by Lisa Doan
“Everybody! Quiet down!”
Ms. Grimeldi, the school’s assistant principal, stood at the microphone. There was no sign of Merriweather so I supposed he really was gone for good.
The crowd shushed as stragglers jumped into their seats.
“Welcome to a brand-new school year,” she said. “I am so happy to see each and every one of you.” Ms. Grimeldi paused and stared at Terry Vance. He stared back.
“My first announcement today is that the school board has named me the new principal of Wayne Elementary.”
Ms. Grimeldi was our new principal? That was hard to imagine. I had gotten used to her just following Merriweather around saying, “Sir, if you would only take a long and slow breath.”
“Of course,” Ms. Grimeldi continued, “I am honored and thrilled and I can promise you it will be an exciting year, filled with learning.”
I tuned out the rest of her speech. Ms. Grimeldi was too far away from her own school years to remember anything about it. Filled with learning it was not. These were tense times on the savannah. Survival was the name of the game—learning was a distant second.
“And finally,” Ms. Grimeldi said, “you will find a new class called group on your schedules. The school board felt that after last year’s unfortunate departure of Principal Merriweather, we should work on improving communication. Group will be a safe place where you can talk about your feelings.”
Half the auditorium erupted in moaning and yelps, and one guy in the back sounded like he had been shot. It was madness; there was no place on the savannah for feelings.
Bethany leaned over and whispered to Jana, “It will be like sharing secrets at a sleepover, except in school!”
I sat back. I had not known that was what occurred at girls’ sleepovers. Rory and I drank a lot of soda and played video games when he slept at my house. What kind of secrets were they sharing? Would group be able to pry any secrets out of my own brain? I hoped not; there was a reason a person did not go around telling people that he had wet the bed until he was five years old and had only stopped when he was told he couldn’t go to kindergarten. (Mrs. Musselman had worried that it was some kind of medical problem, but I had just not felt like getting up in the middle of the night.)
* * *
Group exceeded my worst expectations. As soon as I realized it would be a whole class about secret feelings, I had my fingers crossed to be in a group with Glenna Bradley and Marilee Marksley. Glenna had a lot of strong feelings about how she looked, and no matter how many times you said “No, they don’t” or “I never noticed that,” she said you were wrong and gave you more evidence to prove that her problem was real. She could have talked about the size of her arms until June. If she and Marilee were in my group, Marilee could have stepped in to fill any remaining minutes with an analysis of the size of everybody else’s arms, based on what she had seen with Her Own Eyes. It would have been an impenetrable girl wall of talking, providing cover for those of us who had nothing to say. Little did I know, while I was mulling over the chances of getting through the whole year without saying anything, there was a bigger problem heading my way.
As I walked down the hall toward Mr. Samson’s classroom, I saw Terry Vance coming the other direction. I thought he had a lot of nerve, he wasn’t even supposed to be on our floor. The second floor was for sixth-grade classes only.
“Hey, Vance,” I said, full of kingly coolness, “the fifth graders are downstairs.”
“What of it?” Terry said, sneering at me.
What did he mean, what of it?
“You’re supposed to be downstairs,” I said. “You’re not even allowed to be up here looking around.”
“You’re a piece of work, Mussel-man,” Terry said, veering into Mr. Samson’s classroom.
“Wait,” I called after him. “You can’t go in there!” I hurried after him to see what he was up to. It was crucial that I make him go back downstairs. Fifth graders had to be downstairs, he couldn’t just come up here whenever he felt like it.
Terry had settled himself into a chair.
“This is not your class,” I cried. “You flunked!”
“Yes, it is my class, and no, I didn’t flunk,” Terry said, looking amused. “I started that rumor just to get your hopes up. Worked pretty good, too.”
“You didn’t make it up,” I said. “Marilee saw it with Her Own Eyes. She reported it at the pool over the summer.”
“I might have mentioned something to her,” the crocodile said, smiling.
I stared at Terry. This could not be true.
“I think I even told her that Merriweather changed all my grades to Fs before fleeing to Thailand,” Terry said.
The reality of what he’d said was slowly sinking into my brain. He told Marilee he flunked, knowing the news would fly around like wildfire and I was sure to hear about it. All to get my hopes up. My hopes had been more than up, they had been in the stratosphere.
And now here he was. In sixth grade. In my group.
I fell into a chair and tried to revive my confidence. Terry Vance, purveyor of tacks and hair-removal shampoo, had just played a mind game on me. As I contemplated what that might mean for my future, the rest of my group filed in. They were exactly the people I didn’t want to have in a group full of secret feelings. Where was Glenna Bradley when you actually needed her?
Rory. As best friends, we kept a respectful distance from each other’s emotions. I had no idea what was torturing Rory’s mind and hoped I never found out.
Jana. I wanted Jana to be my girlfriend. I doubted she would want to get involved with some guy who had a lot of feelings he wanted to talk about.
Bethany. Bethany was a walking and talking extension of Jana and thought whatever Jana thought, so really, Jana was in my group twice.
Suvi Singh. A girl I have tried to avoid since she moved here from India in the second grade. Suvi made me feel dumb. Unlike Rory, who made me feel like a Jeopardy! champion.
And worst of all, the Nile crocodile. Terry had not flunked. Not only had I not left him behind, but now I would be forced to view the inside of his diseased mind. I was pretty sure it was filled with knife fights, plans for a bank heist, and all the humiliating pranks he would pull on me this year. My swagger began to trickle out of my body like water going down a drain.
Mr. Samson, the science teacher, was our group leader. He made us put our chairs in a circle.
“Okay, settle down,” Mr. Samson said. “The school board wants everybody to talk about their feelings. So here we go, who has any?”
Silence hung in the room like a fog. I had turned my chair so I wouldn’t have to see Terry staring at me. He always stared at me a lot, but especially right after one of his pranks. I knew he’d be watching to see if the realization that he hadn’t flunked had caused maximum damage. I was determined to ignore him. I had my own plans to worry about. Though I hadn’t yet attempted to speak to Jana, I had waved at her a couple of times at the pool.
I stared at her until I caught her eye and casually waved.
She turned and looked behind her like I was waving to somebody else.
She didn’t realize I was the candy guy from the pool! How was that possible? Maybe she would only recognize me if I were wearing the plaid shorts? I couldn’t have done all that creeping and lurking for nothing.
“C’mon,” Mr. Samson said, “somebody has to say something.”
Rory raised his hand. I turned to him in horrified fascination like he had just offered himself up for sacrifice.
“Fine, Rory, go ahead,” Mr. Samson said, rocking back in his chair.
“So,” Rory said, “just a couple of years ago you could say, ‘Hey, I want to be on the soccer team,’ and then you were on it. And you got to play no matter what. But now you have to show how good you are. I’m against that.”
“Everybody who goes to the tryout makes the team, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Mr. Samson said.
“But you have to
go to the tryout now.”
“What are you afraid will happen at a tryout?” Mr. Samson asked, crossing his arms behind his head.
“I’ll never know,” Rory said. “I’m against trying out.”
I elbowed Rory. I had already told him a million times that the world didn’t care what he was against. He had a whole notebook, titled Things I’m Against, that he had been adding to since the third grade.
Suvi said, “How will you succeed in life if you’re not willing to follow the rules?”
“I’ll follow the rules after they get changed,” Rory said.
“Foreigner,” Suvi muttered.
Suvi called everybody except Ajay Gupta a foreigner, like we had all moved to Mumbai instead of her moving to the Philadelphia suburbs. Nobody ever said anything to her about it; getting into a debate with Suvi Singh was like arguing with a stadium full of Albert Einsteins. As far as I could tell, she had started memorizing Wikipedia the moment she had landed on our shores.
“Right,” Mr. Samson said. “Thank you for expressing your concern about team tryouts, Rory. And thank you for your comments also, Suvi. Though maybe you could refrain from calling everybody a foreigner.”
Suvi folded her arms, so I guessed that was a no.
“Mr. Samson,” Jana said, “that guy is talking about sports tryouts because he doesn’t know how to talk about feelings. He might not even have them—I can’t really tell. Some boys have them and some don’t, but all girls feel feelings really deeply. Like, when the Bombtastics broke up last year, I was highly devastated. I even had to take their poster off my wall because I couldn’t stand looking at it—we had been so happy! I’m only just starting to recover.”
“It’s true,” Bethany said. “She was a total mess.”
I made a mental note to find out about the Bombtastics. At some point in my Jana lurking, I would be forced to speak. Probably sooner than I had planned since she appeared to have no memory of me from the summer and had just referred to Rory as “that guy.” The Bombtastics could be a great way to start a conversation. Mark pretends to like a show about a bunch of rich people living in England because one of the few sentences Cheryl has ever uttered to him was “I love Downton Abbey.” I don’t always trust Mark’s advice, but I saw him work Downton Abbey into a random conversation once and Cheryl’s eyelids flickered. For Cheryl, that’s the height of enthusiasm, so I’m pretty sure he’s onto something.
“Advising you about boy band breakups is way over my pay grade,” Mr. Samson said, “and I’m pretty sure your theory on boys’ feelings wouldn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny.” He rifled through the papers in his hand. “Wait a minute, here we go. There’s a list of prompt questions to guide the discussion. Number one, how do you feel about your home life? Let’s hear from someone who hasn’t had a chance yet.”
I pressed my body against my chair, hoping the plastic molecules and the molecules of my body would meld together and my chair would appear empty. As further insurance, I sent Mr. Samson mind-control messages—“I’m invisible! Look right through me! You do not see a person named Chadwick in this room!”
“Terry,” Mr. Samson said, “how are things at home for you?”
“Fine,” he said.
Typical. That’s what I had planned to say if the molecule meld didn’t work and I was still visible.
“Not true,” Suvi said to Terry. “What about what you told me when I went to your house?”
“I didn’t tell you anything,” Terry said.
“Mr. Samson,” Suvi said, “when I was in the fourth grade, my mother made me join the Girl Scouts. She said it would be an excellent way for me to further understand Americans. Among other dangerous activities, like learning how to build a fire, I was forced to sell cookies to strangers. Remember that, Terry?” she said.
“Not really,” Terry said.
“I went to Terry’s house,” Suvi said, “and he grabbed a box of Thin Mints out of my hands and said his dad would pay me later. Then, just before he slammed the door in my face, he said, ‘Too bad later actually means never.’ Despite numerous attempts to collect the debt, I still have not been paid.”
Terry snorted.
Finally, somebody else had viewed the real Terry Vance. I looked at him with my eyebrows raised, feeling oddly vindicated by Suvi’s story.
“Any household with a median income would find the purchase of cookies well within reach. So you see, Mr. Samson,” Suvi said, “when Terry says his home life is fine, he really means he suffers from economic insecurity. As we know from the data, that particular circumstance is often associated with a poor outcome.”
Okay, now she’d lost me. Somehow, Suvi Singh always circled back to data and outcomes and I didn’t know what else. I pictured her brain as a large vault of all the information that nobody else was interested in storing.
“He has already stolen cookies,” Suvi continued, “a mere stepping stone to more serious crimes. Does that sound fine to you?”
“Um … not when you put it that way,” Mr. Samson said.
“Terry,” Jana said. “Is that why you always go around by yourself? Is that why you’re a loner?”
Terry stared at Jana as if she had left her mind back in her locker.
“That’s it,” Jana said to Bethany. “He’s one of the boys that has feelings, but he’s been hiding them underneath a tough-guy mask because of his tragic life.”
“Oh my gosh,” Bethany said. “How many times have we seen that in a movie? The brooding loner and the girl who hates his guts, but then we find out about his tragic past and that he secretly loves the girl and would die to save her, and then she sees she was wrong, but it’s too late because he almost dies, and then when he doesn’t die, they finally understand each other?”
What was going on? What movie was that? Why were Jana and Bethany talking to Terry Vance? Of course he was a loner—crocodiles didn’t have any friends!
“That’s the truth, isn’t it, Terry?” Jana asked him. She leaned over to Bethany and whispered, “He reminds me of Lance Stalwart from Vampires Have Feelings Too, only not as thin and pale.”
Terry looked from Jana to Bethany. A crocodile smile twitched at the edge of his mouth. He shrugged and said, “Okay, you got me.”
“What you need,” Bethany said, “is a Belinda Swankwell. She’s the only one who really understands Lance.”
“Who is Belinda?” Suvi asked. “Does she go here?”
“Seriously?” Bethany asked. “Belinda is only the amazing heroine trying to cure Lance of his vampirism by listening to all his feelings in his secret cave. It’s the greatest vampire show ever.”
Jana nodded. “Lance Stalwart is full of feelings. That’s how I know some boys have them.”
Terry leaned forward, his arms folded, and stared at the floor. “If only I did have my own Belinda Swankwell,” he said.
Bethany leapt to her feet. “I could be Belinda!”
With vampire-like speed, Jana pushed ahead of Bethany. Bethany staggered along behind her, and Terry disappeared into a three-person hug.
I wanted to shout, “He’s not an emotional vampire! He’s a Nile crocodile who has been stalking me since the first grade!” but I just sat there instead.
The rest of our time in group was consumed with discussing the various and many feelings of Lance Stalwart. Apparently, Mr. Stalwart cried if he even saw a flower crushed. He had to drink blood to survive, but he got it from a butcher and put it in a travel mug so he wouldn’t have to look at it. As far as I could tell, Belinda Swankwell had her work cut out for her.
The only consolation was that Suvi, ever the scientific mind, did not see the connection between a weeping vampire and Terry Vance’s cookie theft. It felt like she was sticking up for me.
When the bell rang, I staggered out into the hall, for once in my life happy to be on my way to math class.
The fifty minutes that I had just lived were almost more than I could process. On top of being terrified that
I would be forced to share my feelings, which I don’t even share with myself, and being on the same side of an argument as Suvi Singh, I had been violently woken up from my dream of swaggering away from Terry Vance, and he had been hugged by my future girlfriend.
* * *
That afternoon on the bus, I ignored Terry, just like I had in the morning. Only this time, I was back to ignoring him so that he wouldn’t notice me. My swagger had taken a serious hit and I’d started to feel like it was last year all over again. All my summer-pool confidence had evaporated into the fall air.
“I’m losing my swagger,” I said to Rory.
“What swagger?” Rory asked.
“The swagger I had at the pool!” I said. “The swagger walk and the plaid trunks and the heads-up-Snickers-coming-your-way? It’s all disappearing because Vance didn’t actually flunk.”
“I did not know those weird plaid shorts were supposed to be swagger. I figured your mom bought them on sale and forced you to wear them.”
“They’re preppy casual,” I said.
“They look like something a girl would wear to play tennis.”
I ignored Rory’s fashion advice. After all, most of his pants only grazed his ankles, and he preferred them that way because he said it kept his feet cooler. “I have to get my swagger back,” I said. “I really liked it and I’m actually going to need it if I want to get Jana to like me. Do you suppose there’s a way we could send Vance back to the fifth grade? Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Your summer swagger, if that’s what it was, didn’t have anything to do with Terry,” Rory pointed out.
I stared at him.
Rory was not usually a fountain of sage advice, but this time I thought he might have accidentally stumbled onto something. I had swaggered all summer even though I had been wrong about Terry flunking. So what if Terry had made it to sixth grade? Until I had seen him in the hall I had been swaggering.
I could still swagger. I would just swagger when he wasn’t looking.
CHAPTER FOUR
I should have seen this coming, since it happens every single year. My mom and dad wanted to know all about my first day at school. If my mom found out about group, she would have questions like: What feelings are you going to talk about in group? How do you feel about your feelings? How come you never told me about these feelings? Then, I would not only have to talk about feelings at school, but at home too. What a nightmare.