by Sally Warner
Gran had put down her toast and was gazing at Skye, seemingly stunned, when the doorbell rang. “That’ll be Maddy,” Gran said softly.
“Oh, all right. Have it your way,” Skye yelled, and she grabbed her book bag and slammed out of the warm, cozy kitchen, leaving her grandmother staring after her in confusion and dismay.
“Okay, we’re here,” Skye said after what felt like the longest, most silent fifteen minutes of her life. “You have your schedule, right? And you know where your locker is?”
“Yes,” Maddy said. A warm breeze ruffled her medium-short hair, which was pretty and blond, but Maddy had worn a T-shirt with a babyish cartoon character on the front – in spite of the obvious fact that she clearly wasn’t a baby.
“Well, okay then,” Skye said as kids of every size, shape, and description shoved past them, stampeding herdlike up the school’s front steps. “See you.”
“At two forty-five P.M.,” Maddy said in her usual precise way.
Skye bit her lip and wished her grandmother had heard this. See what you’ve done? she felt like saying to Gran. “But if I don’t show up, Maddy,” Skye said, trying to be nice, “just walk home alone, okay? Don’t wait around for me.”
“No, I’ll be right here, Skye,” Maddy said, staring at the ground. “I don’t mind waiting for extended periods of time.”
Skye sighed, then turned away and stomped up the steps, heading for her locker. Her assigned locker was on the first floor, in the main hallway, and she’d practiced unlocking it several times after orientation, having easily memorized the combination.
Today, however, she couldn’t get it to open.
“I think that one’s mine,” a squeaky voice said in her ear. “Number fifty-seven.” It was a confident-looking girl Skye had noticed at orientation.
“Oh,” Skye said, blushing. “I’m sorry. I thought it said fifty-one.”
“No big deal,” the girl said, shrugging. “We can trade, if this is your lucky number or something.”
“I didn’t want this one,” Skye tried to explain. “I just made a mistake, that’s all. See how the numbers are sort of funny?”
“Well, no big deal,” the girl said again, after peering politely at the numbers, and Skye crept off to her locker feeling like the biggest fool in the world.
She spent so long pretending to be busy at her locker, trying to regain her composure, that the hall was nearly empty when she finally looked up. Suddenly, a noisy group of boys tumbled down the stairs like a mini-avalanche, and they began pushing and shoving their way through the hall, seeming to pick up speed as they went. The boys – five or six of them – churned past Skye without even seeing her, but Maddy was standing frozen in their path just a few yards away.
Maddy had been watching her, Skye realized, startled, but she hadn’t known enough to get out of the boys’ way.
“Hey, it’s a girl,” one of the boys said, stumbling against Maddy and grabbing hold of her arm – to steady himself, Skye thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The boys were crowding around Maddy now, and it was difficult to see what was happening.
“He finally got a girl,” a second boy said, laughing. “Even if it is just a sixth-grader.”
“Go ahead, Cord,” the biggest boy said. “Let’s hear you talk some game!”
“Give it up,” a fourth boy said in a drawling, too-cool voice. “She’s a re-tard.”
“Ease up, Aaron,” a different boy protested.
Skye wanted to do something to shut them up, or at least to make the first boy let go of Maddy, but she couldn’t move. Everything was happening so fast that it didn’t seem real. Maybe she truly was invisible, Skye thought suddenly. After all, those boys hadn’t seen her, and–
But no. Maddy saw her. The girl’s brown eyes were dark with fear, and Skye took a concrete-footed step forward in spite of herself.
And, as if they were one, the boys turned to look at Skye just as the warning bell rang. “Aw, let her loose,” the biggest boy said, pulling the first boy – Aaron? – away from Maddy. “Let’s go, dude, or they’re gonna sweat us.”
And like that, the avalanche of boys melted away.
Skye and Maddy looked at each other for one long, white-faced moment, and then Skye turned away–ashamed, and angry with Maddy, though she couldn’t have said why.
7
Social Ecology
Skye hid in the girls’ room for almost twenty minutes after school let out, hoping Maddy would walk home alone, but Maddy was still waiting for her at the bottom of the school’s front steps a little after three. “Hello, Skye,” she said, not seeming irritated at all by the delay. And, in spite of what had happened in the hall that morning, Maddy looked cheerful.
“Hi,” Skye mumbled, trying to look around without moving her head, to see who else was on the steps. “You could’ve left without me, you know.”
“I would never do that,” Maddy said softly.
Skye sighed as they began their walk home. She did not want to spend the entire semester walking to and from school with Maddy, but she felt too drained by her first day at Amelia Ear hart to pursue the topic. Also, she admitted privately, she felt guilty about what had happened in the hallway that morning. Should she have said something to those boys? Tried to protect Maddy somehow?
“Are you angry with me for some reason, Skye?” Maddy asked after a few blocks, sounding more curious than worried.
“Why would I be angry?” Skye asked, not answering Maddy’s question.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Maddy said, plodding along.
Skye counted to ten. “Who were those boys?” she finally asked Maddy. “The ones who grabbed you this morning?”
“They bumped into me,” Maddy corrected her. “It was a collision. An accident. Only one of them is really mean, Skye. He’s in the eighth grade. He grabbed my arm last summer when I was just walking down the road, and he bumped into my – my front. That was probably only an accident, too. But he calls me names pretty often. He almost made me cry once.”
“Which one?” Skye asked.
“‘Re-tard,’” Maddy said, pronouncing the word carefully as she answered the wrong question. “Only I’m not, actually. I’m something else. So he’s mistaken.”
“What do you mean, you’re something else?” Skye asked in what she hoped was a casual tone of voice. “Are you saying you have, like, a learning disability?”
“No,” Maddy said, shaking her curly head. “Learning’s easy for me. I get really good grades. It’s the people who are hard! Except for you,” she added quickly, as if not wanting to hurt Skye’s feelings. “You’re different, Skye.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” Skye said. “But I don’t get it, Maddy. What do you mean, the people are hard?”
Maddy frowned, obviously planning her reply. “Other kids sometimes think I’m strange, right?” she finally said, not really asking. “Like those boys this morning. And hardly anyone talks to me at school, but my counselor is helping me with that. She says I should just say hi to people first, and ask them how they’re doing,” she added.
“But what does your counselor say is the matter with you?” Skye asked, hoping the question wasn’t too rude.
“Nothing’s the matter with me, but I have a syndrome,” Maddy said, sounding both important and a little mysterious. “That means like a pattern of symptoms – but not symptoms like being sick,” she assured Skye.
“That’s good,” Skye said weakly. “But I think you should tell people, Maddy. Because maybe then they’d leave you alone,” she said, thinking of those boys in the hall.
“Do you tell people everything that’s different about you?” Maddy asked, sounding curious once more.
“Well, no,” Skye admitted, thinking of her sketchbook–and, of course, her brother. And the fights her mom and dad were having. “I guess I don’t.”
“Me either,” Maddy said, smiling. “So we’re very similar, Skye!”
“Sort of, anyway,” Skye a
dmitted. “But – but who was that boy who grabbed you this morning?”
“That was Cord Driscoll,” Maddy said quietly. “He and Aaron Petterson are friends. Aaron is the mean one, Danko Marshall is the big, scary-looking one, and Kee Williams is the other one.”
“You should have gotten out of the way,” she told Maddy. “This morning, I mean.”
“I couldn’t,” Maddy said. “I was worried about you, Skye.”
“Worried?” Skye asked, shocked. “About me? Why?”
“Because you were just standing there and standing there, with your head inside your empty locker,” Maddy said. “I thought maybe you were stuck.”
“I wasn’t stuck,” Skye replied softly, hiding an embarrassed smile. “Look, Maddy,” she said. “You have to get out of the way when boys go running through the hall like that. Especially eighth-grade boys.”
“They weren’t all in the eighth grade,” Maddy argued. “The boy who told Aaron to ease up this morning is Kee Williams, who is sometimes pretty nice. He’s just in the seventh grade, but he’s on the same football team as the older boys, so he hangs out with them. It’s an honor for him, I guess.”
“How do you know all this stuff about everyone?” Skye asked, truly curious.
Maddy shrugged. “Sierra Madre’s a small town,” she told Skye. “Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, except for the new people.”
“Well, I might be new,” Skye said, “but I’m right about getting out of the way when boys run by, Maddy.”
“Why? Because they’re bigger than us, and they might knock us over?”
“Well, yeah,” Skye said. “And also because they’re boys.”
“But that’s not fair,” Maddy said, frowning as they turned into Eucalyptus Terrace. “I’m a member of the planet Earth just like them. I’m just as much a human being as they are.”
“Not in middle school you aren’t,” Skye mumbled, but she wouldn’t repeat herself when Maddy asked what she’d just said.
Hi, Mom! Thanks for calling! Here is some stuff I forgot to say. I got my fine arts elective after all! It is fourth period. There are some art kids who are nice, and Gran seems relieved that I fit in at least somewhere in what she calls the social ecology of our school.
I hope your back is better. Say hi to Dad for me, okay? And Scott, too.
Love, Skye
P.S. Is Hana okay? I have only heard from her once, but don’t say anything if you see her. She’s probably just busy with other stuff.
Hey, Hana! School started today, but it was boring, and the kids here are boring, too. I wish I was home instead of doing time in Sierra Madre, but you can’t have everything, I guess. Write and cheer me up, okay? Luv, Skye (your friend, remember?)
8
The Thing about Art
In spite of what she’d written to Hana two weeks earlier, the days seemed to be flying by. It was now Monday morning, the last week in September, and Skye was sitting on Amelia Earhart’s wide front steps pretending to study as she secretly drew the kids around her, an act that was almost making them seem real.
The kids at Amelia Ear hart were okay, Skye thought as she sketched, if you didn’t count those football players in the hall – or their admirers, the bad ballerinas, who had earned their name in part, Skye had learned, by tying the ribbons of old toe shoes together and tossing the pale pink satin shoes over telephone wires up by the canyon, to claim that neighborhood as their own.
But every school probably had girls like that – even Taft Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
She’d ask Hana, if she ever got the chance.
Hana had only e-mailed that one time, though, and she hadn’t said much. Miffed, Skye had decided to cut back on her own e-mails to Hana – a decision that ended up being a lose-lose situation, Skye admitted privately. But she’d be back to her real life in Albuquerque soon, and then she could smooth things out.
Skye sighed, and she was looking at one of her drawings as Kee Williams, the maybe-nice seventh-grader, walked by. He was tall, thin, and cute, with dark brown hair, and eyes the color of her grandmother’s morning tea.
Had he looked her way? Probably not, Skye decided, surprised to find herself feeling a little disappointed. But things weren’t all bad, because after lunch she’d be going to her favorite class of all at Amelia Ear hart Middle School: art.
The thing about art wasn’t so much the actual art you made, in Skye’s opinion. It was more that when you were making that art, time stood still and you forgot about everything: about the fun Hana might be having without you back in Albuquerque; about how weird it still felt to be living with Gran in Sierra Madre; even about your messed-up family, especially Scott, whose rehab seemed to have stalled.
She was still Scott’s keyboarding assignment, as he kept reminding her.
“Hey, Skye,” a helium voice belonging to Amanda Berrigan–the first school day’s locker mix-up girl – said. “What’s that?” Amanda tried to get a look at the carefully disguised sketchbook disappearing into Skye’s book bag.
“English,” Skye said, deliberately vague, even though Amanda was in her art class, and Skye was starting to like her. “I was just finishing up an assignment.”
Amanda Berrigan was a little taller than Skye, and slightly plump, with red-blond hair that seemed to glow with its own light. In spite of her bouncy walk and squeaky voice, however, Amanda proudly claimed to have what she called a “dark inner life.”
But Amanda was pretty cool. She was even nice to Maddy, who by now was something of a before-and-after-school fixture in Skye’s life, and who the art kids, at least, were gradually coming to accept.
“Skye-ster,” another voice said. It was Pip Claymore, another art kid Skye had been privately calling Pipe Cleaner in her sketchbook, because he was so skinny.
“Got your maps all ready for Ms. O’Hare?” Amanda asked Pip and Skye. Ms. O’Hare’s assignment had been to draw a detailed map – of anything at all. “I did a map of my dream life,” Amanda said in a hushed voice, not waiting for their answers. She tweaked her bright hair, and, as she closed her blue eyes, sparkly slashes of turquoise eye shadow caught the sunlight. “My dream life is very grim, so prepare yourselves,” she whispered.
“Well, of course it’s grim,” Pip said, the corner of his mouth twisted up in an ironic smile. “Your life is grim, what with all the riding lessons and cell phones and makeup and fancy clothes and everything.”
“What did you do for the project, Pip?” Skye asked him, before Amanda could explode.
“I drew a map of my face,” Pip said, grimacing. “Including my freckles and zits. It’s kind of a connect-the-dots thing. What about you?”
“I drew a map of Sierra Madre,” Skye said, suddenly thinking maybe that hadn’t been such a great idea.
Kids surged around them, because first period was about to start. “Move it, art jerks,” Aaron Petterson called out as he shoved past them. He jabbed his black notebook into Pip’s ribs, and his lima-bean eyes gleamed with malice.
“Jock itch,” Pip mumbled to the boy’s back.
And just as if a reverse switch had been thrown, Aaron backed up. “What did you say to me?” he roared over the din of the kids around them. And then he used a word that made everyone turn and look.
Skye was shocked by Aaron’s use of that ugly word, grounds for a quick march to the principal’s office back home in Albuquerque, at the very least. Still, kids seemed to say it all the time – without even thinking about it, like it was a kind of all-purpose insult. Which made the word meaningless and boring, in a weird way.
“What did you say?” Aaron asked again, challenging Pip.
“Nothing,” Pip mumbled, looking away.
“You better believe it, nothing,” Aaron said loudly, looking around for an audience. “Pipsqueak. Pansy.” No one but Pip, Amanda, and Skye was listening to him, though, so he stopped reciting his list of insults. “You better watch it,” he warned Pip, and then he was gone.
“See you in art, jerks,” Pip said to Amanda and Skye, laughing a little shakily as he echoed Aaron’s intended insult.
“Yeah. See you, art jerks,” Skye said, smiling, and the sting somehow drained away from what Aaron had said as they claimed those words as their own.
9
Temporary
“Excellent, people,” Ms. O’Hare said a few hours later as her art class surveyed the maps tacked up on the room’s wide bulletin board. She fluffed her wavy bangs and smoothed the long ponytail that curled over one shoulder and surveyed her students’ first independent project. “Just excellent.” She smiled, and her eyes shone.
Jamila Westmoreland raised her hand and waggled her long brown fingers to attract Ms. O’Hare’s attention. “Are we going to vote on them, to see which one is the best?” she asked when Ms. O’Hare called on her.
Ms. O’Hare looked momentarily confused. “Vote on them?” she asked. “This is not a contest, Jamila. This is art.”
Jamila – and a few other kids – looked disappointed.
“But I do have an announcement to make,” Ms. O’Hare said, as if that might cheer up her more competitive students. “I’ve been asked to start an after-school art activities group, to take care of all the art chores the school evidently thought we’d be doing in this class.”
It was Ms. O’Hare’s first year here, too, Skye had learned.