“I know,” I said. “Mrs. Dudley shouldn’t have said those things. But why did you bring that—that thing to school?”
Antonia covered the doll’s ears with her hands and glared at me. “She is not a thing,” she whispered. “She has a name. Hush-a-bye. Like in that song Mom sings when it storms and the thunder hurts my ears. I sang it to her last night.” She closed her eyes and warbled a little off-key.
Hush-a-bye and good night
Till the bright morning light
Takes the sleep from your eyes
Hush-a-bye, baby bright
“Fine.” I gritted my teeth and resisted the urge to do something hurtful. “Why did you bring Hush-a-bye to school? Don’t you know what kids would say if they saw you brought a doll’s head to school?”
Antonia uncovered Hush-a-bye’s ears. She tilted the head toward her and smiled. “They’d say, ‘Hello, pretty girl with the curly blond hair.’ ”
The urge won out. I threw a twig at Antonia and hit her smack between the eyes. “No,” I said as she scowled at me. “They’d call you a weirdo. Is that how you want to start middle school? As the class weirdo? How do you expect to make any friends when everyone’s making fun of you?”
Antonia’s chin sank down to her chest, and she sucked in her lips. Her pouty face. I didn’t care. She had to hear the truth whether she liked it or not, for her own good. If I were an only child, I wouldn’t have to put up with Antonia’s nonsense. The idea flashed in my brain briefly, but I let it go. This wasn’t the time for mean thoughts.
“I don’t want to make you feel bad,” I said, trying to sound a little less harsh, “but if you’re going to make any friends this year—”
“Hush-a-bye asked me a question on the bus,” Antonia interrupted. “She was wondering where your friends were at lunch today.”
The question stopped me cold. Antonia’s head was still down, but the doll’s single green eye was looking straight at me like she already knew the answer.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“All the other kids sat with their friends.” Antonia raised her eyes to mine. “How come you didn’t?”
I waved my hands in circles like it was no big deal. Really I was stalling until I could think up a good excuse. “Oh. That. It was . . . You know . . . I . . . I wanted it to be just you and me for lunch and . . . and wasn’t that milk explosion the weirdest thing?”
Antonia’s face brightened. “The milk!” she howled, and doubled over with laughter. “That was a good one.”
“Must have been some kind of freak accident,” I said, relieved Antonia had stopped asking me any more questions about my nonexistent friends.
Antonia shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no. That was Hush-a-bye. She made it happen.”
“She made it happen,” I repeated. It wasn’t the craziest story Antonia had ever made up. When she was eight, she’d insisted a swarm of wasp angels lived under her pillow and had made her their supreme queen.
Except she wasn’t eight anymore. This wasn’t a good sign. Maybe she’d had a hard first day in middle school, and this was her way of running from it. Running from problems was something I knew a lot about.
Part of me wanted to help her, tell her she didn’t need to make up stories. I’d be there for her—and I’d stop imagining what it would be like if she didn’t exist. I’d be her big, strong older sister who’d protect her from all the middle school crud that might crawl under her skin and slowly worm its way into her heart.
But another part of me knew that would never happen, not in a million years, and wanted desperately to avoid any more questions I didn’t want to answer. I knew which part would win out.
“How did she manage that?” I asked.
Antonia scratched her head. “I don’t understand it all exactly. It’s kind of like magic, except I have to want it real bad to make it happen. Real bad. She can’t just do it because she feels like it. So I asked and I asked and then she could do it. The asking is like a key that opens up her magic.”
“A key?”
Antonia nodded. “Yeah. A key that opens up a door of magic somewhere in her heart and lets it come outside. But some other kind of magic goes back inside her too and fills her up. That’s the best part! She gets some magic back to herself, a good kind of magic that helps her. That’s why I took you to this tree. She said something special was waiting here.”
Antonia sat Hush-a-bye against the ginkgo trunk. She snaked her fingers through the dry grass around the tree’s base, searching for the special whatever, her face pinched in concentration. I stood and looked vaguely around, not having a clue what I was supposed to find.
Then Antonia gasped and she pounced on a spot in the grass.
“Oh! Oh!” she squealed, holding up a fist with yellow grass blades poking through. “It’s true! It’s true!”
I squinted at her balled-up fingers, trying to figure out what she’d found. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be very big.
Antonia opened her hand and picked out the bits of grass. She licked her thumb and rubbed at the thing in her palm. Her eyes grew big.
“Oh, Hush-a-bye,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”
I craned my neck to see. “What have you got? Better not be a bug.”
She snatched Hush-a-bye from the trunk without answering, then sat hunched over the doll with her back to me. I was a little miffed at being kept in the dark. I wasn’t used to Antonia keeping secrets from me.
“I’m not going to sit here all day and wait for you,” I said, a little snippily.
“All done,” Antonia said. “Come and see.”
I thought about dragging my feet so Antonia would know I wasn’t happy waiting, but my curiosity got the better of me. I ran around to face her.
Antonia sat cross-legged with Hush-a-bye in her lap. Her face shone with sweat, and her eyes gleamed.
“Look.” She turned Hush-a-bye’s head so I could see the doll’s face.
At first it looked like the same busted-up doll’s head I’d pulled out of the riverbank, only a little cleaner. Hush-a-bye’s head rocked back and forth in Antonia’s fingers, and the afternoon light flashed off the doll’s eyes.
A strange thought crawled through my brain. It’s laughing at me. Then a shiver went up my spine.
I’d heard that expression before, but I’d never really understood what it meant until then—like someone sliding a cold, dead finger up the middle of your back. But I didn’t shiver because of some imaginary laugh I didn’t hear. I shivered at what I saw.
The empty space in Hush-a-bye’s left socket was now filled with a brand-new, bright green eye.
7
THE NEXT DAY, I convinced Antonia to not bring Hush-a-bye to school in her backpack anymore. I told her someone might steal the doll if they knew it could do magic. This put Antonia into an immediate panic. Before she left for school, she stuck Hush-a-bye in a plastic bag and stuffed it in the back of her underwear drawer.
By that time, I’d decided Hush-a-bye’s new eye was something Antonia had found near the river. She must have stuffed it in her pocket, maybe one with a hole, and after it fell out, she forgot she’d ever had it in the first place. Why she’d want a single doll’s eye, I couldn’t figure out, but there was a lot of things Antonia did that didn’t make sense. Like bringing a busted doll’s head to school.
As for the Milk Bomb, the word around school was that spoiled milk was to blame for what happened in the cafeteria. Some kind of nasty bacteria gas must have bubbled up in the cartons until they finally blew up, which also explained why the milk basket jumped. It seemed as good a reason as any.
After taking two “personal” days off, Mrs. Dudley, the lunch lady, showed up for work. She pretended like nothing happened, but every time someone rattled the milk basket, she’d flinch. It got rattled a lot. It d
idn’t surprise me. I knew as well as anyone you could always count on a certain group of kids to kick someone when they’re down. Then again, if anyone deserved a good kick, it was Mrs. Dudley.
After a week and a half, the big event faded, and life at the middle school went back to normal. Which wasn’t the best thing in the world.
I managed as best as I could. The days came and went, some tolerable, some less so. Mr. Capp’s class was still a forty-two-minute-long bright spot, and listening to May Darasavath chatter away about nothing in particular made it shine a little brighter.
The worst part of the day was the three minutes between social studies and science class. Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. Doesn’t sound like much, but it was the longest three minutes of my day.
Every day, after social studies ended, Madison would walk close behind me, an Oslo twin flanking her on each side. And every day she’d beat me down to a pulp.
I don’t mean she actually hit me. Madison never poked me or pinched me or tripped me or slammed me up against the lockers. She never laid a single manicured fingernail on my scrawny body. Her weapon was whispers. She never did it in front of any adults who could call her out, and none of the kids cared enough about me to stop her.
“Did you see that?” she’d start once we left the social studies classroom.
“What? What?” one of the twins would answer.
“A couple of cockroaches crawled out of Trash Licker’s hair and down her shirt.”
“No. Really? Gross!”
“Really. Probably her pets.”
“Ew! You’re so bad, Maddie!”
Worse was when Madison talked about my parents—that is, the people she pretended were my parents.
“You know what I heard,” Madison would say, “I heard her daddy’s on death row. I can’t even tell you what he did, it’s so awful. And I saw her mom picking through the garbage bins at the supermarket, looking for their dinner. She has a face like a weasel, and her teeth are brown and rotten. It’s no wonder Trash Licker’s the way she is.”
I wished I could have swung around and screamed at her, or smashed my fist right into her perfect white teeth, or told everyone who was listening some awful thing about Madison that would make her cry and run away. But I never did. Not even close.
Against the Rules, you know—specifically Rule Number Four.
Madison didn’t know about the Middle School Survival Rules. No one did except for the person who’d invented them, and the person who was under very strict orders to follow them without question. Both of them were me.
The Rules took effect from the moment I stepped onto the bus in the morning until its taillights disappeared around the corner in the afternoon. They weren’t written down anywhere, but I stuck by them every single day without fail.
Never speak to anyone except adults, and then only if they ask you a direct question.
When moving from one class to another, keep your books tight to your chest, your head down, and move as quickly as possible without touching anyone.
Get to the cafeteria before it gets crowded to grab the small round table. If you’re too late, hide in the bathroom until lunch is over.
When other kids talk about you and call you terrible names, do nothing. When they trip you and knock the books out of your hand and elbow you in the stomach, do nothing. When you don’t know what else to do, do nothing.
If you feel like crying, dig your nails into your palms. Then when you’re at home, take a pillow into the bathroom and bury your face in it until the tears stop and remind yourself that school won’t last forever, even if most of the time it feels like it’ll never end.
The idea of the Middle School Survival Rules started last year, on my first day of sixth grade here in Oneega Valley. I’d just moved to the town two days before, at the tail end of September. We were still living in the local shelter, but Mom insisted on signing us up for school as quickly as possible.
I was shuffled into Mrs. Wilbur’s homeroom class on a Tuesday morning wearing my last clean T-shirt tucked into a pair of raggedy jeans with a hole in one pocket and two broken belt loops. Eighteen pairs of eyes stared at me like I was some wild dog who’d wandered into the class. I decided to study the toes of my dirty sneakers with fierce concentration.
Mrs. Wilbur had pressed her bony hand on my shoulder. “Listen up, class,” she’d said. “This is Lucy Bloom. She’s just moved here from Chat-a . . . Chau-ter . . . from another county. Let’s make sure we all—Billy, take that pencil out of your nose right now! Let’s make her feel welcome in our classroom. So, Lucy, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?”
I’d squinted up at the roomful of gawking eyes, and I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
Tell a little about myself? What could I tell? How Mom had snuck us out of our house at midnight while Daddy, full out of his mind with whiskey, shot out the windows with his Glock? How we left Chautauqua County with Antonia snoring in the back seat while Mom drove with one white-knuckled hand on the wheel with the other hand pressed a bag of melting ice against her swollen cheek? Or how we ended up in Oneega Valley because it’s where our car finally ran out of gas, or what it was like living on cots in a damp shelter eating nothing but crackers and baked beans because they were the only groceries donated that week, or how Mom sobbed into her pillow every night when she thought I was asleep?
I didn’t want anyone to know anything about me. I just wanted to melt through the floorboards and never be seen again.
Instead, my mouth stayed open, as if the muscles in my jaw had locked. The other sixth graders kept staring at me. Mrs. Wilbur wrinkled her forehead, slowly realizing this may not have been the best idea. All I did was stand there like a lump of uselessness. Nothing came out of my mouth. Nothing would either, not if she’d kept me there for a hundred years.
At least, that’s what I thought at the time. But once again, I was wrong.
I’d leaned forward a little, my mouth still gaping open. The girl sitting in the front row leaned in toward me like she wanted to hear better. She wore a bright red top, and she had the most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen. I wanted to tell her that.
Instead, I threw up all over her desk. I guess something did come out after all.
Everything after that’s still kind of a blur. Maybe I don’t want to remember. I don’t know. All I do know is not too many people asked me questions after that. Which was fine by me.
But I did learn that girl’s name. Madison Underwood. Maddie to her friends. She made it clear pretty quickly I wouldn’t ever be one of those. Not after what I did to her. And with a little whispering here and there, no one else would either.
And that’s exactly what happened. I became the friendless Trash Licker. And all the nasty laughter and disgusted stares and mean jokes piled on top of me and slowly crushed me like a cockroach. But just like a roach, I kept scurrying along.
I never told anyone what was going on at school—not the school psychologist, who knew how we ended up in Oneega Valley and told me her door was always open; not my favorite teacher, Mr. Capp; or my sister, Antonia; or even Mom. I didn’t say a single word.
It’s not like I didn’t know what I was supposed to do—ignore the bullying, stand up for myself, or tell a friend or an adult. Part of me really did want to tell someone. Anyone. But I didn’t do that. Maybe it because my brain was already a pile of mush from all the terrible things we’d already gone through with Daddy. I don’t know.
But the longer it went on, the harder it got to say anything. I’d convinced myself I waited too long, and I was afraid no one would believe me, or maybe they’d start hating me too. So instead of asking for help, I came up with the Rules. I followed them every day without fail. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do.
8
“HOW’S MIDDLE SCHOOL going for
my firecrackers?” Mom said, slapping margarine on a piece of white bread like she wanted to show it who was boss.
Mom insisted we have regular sit-down family meals every Friday no matter what. She said the twelve-hour shifts she had to work every Saturday and Sunday left her a pile of goo on the weekend, so this was her only chance to catch up with her girls. I never understood why she claimed dinnertime was so important since she spent most of it reminding Antonia to keep her elbows off the table and stop picking her teeth with her thumbnail.
“My locker gets jammed all the time and I have to kick it,” Antonia said as she stuck beans on the end of her fork with her fingers. “Today I was almost late for music. But guess what? Gus Albero did some kind of a trick with it. He whacked it hard in the middle and opened it right up.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t break it,” I said.
Antonia gave me the stink eye. “He wasn’t going to break it. He was helping me.” She smirked. “He likes me.”
Mom’s butter knife paused in midair. “What makes you think he likes you?”
“He asked me if I was going to the Halloween dance.”
Both of Mom’s eyebrows shot up, which meant she was surprised. If only one went up, that meant trouble. “He asked you to a dance?”
“Not exactly.” Antonia pulled off one bean and rolled it between her finger and thumb. “He asked me if I was thinking of going.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said I was thinking about it.” Antonia squashed her bean and popped it into her mouth. “I was thinking me and Lucy could go together. She and me and Gus and whoever she wanted to bring.”
Before I could raise a fuss about that impossible situation, Mom gave a little wave with her knife. “Antonia Willa Bloom, you need to cool your jets. I don’t recall anyone asking me for permission.” She held up her hand before Antonia could start begging. “That’s still six weeks away. I’m not going to talk about it now. How about we see how you do on your five-week progress report first, hm?”
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