by Abby Cooper
“Do you like cheese?” he asked one day after an especially frustrating hour of math with Mrs. Catalano, and I nodded eagerly because, duh, cheese is awesome. “I stole the string cheese from my little brother’s lunch box! Major score! Okay, I asked him for it! But still, he said okay and I got some and here it is!” He handed over a package.
Now, here’s a guy who appreciates me, I thought. Yeah, he is a little too nice, but he gave me cheese. Liam never gave me cheese. And the rest is history.
There is a chance that I might still like Liam, just a teeny tiny, microscopic little bit. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone else but you. He may have never given me cheese, but he did give me gum. Plus, he’s the weirdest guy I know, and the best. Besides Nice Andy, I mean.
Anyway, I don’t know when you’ll read this, but I hope things will be better then.
Goals:
1. Find out who’s writing those notes!
2. Be nicer to Nice Andy because he is a real live guy who likes me and gives me cheese.
3. Stop caring about everything Liam says and does and also his overall existence.
4. Stop missing Jeg. She hardly talks to me now. She’s too busy with her new friends.
5. Get some friends. (No, awesome books and/or socks do not count.)
6. Stop thinking so much and just do things—especially things that will help me become Explorer Leader.
Also, today I bought a pink-lemonade-flavored Chapstick and it looks excellent on me even though technically it is clear. I just thought you should know.
From,
October Self
* * *
I sat back in my seat as the morning announcements began.
“Hey there, it’s your princi-pal, coming to you live from the front office.” I could practically hear Mr. Todd grinning through the intercom. “A special message for sixth graders today—I want to give you fair warning that I’m almost finished reviewing your attendance and grade reports for the first month of school, and the students who come out on top will be interviewed for Explorer Leader sometime in the next few weeks. Congratulations to Ami Kowalski, who is guaranteed an interview after her win at the first competition. There are still five more spots up for grabs. I also want to remind you about the fund-raising show. November is not as far away as it seems! We have only a few acts signed up so far and would really like to get some more.”
The fund-raising show had been announced on the first day of school. We could do anything we wanted, as long as it was appropriate and not that horrible to sit through—and people would have to pay five dollars to see it. All the money would be put toward our Minnesota trip.
People were excited about the show, but everyone knew it was one of those things that was really made for cool people to feel cooler and weird people to feel weirder, like school dances. Sure, I’d been playing piano forever and had performed in about a zillion recitals, but that didn’t mean I needed to do it in front of everybody at school. If I signed up, the whole order of the universe would be messed up, and a lot of people would be really confused. I didn’t want to be responsible for that kind of social destruction, so that would not be happening. But an interview with Mr. Todd? That, I would love to do.
The room started getting noisy after Mr. Todd finished the rest of his announcements, but Ms. Sigafiss held up a hand.
“Moving on. We’re going to do another introduction.” Ms. Sigafiss had started this on the first day of school. She said it was good for kids in middle school to get to know people from different elementary schools. I thought it was a pretty cool thing to do. After all, there were thirty-ish people in our class, and I only knew around ten of them. Maybe there were some nice people in English with me and I didn’t even know it. “Today we will listen to Olivia,” she said without even bothering to see whose hands were actually raised.
“Um, okay!” Olivia said. She stood and rubbed her hands on her faded jeans. “So I’m Olivia, which you already know … I went to Hoover Elementary. My best friends are my five brothers and sisters. My favorite sport is soccer, and my favorite colors are hot pink and turquoise.”
Wow. She was really cool. I’d love to be friends with her, but would she want to be friends with me? And would I even be able to get a chance to talk to her before the Loud Crowd sucked her in?
While I was thinking about it, Lindsey had already complimented Olivia’s shiny black hair (she wore it in lots of little braids running down her back with purple beads at the bottom), and now they were chatting away like they’d been best friends for a thousand years.
“Thanks, Olivia,” Ms. Sigafiss said. “We’ll do another one tomorrow.”
“Can I go tomorrow?” Lindsey’s hand shot up.
Ms. Sigafiss glared at her. “Maybe,” she said.
Lindsey put her hand down and whispered something to Snotty Ami.
“Quiet!” Ms. Sigafiss grumbled. “No speaking unless you’re spoken to.” She grabbed a red dry-erase marker and started writing something on the whiteboard. “Get your response journals,” she said without taking her eyes off the board. “We will be working on these questions silently for the next fifteen minutes.”
We all made a beeline to the basket of journals in the corner of the room. When I made it to the front of the line, I sifted through the few that were left and grabbed my green notebook. It was identical to all the rest except for a white label in the left-hand corner with my name on it.
And except for a little piece of blue paper sticking out like a bookmark.
What?
My throat went totally dry and my heartbeat sped up. I didn’t put a bookmark in my reader response journal when I used it a week ago. And I definitely didn’t put in a blue bookmark that looked an awful lot like one of those mysterious notes.
I peered up at Ms. Sigafiss before removing the paper. Her back was still facing us since she was writing the questions on the board, which meant it was probably as safe as it was going to get. I took a deep breath as I tugged at the edges of the paper and opened it up.
Holy high heels.
There were teeny typed words on the paper, just like the last one. And my name was at the top.
Elyse,
If you want to feel better, introduce yourself to someone new, someone who you’ve never talked to before. I don’t care who it is. I do care that you do it as soon as possible. If you get an interview, doing this will help you be more comfortable during the conversation!
I folded up the paper but then opened it again to make sure I had read it right and wasn’t going bonkers. I scanned the room, not sure who or what I was looking for. No one looked back at me. I had just experienced something creepy and unexplainable for the third time—but to everyone else, nothing had changed.
I kinda wanted to tell Jeg, but I’d never be able to get to her with the Loud Crowd around her all the time. Plus, she probably wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway, and I was still kinda mad at her, too. I could tell Nice Andy, but he’d probably want to tell Ms. Sigafiss or one of our other teachers or Mr. Todd. I could tell Mom, but she’d probably want to tell the police.
It’s kind of weird how getting a mysterious note written especially for you can make you feel so alone.
I read the message again, and then I read it about a million more times until I could practically recite it by heart. Finally, I stuffed the paper in my pocket and tried to answer Ms. Sigafiss’s questions in my reading journal, but it was no use. All I could do was think about how bad I wanted to take the note out again.
The idea of introducing myself to someone new was seriously scary. I wanted to know new people, but I wanted to magically know them without having to do the awkward first-conversation thing. Besides, it kinda seemed like all the girls from the two other elementary schools that had combined with ours wanted to be in the Loud Crowd. Any of them I went up to would laugh in my face.
Although, if this note-writer person really could help me be Explorer Leader, a little laugh in my face might
be worth it in the long run. Without bothering to look down at my sleeves covering the words etched on my arms, I knew it would be worth it. I needed to be popular so I could get good names. And being Explorer Leader was the only way to make it happen. I had to get one of those interviews, and I had to knock it out of the park.
* * *
At lunchtime, I threw open the bathroom door and stopped dead in my tracks. Olivia was sitting on my bench.
For a minute, I just stared, a little annoyed. This was my secret spot, and the last thing I felt like doing was talking to someone. Or giving up the bench.
But then I remembered the note. If you want to feel better, introduce yourself to someone new. This would probably be the best chance I’d have. I guess it wouldn’t kill me.
“Hey,” Olivia said, looking at the book in my left hand and the brown bag in my right. “Looks like we had the same idea.”
“Yeah, I guess!” I gulped. I could do this. I talked to people all the time. And I also sometimes said my name. I could probably do the two together, if I stayed calm long enough to get the words out. “Um, I’m Elyse. We haven’t really gotten to meet yet.” Hooray for me; I did it!
“Yeah, hi!” Olivia scooted over a little to make room. She motioned toward the space next to her.
“Thanks.” I sat down, and she smiled at me. “So … you like eating lunch in the bathroom?”
She laughed. “Yeah, sometimes. I haven’t been doing it much, but I have to take quiet when I can get it. My house is always crazy.”
“Oh yeah! You have a bunch of brothers and sisters, right?”
“Yeah! Do you have any?”
“Nope. If you ever get sick of yours, I’ll borrow them.”
Olivia laughed.
“How old are they?” I asked.
“Well…” She scratched her chin and laughed again. “I should know this. Okay, so Emmanuel is sixteen, and Vera is fourteen, and I’m eleven. Then Philip is eight, Farrah is five, and Matthew is two.”
“Do you all get along?”
“Yeah … we don’t have much choice. Farrah has brittle-bone disease, so we all take care of her together. It’s the mild kind, but still. I think we all feel kinda dumb about fighting when we think about what she has to deal with.”
“Wow.” Everything Olivia said made me want to be her friend even more. She really cared about people. And her sister—it might make me a little selfish, but the first thing I thought was that if Olivia was so kind to her sister, maybe she’d be kind to me, too, if she knew about my CAV.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. The second I considered it, my throat dried up so much that I couldn’t say anything. So instead of talking, I smiled and opened up my book and my lunch. I grabbed my string cheese—courtesy of Nice Andy for the fifth day in a row (now his mom was buying extra for the middle school cheese-eaters)—and offered her a big chunk.
Olivia smiled and took it. Then she opened her book, too, and for the next twenty minutes we sat on our bench with our books, enjoying a little peace and quiet and cheese.
10
WALKS
One of the good parts about being in middle school was that now I was allowed to go out by myself on the weekends as long as my homework was done and I promised to stay close. I could just decide, Hey, I want to go for a walk, and not have to wait around for Mom or Jeg or anyone to agree to go with me.
I didn’t know where I was going when I started walking on Saturday morning. All I knew was that I was crunching in the leaves along the way, and the sun was out, and everything seemed perfect even though some things were a mess and I had lots of dumb, itchy words on my body to prove it. But I tried really hard not to let myself think about it—until I found myself at the big neighborhood field, right near the bleachers.
I looked around, like How did I get here? I didn’t mean to go to the field. I didn’t want to be at the field. I’d rather have been at home, locked in my room with a thousand bottles of the thickest, goopiest, most disgusting anti-itch cream Mom could find than be at the field. Yet there I was. There, my feet had automatically taken me. Traitors.
Last year, Jeg and I had gone to the field all the time because we wanted fresh air, and also because we wanted to spy on Kevin and Liam. Mostly because we wanted to spy on Kevin and Liam.
They were on the soccer team that practiced every Saturday morning. We would pack bags of candy (for energy) and skip down the street, giggling the whole way because we would always say the same thing at the same time and it was hilarious. Everything was hilarious when I was with my best friend, even the stuff that wasn’t really all that funny.
When we’d get to the field, we’d run and hide behind the rusty bleachers on the sidelines. If we sat criss-cross-applesauce, we were at the perfect angle where we could see out but people couldn’t see in. From that position, we watched practice after practice, commenting the whole time about how cute Kevin looked in his uniform (Jeg) and how nice and focused Liam was (me).
“Everyone over here,” a big voice boomed, snapping me out of my thoughts. People in blue jerseys poured in from all directions. I scrambled toward the bleachers and practically dove to my secret spot, getting a small grass stain on my jeans in the process. Whoops. Mom was not going to be too thrilled about that one.
“Morning! Let’s run some drills,” the same voice shouted. “Liam, you’re up!”
Liam! I poked my head out, but he was hard to see. The soccer team had grown—there had to be at least twenty people out there—and they were all dressed in the same royal-blue-and-white uniform. They kept moving—ducking, weaving, tossing, turning, hokeying, pokeying, whatever else soccer players do—and right as I thought I saw Liam, he started running down the field in a different direction. Well, fine. I shouldn’t want to see Liam anyway. I didn’t want to, as a matter of fact. He’d dumped me, and that was that. It was really too bad that he happened to still be cute and funny and weird in the coolest way ever. I think all that stuff should automatically get taken away from you when you dump someone.
The one problem with Spying Saturdays was that Jeg and I had had to fully commit. Since the bleachers were at the far end of the field, we had to get there before the team did and then we couldn’t leave until after they left, or else we’d risk being seen in the big open space between the bleachers and the street that led to my house.
As I sat under the bleachers now, I realized that I was extremely unprepared for this. I didn’t have candy, for one thing. Or comfy pants. Or a friend. Also, I discovered, I really needed to go to the bathroom.
There was one at the end of the field I had come from, the side near my house, but no way was that going to happen. I’d basically have to run right through the middle of the game. I couldn’t always tell which player Liam was, but he would have no trouble picking out the girl who wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Great kick, Liam! Now pass it to Kevin so he can shoot.” There was the coach’s loud voice again.
I peered through the open space anxiously, hoping to somehow catch Liam’s eye in the sea of soccer players. But what would be the point of that? His eye didn’t want to see my eye, or else our eyes would still be going out, along with the rest of us. Him seeing me wouldn’t magically remind him that he used to like me (and probably still could, if he tried hard enough).
I flapped my legs up and down in my criss-cross-applesauce position. Why did I have all that cocoa before I left for my walk? I should never, ever have two giant cups of cocoa—of anything, really—before I go on a walk. I had learned this lesson before. The tricky part was remembering not to be so dumb.
“AHHH!” DUMB formed on my leg, and I couldn’t help yelling out. That dumb word itched like crazy. I clasped my hands over my mouth.
Please don’t let them have heard, I silently begged.
To my relief, there was no coach’s voice booming, Let’s all go investigate that strange noise we just heard from the bleachers! It sounded like a girl being attacked by her
own leg! There was only the sound of kicking.
What was I going to do? They hadn’t heard my AHHH!, but they would definitely hear the sound of a girl peeing behind a bleacher. And that was something I’d never do anyway.
If Jeg were here, she would come up with some brilliant plan that only Jeg would think of. It would be so much fun to pull off that I would forget that the whole reason for having it was that I was going to explode any second.
A few drops of water leaked from my eyes, so I looked up to force the tears back where they came from. I missed Jeg. I really did. And I missed Liam, and that made me feel like dirt. I had a new boyfriend, so I shouldn’t miss my old one! But Nice Andy would never make me feel how Liam did, no matter how much string cheese he gave me. Liam was just the right amount of nice. He was a little weird, too. He got it. And he liked me. But then he changed his mind.
It seemed kinda stupid to miss people I saw every day. I mean, they were right there. But they weren’t really them anymore. Jeg wasn’t the Jeg I grew up with, and Liam wasn’t acting like the Liam I went out with. It was like aliens had invaded their bodies or something. They looked the same (well, aside from Jeg’s boring new hair), but they were not the same people.
And then I had a scary thought: What if they weren’t really the ones who had changed? What if it was me? What if I had been the one driving them away?
Looking down at DUMB on my leg, it didn’t seem like such a crazy idea.
The Explorer Leader would never drive people away. So many people would want to be the Explorer Leader’s friend that the Explorer Leader wouldn’t know what to do with them all.
If I were Explorer Leader, maybe even Liam would add some nice words to my poster. Maybe he’d want to be my friend for real. Friend wasn’t as good as boyfriend, but it was better than nothing.
Now a few more tears crept out of my eyes and ran down my cheeks as I remembered how great it was having Liam like me. I tried to make myself focus on the soccer game, focus on the possibility of being Explorer Leader, focus on something, but instead I just teared up more. Get it together, idiot!