by Barbara Dee
People were crowded around my desk.
Sabrina was clutching my science binder.
Reading excerpts of the Life Cycle.
Out loud.
To the entire class.
“Wyeth Brockman: Tadpole with Croaker tendencies. Croaked on the word ‘weekend.’
“Ryan Seederholm: Croaker. Smells like a gerbil.
“Jonathan Pressman: Croaker. His voice sounds like a chain saw shutting off in slow motion.”
The words—my words—were pinballing around the room, randomly crashing into things, causing gasps and murmurs.
And laughs. From the girls, but not all the girls.
And none of the boys.
I wanted to shout, Stop, that’s private, give it back! Besides, it’s not even what I think anymore. The Life Cycle is over!
But I was frozen; I couldn’t form words. I couldn’t move, either.
And then Maya walked into the room. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
“Finley’s notebook,” Chloe replied. “She’s keeping some kind of warped rating system, apparently.”
“Oh, really?” Maya said. “And if she is, why is that your business, Chloe?”
“Because it’s everybody’s business,” Chloe answered. “I mean, if she just leaves it lying out on the desk. And if it’s about all the boys in this room!”
Maya flashed me a panicked look. Then to Chloe she said: “Trust me, it’s not a rating system.”
“How do you know that?” Sabrina challenged.
Maya crossed her arms on her chest. “Because it’s half mine. I half wrote it. And look, my name’s even on the title: The Amphibian Life Cycle (a.k.a. Finley & Maya’s Super-Perfect Guide to Imperfect Boys). All right?”
The room went silent.
“Omigosh,” Olivia exclaimed, her hands flying to her mouth.
At last I unfroze. “Actually, Maya just wrote one teeny little part, the bit about Dylan. I wrote all the rest. So if you guys want to be mad at someone—”
“We wrote it together,” Maya interrupted. “As a team. I’m just as responsible as Finley.”
Meanwhile, Sabrina was madly flipping pages. “Yeah, okay, so here’s Maya’s handwriting. ‘Dylan McGraw: ribbit! Compliments Maya’s knitting (scarf)! Saves M a seat in the lunchroom! Laughs at M’s joke! Gorgeous smile!’ ”
Maya turned wild cherry.
Dylan put a book over his head.
Dahlia and Sophie went, “Aww.”
“I think that’s sweet,” Micayla Hoffman said.
“Me too.” Olivia grinned at Maya. “And not surprising. But I don’t get the ribbit business.”
“It just means Dylan’s a Frog,” I said quickly. “Which is like the highest form of praise. For a boy, I mean. It’s complicated. Can I please have my notebook back now?”
“I don’t think we’re done with it yet, Finley,” Chloe said. “And besides, what’s so great about frogs? They’re slimy and bumpy.”
“And green,” Sabrina added helpfully.
“Hey, I think frogs are cute,” Olivia protested. “Remember Kermit?”
Sabrina snorted. “Olivia, you would remember Kermit.”
It suddenly occurred to me that only the girls were talking. The boys were all staring at their shoelaces, at other people’s shoelaces, at the patterns in the floor tiles. They didn’t even seem angry; they just seemed embarrassed. Confused. Like they wished they could slip through a portal and come out in some alternate dimension. And right then, I wished I could join them.
But finally it was Jarret who spoke. “All right, this is stupid. And I don’t get the point you’re making—Frogs are cool, and Dylan’s like the only one?”
“No, there are other Frogs,” Maya said. She raised her chin at me. “Aren’t there, Finley?”
I pretended to mentally scroll through a long list. “Um, sure. Let me think. Well, hmm, there’s also Zachary.”
Drew Looper shoved Zachary. Way to go with the ladies, bro. But this time Zachary wasn’t smiling. And he wasn’t looking at me, either.
“Though it’s funny,” Sabrina announced, pointing at my writing. “Because for Zachary it says, ‘Total Frog. Apparently skipped (hopped?) over Croaker.’ Whatever that’s supposed to mean.” She flipped a page. “But then here it says, ‘Frog. Maybe too much of a Frog. Although now associating with Croakers and going by the Croaker name ‘Mattison.’ Can you be a Frog or a Frog-plus with Croaker tendencies? Can you evolve in reverse?’ ”
“That’s not even English,” Drew Looper grumbled.
“Oh, but we can figure it out,” Chloe said loudly. “It’s pretty insulting to Zachary, isn’t it?”
Everyone stared at me then, even the boys.
“Look, it’s not what I think anymore,” I said. I could hear my voice wobble. It didn’t even sound like my voice.
“Finley’s changed her mind.” Sabrina smirked at Chloe. “She’s a new person now. Since when—Monday?”
I peeked at Zachary. His mouth was tight, and his almost-purple eyes were fixed on me, trying to read behind my panicked expression into my brain. If he’d had a camera with him then, he could probably have taken an ungeneric portrait—Girl Freaking When Her Thoughts About Boys—Specifically Zachary—Are Revealed to the Universe.
And that was when Maya made her move. Like a tiny wild cat who’d been stalking an unsuspecting mouse, she suddenly pounced on Sabrina, snatching my science binder from Sabrina’s hands. Really, it was a basketball move, a steal, and you could see by the look on Sabrina’s face that she was shocked at losing possession to a puny gymnast.
“Here,” Maya snapped, thrusting the binder at me. “Put that away! Or get rid of it!”
“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”
Maya shook her head, her ponytail swishing furiously. As Mr. Coffee sauntered through the door, she took her new seat on the total opposite side of the classroom.
CHAPTER 16
Sitting next to Zachary that period was torture. He kept avoiding my eyes and jiggling his leg the whole time, and once when I bumped his elbow semiaccidentally, he didn’t even flinch or move or anything.
But then, about a minute later, he slid this note across our lab station:
So when I saw all that stuff in your notebook (when we were in the library) and you told me it was a newmonic (however you spell that word), you were LYING?
I wrote back: Only because it was too complicated to explain!
Zachary: You mean too hard for my amphibian brain?
Me: Can we please talk about this?
Zachary: CROAK.
That was it. He didn’t write—or say—another word to me the whole rest of class. And as soon as science was over, instead of heading to English, I fled to the school library.
Ms. Krieger smiled as I crashed through the doors. “Some hot chocolate, señorita?”
She’d pronounced “chocolate” cho-co-la-tay. Like this was a pseudo-Spanish day.
I burst into tears.
Ms. Krieger sat me on her squishy red sofa. She handed me a mug, and a napkin, and said in a soft voice, “Talk to me, Finley. Fight with your best friend?”
I nodded. “And with everyone else. The whole class hates me now.” I guess my hand was shaking, because she took the mug from me, and I wiped my nose with the napkin. “How did you know?”
“Oh, wild guess,” Ms. Krieger replied. “And don’t forget, I’m a student of character. Just like you.”
“Better than me,” I said, sniffling. “I’m terrible at it.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that.” She touched my shoulder. “What happened?”
I explained that I’d been “taking some notes about people,” making it sound more Harriet the Spy than Amphibian Life Cycle. (Not to hide all the Croaker/Tadpole/Frog stuff, but because the last thing I wanted to do was explain all those standards to a teacher, and anyhow the specifics weren’t the point.) And I described how Chloe and Sabrina had humiliated me, reading my words out loud in a way th
at made me seem boy-hating. Snarky. Even though I’d taken all those notes as a kind of science project. As a public service, almost. As a way of dealing with boy immaturity. Which, as all girls knew, was a major issue.
Ms. Krieger just listened. Finally she said, “You know, this sort of thing happens in the eighth grade every year.”
“It does?” I said. “Someone steals a notebook—”
“No, I don’t mean this exact situation. I mean there’s always some sort of end-of-the-year kerfuffle.” I must have stared at her blankly, because she said, “You don’t know that word?”
I shook my head.
“Ah. So if we don’t know something, what should we do then, Finley?”
I rolled my eyes. “Look it up.”
Sometimes I forgot that Ms. Krieger was a librarian.
She walked over to the big gold dictionary she kept on a stand beside her desk. I watched her flip the pages. “ ‘Keratin,’ ‘kerchief’ . . . ah, there it is: ‘kerfuffle.’ ‘Informal, chiefly British. From Scottish Gaelic car, meaning twist, and fuffle, to disarrange.’ The first definition is ‘commotion, disorder, agitation.’ More colloquially, ‘hoo-hah,’ ‘hurly-burly’—”
“I think I get it,” I said, sighing. “You’re saying eighth graders are completely predictable, and that’s why there’s always a big fight this time of year.”
“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” She looked at me over her lime-green glasses. “My theory is this happens because you’re graduating soon. And that’s scary, so you pick fights. To distract yourselves.”
“Actually, I think we pick fights because we’re totally sick of each other.”
“It may seem that way now.” She smiled. “But believe it or not, some of the people you like the least in middle school may end up being your buddies in high school. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen that happen.”
I’d stopped shaking by then, so she gave me back the mug of hot chocolate. And I was grateful to have it, because I had nothing to say to that last speech of hers. Buddies with Jarret and Chloe? Or with Sabrina? Because okay, I knew people changed, but there were limits.
I mean, there had to be. Even in high school.
Ms. Krieger closed the dictionary. “Anyhow, Finley, I was thinking. I desperately need to restore order to nonfiction, especially US history, which the seventh grade turned into mush after their last research assignment. If you have any time, I could really use your help.”
“Me?” I asked. “You mean now?”
She nodded. “It’s a big job, so I’ll need to write your teachers a note. But I’m sure they’ll allow it, because they’re all deathly afraid of me. Okay with you?”
Was she serious? It was better than okay. “Thank you, Ms. Krieger. For everything.”
“De nada,” she replied. “Now finish your cho-co-la-tay, señorita, and then vámonos.”
• • •
She wasn’t exaggerating; the seventh grade had rearranged practically the whole nonfiction section. It took me the rest of the morning to hunt down the books and then get them returned to their right shelves. But when I finished, Ms. Krieger said I could hang out in the library, because, quién sabe, she might discover another kerfuffle on the shelves. That was the word she used: “kerfuffle,” even though it was a pseudo-Spanish day. So I stayed.
At dismissal I slipped outside through the cafeteria door. Maya was standing in our usual spot, and I knew it would be weird if I just showed up and acted all normal like, Hey, Maya, and how was your day? And I didn’t want to deal with Sabrina, or with Sophie and Dahlia, for that matter, so I skipped basketball practice too.
The strange thing was, I found myself taking the long way home, on Zachary’s street. What was I thinking? Maybe if we ran into each other I could explain? (Explain what, exactly? I didn’t even know: Yes, I wrote that stuff about you, but accidentally/as a joke/my pen was taken over by mind-control zombies?) But still I walked down Spruce Street, passing the squirrels and the hydrants and the little kids, whose messes were the kind their mommies could clean up for them, literally and figuratively.
And in front of a rusty mailbox on the corner of Cypress I almost crashed into Wyeth Brockman, who was putting out his recycling.
“Hey, Finley,” he said. “More surveillance?”
“What?” I nearly screamed.
“I meant of the block,” he answered. “Remember? You were taking photos? For The Bug?”
“Oh, right. No, I’m done with all that. I was just walking. Just to . . . walk.”
He picked up a milk container that had blown out of the recycling bin, and carefully squeezed it in with empty containers of cat litter, detergent, orange juice. All the stuff that made up a week of life in the Brockman family, I guessed. If I’d had my camera, I’d probably have taken a picture. And it would be a portrait, even though it had no people.
Wyeth watched me study his garbage. “School sucked for you today, didn’t it,” he said.
“Yeah, that basically sums it up.”
“Well, you shouldn’t feel so bad,” Wyeth said. “Chloe and Sabrina had no right to read your notebook. And hey, they should talk—they’ve called people worse things than Tadpole. Remember Freakazoid?”
I kept nodding. Of course I remembered Freakazoid.
And then I saw something in Wyeth’s pale blue eyes, a flicker I probably should have noticed before now. Maybe I should just shut up, I told myself. Or maybe not.
“They picked on you, too?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he answered, shoving his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. “Since practically the first day of middle school. But mostly they acted like I wasn’t there, like I was a negative number or something. And you never did, or Maya, either. So if you wrote that my voice was changing—”
“Which is not a bad thing,” I cut in. “By the way.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. It’s not bad or good; it’s just true—my voice is changing. It’s supposed to, right? Anyhow, what I’m saying is, I don’t care about your notebook.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure other people do.”
The weather was chilly and raw, and I felt exhausted from this long day, but I thought how sweet Wyeth was to be talking to me like this.
Because really: I’d made fun of his Tadpole-ness, hadn’t I? We’d never intended the Life Cycle to be mean, but it kind of was, the more I thought about it. And now, despite everything I’d written, everything the class had heard, here was Wyeth acting Froggy.
If I’d still been keeping the Life Cycle, Wyeth would definitely have deserved an upgrade. Seriously, I would have switched his status to Frog right there.
But I wasn’t the official chart keeper anymore. Nobody was. Anyway, the Life Cycle was over.
It occurred to me then that Wyeth’s house had a basketball hoop in the driveway. “Hey, Wyeth, you want to play?” I said, pointing to the basket.
“You mean, now?” He looked confused. “You against me?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re a girl?”
“No duh,” I said, grinning.
“And you’re on the team.”
“Playing bench, but yeah.”
“And you’re much taller than me.”
“True. You scared I’ll shame you?”
“No.” He laughed.
“Get your basketball, then,” I challenged him. “One-on-one. But I’m not going easy on you, Wyeth.”
“Yeah, Finley, I’m not going easy on you, either,” Wyeth replied.
For about a half hour we played in his driveway. It was fun, even though we didn’t bother to keep score.
Although if we had, I’m positive I would have won.
• • •
By the time I walked into the kitchen, Mom had morphed into Detective Mom. Señor Hansen had e-mailed her to say I was “illegally absent” from his class, so she’d called Ms. Fisher-Greenglass’s office to sort it out. Somehow Ms. Fisher-Gree
nglass had heard I’d spent the afternoon in the library, so Mom called Ms. Krieger, who used the word “kerfuffle” and said I’d seemed “a tad upset.” So Mom thought, Oh, poor Finley, she’s having a rough day; I’ll pick her up from basketball practice and take her out for a cupcake. But when she got to the gym with the Terribles, who were collaborating on a tantrum, Coach Malecki told her I’d never showed up for practice. Mom started to freak—she tried calling my cell, but Ms. Krieger had made me turn it off when I was in the library, and I’d forgotten to turn it back on. So then, from the parking lot, Mom called Maya’s mom, who told her the whole story.
Well, not the whole story—Mrs. Lopez had heard from Maya about my notebook being read aloud, and how Maya had defended me, even though I’d insulted Maya the day before. Maya hadn’t told her mom about the Life Cycle, specifically—but she’d been updating her mom about what a good, loyal friend she was and what a bad friend I was being lately.
“Of course, I don’t believe any of that,” Mom added immediately. “But, honey, if you just skip basketball practice, and you don’t keep me in the loop—”
“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not deliberately hiding things. It’s just I know how much you have going on.”
“You’re what I have going on,” she said. “Nothing is more important to me than my Awesome Daughter. Don’t you know that, Finley?”
I opened my mouth to say something. Not that I had a plan for what that would be—probably some mash-up of I was just shooting hoops with Wyeth Brockman/sorry I made you worry/I’m mad you talked about me to Maya’s mom/this was a terrible day and please don’t make it worse by guilting me out/I love you too/can I please switch schools after the weekend?
But what I ended up saying was this: “How come you took down that post?”
“What post?” Mom asked.
“You know. About getting me to communicate.”
Mom smiled a little. “Because I realized it was a message to you. Not the business of the entire blogosphere.”
And then Addie ran into the kitchen wailing because Max had tossed her stuffed pig into the toilet. So we spent the next twenty minutes giving Oinky a bubble bath and a blow-dry, while Max snuck into the upstairs bathroom and calmly ate an entire cherry ChapStick.