As it turned out, amidst all of this drama, I got into the middle school that was first on my list. I could only assume that my success came because it was also the middle school of Fan’s dreams and she managed to divert the more deserving applicants.
In the end, Fan proved to be a very good friend.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
THE SEWER AND THE CUTTER
A GIRL (SPOILER: me) walks into an auditorium on the first day of middle school. She finds there a large gathering of kids, parents, and teachers, and in front of them all, the principal, who will begin to tell everyone how very excited he is about the school year, how hard he and his staff worked over the summer to get things ready for the first day of class, and how he knows that everyone is going to have a great year.
This girl, tall and chubby for her age, her frizzy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, sighs happily. She is optimistic. New friends. New crushes. A fresh start.
—
Standing next to me was a girl who, clearly upset about the new school, had begun to cry.
“Look,” I whispered idiotically, “it could be worse.”
She stared back, anxious, wanting to be convinced. I needed to say something. I settled on a story I had been told that very morning by Jerry, the manager of the front desk at the Chelsea.
“There were two old Jewish men who worked together in a clothing factory,” I began. “It was crowded and hot, and they stood on their feet all day long.”
Ignoring her bewildered look, I continued.
“One of the men was a cutter and the other a sewer. They were both from the old country and spoke with Yiddish accents. One day the sewer went missing.”
The girl stopped crying. I had her attention.
“Exactly two weeks later, the sewer returned to the factory.”
“Where did he go?” the girl asked.
“Well, that’s exactly what the cutter wanted to know. So he says to the sewer, ‘Where were you? You’ve been gone a long time.’ ”
I waited a few seconds, pretending to decide whether I should continue.
“What was his answer?” asked the girl.
“The sewer tells the cutter, ‘I was in Africa.’
“The cutter responds, ‘What did you do in Africa?’
“The sewer, while stitching a piece of cloth, says to the cutter, ‘I traveled all over, I saw many things, and at the end of my trip, I was eaten by a lion.’
“ ‘Wait a second,’ says the cutter. ‘If you were eaten by a lion, you wouldn’t be living.’
“The sewer looks around the factory and says, ‘You call this living?’ ”
She may not have liked the story, but she appreciated the effort. She became my friend. Janie Fields.
Quickly, almost magically, there were other friends and then still others. Mostly because of Janie. She was likable, and, for whatever reason, she liked me.
What I came to realize is that in new surroundings, girls make quick decisions about who is pretty, smart, nerdy. Girls will attempt to mark other girls as their friends as quickly as possible on the theory that some girls, seeing that another girl has been marked, will move on. This process is best described as “spraying.” An aggressive Italian girl, Maria (who would become my friend), was a first-class sprayer. Bringing a bottle of perfume to the first day of school, Maria actually doused the girls she wanted to meet.
In a new school, with new girls and boys who knew nothing about my past, I got sprayed.
THE DELICACY OF LOVE
“PLAY STREET” WAS the time set aside after lunch for exercise. The boys would occupy most of the gym, rocketing around or hurling a basketball or showing off martial arts moves they had observed in video games.
I usually ended up sitting in the bleachers with Maria and Janie.
Maria was pretty and funny, but short—one of our teachers actually called her a “little person,” which Maria claimed was another way of saying “midget.” The three of us hated athletics, so on those afternoons when we had Play Street, we would sit together and talk. Mostly about boys.
As we entered the gym one day, we noticed something new—a group of boys playing leapfrog. Leapfrog is when boys—who, as a group, are not especially concerned with hygiene—crouch on the ground while other boys, spreading their legs, vault over them; more often than not the bottom parts of the leaping boys are wiped across the heads of those crouching.
“Animali!” Maria snorted. “Adam would never do that.”
Adam was Maria’s big crush. His blue eyes were permanently covered by his then-popular Bieber cut. His smile always seemed too big for his face, and he had a big gap between his two front teeth. He was also a good shake taller than the other boys, and a lot taller than Maria. The Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz were a lot taller than Maria.
Sensitive to Maria’s feeling for Adam, I hastily agreed.
“Adam. Of course not. No leapfrogging for that boy.”
Janie nodded her head in mock solemnity. “Never.”
We took a lap around the gym. Various people called out to Janie in greeting as we walked. Returning to the bleachers, we saw this:
Adam, squatting on the floor, his buttocks jutting in the air, readied himself as a short and chubby boy raced at him from behind. Before we could turn away, the other boy, his hands now up against Adam’s behind, widened his legs and thrust himself upward.
But the laws of physics would not have it: the boy came down on Adam’s head, which crashed to the floor and then disappeared.
“Where did he go?” I asked, opening my backpack to retrieve my daily chocolate bar.
Maria, stunned, said nothing. Her mouth wagged open.
Janie watched in silence, wary of Maria’s next reaction.
“Do you hear anything?” I continued, unwrapping the chocolate.
It was then that I noticed a fringe of Adam’s brown hair poking out from the other boy’s crevice.
“Want a piece?” I offered, extending my candy bar.
Still nothing from Maria.
Janie looked away.
Maria never again spoke of Adam, never looked at Adam. While the boys in the gym could not leapfrog over Adam’s great height, Maria had no such problem: she leapfrogged over his blue eyes, his shaggy hair, his unspeakable encounter with the other boy—and every other memory she had of him, or at least every imaginary encounter.
FRIENDSHIP AND CHOCOLATE
EVERYTHING ABOUT JANIE FIELDS was inoffensive. She wore the right things (circulation-squeezing jeans, bright graphic T-shirts paired with jelly bracelets called Silly Bandz), ate the right things (PB&J sandwiches with the crusts cut off), and had subscriptions to all the teen magazines. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and a medium build. She was an average student. And she was grating in a hard-to-identify way.
Because Janie was my friend, I took the time to study what was happening to her. I came to understand that it was going to happen anyway, and finally accepted it as a natural part of life, like butterflies burning in campfires or puberty.
Janie became a Popular Girl.
As Janie migrated to the other side, she spent less and less time with me and Maria. When it became clear that Janie was no longer our friend, Maria was hurt.
She started to pace, all four feet seven inches of her.
“Janie’s embarrassed by me. She doesn’t want to be seen with a midget.”
There were, no doubt, a lot of bad things in Janie’s character, but hating midgets wasn’t one of them. Besides, there was a more obvious explanation.
“It’s my personality,” I offered matter-of-factly. “Janie needed me when she didn’t know anyone else in the school, but now that she has other friends, she’s ready to move on.”
This was something I had come to understand. In my quest for friendship, I had developed the ability to repel
people upon first serious conversation. Janie had lasted a surprisingly long time.
“I’m going to get her back for this,” Maria declared.
One thing that could be said for the Rips family gene pool (a thing which, in my opinion, should have been drained years ago) is that we lack a thirst for revenge. It was why my father was more than happy to apologize to the tailor, and why I, listening to Maria, was thinking of nothing other than getting my daily chocolate bar from the local deli. My friendship with Janie was all but the faintest unpleasant aftertaste.
“Maria, it is my experience that if you let bad fortune alone for long enough it ripens into something amusing. A funny story, that sort of thing. Besides, a couple of our friends will stay with us.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
She wasn’t listening.
“I have a plan,” Maria continued.
“We go to the deli and get my candy bar?”
“No!”
“No?”
“We give her the Look.”
“Okay. But first, let’s go to the deli.”
“No! First the Look, then the deli.”
The message of the Look, also known as the evil eye, is something like: “Oh yeah? You think you’re going to go and leave your friends? Well, you can bet that when you come crawling back to us, we’re not even gonna look at you! Yeah, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun without you! Ha!”
Maria and I needed to find Janie as quickly as possible so that we could deliver the Look and get to the deli before class started. We searched the school.
As soon as we caught sight of Janie’s group, Maria started to speak out of the side of her mouth.
“Uno, due, tre . . . go!”
Nearing the center of Janie’s posse, we began to strut and then, in unison, whipped our heads toward Janie, delivering the Look. But alas, Janie had turned away. We were giving the Look to the back of her head.
I figured this was the time to assert myself.
“Maria, I’m going to get my chocolate.”
“Once more,” Maria pleaded. “Then we can go.”
“Maria, this has gone far enough. I need my chocolate!”
“Pleassssse! You’ll be my best friend.”
Wasn’t I already her best friend?
Back in formation, we marched toward the group.
“Uno, due, tre.”
We snapped our heads. The Look.
Again, the back of Janie’s head.
At this point, we could not stop. Over and over again, we marched, until we were doing nothing but circling Janie, snapping our heads and grunting. Rather undignified.
And I swear that Janie had a radar for the two of us, for every time we threw the Look, it missed.
The bell rang.
I was furious.
As Maria and I were leaving the cafeteria, I glanced back at Janie and to my horror noticed that Janie was now staring at us. But the horror came not from Janie’s eyes but from her mouth. She was chewing what should have been mine. A chocolate bar.
GRETA RETURNS
THE FIRST FEW months of middle school went well. The change of environment had washed away my stench from elementary school, and though I’d lost Janie, I still had Maria and a couple other friends.
So here I was, the kid who, just a year before, no one wanted to have anything to do with, walking down the hallway with friends, greeting people at their lockers, and, best of all, going to birthday parties.
I was strolling into this happy reality one November morning when I caught sight of Maria and others crowded around a curly haired figure, who was, from nothing more than the top of her head, unmistakably Greta, my former friend from elementary school. Though she and I had ended up at the same middle school, because she hadn’t been in Rebecca’s class, I’d seen little of her.
Her friends were pretty, stylish, and involved in many school activities (dance, athletics, theater); mine were unattractive and liked anime. But to me, none of this mattered; my friends had the one quality that made them superior to anyone else at the school: they wanted to be with me.
“Nicki!” Maria greeted me, stepping away from the group surrounding Greta.
“Maria!” I responded, throwing my arms around her.
“You have to hear this,” Maria whispered excitedly, pulling me into the group.
Greta had just begun the story.
“The other day . . .”
Greta dropped her voice. Everyone moved closer to hear.
“. . . Oscar asked if I would meet him after school.”
Oscar was a sweet, cute (though chinless), but not particularly smart boy. He was a friend of Greta’s, and she had a crush on him.
“When we met, Oscar told me that he needed to tell me ‘a secret.’ ”
Now we were getting to the good stuff.
“ ‘Greta, I did something terrible,’ Oscar told me, ‘and I don’t know what to do about it.’
“ ‘There is nothing so bad that we can’t handle it,’ I said to Oscar. But I was worried. Oscar’s parents were always busy and had no time for him. I was going to have to take charge.”
Gad!
“So I said to Oscar, ‘Oscar, you’re going to have to tell me the secret. I can’t help you, if you don’t.’ ”
Don’t do it, Oscar, my thoughts screamed.
But this wasn’t going to happen. Greta had him and she wasn’t letting go.
“It took me a few minutes to get it out of him,” Greta continued. “But when he finally told me his secret, I thought to myself, Oscar’s in trouble. Real trouble.”
Greta went silent, shaking her head.
But how could the story end there? Greta had to tell us Oscar’s secret. But even Greta, I was sure, wouldn’t reveal Oscar’s secret to a random crowd of girls.
Greta had already started up again.
“ ‘Greta,’ Oscar whispered to me, ‘the problem is . . . ’ ”
Greta raised her eyebrows, and then pointed to her stomach.
“Diarrhea?” Maria cried out.
Greta shook her head.
More confusion.
What?
Greta shoved her stomach outward.
Mother of Jesus. Oscar got someone pregnant!
None of us had heard anything like this. We shivered.
But Greta wasn’t done, for she quickly made it clear that she knew the pregnant woman. We shouted out guesses.
A teacher?
A friend of Oscar’s family?
Who could it be?
With each guess, Greta shook her head.
Tell us, Greta, tell us.
“Nicki, I’m sorry.”
Did I just hear my name?
Everyone was staring at me.
The bell for first period rang. The girls raced to class.
I caught up with Greta.
“Greta, you just told them I’m pregnant!!”
“I said it was a ‘dream,’ Nic. Didn’t you hear that part?”
No one had heard “that part” because that was the part when she’d dropped her voice. Nothing I said in the following weeks could convince anyone that I, an eleven-year-old girl, wasn’t carrying Oscar’s child. Even Oscar, never too smart, seemed confused.
So while my fellow middle schoolers counted their school year in semesters, I counted mine in trimesters, for it wasn’t until the third that anyone would believe that I hadn’t done whatever a girl must do to get pregnant with someone like Oscar.
My fresh start had gone rotten.
MOVING ON
BY THE TIME I was in sixth grade, my parents had lived in the Chelsea for more than sixteen years. As an infant I hadn’t taken up much space, but my presence in the apartment had grown. With each passing year, our home fit us a little mor
e tightly, like a pair of my dad’s college trousers. For this reason, my mom began to think about other places to live.
Every time she tried to introduce the subject, my dad would grumble. If we left the hotel, he’d argue, he would have to find new coffee shops, and that was quite a bit more disruption to his life than he was prepared to take on. We had plenty of space, he’d insist, failing to notice that it was impossible to move around without smacking into his bric-a-brac.
As much as I loved the Chelsea, the idea of moving was seductive. I was sick of people confusing my bedroom for a closet. This was an easy mistake given its small size. During my parents’ many dinner parties people would inadvertently toss their coats on top of me while I slept. I could never manage more than one person in my room at a time without people sitting on my bed, which made playdates impossible. Fatigued by my constant pestering and my mother’s unspoken but obvious irritation with the shared bathroom situation, my father gave in and announced one day that he had arranged for us to see a couple of apartments.
On Saturday afternoon, we put on our coats and headed out the door, down the elevator, and into the lobby. The Crafties were sitting in their usual spot and they applauded us as we walked by.
Mr. Crafty shouted after my dad, “Finally growing some cojones.”
Smiley wheeled into the lobby and grabbed my mother. “Get out before they start stealing your detergent.”
Stanley poked his head out from his office and waved to us.
As we walked, I thought to myself, “This is really happening; we are finally leaving the hotel.”
Outside, my dad stopped walking, took a deep breath, and spun around to face the entrance, just as Stanley and Steve, the engineer who had worked at the hotel for decades, emerged from the entrance. Stanley seized my mom’s hand and gave it a few vigorous pumps, then turned and did the same with my dad and me. After exchanging greetings, Stanley promptly showed us the way back inside the hotel.
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