by Dasha Kelly
CeCe and Laurita stood against the wall beside CeCe’s locker before parting for their separate homeroom classes.
“You know where you’re going?” Laurita asked.
“I think so,” CeCe said. They did not face each other. They were watching the flow of students, timing their plunge.
“OK, but if you have to pull out your schedule, be sure to go into the bathroom,” Laurita said. “You want to look like you know what we’re doing.”
CeCe nodded and the two girls scooted into opposite directions and fell into the stream of students. CeCe waited by Laurita’s locker at lunchtime, as agreed. CeCe regarded her friend’s burgundy-and-cream ensemble, at how the pants matched the cardigan and the polo matched her hair barrettes.
Hair barrettes.
The lunchroom was alive with chatter and shrieking, a cacophony of shoe soles and slammed books, and so, so many faces. Over sandwiches, CeCe and Laurita talked about the presence of the upperclassmen, the homework they’d already been assigned, and the characters in their classes.
“There’s this one guy in my English class named Jesse,” Laurita said, peeling the top from her fruit cup. “He’s so ridiculous. He made fun of everyone when the teacher stepped into the hallway, but after class, out in the hall, he acted like a scared rat. He was really mean.”
“I used to go to school with him,” CeCe said. “He tries to be a bully.”
CeCe did not mention her confrontation with Jesse on their last night at Neil Armstrong, because she would have to tell Michelle’s secret to tell the story. Besides, CeCe didn’t want to think about Jesse. She’d spent two years forgetting him, and figured she could stay out of his path for another four.
She was wrong.
CeCe, Laurita, and another new friend, a Puerto Rican girl named Sophia, were eating lunch at their usual table the next day. Sophia made them all laugh with her retelling of a French horn blare in band class that made the teacher blush for ten minutes. CeCe and Laurita were clutching their stomachs while Sophia acted out the scene. Jesse and two other boys were on their way out of the lunchroom, but swerved to stand at the end of the girls’ table.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, leaning on the table, looking from one girl to the next. His eyes danced with mean flames. None of the girls answered him.
“What’s so funny?” Jesse repeated, straightening to his full, albeit slight height.
“Who wants to know?” Sophia asked, with a snap in her voice.
“Nobody,” he said, glancing at his two sidekicks, seeming to cue their laughter. “Nobody cares what you three bats are talking about.”
The girls replied in staggered sighs and mutterings. Jesse shoved his hands in his pockets and had turned his entire body to face CeCe only. “I just came over to remind Crimson that I’m still gonna get her back,” he said. His small green eyes were piercing and cold. His consonants were sloppy along the letter “S,” his mouth still full of metal braces.
“I had to spend the summer cutting grass for two old ladies on my block for free because you narced on me,” Jesse said, sounding venomous.
“I didn’t narc on you,” CeCe said, hoping to be indignant instead of nervous. She pinched her sandwich between her fingers.
“She’s a liar, too,” Jesse said to the taller boy on his left. He turned his attention to Laurita and Sophia. “Did she tell you how she narced on her own best friend until the whole family had to move?”
“Shut up, Jesse!” CeCe said, her eyes wide. “That’s not what happened!”
“So you admit something happened,” Jesse said, mischief filling his eyes and grin.
“No—well, yes—but I didn’t—” CeCe stopped, her words frustrated. CeCe’s protests sounded like she was defending herself, and she didn’t want her new friends to think she had anything to hide.
“Shut up!” she hissed at Jesse. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, yes I do,” Jesse said. “You narced on your fat friend, you narced on me, and I bet you’ll narc on anybody. I’m gonna hafta warn people about you. You’re a menace.”
A lunchroom monitor moved in their direction, but Jesse curled a wicked grin onto his face as he and his new clique of sycophants moved past CeCe’s table and out of the lunchroom.
“Keep an eye on her, you bats!” he said in a stage whisper to Laurita and Sophia, his words slippery with spit.
The girls were silent once he left. CeCe felt angry and embarrassed, frustrated and upset. Her temples had begun to pound and her heart thundered in her chest. CeCe buried her face in her hands. Sophia placed a hand on her shoulder first, then Laurita reached from across the table to touch the back of her hands.
“Don’t worry about him,” Laurita said.
“Yeah, he’s nothing,” Sophia said. “Come with me to the home ec room. I’ll buy you a cupcake from their bake sale.”
“No, thanks,” CeCe said, lowering her hands and looking at her friends. New friends who were already looking at her differently. Already wondering if they’d made a miscalculation. CeCe knew how it could be for kids on the fringe, like them. In middle school, she had thought all the outsiders would stick together. On the contrary, missteps or misjudgments were much more detrimental to their social survival, and the fringe kids had learned to cut bait fast.
At home, CeCe continued to think of Michelle. Not only their last night, but all of the memories they’d accumulated over the years. In actuality, Michelle and her twin brother Michael had been CeCe’s oldest friends at Neil Armstrong. Now, her single remaining close friend was Pam, and CeCe needed to talk to her now. In the middle of reading her American history assignment, CeCe swung her feet stood up from the couch and went to the phone in the hallway.
Her mother sat at the kitchen table, staring into the usual nothing. CeCe looked at her mother as she lifted the receiver. Waiting, CeCe realized, for her mother to ask—even demand—just who in the world did she think she was calling?
Her mother kept staring.
CeCe looked away and punched Pam’s number into the phone. She raised the receiver to her ear and waited. Silence. CeCe pressed the phone hook with her index finger, but still heard no dial tone. CeCe tapped the hook impatiently.
“Mama, where’s the phone bill?” CeCe asked, looking down at the floor and not at her mother.
“What’d you say, CrimsonBaby?” her mother said.
“Where is the phone bill?” CeCe repeated, still looking at the linoleum floor. She kept one finger on the phone hook and the phone receiver in her other hand, as if the line might spring back to life. CeCe couldn’t look up at her. She wouldn’t be able to stand the slumped shoulders, the ever-present coffee mug, or her vacant expression.
“The phone bill?” her mother repeated. Eyes still on the floor, CeCe could hear her mother shifting in her seat, building momentum to stand, perhaps. CeCe imagined her mother standing and glancing around on the floor as if the bill might be there.
“Forget it,” CeCe said, slamming the phone on the receiver. She went to the hallway desk and fished inside for the notepad she’d made in fifth grade to keep track of their account numbers for the phone company, the electric company, and the bank, contact information for the lawyer’s office managing her mother’s trust fund, and the address for Aunt Rosie and Cousin Coretta.
CeCe didn’t understand how her mother could confuse such a short list of tasks. Sweep the kitchen. Clean the coffee pot. Bring in the mail. Leave it for CeCe. CeCe would have to take three buses downtown tomorrow for a money order and to pay the phone company. CeCe didn’t look at her mother for the rest of the evening.
At school, Jesse continued to yell “narc” at CeCe in the hallways and call her friends “bats” in the lunchroom. Although, Laurita admitted he only acted that way around CeCe, ignoring them when the girls encountered him alone.
“I know you can’t tell us what happened,” Sophia said one day, “but this guy is really, really pissed at you. Maybe you shou
ld apologize.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” CeCe said, surprised at Sophia’s suggestion.
“Sometimes, you gotta take one for the team,” Laurita said. Her tone was flat and she didn’t look up from her pudding cup. CeCe had noticed how Laurita had started to wear her hair down now.
We’re a team?
“I didn’t do anything,” CeCe said, more quietly. Laurita shrugged one shoulder, peering into the bottom of her snack cup. Sophia launched into a story about her little sister tanning a Barbie doll in the microwave.
For the next several weeks, Jesse would swerve out of his way to insert himself into CeCe’s conversations, blurting that CeCe was a narc and couldn’t be trusted with any secrets. CeCe saw him making an erratic beeline toward her one afternoon and closed her eyes in pre-exasperation. She tried to turn away but one of the varsity wrestlers walked by, blocking her path long enough for Jesse’s voice to reach her.
“You gotta go narc on somebody?” he said.
“This is getting really old,” CeCe said.
Jesse walked away laughing. “Maybe for you.”
In late October, on picture day, someone handed a note to the girl waiting in front of CeCe in line. The girl giggled, looking around. She shook her head, sighed, and turned around to look pitiably at CeCe. CeCe looked at the girl blankly until she held up the square of notebook paper for CeCe to read: “There’s a narc bat behind you. Watch your back!”
CeCe looked around, too, but saw no sign of Jesse. Her insides collapsed. He’d enlisted the entire school.
CeCe ate her lunch in the home ec room by the middle of November. The teacher, Mrs. Watson, didn’t ask any questions or demand an explanation, and CeCe was grateful. Laurita and Sophia hadn’t questioned her, either, and CeCe assumed they appreciated the relief. They would speak when passing in the hallway or chatter quickly at the beginning of the school day, but neither asked CeCe to slow down on the way to class or to wait for them on her way to the bus stop anymore.
CeCe would eat her lunch and read while Mrs. Watson graded papers or set up for her sixth-period class. She also taught the health class all of the freshmen had to take. They covered first aid, nutrition, hygiene, mental wellness, careers in health, and an odd review of epidemics throughout history.
“Mrs. Watson,” CeCe asked one day, a random curiosity filling her mind. “I have a weird question.”
“Weird questions are my specialty,” Mrs. Watson chirped. She was a thin woman, with a long graying ponytail and bright hazel eyes. She wore lots of embroidered vests, long denim skirts, and clog shoes. She bounced through the room like a robin, placing gauze and bandages on each desk.
“I started my period this year and I want to make sure it’s normal.”
Mrs. Watson looked up from her fistfuls of gauze. “What makes you think it might not be?”
“My best friend started her period in the sixth grade and, well, I remember her talking about—,” CeCe shifted in her seat, crossing her legs at the ankles and looking down at her feet. “The smell.”
“There’s an odor?” Mrs. Watson asked, moving from desk to desk.
“No,” CeCe said. “That’s just it. I don’t smell anything. With all the Summer’s Eve commercials and stuff, I thought it was supposed to smell, but it doesn’t. I didn’t know if that meant I was low on . . . estrogen or something.”
Mrs. Watson laughed, birdlike. “The way these companies push that stuff, you’d think so,” she said.
Mrs. Watson told CeCe a woman’s body produces its own cleansing fluids and that douches were a marketing ploy. She also explained how the iron content in menstrual blood sometimes created a stronger scent than regular blood. She emphasized the importance of good hygiene and more thorough washing.
“Does that make more sense?” Mrs. Watson asked.
“Yes,” CeCe said. “I wasn’t looking forward to smelling like baloney.”
“Baloney?” Mrs. Watson repeated, and howled with laughter. “Sweetheart, I think smelling like lunch meat would be adding insult to injury for us women!”
CeCe agreed and laughed, wondering why she found it so much easier to talk and laugh with adults.
Laurita appeared at CeCe’s locker before their last class period.
“Where were you at lunch today?” Laurita asked. CeCe noted an unfamiliar edge to her voice. Maybe her friend missed her after all.
“Mrs. Watson’s room,” CeCe said. “She lets me eat in there since—”
“It was you!” Laurita screamed. Laurita looked around and clenched her teeth to constrain the volume of her voice. She stepped close to CeCe’s face. “Lunch meat? You told her I smelled like lunch meat?”
CeCe’s mouth gaped open and her mind raced to connect the explosive dots, but her mind couldn’t focus as she stared up into Laurita’s flaring nostrils.
“I didn’t—,” CeCe said. “I mean, I wasn’t talking about you—I was asking—”
“Save it, CeCe,” Laurita said. “I do not believe you. Why would Crystal come up to me out of nowhere and ask how my lunch meat was doing this month?”
“Crystal?” CeCe said, confused. “Jesse’s girlfriend?”
“You can’t blame this on Jesse,” Laurita said. “It was you talking about your friend to Mrs. Watson, who thought it was so funny she told Ms. DiPaulo and guess who was retaking a test in Ms. DiPaulo’s room?”
“But I wasn’t talking about you,” CeCe said, tears making their way to her eyes.
“Right, like you have another ‘best friend,’” Laurita said as she turned to leave.
“Laurita—”
“Look, I’m already sick of having this crazy-ass kid calling me a ‘bat’ every day because of . . . whatever you did to him, and now his crazy-ass girlfriend is telling our gym class my coochie smells like lunch meat!” Laurita said, backing away. “Find a new best friend, Crimson.”
CeCe wanted to protest again, but the venom Laurita had coiled around the syllables of her name made CeCe stop. As her friend stomped away, CeCe knew Jesse had won.
By the time the weather chilled and snow threatened its return, Jesse had expanded his menacing enterprise to a small network of enforcers. Systematically, they made CeCe’s name a damning expletive for any brand of unfavorable news:
“We had a pop quiz in Geometry. Crimson narced.”
“We’re getting apple slices instead of tater tots. Crimson.”
“The Aerosmith concert got Crimsoned.”
The slightest grace was that most of her classmates knew her as CeCe, if they registered her name at all. She sat in the back of their classes as they flung around her birth name like a booger. Laurita ignored her completely, but Sophia greeted her between classes, band practice, and forensics. CeCe tried sinking into the walls and floors inside Maclin High School. She didn’t waste time rolling curlers into her hair and stopped laying out her clothes at night and agonizing over the makeup bag. She stopped it all and no one seemed to notice.
“CeCe, Mr. Meadows would like to see you in his office,” said her homeroom teacher one morning. It was the last week before holiday break and everyone was anxious for vacation to start. As she gathered her books and stood, a few of Jesse’s minions chanted quietly from the back of the room, “Narc! Narc! Narc!” A hushed rumble of laughter followed CeCe from the classroom.
She walked the wide hallways, listening to the slip of her flat shoes across the tiles. CeCe looked down at the gleam on the floors as she made her way to the office. She passed banks of lockers, intersecting hallways, and classroom doors with clips of the teachers’ lessons lobbing overhead as she walked by. It was calming to move through the corridors alone.
“CeCe, come on in,” Mr. Meadows said, standing in the doorway of his interior office. Mr. Meadows was a large man with a broad back and shoulders, as if he wore hooded sweatshirt beneath his plaid dress shirts. He also had a booming voice and an effortless smile. Like all the other freshmen, CeCe had liked Mr. Meadows since he had guid
ed them through their first day as Maclin Vikings.
She felt uncomfortable now. She’d already had a midterm one-on-one with him, like all the other freshmen, and didn’t know what this meeting could be about. CeCe hoped the trend of social workers hadn’t followed her to high school. She sat at the small round table in the corner and waited.
“I like to be straight with you kids,” Mr. Meadows said as he sat, lifting his ankle to cross his knee. “I don’t like beating around the bush because we’re too smart for that, right?”
CeCe nodded and swallowed, perching the tips of her fingers nervously on the table’s edge.
“There’s something going on with you, CeCe,” Mr. Meadows said, “and I wanted to talk to you before things got out of hand.”
CeCe’s eyes widened and her brain searched for things she’d done or said that might “get out of hand.”
Mr. Meadows released one of his rolling-thunder laughs. “Relax, CeCe. I forgot to say, ‘You’re not in trouble.’”
CeCe relaxed her shoulders and lowered her hands into her lap.
“Your grades are OK but, based on your marks at Valmore, we were expecting a bit more from you,” he said. He considered his words before adding, “It doesn’t seem you’re making many friends, either. Is it true Mr. Kingsman found you eating lunch in the girls’ shower?”
CeCe dropped her head. It sounded more pathetic when Mr. Meadows said it out loud. She’d started eating in the bleachers then moved to the locker rooms for complete seclusion. Once she realized girls still streamed in and out to retrieve forgotten folders, books, and hair bands, CeCe had moved to the shower stalls. Mr. Kingsman, the janitor, found her sitting on a pallet she made of clean towels with a book in her lap and sandwich in hand.