A Girl Called Dust

by V. B. Marlowe

  She looked so sad and broken in that moment, and all I could think about was the girl who had been my bestie for so many years and how I didn’t want her to look like that anymore. “Forget it. Let’s go back to class. You can be my partner. I’ll do all the dissecting.”

  I waited for her to wash her face, and then we headed back to class. Lacey and her minions threw us dirty looks, which I told Bailey to ignore. I’d become a pro at that. She still looked sullen. Who knew what kind of trouble she would get into with Lacey for being my lab partner?

  I showed Bailey where we were on the lab sheet, and she put on her safety gear. She looked at the dead crayfish and made a face. “Gross.” Her voice sounded muffled behind her mask.

  I pointed all the parts of the crayfish out to her. Andres Bryant, who sat at the station in front of us, chuckled when I mentioned “sex organs.” I wanted to ask him how old he was, but when it came to Andres, the self-proclaimed class clown, it was best not to engage.

  I picked up the scissors. “Now for the fun part.” Holding the crayfish down with one hand I began to cut its back open, being as delicate as I could. Using the forceps, I pulled the skin back. Bailey gagged beside me, but I had to give her credit for sticking it out.

  Looking at the inside of the crayfish the smell of something titillated my nose. The odor of the formaldehyde wasn’t weird anymore. I smelled something else. Fish, meat, and salt. The salty smell made me think of the saltiness of the olives I loved to eat.

  “Arden?”

  I looked over at Bailey. I’d almost forgotten she was sitting there. She pressed her mask to her nose. “Can we move this along? I think I’m going to puke.”

  I nodded and looked at my lab sheet, matching the parts on the labeled diagram to the actual crayfish. The stomach. The ventral nerve cord. The heart. The intestines. The liver . . .

  Next thing I knew, my dissection tray was empty and something was sliding down my throat quick and easy. Everyone around me broke into gasps.

  Andres almost fell off his stool. “Holy shit!”

  “Mr. Bryant!” Ms. Melcher scolded, but she was staring at me, confusion etched across her face. “Arden, where’s your crayfish?”

  I looked down at my tray again and then over at Bailey, who was standing by and gazing at me as if I were a dead bug she’d found in her food. If I’d ever seen the look of total disgust on her face that was it.

  “What?” I asked.

  She backed away from me even more. “You just ate that crayfish. Like swallowed it.”

  “Ewwww!” the class groaned like a bunch of five-year-olds. If they hadn’t known what happened before, they knew then.

  Everyone stood, circling me, watching as if I were some kind of circus attraction. I immediately felt like I was going to suffocate. Why wouldn’t Ms. Melcher tell them to sit down?

  What Bailey said happened couldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t swallow a raw crayfish. What person in their right mind would do that?

  I searched the floor for the crayfish. It must have slid off the tray, and Bailey had made up the rest for some reason, but the crayfish wasn’t anywhere. The taste of something foreign and indescribable had invaded my mouth, and I knew she was telling the truth. Bailey was back in her seat at the front of the room, and I was one hundred percent sure she would never speak to me again.

  Ms. Melcher clapped her hands to get the class’s attention. “Okay. Everyone, back to your seats. Back to work.”

  Reluctantly everyone moved back to their stations, but that didn’t stop them from whispering and sneaking their phones out to text, which was strictly forbidden during classes.

  Without a word, Ms. Melcher removed a pink clinic pass from her top desk drawer. I left my seat to retrieve it, saving her the trouble of saying anything. In the nurses’ office, I explained my story to Nurse Jean while she listened with raised eye brows.

  “How do you feel?” she asked tersely as if I were wasting her time.

  “Fine. The same way I always do.”

  She took my temperature and checked my eyes with a tiny light. “I’ll call your mother. Go back to class for now. If she thinks you should come home, I’ll call for you. Don’t eat any more science projects.”

  Back in class, Ms. Melcher wouldn’t even look at me. I spent the rest of the period too stunned to complete my paperwork. What was wrong with me? After what seemed like forever, the bell rang to dismiss us. I took my time packing up so that almost everyone would leave before me. I didn’t need to hear their conversations about me.

  Once the room was nearly empty, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and attempted to slink out of the room, at least until Ms. Melcher called for me.

  “Arden? A minute, please.”

  Reluctantly, I slumped over to her desk, where she scribbled something on a notepad. “Yes, Ms. Melcher?”

  She still wouldn’t look at me. “What . . . what happened?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t know. “I just . . . it just happened.”

  Finally, she made eye contact. She stared at me for a long time, and I realized for the first time how gray her eyes were. I wished she would go back to not looking at me. I was going to be late to my next class, but I couldn’t worry about that. This was the one teacher who actually liked me, my favorite teacher, and she thought I was some kind of freak, which was probably true.

  Students trickled in for her next class. She stopped staring and cleared her throat. “You can make up the assignment after school . . . on the laptop. Run along before you’re late.” I took that to mean, please get out of my sight because you’re freaking me out.

  By lunch, everyone knew about the crayfish incident, and even though I was starving—I always seemed to be starving those days—I didn’t dare enter the cafeteria. I didn’t have a death wish, and venturing into the cafeteria after what had happened would have been just that. I would have been a stupid mouse walking willingly into a lion’s den. Instead, I opted to sit on the curb in the school parking lot and wait out lunch period, ignoring my rumbling belly.

  I was busy folding a leaf into fours when someone stuck a peanut butter sandwich in my face. Fletcher sat beside me. “They’re serving meatloaf today, so this was the safest thing.”

  I grabbed the sandwich from him. Peanut butter wasn’t my favorite, but I would have eaten anything at that moment. “Thanks,” I managed to mumble after I had inhaled half the sandwich.

  “I heard about the crayfish. Didn’t you eat breakfast this morning?” If this question had come from anyone else, I would have thought they were being an ass, but of course this was Fletcher. He was dead serious. “You probably shouldn’t eat things like that in front of people.”

  You think?

  “How did it taste?” Fletcher asked.

  “How would I know? I don’t even remember doing it. I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, even though I did. Once I’d finished my sandwich, still hungry, I looked at Fletcher. “Why did I do that? I didn’t realize what was happening until it was over.”

  Fletcher looked away from me and bit into a pear he’d probably brought from home. “I don’t know.” I knew he was lying because he avoided looking at me, but Fletcher never lied. So why was he?

  “You know. Why are you lying to me? You never lie. You just say you can’t tell me.”

  He looked at me. “I can’t tell you. Not now.”

  “Fletch, come on!” I whined. Somehow, he knew things about me, secrets I didn’t even know about myself, and if he didn’t tell me soon, I would explode.

  He finished his pear and gnawed on the core. “Soon, I’ll tell you. I promise.”

  That afternoon I went back to Ms. Melcher’s class to complete my assignment using the computer program, which I found to be insanely boring. Bailey was also there making up her project, which she also hadn’t been able to complete on account of me. She never looked at me once to acknowledge my presence.

  Mom was banging away
in the kitchen when I got home. I hovered in the doorway. “I’m home. Sorry I’m late. I had to do some makeup work.”

  She slammed a pot on the stove. “I know. Ms. Melcher called earlier.”

  My throat tightened. This was the last thing I needed. Another reason for my mom to be disappointed in me. “What did she say?”

  Mom stopped what she was doing and glared at me. “She told me what happened in class, Arden. What’s wrong with you? I mean, really, what is wrong?”

  I had no answer. What I had done was gross and weird. I couldn’t argue with that. I had no idea why or how I had done it. I certainly hadn’t planned on doing it. I wanted everyone to forget it ever happened, but I knew that was asking too much.

  Mom looked at me expectantly and then gave up on getting an answer. “Don’t bother taking your shoes off. We’re going right to Urgent Care.”

  Everything seemed like a delayed reaction. The incident had happened hours ago and Mom hadn’t been concerned enough to pull me from school early. Maybe it had taken her a while to accept what I had done.

  My backpack slid off my shoulder and plopped to the floor. “Urgent Care? For what?”

  Mom put her hands on her hips. “You ingested a raw crayfish soaked with formaldehyde. I need to be sure everything’s okay.”

  “I feel fine.”

  “I need to be sure. Let me grab my purse and we’ll go.”

  On the way out, I paused in the living room. “Are we really going to Urgent Care?”

  Mom turned and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Arden.”

  “It’s just that I was watching this movie on TV about this girl, and the parents told her they were going shopping, but then they ended up taking her to a mental institution.”

  Mom groaned as she turned back around. “Car. Now.”

  At the Urgent Care center, I hung my head in shame as Mom told various medical personnel about my adventures in raw crayfish eating. They all looked as if they were waiting for us to tell them we were joking. When they realized that had really happened, they avoided eye contact. I was sure I would be the topic of their conversations for weeks to come. “Hey, remember the day that crazy girl came in with her mom? Oh, you mean the one who swallowed the crayfish in her biology class? What a whack-a-do.”

  That night Mom made tuna casserole, my least favorite meal, but I had four helpings of it anyway. I knew she’d only made it because she was mad at me, but for some reason I was way hungrier than usual.

  Later that night when I tiptoed to the kitchen to swipe a jar of olives, I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom above me.

  Dad was yelling, and he hardly ever yelled. Sometimes he shouted at strangers in traffic, but never at Mom. “Stop expecting her to be normal. She’s not. She can’t be. I don’t know why you’re surprised by this.”

  Why shouldn’t she have been surprised? I was.

  Something thumped. Maybe one of them had thrown something. “Well, she’s got to be normal,” Mom screamed back. “She’s got to at least try. What are we supposed to say to people?”

  Of course her main concern would be what people thought when it should have been why I’d done what I did. That was my concern. I needed to know. And what did Dad mean when he said that I couldn’t be normal?

  They continued to argue, shouting words that I could barely make out. One thing I did hear was something Dad said. “Well get ready. She’s only going to get worse.”

  Chapter Nine

  The following day was the worst day of school I’d had in a long time. Maybe the worst ever. The teasing about the crayfish was relentless, as I knew it would be. I’d begged Mom to let me stay home from school, but she said I’d brought it on myself, so I needed to deal with it.

  Fletcher and I sat in the five hundred hallway during lunch because it was almost always deserted at that time. We ate our lunches sitting on the ground with our backs against some lockers. Fletcher had once again brought my lunch because I was too chicken to go into the cafeteria on my own and, surprisingly, had gotten lunch for himself. The only good thing about the day was that lunch was fried chicken, the best thing the cafeteria made.

  “Since when did you start eating school lunch?” I asked.

  Fletcher looked down at his tray and examined his chicken. “I’ve been hungrier than I used to be.”

  “Me too.” I bit into my chicken leg, watching flakes of the coating fall onto the tray nestled in my lap. “At least the day’s almost over, but I still have to see stupid Lacey in PE.”

  Fletcher stirred his fruit cup with his spoon. “What’s wrong with Lacey?”

  I dropped my chicken on the tray and stared at him. “What’s wrong with Lacey? Are you serious?”

  He nodded.

  “She’s horrible to me. She’s the one who named me Dust.”

  Fletcher frowned. “You don’t like that?”

  My jaw dropped. “No, I don’t like it.” How could he not know that? “Dust is nothing. It’s insignificant. No one pays attention to it. That’s why she calls me that. You think I actually like that name?”

  Fletcher shrugged and stared into his fruit cup. “You answer to it. You never tell them not to call you that, so how would I know?”

  “It wouldn’t make a difference. They’d still call me Dust anyway.”

  Of all the horrible things that could have happened at that moment, the worst happened. Ranson came strolling out of one of the classrooms with that cocky arrogance I couldn’t stand. I had the urge to grab my lunch and make a run for it, but he’d already spotted us. Fletcher kept eating as if the biggest jerk to ever walk the earth hadn’t set his sights on us.

  Ranson stopped in front of us. “Oh, look. It’s Dust and Freakazoid.”

  I immediately lost my appetite. “Why are you here? No one comes to this hallway during lunch.”

  He smirked as if contemplating whether he should dignify my question with a response. “I had lunch detention with Mr. Barber, but he let me out early for good behavior.”

  I shook my head. We weren’t even ten minutes into the lunch period. What kind of detention was that? Ranson was always getting off easy. He could be very charming when he wanted to be. Ranson pointed to my tray. “Nice to see you eating cooked food today. Swallowing a raw crayfish from the biology lab was kind of, you know, beyond weird and really gross. You creep me out, Dust.”

  Fletcher continued to eat quietly, not because he didn’t care that Ranson was being a jerk but because he had no idea Ranson was being a jerk. Ranson focused on Fletcher. Clearly he didn’t like being ignored because he knocked Fletcher’s tray with his foot, sending it a few feet away on the linoleum. I wanted to slug him right in that square jaw of his.

  Fletcher looked up, blinking and waiting expectantly. Normally he would be a prime target for an ass like Ranson, but Fletch took all the fun out of bullying. He didn’t fight back, but he didn’t run either. He never engaged anyone in an argument. At the beginning of last year, Ranson had cornered Fletcher in the parking lot. No matter how many times he punched Fletcher, Fletch didn’t flinch or move. The injured area would be red for a moment and then disappear. After a while, Ranson looked like a fool. Fletcher made him seem like a weak person who was not to be feared, so Ranson stopped bothering him. Unfortunately, that day in the hallway, Ranson had no audience to keep up appearances for, so there was no telling what he would do.

  He knelt in front of Fletcher, and I braced myself for whatever was about to happen. “You know I really hate you, right?” Ranson spoke in a threatening whisper. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you or where the hell you came from, but you’re going to learn to respect me.”

  In other words, “You’re not afraid of me, and I plan on doing something about that.”

  Fletcher leaned over and reached to retrieve his lunch tray, but Ranson kicked it farther away, causing the fruit cup to spill onto the floor.

  “Leave him alone.”

  Ranson curled his upper lip at me. “Shut up, Dust.”<
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  Fletcher stared at the juice from his fruit cup running across the floor. “You shouldn’t call her Dust. She doesn’t like that.”

  Ranson glared at Fletcher. “What are you gonna do? Stop me if you don’t like it.”

  Fletcher only gazed at him until Ranson slapped him on the forehead, causing his head to bounce off the locker Fletcher leaned against.

  “Stop it!” I screamed, wishing that just this once Fletcher would do something.

  Ranson threw his attention back to me. “You know I had to tell Wiley about the crayfish, right? He’s my boy. It was only right.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What does Wiley have to do with anything?”

  Ranson stood up and backed away a little. “For some stupid reason he kind of likes you, or at least he did. Not anymore though. You blew your only chance at having a boyfriend, I mean one besides this punk ass.”

  That meant nothing to me since I wanted nothing to do with Wiley.

  I went back to my lunch and decided to follow Fletcher’s lead and ignore Ranson.

  “I need to grab a bite before lunch is over,” he said as if we cared. “You losers carry on.”

  “I hate him,” I muttered as Ranson disappeared around the corner, laughing to himself.

  “Don’t,” Fletcher said. “He’s not even worth that emotion.”

  “How long is it going to be until they forget about the whole crayfish thing?” I wondered aloud.

  Fletcher shook his head. “They’re never going to forget about that.”

  Thanks, Fletcher. Thanks.

  That Sunday, Fletcher would be joining my family for dinner. Mom was making lasagna and going on and on about how it was about time I introduced the family to my best and only friend.

  Fletcher rang our doorbell at six on the dot. I was glad he was on time because tardiness would have given my mother something to complain about. I needed my parents to like Fletcher. Maybe if they did, Mom would stop pushing so hard for me to make other friends. Because of the crayfish incident, I had been totally failing at Scarlett’s assignment for me to make a new friend. If someone hadn’t wanted to be my friend before, they definitely didn’t want to be my friend after The Great Crayfish Incident.