“Okaaay…”
“Stop saying that!” she said.
“Sorry, sorry. I guess I just never thought of Nick as someone anybody would have a crush on. Or an obsession with.”
“Don’t you think he’s so different than he was at Starling?” she asked. “I didn’t see him all summer, and now he’s taller. And I think his voice is deeper.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw him at the pool a bunch over the summer. He seems the same to me.”
“You saw him at the pool?” Amber asked me in a voice that started in a high pitch but ended in a fierce whisper. “What was that like?”
“It wasn’t like anything. I was mostly with Layla, and he was with Jason and Mekhai. We all played Marco Polo a few times.”
“You played Marco Polo with him?” Amber asked, as though I’d said we’d gotten engaged.
“Well, yeah. We were at the pool.”
“Tell. Me. Everything.” Amber ordered. “Starting with what he looks like without a shirt on.”
Ew. That was it. We had been warned during our puberty talk with the school nurse at Starling last year that girls generally mature more quickly than boys, and that girls might start showing “romantic inclinations” sooner. But I would hardly call the way Amber was acting “mature” (or “romantic,” for that matter). In fact, she was officially weirding me out.
“Amber, you’re officially weirding me out,” I told her. I had only had about three bites of my Nachos Fiesta, but my appetite was gone. “I’m gonna go practice opening my lock.” I admit it was a pretty lame excuse, but I don’t know if Amber even heard a word I was saying. Besides, as I’ve established, I did need some lock practice.
“Oh, you’re leaving?” Amber’s tone was surprisingly disinterested, considering she had been frantic for me to sit with her five minutes ago. She was still looking at Nick. While pretending not to look at him.
“Yes. Lock practice.” It sounded even lamer the second time I said it.
“Can you wait a minute and watch me throw away my food scraps?” Amber asked. A request that made “lock practice” sound really important.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I have to walk past Nick on my way to the trash can, and I want you to watch and tell me if he looks at me.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” I said, deciding that I’d clear my tray at a different trash can on the other side of the cafeteria.
I turned to make my escape from Amber, and that’s when I ran into the next person I would meet in middle school.
“Hey,” said a short girl with long brown hair and a narrow, serious-looking face. “You’re Augusta, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little awkward because I had no idea who she was.
“We played soccer together,” she said. “I’m Sarah Novak.”
“Oh right,” I said. “On the Hurricanes.”
I remembered now. Sarah was on my soccer team in second grade. She was quiet but friendly. We used to blow dandelion seeds in the soccer field together, and we had the shared distinction of being the only two kids on the Hurricanes who scored goals against our own team. (It was very confusing for a second grader. Why do they have to switch the two teams’ goals halfway through the game? Now you know why I didn’t play soccer again after that year. I’m guessing Sarah didn’t either.)
“Yeah,” she said. “Did you finish your lunch already?”
“Sort of.” I didn’t feel like explaining why Amber and her crazed hormones had made me lose my appetite after two bites of nachos.
“Oh, okay.” She looked disappointed. “I couldn’t find a good place to sit, so I’m taking my lunch outside.”
“We’re allowed to do that?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “My brother told me. Josh went here until last year; now he’s in high school.”
It was sunny out, and so warm this morning that Dad had tried to convince me to wear sunscreen. (I’d said no. Did not want to start middle school with an extra-shiny face.) But it was definitely one of those first days of school that seem especially cruel because it still feels like summer. Sitting outside with Sarah didn’t sound like the worst way to spend the rest of my lunch period.
“I can still hang out with you if you want,” I told her.
“Okay, good.” Sarah smiled. “I think it’s this way to the courtyard.”
We walked down a short hallway to a door I hadn’t noticed before. It opened onto an interior courtyard with a brick pathway and a few stone benches. The courtyard was overgrown with weeds, and long strands of ivy trailed over the pathways. But I could tell it had been cared for once: honeysuckle flowers grew on a trellis on the opposite side, and a gold plaque on the wall near us read IN LOVING MEMORY OF MRS. JACKIE SISTRUNK.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know this was here. I can’t believe no one else is out here.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Maybe it’s more crowded during seventh- and eighth-grade lunch. But most sixth graders don’t know about it yet. It’ll probably get crazier here later in the year.” (She would turn out to be right about that, but not in the way she meant.)
We only had about fifteen minutes left in lunch period, and it went quickly. She told me everything she knew from her brother about the teachers I had. (Some things were no big surprise: for example, that Mr. Smeed was really boring. But other information he had was unexpected, like the fact that Ms. Tedesco used to be an actress.) She also told me that Ms. Barakat, the teacher I was going to have for language arts after lunch, was “goofy, but nice.”
I asked Sarah if she knew anything about Mrs. Sistrunk, the person the courtyard was named after.
“Only that she was everyone’s favorite teacher,” she said. “And she led a club that gardened in the courtyard. But she died a few years ago.”
It made me sad to know that someone had once loved this courtyard and cared for it, and now she was gone and the courtyard was overgrown. How had everyone else let that happen?
I wondered something else: Where were Sarah’s friends from Minter Elementary? Who had she eaten lunch with there? Wasn’t it weird that she apparently had no one but me to eat with here? I almost asked her, but then I realized she might be wondering the same thing about me. Maybe she had a Layla of her own who’d also wound up at a different middle school. Maybe she hadn’t seen anyone safe to sit with either. Maybe she was also feeling like an alien.
I don’t know if you’ll have a favorite teacher in sixth grade, Lou, but I hope you do. You probably won’t know yet on the first day. I didn’t. And I was convinced no one could ever beat Mr. Singer from fifth grade anyway. He made up songs to teach us state capitals. He took us on a field trip to the beach. He let us team up to answer questions about stories in the news, and the winning teams got candy (like whole chocolate bars, not just weird little dinner mints). He actually made school fun almost every day. Everyone loved him so much that kids and parents cried at the surprise party we threw for him at the end of the year when he left teaching to go to journalism school.
Anyway, at first I thought my language-arts teacher, Ms. Barakat, was a little goofy, like Sarah had said. She was all kinds of asymmetrical: her blouse was only partly tucked in, and half of her skirt hem was coming apart. Even some sections of her hair hung down lower than others (but not in an artsy, intentional way—more like she’d had a bad haircut).
But Ms. Barakat has turned out to be one of the best parts of sixth grade, which has come in handy because I have people like Addison Aldrich and Heidi Carruthers in my class. And they have not been the best parts of sixth grade. More on that later.
The first day of school Ms. Barakat asked us to write her a letter telling her what we hoped would happen in sixth grade. This assignment raised a lot of questions in the class.
Heidi Carruthers: “Can
it be something like ‘I hope I meet Spoiler Alert?’ ” (Spoiler Alert is Heidi’s favorite boy band. As you know, I think their music is pretty terrible.)
Natalie Daniels: “Can it be ‘I hope we don’t have any homework’?”
Addison Aldrich: “Can it be ‘I hope we read Shakespeare’?”
Eric Hewson: “What about ‘I hope the school burns down’?”
Ms. Barakat said yes to all these. (But she did add, “Although I hope you’ll give careful consideration to the implications of what you’re hoping for,” when she answered Eric.)
“Definitely stretch your brains a little,” she said. “That’s what we’re here for. If you want to include any wishes that I might be able to help come true—like reading Shakespeare, or maybe going on a field trip to see a play—then that would be great. But the other wishes are interesting too, and will help me get to know you.
“Oh! Which reminds me,” she said, “you need to get to know me too. So it’s only fair for me to share my letter with you all.” She tapped the Smart Board, and this letter appeared (I remember it pretty well because she wound up printing it out and posting it on a bulletin board):
Dear Sixth Graders,
Welcome to Language Arts! Here are a few of the things I hope for all of us this year:
If you already love reading and writing, I hope that in my class you will discover books and poems that will expand your universe and make you love words even more than you already do.
If language arts is not your favorite subject, I still hope that in this class you will meet a book or a writer who speaks to you and makes you think!
I hope we discover more about the things that connect us to each other and to people throughout time.
I hope you will not hesitate to ask questions or offer insights.
Finally, I hope that middle school for you can be a time of getting to know yourself and finding your village.
Heidi raised her hand. “What do you mean, ‘finding your village’?” she asked.
“Your people,” Ms. Barakat explained. “The ones who make you feel at home in your own skin.”
Addison, Marcy, and Heidi exchanged a look that said they already had a village and were also quite comfortable with their skin, thank you very much.
I looked around and wondered if I would ever have a village at all. Or feel comfortable in my skin. Half the time lately, I didn’t even feel “at home” in our actual home. Either of them.
In my letter to Ms. Barakat, I wrote:
I hope for a good year with good grades and not too much homework. And I hope you’re right about finding a village. And feeling at home. We’ll see.
I signed my name and folded the letter twice before dropping it in the wire basket on her desk as I left the room.
Walking to the next class on the first day, I braced myself. Who was I going to find in here? The Huggers? Natalie and her dance friends? Some other kids who already had their village? And what about the teacher? Would it be a man or a woman? Would he or she slam the desks with a golf club, give us weird jobs, or say things to embarrass me?
So it was a relief when I walked in and the first person I saw was Sarah. And there was an empty seat beside her.
“Hey, sit here,” she said when she saw me. I was glad she said it right away so I didn’t have to ask if she was saving the seat for someone.
“What was your class last period?” I asked her.
“Band,” she answered. “Are you in band?”
I just said that I wasn’t. I didn’t tell her that I wanted to be in band, but that an instrument wasn’t really in Mom and Dad’s budget this summer, between renting Dad an apartment, and getting new furniture for it, and buying us an extra everything (jackets, boots, jeans, sweaters) because the family therapist said that would “ease the transition” (oh yeah, they also had to pay the family therapist)…well, I just kind of sensed that it wasn’t the right time to ask about renting a trombone. Or two trombones, come to think of it. So I was stuck with gym as my elective. Joy.
“How was language arts?” Sarah asked. “What’d you think of Barakat?”
“She seems okay; she made us write about things we hope for this year.”
“Oh yeah, I have her first period. We did that too. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I made up something about field trips. Who was in that class with you?”
I told her about Addison, Marcy, and Heidi. “Do you know them?” I asked her.
“I know Heidi,” she said. “We were in the same ballet class when we were younger and we got to be friends.”
“Oh,” I said, kind of surprised. Heidi didn’t seem like someone Sarah would be friends with. “Are you guys still friends?”
“Not so much.”
I wanted to ask more, but I wondered if the story of Sarah’s friendship with Heidi was something she’d rather not talk about, sort of like me and the reason I wasn’t in band. Besides, class was starting.
As for the math teacher, Ms. Rice…she’s the kind of adult I imagine a lifeguard would grow up to be. Or, like, a really good athlete who also volunteers to build houses for homeless people. She is super confident, a little tough but also kind, and of course really, really good at math. All things I’m not so sure I’ll ever be.
My next class was gym. Since I figured Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me take band and I had to do the gym elective instead, it’s fair to say I was not exactly looking forward to it. In fact, I was dreading it. I recognized a few of the kids in gym from classes earlier in the day. One of the Huggers was in there. Also Jason Cordrey. But no one I wanted to squeeze next to when the gym teacher, Ms. Lewis, told us to line up on the first bleacher and sit down. The first bleacher was about twenty kids wide…and there were twenty-five of us in the class. Squish.
I wound up smushed between the lone Hugger and Jason, who pretended he didn’t know me even though we’d been in the same class together four times since preschool. Fine. I guess I was pretending not to know him either. He was at the end of the row, practically falling off the edge.
The last kid to sit down was a girl I didn’t know who I recognized from homeroom. She didn’t hurry to get beside a particular person. She didn’t squeeze her way between people, or try to perch at the end. In fact, she didn’t even sit in the front row at all. She strolled over to the bleachers, examining her fingernails like they had something written on them, and sat in the third row, two bleachers behind everyone else.
“Excuse me,” Ms. Lewis said, clutching her clipboard to her chest and pointing. “You in the third row. What’s your name?”
The girl glanced up from her fingernails and looked at the bleachers in front of her. She bobbed her head a couple of times, apparently counting to see which row she was in. She looked up at Ms. Lewis.
“Me?” she asked.
“Seeing as how you’re the only person in the third row,” Ms. Lewis said, “yes. You.”
“Oh. I’m Quincy.”
“Hello, Quincy. Welcome to physical education. I asked you all to please sit on the first bleacher. Not the third.” Ms. Lewis reached up to her blond ponytail and gave it a little flip through her right thumb and forefinger, like she was making sure it was still there.
“There’s no room there,” Quincy said.
“All your other classmates managed to find spots.”
“But they’re all squished together. What’s the point?”
“The point, Quincy, is for me to find out how well you all follow directions. It seems I’ve already learned something about you.”
I glanced at Quincy out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t move or apologize or blush or do any of the things I would have done.
No, Quincy leaned forward to a boy in the front bleacher and whispered, “Do you think we need pens in here? I forgot my
pen.”
“Quincy!” Ms. Lewis’s eyes were open so wide I could see the whites all the way around her blue irises. “We are not talking and we do not need pens and we are SITTING IN THE FIRST ROW.”
Quincy looked up again. “I guess I’m just not sure why.” Her voice was perfectly calm, completely different from the tone Ms. Lewis was using.
“So you think you should all be able to just sit wherever you want, even though this is my class?” Ms. Lewis’s voice seemed tighter, somehow, than it had when we first walked in.
“Well, if there’s no room where you want us to sit, then sure,” Quincy answered.
Ms. Lewis narrowed her eyes. “Everyone except Quincy, please go to the locker rooms and choose the lockers you will use for the year. I know you don’t have gym clothes with you yet today, but next time you will, and I will expect you to change quickly. So spend some time practicing opening and closing those locks. Quincy, you wait here for a moment to speak with me.”
Great. Locks again. I fell in with the rest of the class as they split into two separate groups walking toward the doors at the far end of the gym (one with a BOYS sign above it, the other with a GIRLS sign).
Even though it was only the first day of school, the locker room already smelled like dirty socks. The lockers were all bright orange, kind of like the jumpsuits people in prison have to wear. I put my backpack on the bench in front of an open locker at the end of a row and pulled out the lock Mom had bought me for gym. Not surprisingly, most of the other girls already had their locks on their lockers and were spinning the dials like tops as they chatted with each other. I, on the other hand, was alone with my closed lock and my clumsy fingers.
“Do you need help?” a voice beside me asked. I looked up and saw Quincy standing at the locker beside mine, already putting an open lock on it. I guess it hadn’t taken long for Ms. Lewis to say whatever she had to say to her.
The 47 People You'll Meet in Middle School Page 4
