by Ali Standish
Getting Along
“SO, ETHAN, HOW DO you like your new school?” Dad asks as he chews a bite of burned roll. Mom is always burning things because she gets distracted and forgets about whatever’s in the oven. Like, she’ll remember an idea she has for a textbook she’s editing and go running off to jot it down, or she’ll decide that she has just enough time to fold the laundry before taking the nachos out of the oven.
“School’s fine,” I say. Then I add “pretty much” because my parents like it when I give them descriptive answers. It makes them worry less.
“Did you like your teachers?” Dad asks. “Did they seem competent?”
“How is Ethan supposed to know if his teachers are competent?” Roddie interrupts. “He’s twelve.”
“I asked Ethan a question,” says Dad, straightening his glasses and shooting a stern look at Roddie. Dad is short, pale, and wiry, so he has to try very hard to look intimidating. “I’ll ask about your day next.”
“Don’t bother,” Roddie mumbles, stabbing at a green bean. He misses and stabs again.
“Stop that,” snaps Mom. “Or you’ll ruin the china.”
The front door opens and closes, and after a few minutes, Grandpa Ike shuffles in from the kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve seen him all day. He’s not eating Mom’s mac and cheese, rolls, or green beans. His plate holds a ham-and-mustard sandwich and a few salt-and-vinegar chips. The same thing he’s eaten every night since we’ve been here.
Mom rolls her eyes and shoots Dad a look. “I made plenty of food for you, Ike.”
I’m not sure why Mom calls her own father “Ike,” or why he refuses to eat her food.
I don’t know much about Mom and Grandpa Ike’s relationship at all, except that Mom never talked about him back in Boston. I always kind of figured it was because talking about Grandpa Ike reminded Mom of Grandma Betty, which made her sad.
Instead of answering her, Grandpa Ike slides into the chair next to me. “You can’t teach an old dog, right, Ethan?” he says. Then he takes a huge bite out of his sandwich as Mom scoffs.
They definitely don’t get along. Maybe that’s the real reason we’ve never been to visit before.
Roddie is still harpooning at the prey on his plate, and Dad has started tapping his fingers on the table like he’s typing at a keyboard, something he does when he gets anxious. He’s a coder, so he spends too much time with computers.
“Ethan?” Mom prompts. “Your father asked you a question. Did you like your teachers? What about Suzanne? Did you talk with her today?”
“That’s three questions,” corrects Grandpa Ike. “How is the boy supposed to answer all those questions at the table? He’s trying to eat, for God’s sake.”
“This food is too gross to eat anyway,” says Roddie. “Even the green beans are burned. I didn’t know that was possible.”
Mom drops her fork to her plate with a clatter. Her cheeks flush and her lips pucker. She looks like she can’t decide whether to yell or cry.
“Someone else can do the dishes,” she says in a dangerously quiet voice. “I’m going upstairs.”
She stomps out of the dining room, and we all hear her door slam a minute later. Dad chews and taps furiously on his place mat. Roddie grabs his baseball cap, which Mom always makes him take off at the table, and jams it back on. He alternates between his Boston College hat and his Red Sox hat. Tonight it’s Red Sox. Grandpa Ike polishes off the last bite of his sandwich and goes to the living room to switch on the TV.
No one is getting along.
No one is happy here.
“My teachers seem nice, Dad,” I say, too late, but trying to sound enthusiastic. It’s the least I can do. I shovel a large bite of crunchy pasta into my mouth. “Tell Mom I said the macaroni was good.”
“Suck-up,” Roddie mutters.
The Second Day of School
DURING HOMEROOM THE NEXT day, Ms. Silva, who will also be my English and social studies teacher, asks me to stand up and introduce myself again, even though Mr. Beasley already did it for me over the intercom.
“I thought you might like to tell us a little more about yourself,” she says.
She’s wrong.
At least today I have a desk, near the back of the class.
I stand up, wincing when my chair makes a screeching sound as it drags across the floor. Suzanne waves her fingers at me one by one before placing her fist under her chin. “Um,” I say.
“Why don’t you start with your name?” Ms. Silva says gently.
“I’m Ethan,” I say to my desk. I keep my eyes on the words EDDIE WUZ HERE, which have been carved in blocky letters into its corner. “From Boston.”
I’m not looking at her, but my guess is that Ms. Silva is nodding encouragingly and smiling. Judging by her shoes, which are adorned with purple bows, she seems like the kind of teacher who would.
“Is there anything special we should know about you, Ethan? Any hobbies or fun facts?”
“Um. I don’t think so.”
My voice cracks slightly on the word so, and I hear someone whispering. I concentrate on keeping my cheeks from going pink.
“Well, I’m sure we’ll get to know you better soon,” says Ms. Silva. “You can sit down now.”
My legs drop me gratefully back into my seat.
Ms. Silva says something about a diorama project, but my head’s buzzing so I don’t catch much of it.
I’m remembering what school was like before. When I had Kacey. I didn’t mind talking in class back in Boston. If I said something stupid, she would just make a joke about it afterward, and we would both laugh. If my voice cracked, she would do an impression of me, and I would shove her and she would shove me back.
Everything was funny all the time.
I push those memories out of my head and go back to staring at EDDIE WUZ HERE, trying to guess where Eddie is now. I wonder when he carved his name here. If he’s already long gone and grown up.
Not everyone gets to grow up, says a voice inside my head. Maybe all that’s left of Eddie is these letters scratched into this desk, like words etched onto a tombstone, or Kacey’s name typed on that bill.
I jerk my eyes away.
After homeroom I have health instead of PE. All we do is take notes on a video about the causes of cancer. Tomorrow, a guest speaker is coming in to talk to us about the dangers of carcinogens. I guess some things are the same no matter where you go to school.
The next period is science with Mr. Charles, whose hair sprouts thin and white from his head like a dandelion tuft, but whose beard is oddly full and black. He takes my pale hand in his dark-brown one and shakes it firmly when I enter the class.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ethan,” he says. He talks to me like Grandpa Ike does. Like I’m a grown-up.
“I don’t do assigned seats in here,” he continues. “So you can take whatever is free. Here’s a packet of make-up work I’d like you to do. Take your time. It’s what we’ve done so far this unit. I’ll give you one for math later today.”
I take my packet and nod. By the time I turn around, the rest of the class has shuffled in, and there are two empty seats.
Suzanne nods toward one of them, next to her in the third row. The other is behind her, next to a gawky boy with greasy hair and acne. I trudge down the aisle, heading toward Suzanne.
“You don’t want to sit next to Herman,” she hisses. “He stinks.” She waves her hand under her wrinkled nose like she’s trying to get rid of a bad odor, then giggles. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Herman’s shoulders droop.
I was just about to put my stuff down in the seat next to her, but now I hesitate. Maybe Suzanne is popular, but so was Kacey, and she would never make fun of someone like that, no matter what she thought about them.
“I like the back,” I say.
Suzanne squints her eyes at me and shrugs. “Whatever.”
I take a seat next to Herman, who gives me a small smile. Suzanne was right. He does sm
ell. Like stale Doritos.
I smile back at him uncertainly, and he puffs his chest up, like a human blowfish. I’m not sure if I want to encourage him. I don’t know if I want the smelly kid to be my first friend at Palm Knot Middle School. I’m still not sure if I want any friends at all.
Or if I deserve them.
Memories
WHEN WE GET HOME from school that day, I find Dad trying to push Grandpa Ike’s Fixer-Upper out of the garage and onto the driveway, where huge piles of mildewing boxes are already stacked. I can see for the first time that it’s a truck, even older and rustier than the one Grandpa Ike drives now. Grandpa Ike stands behind the truck bed, trying to push the car back inside the garage.
“You can’t throw this out,” argues Grandpa Ike. “It’s my property. An antique. And besides, I’m gonna fix her up one of these days.”
Roddie leans against the garage, watching. “He’s right, Dad,” he says. “You can’t just throw it out.”
Dad finally throws his hands up in defeat and stalks inside.
Before dinner, I go to my room and sit in my window seat, watching the Spanish moss blowing in the trees and the marsh tide draining out to sea. It would be peaceful except for Roddie’s emo music, which thumps through the walls. He’s been listening to that stuff a lot since we moved here.
After a while, I get up and bring over the framed photograph I noticed on the chest of drawers my first night here. It’s a black-and-white photo of a woman I recognize as my grandma Betty. In it, she perches on a bike underneath a leafy cascade of tree branches. A bandanna is tied over her hair and her head is tilted back in laughter. One rounded corner of the photo is thick and blurry, like whoever took the picture accidentally held one finger over the camera lens.
Grandma Betty died of cancer when Mom was still a kid, so looking at pictures of her is the closest I’ve ever come to meeting her. Whenever Mom talks about her, she starts crying, so Roddie and I don’t really ask.
I wonder if Grandpa Ike put the picture in my room on purpose or if it has been here all along. Something about the way he looked at it that first night, like he wanted me to notice it, makes me think he placed it there specifically for me.
I go back to staring out the window for a while, until a creaking floorboard makes me turn my head.
Mom is standing in the doorway, a basket of laundry tucked under her arm. She’s staring at me.
“You never used to sit still like that in Boston,” she says with a little sigh.
I guess she’s afraid of what I’m thinking about.
Like right now, I’m imagining what Kacey and I would be doing if she were here. Probably, we would be kayaking through the marsh, daring each other to do a backflip into the water or pet an alligator.
My fingers brush the scar I have from when Kacey and I capsized our canoe last summer and she accidentally busted my chin open with her paddle. I had to have eight stitches.
Kacey always went with us on our family camping trips. The summer before fifth grade, my parents sent the two of us to get water after we got to our campsite. But when we shone our flashlights at the pump, a skunk was crouched right beside it, glaring at us. It looked at us for a minute, then turned and waddled off as fast as its stumpy legs could go, which was still pretty slow.
We should have known better than to chase it. We did know better. But where’s the fun in that? We didn’t even have to dare each other. We just hurtled through the dark after it.
Mom made Dad drive the two of us back that night. We drove the whole way with all the windows down and stopped at a grocery store so Dad could buy all the tomato soup he could find. When we got home, he filled a kiddie pool up with it, and Kacey and I both had to take tomato soup baths in the backyard to get rid of the smell—even though it was the middle of the night.
It wasn’t until the next day that we both realized we must have followed that skunk right through a patch of poison ivy.
When we started school again that Monday, we stank so bad, no one would sit near us, and we scratched our legs so much that the nurse had to wrap bandages around our calves to keep us from itching. We didn’t make a lot of new friends that year. But it was worth it.
Not until my cheeks start to ache do I realize that my lips have been stretched out in a stupid grin.
I drop it from my face faster than if someone slapped me.
Coralee
IN HOMEROOM THE NEXT day, Suzanne purses her lips in a pout when I mumble “Good morning,” which makes me feel a little bad about not sitting next to her yesterday. So when we go to the gym for health class, I sit beside her on the bleachers as we listen to a doctor talk about smoking and lung cancer. While he uses a puppet to illustrate the effects of secondhand smoke, Suzanne stealthily introduces me to Maisie, a freckly, snub-nosed girl I’ve seen following her around, and Daniel. When I finally look up from his fat-tongued black sneakers, I recognize him as the captain who had to pick me for his soccer team. His mouth is set in a permanent scowl, so it’s hard to tell, but I don’t think he’s at all excited to meet me.
“Ethan’s family moved here to take care of his grandpa,” Suzanne whispers to them. “He’s, like, dying or something, right? That’s what my mom said.”
“Um,” I say. “No.”
I decide to sit next to Herman again in science.
All the other students bring in diorama projects to science class. Herman explains that the seventh grade took a field trip to some wolf preserve nearby, and everyone had to re-create the ecosystem they saw by making a diorama.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m sure Mr. Charles didn’t expect you to do one.”
“Did you really see wolves?” I ask, curious in spite of myself.
Herman nods. He smells a little better today. “Red wolves,” he replies. “They’re like regular wolves, but smaller and—”
“Redder?” I guess.
“Exactly,” Herman agrees. “They’re, like, an endangered species or something.”
Mr. Charles asks for a volunteer to present first.
“I’ll go,” Suzanne says, raising a prim hand with purple nails.
Mr. Charles waves her up to the front of the room. Maisie whispers something that makes her giggle. Suzanne pops a bubble with her gum and clears her throat. “Eh-hem.”
“Stop,” Mr. Charles commands. “Gum. Spit it out.”
“But it helps me concentrate!”
“Out.”
Suzanne sighs and saunters over to the trash can, dropping her gum in. She sets her diorama on a table in front of the class and pulls out a thin stack of flash cards.
“As I was saying,” she starts again, “this is my diorama, depicting a mother wolf and her pups. The average mother wolf will give birth in the spring to up to nine pups. She likes to nest by a stream bank, or in a dark, confined . . .”
I find myself more interested in watching the sixth graders on the jungle gym outside than listening to Suzanne prattle on in her flat voice, which makes me feel like taking a nap.
I must be close to falling asleep, because I nearly jump out of my seat when the door bursts open, slamming into the wall. Thankfully, only Herman sees me.
Suzanne stands with her mouth agape, looking at the girl who just marched in through the open door.
“Oops,” says the girl, planting her feet apart and spreading her arms out with her palms up, like a starfish. “I forgot how these doors fly open. I hope I’m not interrupting.”
Mr. Charles stands up. “You must be—”
“Coralee Jessup, that’s me, reporting for duty. Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.”
“You’re not supposed to be here!” Suzanne sputters, accidentally dropping one of her flashcards. “You’re supposed to be in Atlanta!”
Ignoring her, Coralee sidesteps Suzanne to shake Mr. Charles’s hand. She looks too short and scrawny to be in the seventh grade, and I wonder if she meant to walk into one of the sixth grade classes instead. Her elbows and knees jut ou
t from her long cutoff shorts and pink T-shirt. Her hair hangs loose around her chestnut face in dozens of little braids, and a sly smile plays on her lips.
Suzanne looks from Coralee to Mr. Charles in confusion, as if she’s trying to solve a difficult math problem in her head. “Why are you here?” she demands. “You don’t go here anymore! You live in Atlanta now!”
Coralee turns her attention to Suzanne and arches her eyebrows. “Do I?” she says. “The evidence doesn’t seem to support your hypothesis.”
Next to me, Herman snorts. A couple of kids chuckle, while some whisper to each other.
“I see you know your scientific method,” Mr. Charles says. “But why don’t you have a seat now. Miss Carroway is in the middle of a riveting presentation, and I would hate to have it delayed further.”
“Thank you, Mr. Charles,” Suzanne says, her chin lifting. But the way Mr. Charles said “riveting” makes me wonder just how much he is enjoying her presentation. “As I was saying, the mother likes to make her den by a stream bank, or in a dark—”
Coralee skips across the classroom and down the aisle in front of me. She slides into an empty seat.
“That’s my seat!” Suzanne cries.
Coralee jumps up like she’s sat on hot coals and raises her hands in the air. “I hope I didn’t catch anything!” she says, causing a few more giggles to erupt around the class. Maisie looks like she’s sucking lemons as her eyes follow Coralee, who scoots over to the seat next to Suzanne’s, diagonally across the aisle from mine.
“Take your seat quietly, Miss Jessup,” Mr. Charles reprimands.
Coralee gives him a silent thumbs-up and turns around to hook her backpack over her blue plastic seat. She catches my eye and stares at me for a minute.
“You’re new,” she observes.
“So are you,” I reply.
She shakes her head. “You’ve got a lot to learn, new kid.”
