“I want to look different,” Lizzie said, pouring milk on her cereal. Or, rather, she didn’t want to look different. She wanted to look different from the way she used to look, not different from the other girls.
Lizzie’s parents dropped her off at school on their way to the university. As they pulled up to the curb, Lizzie thought again: I can’t do it. She wished she had crammed one of her dresses into her backpack so she could run into the girls’ room and change. But she hadn’t.
“All right, Elizabeth, dear one.” Her mother leaned over and gave Lizzie a kiss. From the backseat, her father laid down his paper long enough to give a gentle tug to one of her bright red curls. Lizzie wondered if other kids’ parents kissed them and tugged at their curls before dropping them off. Was that something you were still allowed to let your parents do in seventh grade?
“I know you’re going to do well this year, the way you always do,” her mother said. “Seventh grade will be a breeze for you.”
As if it were her subjects Lizzie was worried about. As if a person wearing a bright turquoise tank top for the first time was worried about how she would do in seventh-grade math and social studies!
Since she had no choice, Lizzie got out of the car. Her parents drove off, leaving her there.
Seventh grade had begun.
Lizzie joined the crowd milling around in front of the West Creek Middle School doors. For the first time she really looked at what the other girls were wearing. She saw a few short skirts and a fair number of shorts, but most were wearing jeans just like hers, with a variety of tops, some like the green T-shirt she hadn’t worn, some like the turquoise tank she had on.
Three girls talking together shot a look Lizzie’s way, then started to laugh. Were they laughing at Lizzie? Or at some private joke of their own?
Lizzie saw Alison Emory, who had been in her summer French class, too. Alison had been nice enough to Lizzie in French class, though Lizzie had spent class breaks writing in her notebook rather than trying to socialize. Lizzie vaguely remembered that Alison had hung around the year before with a quiet girl named Melissa, and that Melissa had moved away over the summer. In any case, Alison, like Lizzie, was standing by herself right then. Yes, Lizzie would practice on Alison before she had to confront Marcia, Alex … and Ethan.
“Hi, Alison.”
Alison’s eyes widened. “Lizzie?” It felt like a replay of the scene at breakfast, except that Alison was clearly not disapproving, and Lizzie still wasn’t sure what her mother had thought about the startling change in her daughter. “You look great!”
“Thanks,” Lizzie said, trembly inside with relief.
“I love that top! It’s perfect with your hair.”
Alison’s top was almost exactly like Lizzie’s, but orange instead of turquoise.
“I like yours, too,” Lizzie said, though she couldn’t figure out what there was to like about a small piece of bright-colored fabric with two little straps.
“What are you taking?” Alison asked.
Lizzie pulled out her schedule card, which had come in the mail a couple of weeks before. Alison pulled out hers, and they compared classes.
“I have first-period orchestra and second-period English, too,” Alison said, sounding pleased. “And sixth-period family living.”
Alison turned to greet some other friends Lizzie didn’t know. Lizzie put her card away. Would Alison have acted happy about having classes together if Lizzie had been wearing one of her old dresses? Alison had never made fun of her, the way Marcia did, but she had never been particularly friendly, either, though maybe that was because she’d had a best friend of her own. Lizzie had never had a best friend; no other girl had ever wanted to be friends with Lizzie before. It suddenly occurred to Lizzie that the old Lizzie, the Lizard, had spent her entire childhood in the company of adults, or alone.
A sudden shaft of sadness struck Lizzie for the girl she used to be. She felt the familiar swell of a poem, stirring inside her.
For the Girl I Used to Be
You, there, in the white lace dress—
In the dress from long ago—
Standing there, all alone—
Don’t you know?
You, there, from another time—
You, there, from another place—
Don’t you know, girl in white lace,
You’re all alone?
Lizzie shrugged off her backpack and unzipped it to take out her notebook. She had learned from experience that if you didn’t write down a poem right away, it would disappear.
Then she stopped. It wasn’t just her clothes that had made her different from the other girls. The other girls didn’t sit down wherever they were, open their notebooks, and start scribbling poems. If she was going to fit in this year, if she wasn’t going to be all alone for the rest of her whole, entire life, she was going to have to change more than just her clothes. She was going to have to study the popular girls, the girls like Marcia Faitak, and make herself do the things they did, and act the way they acted.
The bell rang. Lizzie rejoined the crowd that carried her up the stone steps into middle school.
In homeroom she turned over her schedule card and tried to jot down on the back as much as she could recall of the poem.
For the Girl I Used to Be
You, there, in the white lace dress—
She couldn’t remember the rest. The poem was gone.
* * *
The person Lizzie wanted to compare schedules with was Ethan, but of course she couldn’t. She just had to wait to see if she had him in any classes. He wasn’t in first-period orchestra, but Lizzie hadn’t expected him there; Ethan didn’t play an instrument. What if he was in none of her classes? She pushed the thought away.
As soon as she took out her familiar flute, Lizzie forgot her unfamiliar clothes. She loved the feel of the slender silver instrument in her hands; she loved the sounds of its high, clear notes. She had practiced a lot over the summer—well, not really practiced, just played, sometimes for hours, until her fingers ached and her lips stiffened. Mr. Harrison looked impressed when Lizzie played a brief solo for him. She was proud to show him how much she had improved. Alison’s clarinet was sounding lovely, too.
On the way to second-period English, Lizzie stopped at her locker to put her flute away. Marcia was at her locker, a few doors down. Lizzie decided not to say anything to her. She wasn’t feeling that bold. But she lingered a few extra seconds to give Marcia time to see her. She might as well get the first encounter over with, out of Ethan’s hearing.
Marcia turned around. Like Lizzie’s mother, like Alison, she stared.
Lizzie waited. She couldn’t believe she cared so much about how Marcia would react to her new clothes. But she did.
“Well!” Marcia finally said. “Who dressed you?”
The tone was pretty mean, but not completely mean, not as mean as the tone Lizzie had overheard yesterday in the mall.
Lizzie took a chance. “Do I look all right?” she asked. After all, she couldn’t very well pretend she had always dressed this way. As of yesterday afternoon, she hadn’t. And no one knew that better than Marcia Faitak.
Marcia took a step back and squinted appraisingly at Lizzie. “Sure,” she said with a shrug. Her dismissive tone added the words she didn’t say: as if anybody cares what you look like. “It’s better than looking like you’re in some kind of time warp.”
The last comment stung. But Lizzie decided to take Marcia’s verdict as a positive one, anyway.
As she entered English class, Lizzie quickly scanned the room for Ethan. He wasn’t there. But then, as she was slipping into a vacant seat, she saw him coming through the door with his best friend, Julius. The two boys looked funny together, because Ethan was so short and Julius so tall. The only empty seats were in front of Lizzie and Marcia. Ethan and Julius took them without a backward glance.
The teacher, Ms. Singpurwalla, introduced herself. She was beautiful, with dark skin, d
ark hair, and dark eyes, and was dressed in a pale lavender sari. She spoke in a low, soft voice that held the class’s attention better than a louder voice would have.
“Class, this year we’re going to begin with a study of one of the plays of the great English playwright William Shakespeare. Have any of you ever seen a Shakespeare play performed on the stage?”
Had Lizzie ever seen a Shakespeare play? Ever since she was five years old, her parents had taken her each summer to an outdoor performance at the university’s annual Shakespeare festival. There, as the twilight deepened to darkness and stars spread over the cloudless Colorado sky, she had sat between her mother and father and watched the magic unfold. Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing—she had seen them all.
She raised her hand. A few other people put up their hands, too. Not Ethan, not Julius, not Marcia.
Ms. Singpurwalla called on a dark-haired boy named Tom, who was sitting in the front row. Lizzie had never had him in a class before. “What have you seen?” Ms. Singpurwalla asked Tom.
“I saw Romeo and Juliet last summer at the Shakespeare festival,” Tom said.
From the back of the room, Alex Ryan snorted. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” he called out in a falsetto voice.
“Have you seen the play, too?” Ms. Singpurwalla asked Alex.
“Me?” he asked. “No.” He made no sound like no way. “I heard that line once on TV. It was in a commercial. A dog food commercial.”
Ms. Singpurwalla looked confused.
“They had this lady dressed up like Juliet, and she was standing on this balcony and saying, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ And then she put out this bowl of dog food, and this dog came running up and ate it, and she said, ‘Good dog, Romeo.’”
“Oh,” Ms. Singpurwalla said, her voice still low and pleasant. “Shakespeare’s plays have had an enormous influence on our culture in many ways. What plays have the rest of you seen?”
One girl had seen a movie version of Hamlet. Another had acted out a scene from Macbeth in a summer drama camp. Beside Lizzie, Marcia giggled.
“What about you?” Ms. Singpurwalla asked Lizzie.
She had put her hand down when she saw that Marcia hadn’t raised hers, but Ms. Singpurwalla must have noticed it. “I’ve seen…” She wasn’t going to give the whole list. “I’ve seen some of them in the Shakespeare festival, too.”
She could hear Marcia’s little snort of contempt and tried to ignore it.
“Which one was your favorite?” Ms. Singpurwalla asked.
Lizzie tried to decide. The speeches in Hamlet were incredible, and Much Ado about Nothing was so funny, and the doomed lovers in Antony and Cleopatra had broken her heart. But the one she loved the very best was A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she said.
She was suddenly aware that Ethan had turned around to look at her. Did boys notice clothes the way girls did? Her father didn’t, but Lizzie was aware that he was hardly typical of the boys in her class.
Lizzie met Ethan’s eyes and held his gaze for a long moment. Then, blushing scarlet, he turned away.
He had noticed her clothes. She was almost sure of it.
“Well,” Ms. Singpurwalla said, “it just so happens that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the play we’re going to be studying this fall.” She gave Lizzie a warm smile.
Lizzie smiled back, until she noticed how bored Marcia was looking with the entire discussion of who had seen which Shakespeare play. Maybe popular seventh-grade girls didn’t smile at their teachers. She stopped smiling in the nick of time. Modeling herself after Marcia wasn’t going to be easy: Lizzie could tell that already.
But she was still smiling inside. She had survived her new clothes. Alison had been friendly; Marcia had been considerably less mean; they were going to be reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Ethan would be in class with her, and he’d blushed when their eyes had met. So far, so good.
Three
Lizzie was with Ethan in third-period math, too, and their teacher was Mr. Grotient, the same teacher they had had for sixth-grade math last year. As they walked into class, Ethan just ahead of Lizzie, Mr. Grotient greeted them both with a big smile. He was the only male teacher at West Creek Middle School who wore a suit—with a bow tie—and his plump body filled out his jacket and trousers like air in a balloon. Lizzie liked Mr. Grotient. He was a kind man and a good math teacher, and he had paired her with Ethan for Peer-Assisted Learning last spring.
“We’ll be doing PAL again this year,” he told the class as the students took their seats. “I want to keep last year’s partners together, if I can, at least when they worked well as a team.”
Ethan blushed for the second time that morning, and Lizzie felt the color rising in her own face. Peer-Assisted Learning had worked out well for her and Ethan because she was good at math and Ethan wasn’t. Or, rather, hadn’t been. He had come a long way in a couple of months, thanks to Lizzie’s patient tutoring.
The question suddenly occurred to Lizzie: Did boys like girls more or less when the girls helped them in math? She made a mental note to find out. Aunt Elspeth would probably know. As an engineer, she had to be awfully good in math. And she had gotten married, so she had to be good with boys, too. Of course, now she was divorced. Maybe Lizzie wouldn’t ask Aunt Elspeth. This was the kind of thing Marcia would know. But Lizzie didn’t think she would ever be brave enough to ask her.
To Lizzie’s relief, Mr. Grotient didn’t have them work with partners on the first day. The first day of seventh grade was intense enough without having her desk pushed up against Ethan’s, their heads bent together over the same book.
Ethan wasn’t with Lizzie in fourth-period social studies. She saw him at fifth-period lunch, with Julius, across the crowded cafeteria. She had brought her lunch from home and took it outside to a picnic table under a tall shade tree. The cafeteria was too small for West Creek’s growing student body, so on nice days they were encouraged to eat outside. Lizzie sat alone, as usual. Her clothes certainly didn’t cause a stampede of new friends to her table.
Alison came outside with some other girls; she didn’t come over to sit with Lizzie, but she waved, and the wave made Lizzie feel more hopeful again. The soft late-summer breeze felt good on Lizzie’s bare shoulders. For minutes at a time, she had found herself forgetting about her clothes. Maybe she’d get used to them one day.
Sixth-period family living was held in one of the specially designed rooms in the new wing of the school building. Lizzie’s summer French class had used the kitchens there for French cooking. Family living was a requirement for all seventh graders, boys and girls.
The family-living teacher, Ms. Van Winkle, looked energetic and upbeat—sort of like Aunt Elspeth in the decisiveness of her movements. The room was filled with tables, each with six chairs. Lizzie sat down at the table closest to a window. It was one of her fixed principles always to sit near a window.
To her surprise, Alison hurried over to join her. “This is going to be the coolest class,” Alison said. “I love sewing, don’t you? And when we cook, we’ll get to eat everything we make, and I’ve heard they fix some really yummy stuff.”
Lizzie was about to say that she liked old-fashioned sewing, the kind you did with a needle and thread, not the kind you did on a sewing machine, when Marcia came in, Alex Ryan trailing behind her. Alex liked Marcia, Lizzie was almost sure of it. At least, he spent a disproportionate amount of time teasing her—not in the nasty way he sometimes teased Lizzie but in a playful, flirtatious way.
“Marcia! Come sit with us!” Alison called out in her friendly voice.
Lizzie stared at the ceiling, trying to pretend that she didn’t care what Marcia would do next. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marcia survey their table, hesitate, then shrug. Like a queen, Marcia swept across the room and
settled herself next to Alison. Lizzie let out her breath.
“I want the tables balanced, boys–girls,” Ms. Van Winkle announced as students continued to arrive and look for places. The two girls who had been heading toward Marcia chose another table, leaving the three boy seats still vacant.
Sheepishly, Alex sat down next to Marcia. “But if we cook today, I’m not eating anything you help make,” he told her. She swatted him, then giggled. Lizzie took note: boys like girls who swat them; boys like girls who giggle.
Then Ethan and Julius came in. Now Lizzie was sorry she had chosen the table by the window, farthest from the door. She couldn’t very well expect Ethan to walk by all the other tables to sit with her. How could she even think that he might? Last year he would have gone out of his way to avoid sitting with her.
But Lizzie’s was now the only table with two seats open. Would Ethan choose to sit with Julius even if it meant he also had to sit with Lizzie? He did. The two boys completed their table.
“Class!” Ms. Van Winkle clapped her hands; the emphatic gesture felt like a clash of cymbals, calling them all to attention. “Welcome to family living. West Creek Middle School’s a big place, and I know we have a number of new students with us this year, so I want you to take a few minutes to introduce yourselves to everyone at your table. You’re going to be members of the same family-living family for the rest of the year.”
For the rest of the year? Marcia shot Lizzie a look that seemed to say: I was willing to sit with you for one day; I certainly didn’t know I’d have to sit with you for the whole year. Ethan, too, had an expression on his face that Lizzie could well imagine on the faces of prisoners on death row.
“I’ve made up a little game to help you get to know one another better,” Ms. Van Winkle went on. “I want you to find one thing that you all have in common, and then find one thing that is distinctive about each of you—some characteristic that no one else at your table shares. Everyone understand? All right!”
For a moment no one at Lizzie’s table said anything. Then, as if making the best of a bad situation, Marcia took the lead. “Well, we all live in Colorado.”
Lizzie At Last Page 2
