“Look at the diagram again,” Ms. Van Winkle said. “Help her, Julius. I want you two to figure this out yourselves.”
Ms. Van Winkle went off to check on Marcia and Ethan. “Good, good,” Lizzie heard her say. Had Marcia helped Ethan with it, because sewing machines were more of a girl thing? Or had Ethan helped Marcia with it, because Marcia liked to let boys feel important? Or had they figured it out together?
“Maybe it goes under that thing,” Julius suggested.
Lizzie tried it that way. It still looked wrong.
“Maybe under that thing and over this thing?” This time Julius took his own suggestion and awkwardly redirected the thread. It still looked wrong.
“That’s right,” Lizzie heard Ms. Van Winkle say to Alex and Alison.
Then Ms. Van Winkle came back to check on Julius and Lizzie. “Almost,” she said. “Like this.” Ms. Van Winkle made some quick changes in the threading that Lizzie couldn’t follow and then bustled off to check some more threading.
“Ta-dah,” Julius said lamely, with a sheepish grin.
“Betsy Ross didn’t have to thread a sewing machine before she made the first flag,” Lizzie grumbled. “She just sewed.”
Julius laughed. Ethan and Marcia looked at them curiously. Lizzie tried to think of another witty remark. But one witty remark to a boy—her first ever—would have to do for now.
* * *
On Thursday, Mr. Grotient announced the start of Peer-Assisted Learning for the new year, PAL for short. He made the same speech he had last year, about how students learned better when they learned from each other and helped each other learn.
“I’ve worked out your peer partners,” he said then. “For those of you who had me in sixth grade, I’m keeping some of last year’s partners, and others I’m mixing up.”
Even though Mr. Grotient had said on the first day of school that he planned to keep successful teams together, Lizzie allowed herself to hope that this time he would put her with another girl, so she could still be as good at math as she had always been and have her help appreciated. She couldn’t imagine how to follow Marcia’s advice of letting Ethan help her.
But sure enough, when Mr. Grotient began to read the PAL assignments, the first names he read were Lizzie Archer and Ethan Winfield.
Maybe they could struggle together, like Lizzie and Julius on the sewing machine. That had been fun, in a way. As Alison had said about roller-skating, if you were terrible at something, it was more fun if you were terrible at it with someone else. The only problem was that Lizzie wasn’t terrible at math. She was probably the top math student in the whole seventh grade.
Last year Ethan had sat like a lump the first few times they had worked together. This time, as they shoved their desks together, he gave a small grin and said, “Here we go again.”
Lizzie smiled back nervously.
They turned to the problems on page 17. Lizzie looked at the first one. The answer leaped off the page. She had found that the textbook people often made the first problem extra-easy so that everybody would understand what was going on; the problems then escalated in difficulty, with a few tricky ones at the end.
Lizzie pretended to study it. “Hmm,” she said, as if perplexed. “These look hard.”
As she continued to gaze down at the page, anxious not to give herself away with her usual blush, Ethan said, “Isn’t the answer just 7x plus 3?”
It was. “How did you get that?”
Ethan shot her a suspicious look. Then, as she maintained her act of ignorance, he took a piece of paper and easily showed her.
“That looks right,” Lizzie said. She copied Ethan’s answer onto her own paper. “Do you do the next one the same way?” Of course you did the next one the same way. That was the whole point of the problem set. You did all the problems the same way.
Ethan picked up his pencil and stared down at the page. He looked especially cute when he was concentrating. “It’s 8x plus 4,” he finally said. “I think it’s 8x plus 4.”
“Oh, I get it.”
There were eight more problems in the problem set. She couldn’t act dumb on all of them. As Marcia would say, she needed to use some common sense. Ethan wasn’t stupid, after all; if Lizzie overdid her newfound helplessness, he would notice it, if he hadn’t already. So she did the next four problems with ease. Ethan did, too, Lizzie saw.
The seventh problem had a little trick to it.
“What about this one?” Lizzie asked.
She and Ethan frowned at it together—a sewing machine moment? Then Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Should she tell him? It was too hard not to. “Maybe if we tried it this way?” Lizzie worked it out on her scrap paper, turning the paper so that Ethan could follow her steps.
“That’s it,” Ethan said. Lizzie liked hearing the new note of confidence in his voice, as he pronounced authoritatively on the correctness of her answer.
Problem eight was just like problem seven. Ethan saw that on his own. Lizzie let him solve it, then copied down his answer.
Problem nine was genuinely hard. It took even Lizzie a minute to figure it out.
Ethan gave a low whistle. “Got me.”
Lizzie forced herself to echo: “Me too.” Her fingers itched to fly across the page with her pencil, showing Ethan how the problem was done.
Mr. Grotient stopped by their desks. “Everything all right here?” he asked in his jocular tone. “I know I don’t have to worry about you two.”
“Actually”—it would be even harder to fool Mr. Grotient than Ethan—“we’re having some trouble with problem nine.”
“Lizzie.” He said her name with good-natured reproach in his tone, as if to say, I expect better from you. And why shouldn’t he expect better? Lizzie knew the answer to nine, and to ten, too. In sixth grade she hadn’t gotten a single math problem wrong all year.
Ethan gave her another quizzical look. But then, as Lizzie continued to sit silently—her misery now real, not faked—Ethan helped her out. “It doesn’t solve like the others,” he told Mr. Grotient.
“No, it doesn’t,” Mr. Grotient agreed affably.
Lizzie knew that Mr. Grotient would have helped her if she had really needed it, but she still felt annoyed at his apparent attempt to call her bluff. She refused to pick up her pencil and give in.
“Here’s a hint,” Mr. Grotient finally said. He wrote it on Lizzie’s paper, then moved on to another pair of desks.
Worn out from pretending, Lizzie quickly solved problems nine and ten and showed the answers to Ethan.
He copied them, then said, “We did it!”
He sounded proud and pleased, as if he and Lizzie were part of a team, working together, overcoming obstacles, achieving hard-won success. Maybe Marcia’s advice had been good, after all. But Lizzie’s cheeks still burned with the memory of the way Mr. Grotient had looked at her when he jotted down the hint for problem nine, and then turned away.
Seven
On Friday, Ms. Singpurwalla began class by handing back their first writing assignment. It had been to take a speech from one of the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and write it over again in modern-day English. Lizzie had chosen one of Helena’s speeches, of course. Actually, she had rewritten an entire scene between Helena and Demetrius at the beginning of Act Two, taking advantage of her new familiarity with the popular clique to make Shakespeare’s characters sound as much like West Creek students as possible.
“I think you all did an excellent job on this,” Ms. Singpurwalla said, with one of her gentle smiles. Lizzie had already taken a quick look at the grade on hers: A+. It was a grade she had come to expect on all her work, in any subject except for gym—and now, sewing machine assignments in family living—but she was still pleased.
“One of you in particular did a remarkable job, rewriting not just a single speech but an entire scene.”
Lizzie’s surge of satisfaction in her grade suddenly turned into a twinge of te
rror. She willed Ms. Singpurwalla not to say her name.
“Lizzie, would you be willing to read yours?”
Lizzie shook her head, her eyes fixed pleadingly on Ms. Singpurwalla: Please don’t make me, please don’t make me, please don’t make me. But the teacher, apparently mistaking Lizzie’s true desperation for false modesty, went on, “This is a scene between Helena and Demetrius.”
There were some snickers in the room. By now, the end of the second week on the play, everybody knew who Helena and Demetrius were.
“Come on up front, Lizzie, and read your Helena. Who would you like as your Demetrius?”
Unable to disobey Ms. Singpurwalla, Lizzie made herself walk to the front of the room. But she wasn’t going to say Ethan’s name. She would die a harrowing death before his name could be forced from her lips. She expected Alex to call it out nastily—he loved teasing Ethan about Lizzie’s famous crush on him. If only Ms. Singpurwalla would ask for volunteers, and Tom would raise his hand! But as Lizzie hesitated, Ms. Singpurwalla said the only name that might be even worse than Ethan’s: “Alex. You can be Demetrius today.”
More snickers. Clearly Lizzie was still enough of a nerd that it was a joke on any boy to be asked to play a scene with her. And the others didn’t even know yet what scene she had chosen, the scene where Shakespeare has Helena say to Demetrius:
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Those were the lines that Lizzie had put into modern-day English. Ms. Singpurwalla expected her to read them to wisecracking, bullying Alex Ryan in front of the entire class.
“Do I have to?” Alex asked.
“Alex.” Ms. Singpurwalla’s low voice had a warning in it.
Alex slouched up to the front of the room. Because there was only one copy of Lizzie’s adaptation, he had to stand close to her so they could read from the same paper.
Scowling, Alex began to read:
I don’t love you, so don’t chase me.
Where is Lysander and that cute Hermia?
I’ll kill him, but, hey, she kills me.
The class laughed. Alex stopped and looked angry at first, but then, as if realizing that the lines he had been reading really were funny, he continued, hamming it up on purpose to make his part even funnier. Lizzie felt a stirring of hope. The class was laughing with them; it wasn’t laughing at them. So when she got to her longest speech, she, too, tried to bring out its comedy.
I’m, like, your puppy dog, and, Demetrius,
If you beat me, I’ll just lick your hand.
Treat me like a dog, go ahead, kick me.
I don’t mind. Really I don’t.
The laughter in the room felt good now. When the scene was finished, the class clapped spontaneously, and Lizzie realized it was the second time in two weeks that they had clapped for her. It was the second time in her life that they had clapped for her.
The real question was: What would Marcia say? Lizzie didn’t have to wait long to find out. At the end of class, she lingered outside the door, waiting for Marcia, to get her verdict over with.
“I didn’t know you were so funny,” Marcia said with appealing frankness.
“I didn’t know I was funny, either.”
As Alex passed by them, he gave Lizzie a grin that was almost friendly. Lizzie remembered that Alex liked being the center of attention; he was always trying to make people laugh. He must have enjoyed the applause as much as Lizzie had.
Marcia’s eyes followed him. When she turned back to Lizzie, she was still smiling, but her smile had a new edge to it. “One little piece of advice, though.”
“What?”
“Stick to Ethan.”
Alex’s parting grin had made Marcia jealous! That was the only way Lizzie could interpret Marcia’s cryptic remark. Marcia Faitak was actually jealous of her, Lizzie Archer!
But of course she would stick to Ethan. He was her Demetrius, and always would be.
* * *
At their family-living table that afternoon, before class began, Marcia asked, “Who’s going to the football game tonight?”
What football game, Lizzie wondered. West Creek Middle School didn’t have a football team. Lizzie knew that much about school sports.
“The high school football game,” Marcia said, as if reading Lizzie’s face.
All three boys were going.
“My brother Peter’s on the team,” Ethan said, “but he’s just a freshman, so he mostly sits on the bench.”
“Go, bench!” Julius cheered. “I like to root for inanimate objects,” he explained.
“I’ve never been to a high school football game,” Alison said. Lizzie didn’t bother to say that she had never been, either.
“They’re fun,” Marcia said. “You should come. You can sit with me and Jenni and Katie.” Then, as if forcing herself to spit out the words: “You too, Lizzie.”
The significance of the seemingly casual invitation wasn’t lost on Lizzie. She, Lizzie Archer, the Lizard, had been invited to sit with the queen of the popular girls and her court. This wasn’t the kind of invitation one refused.
* * *
That evening, under a dark sky threatening snow, Lizzie found herself walking into the West Creek High School football field, with Alison by her side.
The weather was cold. In West Creek, Colorado, snow in September was not unheard of, and the low clouds and nippy wind certainly suggested that snow could be on its way.
“If it snows, they’ll cancel the game, right?” Lizzie asked Alison hopefully.
“I don’t think so. I’ve seen football games on TV when it was snowing. Football players are tough, you know.”
Football players, maybe. But not necessarily football fans. That is, if Lizzie counted as a football fan.
They climbed to the bottom row of the bleachers, then looked around for Marcia and her friends. Lizzie couldn’t see them anywhere and found herself relieved rather than disappointed.
“Let’s just sit here.” Lizzie gestured to a vacant stretch of bleacher on the lowest row. She didn’t like heights and was glad to sit where there was no deadly drop to the hard ground below.
Then: “Alison! Lizzie!” Marcia was waving to them from the top row of the bleachers halfway down the West Creek side.
“You go with them.” Lizzie tried to make her voice light and cheery. “I’ll stay here.”
“Lizzie. I’m not going to leave you all by yourself. What is it?”
“I don’t like heights,” Lizzie admitted.
Alison gave a friendly laugh. “I’ll be right next to you. And it’s not like you can fall through the bleachers, or anything.”
Lizzie followed Alison, first along the wide walkway at the bottom of the bleachers, then up the narrow metal steps to where Marcia and her friends were sitting. With each step Lizzie took, the bleachers seemed to shake and sway beneath her unsteady feet. What did Alison mean, you couldn’t fall through the bleachers? Of course you could fall through them. Lizzie saw one boy drop something, lower himself down through the bleachers to retrieve it, and then swing himself up again. She tried not to look down as she kept on climbing.
The top row was all seventh graders. Ethan was there, and Julius and Alex, and Tom from English class, who apparently liked football as well as Shakespeare. At the sight of Ethan, Lizzie’s terror of the bleachers relaxed a bit. She knew it was silly, but she felt that she couldn’t fall through if Ethan was there.
She and Alison squeezed in between Marcia’s friend Jenni and some boys Lizzie didn’t know. Alex was right next to Marcia; Lizzie wondered how Marcia had managed that. Ethan and Julius were six or seven seats away.
Lizzie soon discovered that sitting in the bleachers was almost as bad as climbing up the bleachers. Ahead of her feet was—nothing. Behind her back was one skinny little bar, then—nothing. The void! A gust of wind rattled the bleachers. Lizzie couldn’t help the small, stifled scream that escaped her.
“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” the boy next to Lizzie asked.
“A little bit.”
“Look.” To Lizzie’s horror, he leaned all the way back, flailing his arms frantically in a pantomime of falling.
“Don’t,” Lizzie said.
“It’s not that far down. You might break your arm, or maybe both legs, if you fell, but it probably wouldn’t kill you.”
Lizzie tried to ignore him and concentrate on the game, which was finally about to begin. First, though, everyone had to stand for the National Anthem. The boys next to her, clowns that they were, stood on top of their seats to get even higher. When they came to “O’er the la-and of the FREEEE!” they stamped their feet so hard that the whole bleachers shook. Even Marcia gave a squeal then and buried her face in Alex’s shoulder. More than ever, Lizzie wished that she were next to Ethan.
The game began. Someone on one of the teams kicked the ball. Someone else caught it, but then a bunch of players jumped on him, and another bunch of players jumped on them, and there they all were, both teams, in this funny, writhing heap. It was so absurd, like a game played in Wonderland, that Lizzie laughed. The two boys, apparently intent on the game now, glared at her.
Lizzie swallowed her laughter and tried watching some more. The football players ran in no pattern that she could discern. A referee blew the whistle. The West Creek cheerleaders, in their skimpy little outfits, screamed, “First and ten, do it again!” The crowd joined in, but Lizzie couldn’t make herself do it. She would have felt too foolish.
“Are you following the game okay?” Alison asked as the players stopped running around and falling in heaps and just stood on the field for a while, chatting.
“Not really.”
“Well, it’s like this. You get four downs to go ten yards. So when the cheerleaders say, ‘First and ten, do it again,’ that’s what they’re talking about. ‘First’ means first down, ‘ten’ means ten yards.”
Lizzie still didn’t understand. Then she thought maybe she got it. “A down, is that when they all fall down?”
“Not exactly.”
Lizzie At Last Page 5
