by Marnie Lamb
Boy, I thought, those tarot cards were right. I do have major problems with women, and who would’ve thought Marcia would be one of them? I wondered what I was going to do about her. What if Kallie kept wanting to hang around with her? If Kallie was a geek, Marcia was a supergeek. No way Chanel would want to be friends with me if I hung around with her. Suddenly I thought of the Lovers. Maybe the decision I had to make involved Marcia. But if that was true, who was the Empress? I wish those cards had been clearer. Maybe then they’d give me some real help. I could sure use it.
-13-
The Ethnic Shield
I was standing in the hallway after school, minding my own business, when someone slammed me headfirst into my locker. As I blinked, trying to stop the cheeseburger-shaped stars from spinning around my head, a voice called out, “Hil! You’ll never guess what!”
I saw a body undulating like a wave of heat. Finally the body stopped moving long enough for me to identify it.
“Lynn,” I said weakly, rubbing my head.
“Oh I’m sorry. Did I hurt you? I just wanted to get your attention. Are you O.K.?”
“I guess so but —”
“Oh my God, Hil. You’ll never guess what happened. Are you ready? Amber asked me to lend her my home ec notes!”
There was a silence. “And that’s why you smashed me into my locker?”
“No, no, that’s not the best part. After I gave her my notes, she invited me to sit with her!”
In my dazed state, it took me a while to figure out what she meant. But when I did, it was worth the wait. “You — you sat with Chanel?”
“Yes, and that’s why I smashed you into your locker!” she squealed. “Oh my God, she is so beautiful. She was wearing …” But I wasn’t listening. Visions of Chanel and Brett and new clothes and parties danced in my head. I woke up in time to hear Lynn say, “And she’s even skinnier up close.”
I swallowed. “Does this mean we can be friends with them?”
“Don’t get too carried away, Hil. It might just be a one-time thing to thank me for lending Amber the notes. But it’s still pretty exciting. Chanel and her group barely ever talk to anyone else. So if they asked me to sit with them … this could be it. This could be our ticket in to the cool group!”
We both shivered.
The next evening, Lynn called to say she’d sat with the cool group in home ec again.
“So it’s not just a one-time thing,” she said. “Let’s sit together at lunch tomorrow, just you and me. We can watch the cool group.”
I eagerly agreed.
My last class before lunch was art. I spent most of it daydreaming. When the bell rang, Kallie tried to talk to me, but I hurried away. Lynn and I had to find a table close to the cool people, and that wasn’t easy.
We sat two tables away from them. Our table gave us a good view, but also allowed us to duck behind some older students if Chanel’s group looked our way.
I recognized most of Chanel’s friends except one girl, who turned out to be Amber. Amber had big lips (seductive), stringy blond hair (windswept), and an annoying laugh (which just takes a little getting used to). What I wouldn’t give to be Amber or any one of Chanel’s friends, I thought. They ate delicious-looking lunches. No peanut butter sandwiches in brown bags for them — they had pizza and salads from the caf. Their table was right next to a window. And they laughed more than they spoke. I didn’t have that much fun on my birthday.
“Wow. You’re so lucky to get to sit with them,” I said, sighing.
“I know. I just wish I had better clothes!” Lynn picked at her green shirt.
I’d always admired Lynn’s crisp green shirt, so her comment made me hate my own pilled navy blue sweater even more. There was no way I could meet Chanel wearing something like this.
“Hey, I know! Let’s go shopping tomorrow!” Lynn said. “We could both buy some new clothes.”
“O.K. Oh no,” I said, suddenly remembering. “My short story for Miss Stephanopoulos is due on Monday. I haven’t even started it yet.”
“Who cares? You always get an A+ anyway. Just come.”
I hesitated. Ever since I’d started junior high, I had a ton of homework, twice as much as last year. I wasn’t sure I could afford the time to go out. Then again, my social life had been non-existent for the past ten days. I had to relax sometime. And if I really crammed, I could get my work done for Monday. So I told Lynn I’d go.
The next day, we hit the mall, where we both bought a couple of things at Fashionisteen. (We weren’t brave enough to defy our moms by buying stuff from The Limit.) After I’d paid, my cash supply was even more pathetic than usual, but I figured if the clothes helped me become friends with Chanel, they’d be worth the investment. Lynn was going to get her hair done because she said it looked awful (I didn’t think so). I had just enough money to have mine done, too. My hair had grown during the summer, and the hairdresser shaped it into a stylish new ’do. I went home feeling better about myself than I had in a long time.
My mom surprised me by complimenting me on my new hairstyle. Then she told me Kallie had come over while I was at the mall. But I didn’t have time to return the visit. I had to start my homework right away if I was going to get it all done for Monday. Whatever Kallie wanted would have to wait until then.
I began writing my story on Saturday night, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as I feared. I pumped it out in less than an hour. My creativity is back, I thought as I looked at the finished product, and now I can write faster and better than ever.
The story was about a girl named Diamond Summers. She was rich, beautiful, popular, had an A+ average, and could eat anything she wanted without getting fat. She’d just turned sixteen, and her dad had given her a red Mustang for her birthday. Her boyfriend, Jasper, was the most gorgeous guy at school. All was not well for Diamond, however. At her big birthday party, Jasper dumped Diamond for her best friend, Lacey. Diamond was devastated. But then Lacey realized that Diamond and Jasper truly belonged together, and Jasper came running back to Diamond, explaining that his mind had been temporarily deranged due to some mouldy blue cheese he’d eaten at her party. He vowed to always love her and never leave her. Then he took her in his arms and they kissed as the fireworks left over from Diamond’s birthday party went off, making little heart shapes in the California night sky.
I really liked this story. I thought it was more mature than anything I’d ever written. Most of the stories I’d written before that were about things that happened to me. Like the time my dad had put up this clown tent in the backyard for my eighth birthday. There was a windstorm that night, and the tent ripped off its pegs and blew up against my bedroom window, the white clown face leering at me with its inflated red lips and googly eyes. I was so scared, I peed all over my new pyjamas. Sure it was funny, I told myself, but there’s no drama in stories about clowns. If you want drama, you have to write about something bigger, like unrequited love or unhappy rich people. Something that happened to someone more interesting than you.
Still, I couldn’t help being nervous. This was the first story I’d written for junior high, and I really wanted to do well. On Monday morning, I placed my story on Miss Stephanopoulos’s desk.
“Thank you, Hilary,” she said, smiling her red-lipstick smile.
I smiled back. I liked Miss Stephanopoulos. Unlike my other teachers, she didn’t yell at people if they came in late, and when she spoke to the class, you felt like she was talking to you, not lecturing you.
I was thinking about this as I left the class. Then I heard Kallie say from behind me, “Hilary, I need to talk to you about the art fair.”
The art fair! I’d completely forgotten. I stopped walking. “Oh yeah. We had to pick our group by Friday, didn’t we? Sorry,” I said in a small voice.
She looked annoyed. “No we didn’t. Weren’t you listening? A lot of people were complaining that they didn’t have groups, so we all got another week’s extension. Anyway, I’ve thought of a co
uple of people we can ask to be in our group.”
“Oh. Who?”
“One of them’s Marcia.”
My embarrassment gave way to anger. “What?”
“I know you don’t like her, but remember that first assignment we did? The one where we had to draw several pairs of scissors? Well, I saw hers and it was really good. Plus I don’t think she has anyone else to go with.”
Big surprise, I thought.
“We can also ask Chu Hua,” Kallie said. “Her stuff’s good, too. And she’s on my track and field team, so I already know her.”
Chu Hua? The name called to mind a small, quiet girl who sat at the back of our row in homeroom. She resembled a field mouse, a field mouse in a flowered polyester jumpsuit with matching hair ribbons.
“She’s on your track and field team?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Kallie pointedly. “So what do you say? Do you agree?”
I sighed. None of the cool people were in art, but there had to be somebody better than Marcia and Chu Hua. Kallie was impatient, though, and I couldn’t think of anyone else, so I agreed.
“I just wish you’d told me about this earlier,” I grumbled. Maybe with more time, I could’ve thought of someone more decent.
She gave me a hard look. “I tried to talk to you on Friday, but you took off as soon as the bell rang. Then I came over on Saturday and your mom said you’d call me but you never did.”
I pressed my lips together. I was sure Kallie wouldn’t like it if she knew why I hadn’t been there when she came over, so I just turned away.
The next morning, we were standing against a row of lockers, waiting to be let into homeroom. Directly across from us, Chanel, Burgundy, and Tiffany were talking about homerooms and about how ours was definitely the coolest.
I felt warm inside until I heard Chanel say, “Poor Brett. He’s all alone in 7C. Remember that loser he told us about, the one who never washes her hair or wears deodorant? He told me he tried to tell her nicely that she stinks, and she just looked at the ground and walked away. How rude. What was her name?”
“Marcia,” said Burgundy, like the word was a piece of rotten meat.
I felt as if a voodoo artist had pricked me with a needle. I couldn’t move, speak, or breathe. All I could do was pray that Kallie hadn’t heard Burgundy’s comment. I saw the three girls look at their nails and Kallie step across the hall…
“Excuse me,” she said, in a pleasant tone. The three girls looked up from their nails and down at her. “Marcia’s a friend of mine. I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk that way about her.”
Chanel sucked in her breath, when the homeroom door suddenly swung open.
“Homeroom, everyone,” drawled a voice. “Come on, girls. No dawdling.” Right then I came as close as I ever did to thinking Mr. Benson was a god.
I hurried inside, well ahead of Kallie, but not before I heard a disgusted voice say, “What-ever!”
All morning I felt like Chanel’s eyes were boring into Kallie’s back, although whenever I snuck a glance at her, she was looking somewhere else. When the bell rang for lunch, I grabbed my knapsack and hurried to my locker, keeping as much distance as possible between Kallie and me. But fortunately the popular girls didn’t hang around long.
When the crowd had cleared out and I was sure no one else was within earshot, I said to Kallie, “You shouldn’t have said that to Chanel.”
“Said what?”
“That stuff about Marcia. You shouldn’t talk back to Chanel. She’s popular. She has a lot of influence over people. You don’t want to become her enemy.”
Kallie scoffed, “I don’t care how popular she is. I’m not going to stand there and listen to her insult my friend.”
“Marcia is not your friend!”
“Yes, she is, and I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks of her.”
I swallowed. I admired Kallie’s determination to stand up for what she believed in, but didn’t she understand the risks to her, to me? Her friendship with Marcia was putting me in an awkward position. How could I get her to realize that?
“Oh, that reminds me. She and Chu Hua are waiting for us in the caf,” said Kallie.
“What?” I demanded.
“Yeah. I asked them to have lunch with us so we could start talking about a topic for our project.”
“It’s not due until December!”
“Well, at the rate you’re going, we’re going to need that much time.”
I trudged along behind Kallie, feeling like I was being forced to consume the slop they sold at the caf under the label “soup.” (Lumpy, orange, and smelling strangely of rancid musk. Ugh.) When we got to the table where Marcia and Chu Hua were sitting, Kallie greeted them warmly. I said a polite hi to Chu Hua, who smiled. Then I sat down.
“Hi Marcia,” I said bluntly.
Her eyes flickered up at me briefly before returning to their usual position, somewhere between the table and the floor.
Fine, I thought, I try to be nice to her and she doesn’t even answer me. What a wimp. No wonder everyone hates her.
The conversation started off being about the art fair, but we didn’t make much progress on our topic before Kallie began talking about a new recipe she’d tried for dinner the night before. That only made me angrier. She’d forced me to have lunch with Marcia because of our project and now we weren’t even getting any work done.
Sitting across from Marcia made me uncomfortable. She didn’t say two words the whole time, just kept her head bowed and chewed her lips. I wanted to yank her head up and hold it in place with a ruler. And Chu Hua seemed nice, but she spoke so softly and her accent was so thick I had a hard time understanding her.
When the bell rang, I thought, The only good thing about that lunch was that Chanel wasn’t eating in the caf today.
That afternoon I noticed a glittery poster advertising the first school dance of the year. I was excited — until I realized I had nothing to wear. And even if I can get Mom to buy me a new dress, how cool could a size 100 dress be, I asked myself. I remembered my summer vow to lose weight and realized I hadn’t made much progress. I wondered if I should try dieting again.
At home, I got out some magazines Lynn had lent me, and began flipping through them in hopes of finding another diet. As I looked at the articles — The Whole-Wheat Diet, The Pineapple Diet, The Eat Anything You Want As Long As It Doesn’t Have A Certain Kind Of Fat In It Diet — my heart felt like a ten pound weight. I didn’t think I could give up all my favourite foods. I looked at the list of “forbidden foods” for one of the diets: chocolate, cheese, mayonnaise, buttered popcorn, potatoes, red meat. There’d be nothing good left. It would be torture. There had to be a better way.
Then I remembered my plan to exercise my excess weight away. My mom was always telling me I needed more exercise, anyway. That night, I asked my dad to lower the seat on the stationary bike. I knew what I was in for this time, and I managed to pump slowly for about ten minutes. I planned to go a little longer every night. With my new clothes and hairstyle, I figured that once I lost weight, I’d be firmly planted on the road to being cool.
If only I could get rid of Marcia.
The next day, Chanel and her friends ignored Kallie during homeroom, so I thought my troubles were over. But then in social studies, Miss Stephanopoulos gave us a special assignment.
“In about a month, it will be United Nations Day,” she said. “This is the day we celebrate different races, countries, and cultures. In honour of that, I’m going to ask each of you to make an ethnic shield.”
An ethnic shield, she explained, was a shield showing what nationality your ancestors were. We each had to draw a shield and divide it down the middle. One half was for your father’s side, the other half for your mother’s. You could divide the shield into quarters for your grandparents or eighths for your great-grandparents. When you finished dividing it, you made a crest for each nationality.
“For example,” said Miss Steph
anopoulos, drawing a shield on the board. “My father is Greek, and my mother is Italian. So on this side of the shield” — she pointed to the left — “I could draw a statue of a Greek god, and on the other side, I could draw the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”
The shields were going to be displayed in the main hallway. Miss Stephanopoulos encouraged us to make our shields colourful and to put as many drawings as we could onto each crest. I thought it was a neat assignment, partly because I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know where my ancestors were born. My mom’s parents were from Quebec. But where had my dad’s parents come from? I’d never thought to ask.
Some people, like Kallie, were scribbling away. The rest of us were looking around, as if to see if we could borrow an ancestor from someone who had too many. After a few minutes, Chu Hua scurried to the front and whispered something to Miss Stephanopoulos.
“Chu Hua has just asked a very good question,” said Miss Stephanopoulos. “Her parents are both from China but from different parts of the country, and she wanted to know whether she could still divide her shield. The answer is yes.”
As the bell rang, she reminded us that tomorrow we were going to stand up and present our shields. “Take time to make your shield a work of art,” she said. “It’s helped make you who you are today.”
That night at dinner, I asked my parents about our ancestors.
“My father’s grandparents came from Brittany in France and settled in Quebec City,” explained my mom. “My mother’s family also came from France, but from a town farther south called Limoges.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Yes. You and I have a lot of French blood. In fact, my name is Sylvie, not Sylvia. My brothers and sisters and I anglicized our names when we moved to Ontario.”
“How come?” I asked.
“My parents thought it would be easier for us. Less chance of being called a ‘frog’ by the English kids.”
I snorted. “‘Frog’? What does that mean?”