Deep Down Popular

by Phoebe Stone

  And then the camera switches to Conrad. “Well, Conrad Smith,” says the newscaster, “how are you feeling?”

  “Wonderful,” says Conrad. “I’ve been walking all over the halls in the hospital. The nurses have practically had to tie me down.”

  “I understand you’ve got a sixth-grade graduation dance coming up that you’re not going to miss this year. Am I right? And now that you’re all fixed up nice, you can have your pick of any little girl you want to take. Am I right?”

  “Hope so, it’s about time,” says Conrad, smiling, “and there are a lot of pretty girls in my class. It’s almost going to be hard to choose.” The newscaster laughs. Melinda laughs. Granddaddy laughs. But I cry. Deep down inside I cry. The camera zooms out, and Dr. Jerome Wildy and Conrad with a small Day-Glo crutch under one arm are seen walking down the hospital hall together gesturing and talking.

  “Nice little human interest story for a change,” says Granddaddy, going into the kitchen to get himself another Snack Pack chocolate pudding. Then he calls out, “Isn’t that a boy from your school, Jessie Lou?”

  The newscaster goes on now to talk about other things, the upcoming air show and the opening day festivities planned for the end of the week, when the new shopping mall and Big Box Home and Hardware will be opening their doors.

  Suddenly our phone is ringing. It is Louise the Louse. “Hi, Jessie Lou,” she says. “Did you see Conrad on TV? Didn’t he look handsome? I can’t wait to see him. He’s famous. He’s been on TV. I’m going to get his autograph.”

  After I hang up the phone, it rings again. It’s Elizabeth Parnell, the once-in-a-while-who-are-you friend I used to have. “Hello, Jessie Lou, good to talk to you. Have you been watching the news tonight? Did you see Rad on TV? Wasn’t Rad funny?”

  “Rad?” I say.

  After I hang up the phone, it rings again. Sarah Jane Peabody, Tiffany B., Moon n’ Stars Montgomery, and even Brice Buttonwood call here. Every piccolo player in the class rings my number. And the phone keeps going all evening. It rings and rings and rings. Practically half the people in our school call to say they saw Conrad and that they love him and that he is famous and isn’t it a miracle and isn’t Dr. Wildy wonderful? Didn’t Conrad handle the publicity with ease? Wasn’t it just too cool? Yes indeed, before Conrad even stepped one foot out of the Winifred P. Culpepper Memorial Hospital, his popularity was entirely restored and then some.

  Three more days of even darker darkness. The sun barely shines. The clouds are mean and warlike. The river is indifferent, cold. The trees are strangers turning away from me. Of all the birds that are singing and carrying on for spring, it is the catbird I listen to. It sounds like a human baby crying in the treetops. But how would a human baby get way up there in the leaves and sky?

  I skip school. I trick Granddaddy into thinking I am getting on the bus this morning and then I don’t. I have never tricked my granddaddy before and it makes me feel even worse to do it.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” he says, “have a nice day at school.” And he hands me my lunch bag with a special cheese-and-tomato sandwich that he made for me and the last peanut butter cookie in the house that I added to the bag myself, secretly. I usually have to hide a few of those cookies ’cause Granddaddy has a real bad sweet tooth and he’ll gobble up any peanut butter cookies that get brought into the house. (Mama says Granddaddy’s just plain devious when it comes to cookies.) Sometimes he even ferrets around and finds the hidden ones. But not this time. I can feel that cookie in the bottom of the bag, and it kind of makes me feel terrible too, knowing I’m keeping it from my poor old granddaddy.

  I wave the bus on from the opposite side of the road. I duck behind the bushes so Granddaddy can’t see me, and then I cut off down the hill with my lunch under my arm. I hate to do it to my granddaddy, but I can’t face what I know is waiting for me at school.

  Quentin Duster sees me and he has eyes as wide as two plates setting side by side on a shelf, watching me waving the bus on, knowing I’m skipping school. I can see him wriggling out of his seat trying to get the bus to stop, but it doesn’t. It just keeps rolling on the way buses do, headed straight for school. Quentin is trapped, but I am free. Let him field all those questions. Let him witness all those turncoats turning yet again.

  Maybe it isn’t such a bad day outside, but inside me it is storming. Outside the sun keeps sailing in and out of those clouds, showering me with light and then showering me with shadows. I sit on a rock in a field of dandelions, letting bees buzz around me, watching the wind roll across the field, rippling it like a big green loose-weave rug.

  My granddaddy says you have to bounce in this world. Just like a big beach ball. “You’re going to get hurt sometimes,” he says. “You’re going to fail once in a while, but you got to bounce back like a big bouncy ball.” If I were a ball right now, I’d roll away to the sea and I’d never come back.

  I can still hear the newscaster on television saying, “Well, young man, looks like now you can invite any little girl you want to that dance.”

  And Conrad answers, “Hope so, it’s about time, and there are a lot of pretty girls in my class. It’s almost going to be hard to choose.” I don’t want to lose Conrad, but I know I already have. I can feel it. It’s in the air. It’s in the birds singing. It’s in the wind blowing. It’s in the river rushing, still fat from the storm. It’s in the dandelions, all yellow and dancing, thousands of them.

  I’ve lost Conrad Parker Smith. I cry ’cause I’m alone and I know nobody can see me and crying is the only way to get rid of that horrible rock in my throat that is hurting so bad. I sob, thinking I’m all alone, but then I realize I’m not. I can see my sister, Melinda, walking through the field with a butterfly net and a notebook. When she gets within shouting distance, she calls out that she has the morning off and she’s looking for milkweed pods and monarch butterflies for a paper she is writing for school.

  Eighth graders call them “papers.” Sixth graders call them “reports.” Whatever they are, they’re a whole lot of trouble, and I haven’t even thought about our discovery report due at the end of the year. It hasn’t even crossed my mind for days.

  I kind of doubt Melinda will find any monarch butterflies at all since Granddaddy says they’ve gone scarce because of all the spraying of pesticides everywhere. “We have a lot of milkweed here, but we don’t have the monarchs anymore,” Granddaddy often says, slapping a book down on the table. “Used to see whole fields of them. Now you’re lucky if you see a one.”

  Melinda walks toward me in the tall grass with her butterfly net and her eyes squinting under the changing sun. “Jessie Lou,” she says, “are you crying?”

  I say, “No, I am not crying.” She sits down on the rock too, and we look at the field and the bees and the dandelions and the shadows of clouds coming and going. And then suddenly I start crying again. I can’t help it. Then she starts crying too. We both sit here sobbing. I know why she is crying, but she doesn’t know why I am crying, and that doesn’t seem fair, me knowing and her not knowing. So I tell her. I don’t mean to, but when something wants to pop out of me it just does and I never have been able to stop it. “I lost Conrad,” I say. “And I love him to pieces. I lost him. He’s looking forward to inviting any number of girls to the dance coming up. He won’t need my friendship anymore.”

  Melinda looks right at me with her green eyes, so green as to mimic the fields all around us, her face so smooth as to be like one of those glass angels in Conrad’s kitchen. “Jessie Lou,” she says, “he isn’t going to be the only boy you ever like. He may be the first boy, but there’s going to be a whole lot more in your life coming up. I promise you that.” She gives me a nice little smile, tilts her head, picks up my lunch bag, and says, “What y’all got in here anyway?”

  We decide to split the sandwich. It tastes pretty good. Then I get out the peanut butter cookie and we make a real accurate line with Melinda’s ruler that she has tucked in her notebook. We make the line ri
ght down the middle of that cookie and we break it in half to the absolute point of perfection. Yes indeed, Granddaddy would have eaten this cookie long ago, if I hadn’t hidden it in the back of the kitchen cabinet under two saucers and a teacup.

  Next day I go to school. I face the music. I think of myself as a ball. I bounce off the bus. I hop down the hall. It’s Conrad’s first day back at school, but I can’t get near him. There are crowds of kids pushing around him trying to get his autograph. I can’t imagine why — Conrad has the worst handwriting in the world. Girls are pushing and shoving in the hall trying to talk to him. Tomorrow night is the big sixth-grade dance and all the girls are talking about going with Conrad. In the girls’ room they are drawing straws for who gets to ask him first.

  Quentin is even pushing in the crowds by the front door trying to get Conrad’s autograph. I nudge Quentin in the arm as I walk by. “Quentin Duster,” I say, “what the heck are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to get Conrad’s autograph,” he says. “Conrad’s famous. Dr. Wildy might be asked to visit the president. I’m going to get that autograph. I’m only twenty-second in line.”

  “Quentin,” I say, “Conrad isn’t any different now than he was before he got on TV. He’s still just plain old, stupid Conrad. What do you want his sloppy left-handed signature for anyway?”

  I go into our classroom and I sit down at my desk. There isn’t anybody in the room at all except for me and Mrs. Duster. She looks at me a long time like she’s trying to read a sign that’s too far away. I slouch at my desk and look down. She pulls a Weight Watchers frozen lunch out of her bag, preparing to take it to the refrigerator in the teachers’ room next door. She arranges some papers on her desk and then she says, “Jessie Lou, aren’t you going to add anything more to your self-portrait for tomorrow night? You’re the only person up there who hasn’t got anything at all to say about themselves.”

  I look away like I don’t hear her, like I’m busy watching something invisible in the air. I am repeating to myself, nodding my head up and down in a knowing kind of way, Popular people are not nice to unpopular people. It’s just the way things are. Kids are fickle like the Cabanash River rising and falling. I’ve seen them be fickle over and over again.

  The bell rings and everybody scatters like a bunch of mud bugs when you turn over a rock. Everybody starts rushing toward their classrooms. Conrad comes through the door with Elizabeth Parnell, Moon n’ Stars Montgomery, Sarah Jane Peabody, and Louise the Louse all draped around him. Hannah, Emily, and Tiffany B. are close behind. Jenny Bonners is beaming because she has his autograph, CONRAD PARKER SMITH, written with a Magic Marker in big letters on her arm all the way up to her elbow. Brice Buttonwood is standing next to him with his hand on Conrad’s shoulder. Conrad is smiling, walking straight, looking happy, giving everybody all kinds of attention. He even waves to me from afar, the way a candidate waves to a potential voter he barely knows.

  I feel like I’m going to faint. I feel all dizzy and I ask to go to the nurse’s room. As I walk down the hall I try to bounce with each step. I bounce past the decorating crew working on the hall for the dance. They are hanging up red, white, and blue streamers.

  “We’re going with a patriotic theme this year, Jessie Lou,” Paula T. calls out to me. “What do you think?”

  “Looks real nice,” I say.

  I know how kids can turn on each other. I know how keeping on the right side of the crowd can be tricky and unpredictable. The tables have turned on me many a time. It isn’t the first time. This time though, I say to myself, I’m going to bounce. And I do. I bounce like a ball down the hall. I bounce past the principal’s office. I bounce right past the nurse’s office and I bounce right out the door.

  When I get out on the road, the sky is mixing around like water coming to a rolling boil. I’ll probably make it home in time for lunch, though I feel too upset to eat one little bite. I think I’ll just sit at the table while everybody else is wolfing down everything and I’ll cut coupons out of the Piggly Wiggly flyer, helping Mama get ready for “Two for Tuesday,” double coupon day. That’s the only time Mama doesn’t say, “Honey, you better start eating. You know a girl your size should be getting 1,200 to 1,500 calories per day. There’s a fine line, Jessie Lou, between skinny and scrawny. You don’t want to cross that line.”

  “I probably already have,” I usually say. “Guess I crossed that line a year ago and didn’t even give a hoot about it at the time and still don’t.”

  As I’m running along, I try to make sense of everything. But nothing seems to make sense. I just found out as I was leaving school what all those white envelopes were that Brice Buttonwood was handing out that day on the bus. Brice was selecting popular kids to go up to Buttonwood’s Bowl-a-rama II during opening day celebration. They’re gonna be putting on a Lewis and Clark discovery skit with costumes and props and everything. Today Conrad was asked to be Clark. Brice will be Lewis, and the wonderful discovery they’ll be making will be the new Bowl-a-rama. How can Conrad play Clark when he’s been Lewis for all these weeks? It just makes me feel like losing it in the road.

  I pass the old meandering Cabanash River, the river that knows everything and says nothing. I pass the spot where Conrad pushed his bike in a long time ago — or at least that’s what it feels like. Then I reach down and pick up a handful of gravel and throw it up high till it falls into the river, making a shower of little stones. It seems like where things fall is just up to gravity and luck, with no sense to it at all. I sit down on the edge of the bank and lie back and look at the sky.

  When I finally get home, I don’t even say boo to anybody. I just take a peek at the little barn swallow lying in the grass in the box in the hallway. Granddaddy’s got birdseed and bread crumbs in there for it. I sit and hold the box for a while like to rock that bird to sleep. Then I just go up to my room to my desk and get out my big black Magic Marker and a pile of T-shirts. I’ve done fifty shirts already. (Granddaddy’s done ten.) Just like Quentin once did, I cross off the words Aren’t Things and I write in Are Tulips. So the T-shirts read, Best Things in Life Are Tulips. Shop Bailey’s Hardware.

  “Boredom is for people who don’t have any imagination, honey. Life is too short to waste it being bored,” shouts Mama, whizzing around my feet with the noisy nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. I am sitting at the kitchen table poking a bunch of cherry tomatoes with a chopstick, ruining them all. Somebody has left their Chinese fortune from a cookie on the table. It says, Wise is the frog that hops away.

  I’m so glad today is Saturday. I won’t have to witness Rad and Moon n’ Stars and Elizabeth Parnell and Louise the Louse and all the others. I have all kinds of time on my hands. It isn’t exactly boredom. It’s just that I used to knock around with Conrad and Quentin, but now I don’t. I poke another cherry tomato.

  Granddaddy comes into the kitchen wearing his fishing jacket, carrying a pair of binoculars, a camera, and his fishing hat. “Where are you off to, Mr. Ferguson?” says Mama, sucking up a stray sock with the vacuum cleaner by mistake. It gets caught on the end of her nozzle and makes a terrific racket, like something begging not to die. Granddaddy pulls the sock off the nozzle and takes his foot and clicks the vacuum cleaner off, bringing the room to a kind of startling silence.

  “I’m going fishing, but on my way I’m going to stop over at the shopping mall to see the final results. They’re opening up tomorrow. There’s going to be all kinds of enticements on a Sunday morning to get people away from going to church, to go on down there and buy and buy and buy. Never mind what it is, just buy.”

  “There’s going to be a real nice air show,” says Mama. “Some man from Richmond is going to be shot out of a cannon. There’s going to be all kinds of stunt airplane acts, planes going upside down and the like. Jack Duster told me another fella is going to skydive out of a helicopter and he’s going to land in one of the pools from Pool World. There’s a lot of skill involved in those stunts,” says Mama, punching on the vacuum
cleaner again, ending the conversation with a roar.

  “You want to go, Jessie Lou?” shouts Granddaddy, putting his arm around me. ’Course I do. All I have to do today is poke cherry tomatoes with a chopstick. Can’t get much worse than that.

  When Mama said the air show was tomorrow, it kind of jolted me ’cause I haven’t finished all those T-shirts. It tears my heart out to think Conrad will be going over to the new Buttonwood’s Bowl-a-rama to be Clark of all people, so those shirts are up to me. I’m on my own now. I lay my head back against the car seat and I close my eyes and I don’t open them till we are there.

  At the shopping mall there is already all sorts of hoopla going on. They are pumping up an enormous air balloon on site in the shape of a huge Big Box Home and Hardware truck. It lies there with its big blue lettering getting fatter and fatter as the air is pumped into it. It is so big that it takes up a huge portion of the parking lot. There are all kinds of people standing in a big circle around it, looking at it with awe, admiring it like it is some kind of enormous circus animal lying on its side getting plumper and plumper.

  We drive up to the edge of the parking lot. Moon n’ Stars’s mama is on the corner, wearing her big fat Earth Day globe costume, holding a sign that says SAVE THE EARTH. I blush and I don’t want to get out of the car, but Granddaddy doesn’t pay me any mind. He parks the car and opens the trunk. He gets out two fishing poles, a couple of fishing baskets, and two pairs of tall rubber waders. He hands me a pair and a pole. Then he gets out a big sign that says, WE SMELL SOMETHING FISHY. BIG FISH GO HOME.

  “Keep it under your hat, sweetheart,” Granddaddy says. “I mean where your mama is concerned.”

  Well, I don’t really want to do it, but I get out of the car and I take the sign. Then Fred and Frank Bailey show up on their moped in fishing outfits too. Their signs say, SHOP AT FRED AND FRANK BAILEY’S FOR YOUR FISHING SUPPLIES.