This year, in third grade, I don’t know what’s going to happen at recess.
Hopefully nothing new.
When I get outside, I see that recess is still loud, fast, crowded, and rough. I sit on the steps. I pull out my book. (I’m starting off the school year with 101 Things You Didn’t Know about the Human Heart.) Without moving my head too much, I look around for Quinny. Not because she is my friend, but just to see where she is, so I know where not to look. I see her standing with Victoria and a bunch of Victoria-type girls by the sycamore tree. They’re talking in one another’s ears and covering their mouths with their hands. But Quinny isn’t talking. She doesn’t look happy. Which is not my problem, since we’re not friends anymore.
Then a strange thing happens.
One of the new kids, a boy named Caleb who moved here from California and who doesn’t know yet that I’m not too friendly, runs past and tags me.
“You’re it!” Caleb cries as he runs away.
I stand up. “Wait.…”
I’m never it. I’m not even in the game. If this new kid knew me, he’d know that.
But Caleb keeps running away.
And then I realize everyone’s looking at me. Everyone’s waiting.
Suddenly I am in the game, even though I don’t want to be. I’m it.
I put down my book and walk down the steps.
Everyone runs out of my way because I’m it. But I don’t chase anybody.
I walk all the way over to the other side of the playground, to the sycamore tree.
I walk right up to Quinny and I tag her arm.
“You’re it.”
Thirty-three
I’m what?
I stare at Hopper, very, very, extra-very shocked.
First of all, he isn’t even my friend anymore, and second of all, we’re not supposed to be playing tag in third grade (although a ton of kids didn’t hear about that rule, I guess, and are still playing tag). And third of all, Victoria is watching me, and I don’t want to make her mad by playing tag with a boy who is not even my friend anymore.
But here he is, standing right in front of me.
So I tag Hopper back. Hard.
He stands there for a second, like he’s surprised, and then he tags me AGAIN.
So I tag him again. And he tags me again.
This keeps happening until Victoria steps between us.
“Leave her alone!” Victoria booms at Hopper, right up his nose, which is the place he is most sensitive about words getting boomed.
Hopper’s startled nose backs away from Victoria. He looks at me. It is not a making-fun kind of look.
I don’t know what to do now. I’m still mad at him and I’m still sad at him, but I’m also still curious about him.
“Quinny, why are you playing with a boy?” Victoria huffs at me.
“I…I…”
“Remember the rules.”
And then Victoria’s mouth makes a terrible kissy shape. The other girls giggle.
“Get him!” Victoria cries.
Two pretty friends grab Hopper’s arms and back him up against the sycamore tree.
Victoria and another pretty friend push me toward Hopper.
“Pucker up, city girl,” sneers Victoria.
“No!”
“Kiss him!”
“Do it!”
“On the lips!”
“You love him!”
The pretty friends giggle as they push me toward Hopper now. His face is white. His looking-looking eyes are bulging. Our lips are getting closer.
Hopper’s lips + my lips = the biggest vomit volcano in the history of vomit volcanoes.
I shake my head, I close my eyes, I try to swallow my own mouth. This can’t be happening. It’s just a bad dream.
And then somebody screams.
“KEEE-YAAAAP!”
It’s me. And it’s called self-defense. A strong, fast side kick to the left. My leg does it without me even realizing.
“Owwww!” screeches Victoria, whose knee gets in the way of my kick.
The other girls move away from me. No one’s giggling anymore. They all look afraid. That’s right. You mess with a tae kwon do green belt, you should be scared. Very, very, extra-very scared.
“I think you broke my kneecap,” Victoria whimpers, limping a little before falling elegantly to the ground. “Call nine-one-one. I need an ambulance—”
“Victoria, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t touch me. Shame on you for attacking your best…”
But then Victoria stops in the middle of her sentence. Her face gets all stiff.
“Quinny?” she says in a creepy, calm voice.
“What?”
She points up at my bare wrist. “Where’s the friendship bracelet I gave you?”
I look at my wrist. I realize that itchy-pink thing must have fallen off.
“What did you do with it?” Victoria snaps. “You weren’t supposed to take it off, ever.”
“I didn’t.”
“Put it back on right now.”
I look at the ground all around me, but it’s no use. That friendship bracelet is gone. I look around the playground. Hopper’s gone, too.
“Quinny, we’re waiting!”
Victoria stands up, glaring at me. The good news is, I guess she doesn’t need an ambulance after all. The grumpy news is, she’s waiting for me to put on something that I don’t even have.
The other girls wait for Victoria to finish waiting. Kaylee whispers into Kaitlin’s ear. Then Kaitlin whispers into McKayla’s ear. All their eyes stare at me in a sunburny way.
I close my eyes and try very, very, extra-very hard to remember the rules again. Especially this one: there’s no crying in third grade.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I don’t know where it is.”
“Fine,” Victoria huffs.
Then, with a mean little smile, she reaches up to her own head and unsnaps my precious watermelon barrette and throws it over the playground fence.
Thirty-four
I’ll have to move now. Switch schools. Switch towns. Switch planets. Almost getting kissed on the playground isn’t the kind of thing a person can survive.
“Hey, moron, you’re still it!”
That’s what Alex Delgado shouts at me as I walk back to the steps, where I left my book. I turn to look at him. And I realize he doesn’t know. Alex didn’t see me getting attacked by that pack of wild girls. No one did. It all happened behind the sycamore tree.
“Hey, moron!” Alex hollers again. “Any day now!”
Alex is the biggest, fastest, toughest boy in my grade. I’m not weird enough for him to tease or sporty enough for him to play sports with, so he usually doesn’t pay me any attention. And I’d like to keep it that way. But I guess Alex doesn’t know that I’m a pretty fast runner, too, when I bother trying. (The reason: years of practice running away from Trevor and Ty.)
I start running toward Alex Delgado.
He laughs at first. Then he finally starts running away from me. I’m still IT, after all.
Alex runs fast. But I run faster.
It only takes me about five seconds to tag Alex Delgado on the back.
“You’re it!”
Alex turns around. He’s all mad and sputtering and breathing hard. But it was a fair-and-square tag. Everybody saw it.
He reaches out his hand, but before he can tag me back, I run. I hear Alex’s feet pounding the ground behind me. I hear the kids around us yelling and cheering. My legs are burning and my lungs are burning, but I feel good everywhere else and I keep on running.
Alex can’t get close enough to tag me.
The recess bell rings, and I run right into the line for my class.
“Till next time,” Alex says, trying to catch his breath. “Moron.”
But this time he says it with a chuckle. He shoves me in a way that is almost friendly. Then he lines up with his own class and goes back into the building.
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And I am kind of amazed that I am still alive.
After all that running, I’m hungry. Which brings me to the second-worst thing about school. Lunch.
In the cafeteria, each classroom has to sit together, and you only get three tables per class. The first table is always full of girls. The second table is full of boys. The third table gets the leftovers—some boys, some girls—and this was where Owen and I would always sit before he moved away. Even though he is gone now, I still sit at the third table. But there is nobody there for me to be quiet with, so I just try my best to eat through all the talking.
And that’s the main problem with lunch. Talking. It would be a lot better if you could just sit there and chew your sandwich in peace. All that conversation is pointless, if you ask me. People say the same stuff over and over again, day after day.
But today, they say something different. And they say it to me.
“I can’t believe you tagged Alex.”
“That was awesome.”
“No one’s tagged Alex since first grade.”
“Did you see the look on his face?”
“No,” I say. “Because he was running away from me.”
The kids laugh.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Playing tag is not as much fun as swimming laps or reading Blood and Guts or making body-part models or juggling or correcting the pH level in my fish tank or sketching with charcoal pencils in my own quiet room.
But it might be an okay way to spend recess sometimes. Since I have to be out on the playground anyway.
The other kids keep talking as they clear their lunch trays. So do I.
I can’t believe I’m talking at lunch. I can’t believe I played with other kids at recess. Maybe I’ve been taken over by aliens. Or maybe third grade isn’t the end of everything. Maybe it’s the beginning of something new.
After lunch we go to science. This year we get to do science in a room down in the basement called a laboratory that’s all set up with microscopes and test tubes and goggles and stuff. There’s no life-size skeleton in here, but there’s a giant poster of one. I think this might be the most interesting place in the whole school.
After science we go to art, where I draw the fastest animal on the planet. Most people think that’s a cheetah, but it’s not. The fastest animal in the whole world—land, water, and air included—is actually the peregrine falcon, a bird that dives through the sky at more than two hundred miles an hour.
“Holy smoke,” says Mr. Duvall, the new art teacher, smiling down at my sketch. “Hopper, I didn’t know that. What an amazing creature.”
He wants to hang my work on the wall, and I let him.
After art, it’s time to go home.
I can’t believe the day is over. It feels like I just got here.
We get our backpacks and line up to go outside. Everyone walks out, but I notice something that makes me stop—a pair of big feet sticking out of the very last locker. The person they’re attached to looks like she is trying to hide.
I know what trying to hide feels like.
I walk back to the feet. I open the locker door all the way.
Quinny’s eyes look up at me. A tear rolls down her cheek and falls into that little hole called a dimple.
Thirty-five
Hopper sits down by my feet.
“Quinny, are you okay?”
I can’t talk and cry at the same time, so I just point to the marker stains on my backpack and hold up my bare wrist.
He pulls a tissue out from his backpack and hands it to me. My nose is leaking, but I don’t want Hopper’s tissue. I don’t want anything from that boy. So I get up and push past him and walk out to the school bus, like I’m supposed to.
On the bus, I stare out the window and ignore Hopper some more, which is hard to do since he’s sitting right next to me and his looking-looking eyes look especially X-ray-ish.
“Quinny, say something.”
But I can’t.
The whole ride home I just can’t.
I can’t trust Hopper anymore. I thought he was my friend, but then he threw me away and I don’t even know why. As I sit next to him like this, all I feel is lonely.
Thirty-six
I was the one who was supposed to have a bad first day of school, not Quinny. How did things get so mixed up? She won’t even look at me.
The bus turns onto our street. Her dad and my mom are waiting for us on the corner.
“Quinny,” I call as she walks off the bus and toward her house. “Quinny, wait!”
My words come out louder than I expected.
Quinny stops. She looks back at me with a blank, droopy face.
Now I feel embarrassed and stuck. I don’t know what to say next. All the things I am thinking get jumbled up in my mouth—I’m sorry, I wish we were still friends, I was scared, I was stupid, I didn’t mean to ruin everything.
“What happened to Freya?” I finally blurt out.
Quinny looks surprised by this question. Her shoulders make a sad shrug.
“Freya died of loneliness.”
“What?”
“Or a hawk snatched her up.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“You’re right. It could have been a possum—”
“Quinny—”
“I don’t care anyway. Just leave me alone. Who cares about some stupid old chicken?”
And then she walks away.
I stare after her for a moment. Then I follow my mom home.
I go up to my room and shut the door.
I feel like crying, but instead I sit on my bed and think.
I try to think like a chicken.
It doesn’t take me long to realize what I have to do this afternoon. And it’s not homework.
I walk downstairs and out to our garage. I find Mom’s snorkeling mask and put it on. I find a pair of gardening gloves. From my yard, I pick up the heaviest rock that I can carry.
I walk over to Mrs. Porridge’s house and knock on her door. She opens up and looks down at me like I just kicked her.
“What now?” she snaps.
I take a deep breath (which is hard to do when you’re wearing a snorkeling mask) and look up at Mrs. Porridge.
“I need a favor.”
Thirty-seven
I’m so tired from my terrible first day of school that I run upstairs and crawl under the covers and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m never ever getting out of bed again—ever!
But then I hear clucking in my dreams. It’s very familiar clucking, and it’s getting wilder and crazier, and it finally wakes me up, which is when I realize that the clucking is REAL, and it’s coming from outside my window.
“Freya?!”
“Bockbockbockbockbock!”
I don’t see her anywhere out there, so I rush downstairs and run outside, and somehow my feet start running toward all that invisible clucking, and I end up by Hopper’s back porch, and then Hopper bursts out from that little trapdoor under the porch, and he’s got Freya in his arms, all feathery and flapping and dusty and alive!
“Freya! It’s you, it’s you! And you’re not dead!”
I had no idea that chicken was living under Hopper’s back porch!
“Hopper, be careful! She looks upset.”
“No kidding.”
“How on earth did you catch her?”
“Hand-to-hand combat.”
“What?”
“I had some help from Mrs. Porridge, too.”
Hopper lets go of Freya, and she plops down on the ground and shakes out her feathers, but she can’t run away, because she is wearing a spiffy red leash. And I’ve seen that leash before.
“Is that…?”
“Walter’s cat leash,” Hopper says. “Mrs. Porridge lent it to me.”
“I can’t believe Freya let you put her on a leash!”
“Well, she didn’t exactly let me,” says Hopper. “I wore goggles so she couldn’t peck my eyes out. I wore glov
es so she wouldn’t scratch my hands. And I blocked the door from the inside with a rock, so she couldn’t escape from under the porch.”
“Hopper, I had no idea you were so brave.”
“Me neither. Here, hold the leash,” he tells me. “Grandpa Gooley said he would drive us to Mr. McSoren’s new place if we caught Freya, so I better go call him.”
And then Hopper hands me that chicken on a leash!
“Freya, I missed you so much!” I lean down to her. “You look fabulous in red. This leash matches your wattle.”
“BOCKbock,” Freya thanks me.
“I’m so glad a fox didn’t eat you. Let’s go for a stroll.”
I pull Freya along—gentle, gentle. “Come on, girl.”
“BOCK bock BOCK bockbockbock BOCK.”
“I know you don’t want to, but just for a little bit, okay?”
I wrap the leash around my hand twice as I walk that gorgeous zebra-chicken down the street. And she actually almost lets me! We’re getting the hang of this.
Hopper catches up to us and says, “Grandpa Gooley’s on his way.”
And then I think of something even more shocking than the fact that I am walking a chicken on a leash. “Hey, Hopper, guess what! You’re being nice to me again!”
He shrugs at this.
“But I thought you stopped being my friend.”
“I never stopped,” he says.
“But you were rude to me and sent me away and yelled, ‘Everything’s over.’”
“Because I was scared you wouldn’t be my friend in school. And then you started playing with Victoria.”
Then he tells me about his friend Owen. And how Owen moved away. And how no other friends popped up after that. Until me. And how he was afraid he would lose me, too.
Quinny & Hopper Page 9
