feet are glued to the cafeteria floor, my hands gripping my tray. I stare after her, and I’m pretty sure my mouth is hanging open. Stuck-up? Me? Haley’s got it all wrong.
DAVID
Knowing that Luke likes Sammie and he’s experienced in the girlfriend department, I start to notice things. Like the way he takes her pencil in math class and won’t give it back. And how, every day at lunch, he ends up sitting next to her. She’s always late because she comes from Mr. Pachelo’s English class, so maybe it’s just by coincidence that the last open chair is always next to Luke. But I decide to do a little experiment.
Our table fills up until there is just one empty chair—next to Luke, with his backpack on it. I pick up my tray and head to the salad bar. Just as I get there, Sammie comes through the cafeteria doors. I wave to her, and so does Luke. I’m just about to go over and invite her to our table, even though it’s hers as much as anyone’s and she doesn’t need an invitation, when some girl walks up to her and they start talking. Haley something, her name is. She only started at E. C. Adams in the fall, and is the opposite of Sammie; where Sammie is small and quick and wild and dark, Haley is tall—as tall as Luke—and pale. She moves deliberately, like she’s stalking something, like she’s sure of herself. Her blond hair is always pulled back into a tight, neat ponytail. Even when Sammie puts her hair in a ponytail, there are pieces that can’t be captured. Haley’s pretty, I guess, but not as pretty as Sammie.
After a minute, Haley walks away, Sammie turns toward our table, and I spring into action. Well, not spring, exactly, but I wave and walk toward her, pretending like I don’t even notice Luke hovering over his backpack, which is still on the chair.
I let Sammie get two steps ahead of me, and sure enough, right as she’s at the table, Luke whips his backpack off the chair and says, “This seat’s free.”
“Great,” I say, elbowing past Sammie and plopping my unwanted dough-boy butt right down next to Luke, feeling like I just hit a winning home run. Sammie walks around to the other side of the table and sits in my seat.
“Five weeks until the mandatory baseball meeting,” I say, trying to shift attention away from the musical chairs event.
“Why is it mandatory anyway?” Luke asks.
“Coach’s way of weeding out the guys who aren’t serious,” Jefferson explains. “He always makes it the first Tuesday in March because it’s a totally random day.”
“If you don’t show up to that meeting, with all your paperwork complete, don’t bother coming to tryouts,” Max says.
Kai nods, wagging his finger at Luke like he wants to say something but he can’t because his mouth is full of pasta. He chews and swallows. “You need a physical. I have mine next week, so I’m trying to bulk up.” He leans over his tray and shovels another forkful of pasta into his mouth. Kai’s shorter than me, and thin, sort of like a very short piece of human spaghetti, and no amount of pasta is ever going to make any difference.
“I had mine back in November,” Andrew says, blinking twice. “I already printed and filled out the forms. I’m psyched to see how my new contacts do.” He blinks quickly a dozen more times, his dark eyes sending out some kind of Morse code. Andrew is a better player than me, but not by much. He really loves the sport, though, and plays three seasons. For years, he wore glasses, which he insisted hurt his game. This past summer, he got contacts, which make him blink twice as often as anyone else. The jury’s out on whether he’ll play any better.
Sammie doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to the conversation. She’s sitting over her tray, holding her fork and staring at nothing.
“What about you, Sammie?”
“Huh? What?” She stares b
lankly across the table at me.
“You have your physical yet?”
Her eyes dart to Luke, then dart away.
“Of course,” she says. “Dad set it up for me in the fall.”
Sammie’s not a person who bursts into tears when she’s upset, but I can tell: she’s upset. It suddenly occurs to me that maybe Sammie wanted to sit next to Luke just as much as he wanted her to.
Which is when I realize that Luke will make the team for sure, and Sammie too, but me? I’m a benchwarmer. How many of those does the E. C. Adams baseball team need? What will happen to Sammie and me, to our friendship, if I’m not even on the team? And worse: What will happen between Sammie and Luke if they’re together all the time without me?
I try to remember the last time I hung out with Sammie alone, without Luke. It was New Year’s Eve, before Luke and his family arrived. That was the night he kissed her, while I stood there and watched.
I realize I’ve been hanging with Luke so much that I kind of forgot about Sammie. Before it’s too late, I need to get her alone, away from Luke, with just me.
SAMMIE
Before sixth grade, I had plenty of friends who were girls, and we did normal friend things. Then we started middle school, and something happened to my friends. They changed. All of a sudden, they turned cliquey and giggly and dumb. Sarah Canavan, who used to come over to my house and color and play board games, started wearing eyeliner and lip gloss, and flirting with boys. Carly Martin, who used to shoot baskets with me in my driveway, became this dramatic, weepy person who started straightening her curly brown hair and painting her fingernails a different color every single day. Then she began spelling her name “Carli”—with a heart instead of a dot over the “i.” Suddenly, my friends were whispering about each other in the halls and crying in the bathrooms and passing notes and batting their eyelashes at boys—the same boys they used to complain about sitting next to because they might get cooties. When I teased them, or pointed out how silly they were being, my girl friends would look at me like I was the silly, crazy one.
Once, in the hall before school, Sarah was braiding Marissa’s hair. I was doing homework, and only half listening to the conversation.
“Can you do pigtails?” Marissa asked Sarah.
“Not today, silly,” Sarah said. “Amanda has pigtails.”
“Why can’t Marissa have pigtails too?” I asked.
Both girls looked at me like I was insane.
“The same as Amanda?” Sarah asked.
“Yeah. The same as Amanda. Why can’t Marissa have pigtails, the same as Amanda?”
“She just can’t,” Sarah said, like that explained anything. “She can’t.”
It was like they’d learned a code that I couldn’t decipher.
Then, in November of sixth grade, I got sick. I missed three days of school. I texted all my friends to let them know, but no one texted me back, not even to ask how I was feeling. On the third day, when I started texting them to get the homework I’d missed, no one responded. It was like I didn’t exist. I got so desperate that I finally tried calling. Sarah’s cell rang and rang, until I got a message that her voice mailbox wasn’t set up. Carli’s went to voicemail after the second ring, and even though I left a message, she never called me back. I knew Raven’s home phone number, from when we were little, so I tried that, but when her mom answered, she said Raven was in the shower. Mackenzie’s mom answered her cell, said, “Hold on,” then a minute later came back on the phone, all apologetic, and said Mackenzie was “indisposed.” I was eleven. I had to look that word up.
Finally, after I’d texted and called every girl who’d ever been my friend, I texted David Fischer. We’d known each other for years from Little League and New Year’s Eve and summertime family barbecues. We were friends. The kind of friends you are when your families are friends. But he was in my half of my classes, and he texted me right back. He saved me. He made copies of the math handouts and his science notes and the vocabulary sheet for English. And he brought everything over to my house, along with some Brazilian candies that his babysitter made.
I told myself there was some kind of explanation for the girls. That when I got back to school, everything would be the same. But when I returned, after only three days out, none of my so-called friends would talk to me. Not in the halls, not in class. At lunchtime, I went to sit at our table—their table—and there were no empty chairs. I actually saw Raven pull an empty chair away right when I walked into the cafeteria. But I thought I had to be imagining things, so I grabbed a chair from another table, pulled it over, and sat down. No one said a single word to me. I was invisible. They didn’t pretend I wasn’t there; I wasn’t there. I tried to act like everything was normal. I sat in my seat and choked down a couple bites of sandwich, and acted like I was part of the conversation, but my insides were turning to ashes.
The next day, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t sit with those girls again. But I had nowhere else to go.
David Fischer saved me, again.
When the bell rang for lunch, I started gathering my books and things up as slowly as I could. I was stalling for time, trying to figure out where else I could go so I wouldn’t have to face the girls. David was in my class, which was math, and he was still packing up too because his backpack and binder are always a disaster.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you understand that last problem Mr. Johnson put up on the board?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I totally didn’t get it. Could you maybe go over it with me? At lunch?”
“Sure,” he said. So we walked into the cafeteria together, and I stuck right next to him while we got our trays and our food, and sat down. I knew all the guys at his table—I’d played on Little League teams with most of them at some point. David showed me how to do the math problem, which I’d actually understood, of course. Then we talked about basketball and the Knicks’ awesome win against the Suns, and how amazing Kristaps Porziņģis was.
That weekend, I called David and asked if he wanted to hang out, maybe shoot some hoops. He said sure.
The next week, something shifted, and I became visible to the girls again. In English, Sarah asked me if I’d finished reading The Midwife’s Apprentice. In science, Marissa and Raven wanted to be in my group for the volcano experiment.
But I kept sitting with David and his table at lunch. The guys were all fine with it. And the girls who’d been my friends? I didn’t have much in common with them anymore.
I wasn’t stuck-up. I’m not stuck-up. I’m just not interested in the same things as other girls. I don’t know their code. And, honestly, I don’t want to. I have more in common with David and his friends than with a bunch of girls. Or, at least, more in common with David. I don’t actually hang out with the other guys, except at lunch. David’s my friend. My best friend.
Or he was, until Luke came along.
DAVID
The bell rings, so we all stand up and dump our trays in the trash, and Luke of course is walking next to Sammie, but I have a plan.
“Hey, Sammie,” I say, stepping up next to her on the other side. “Would you rather play baseball in a dress or a bathing suit?”
“What?” she asks.
I repeat my question.
“What kind of dress?” she asks.
“That’s so stupid,” Luke says. “That’s never going to happen.”
“Your bat mitzvah dress,” I say. Sammie hated her bat mitzvah dress.
“One-piece or two-piece bathing suit?” she asks.
I slow down my pace, and Sammie slows with me.
Luke groans. “You guys and your ‘would you rather.’ Ugh.” He runs to catch up with Andrew and Kai.
“A one-piece.”
Sammie tips her head to one side, thinking. “I’d go for the dress. Better coverage for sliding.”
“Me too,” I say. “Definitely the dress.”
“I’d like to see you in my bat mitzvah dress,” Sammie s
ays, flashing me a quick smile.
“Hey,” I say, like I just thought of it. “Want to meet at the Fort sometime? Like we did during winter break? Maybe after school one day?”
Sammie looks at me, and I can tell she’s surprised. “Just you and me?”
“Just you and me.”
She shrugs. “Okay. Could you remember the hand warmers this time?”
I grin. “I’ll try. But I’ll probably forget.”
Thursday, February 5
DAVID
I finally have a plan to hang out with Sammie, so of course God decides to prank me. The rest of the week is one of the coldest on record. The Channel 12 weatherman practically poops his pants with excitement about how cold it is. “And the high today will be a whopping twelve degrees!” he says on Friday. I hate the word whopping. I hate weathermen. And weatherwomen. And winter.
On Saturday it warms up into the mid-twenties, and we get a couple inches of snow. It’s still in the twenties on Sunday, so I text Sammie Fort? then don’t hear from her for almost two hours, when she finally texts back Can’t. Skiing. It drops down into single digits on Monday, and when a thaw finally sets in on Tuesday, it rains, so I still don’t say anything to Sammie. Wednesday, it’s warm and not raining, but the ground’s muddy and gross, plus the weather app says it’ll get up to fifty on Thursday. So I wait until Thursday because I want the Fort to be perfect.
When the last bell rings, Luke has to stay after to talk to the teacher, which I am pretty sure is a giant “go for it” sign from God.
“Meet you on the bus,” I tell him, then race-walk out of class.
It’s so warm out that kids are carrying their coats, and the sun is shining, and everything is going my way.
Sammie’s in her seat, so I slide in next to her. “Fort in an hour?”
“I thought you forgot,” she says. “Or were goofing on me.”
“I didn’t forget,” I say.
Sammie nods. “Promise you’ll be there?”
“I promise,” I say, then move across the aisle to my regular seat. A couple of minutes later Luke gets on and sits down next to me.
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