Lizzie Flying Solo

by Nanci Turner Steveson

The night before school began, I studied the bus map Mom gave me and found the next closest stop after ours. It was almost half a mile away, but I didn’t care about the extra walking. It meant no one would see me getting on at Good Hope Lane. The shelter was the only house on the road and there was no need for anyone to know where I lived. That would only lead to questions about why we lived there, and my secret about what Dad had done wouldn’t be a secret anymore.

  I waited by myself on the opposite side of Brook Drive until I saw the yellow bus round a corner. Just before it squealed to a stop, I darted across to where everyone had lined up, and slipped into the empty seat behind the driver. I should have known he’d complain. Bus drivers are never happy until the last week of school.

  “Hey,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t run in front like that again, got it?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Lose my job if I run you over.” He closed the door and the bus jerked forward, letting loose that loud whoosh noise.

  A few minutes later, we pulled into a roundabout driveway at the school. The building looked pretty much the same as the middle school back home. There didn’t seem to be anything remarkably different about the students either or the way they dressed—lots of jeans and Converse sneakers in assorted styles and colors. Mom had bought me a pair last year before name-brand sneakers were considered unessential. I’d had to yank and pull and practically bind my feet to get them on this year, and my toes were so squished they might never unkink again. But the struggle was worth it. If nothing else about me was the same as these other kids, at least my shoes were.

  A boy with long blond hair was the last one off the bus ahead of mine. Apparently, he didn’t care whether he looked the same as everyone else or not. He stopped on the curb and hooked his thumbs into a tooled leather belt—the kind with a giant silver buckle on the front—as if he wanted to be sure everyone saw it. Then he raised his chin a little and headed for the front door, scuffing the heels of shiny black cowboy boots against the concrete with each step. I wasn’t the only one who noticed he stood out. Even the bus driver lowered his sunglasses to look.

  Mom had told me to pick up my schedule in the office before class. I waited at a counter until a lady with purple cat-eye glasses came out of a cubicle. She pointed at me with long fingernails painted plum and tipped in silver, an exact color match to the Go Rockets! banner hanging on the wall.

  “New student?”

  I nodded.

  She pointed past me. “You too?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was the blond boy with the cowboy boots. I moved aside to make room for him.

  “Last name?” the lady asked me.

  “St. Clair.”

  “And you?”

  “McDaid,” the boy said.

  “I’m Ms. Bacigalupi,” she said, pointing to her badge. “Don’t try to pronounce it. Just call me Miz Bee.” She had a twinge of a Southern accent.

  “Miz Bee?” I asked.

  “Close enough for chocolate,” she said.

  Miz Bee opened a metal drawer, riffled through some files, and came back with two packets.

  “Bryce McDaid, this is yours,” she said, reading the label on the front. “All the way from Wyoming, huh? Schedule is inside. Elizabeth St. Clair, here is yours.”

  “Lizzie,” I said.

  Miz Bee eyeballed me over the cat-eye glasses and raised her brows like she thought I was being rude. “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing, it’s okay, I’m good, thank you so much.” I turned quickly and fled into the hall.

  It was easier than I’d feared to keep to myself. Most everyone else already knew one another, so no one bothered to try and talk to me except Bryce McDaid. That was only because we collided trying to go through the door to history class at the same time.

  “Ah! Sorry!” I said.

  “No worries.” Bryce grinned and waved me ahead of him.

  I spotted an empty desk in the back corner and sank into the seat, clutching my backpack in my arms. One more class until lunch. Then I could find a place to be alone and mentally regroup for the rest of the day.

  Bryce stood by the next desk over. “You mind?”

  “No,” I said. “Go for it.”

  I unzipped my pack and pretended to search for something so I didn’t have to make eye contact with anyone else in the room. That worked until a group of noisy girls came in, clinging to each other like a single unit of human-ness instead of four individual people. But they were four individuals. I knew this because they were the four girls who rode at Birchwood every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Before I could sink lower in my chair, Jasmine caught sight of me. Her dark eyes flashed, like she was trying to place where she’d seen me. Before she could recall, Jade jabbed her in the side.

  “Look, Jasmine, it’s that cute boy.”

  And just like that, all eyes were riveted on Bryce McDaid. He’d hooked the cowboy boots around the legs of his chair and was tipping it back and forth while he doodled in a notebook. His hair fell down over the left side of his face and eye, and he was completely unaware that everyone was staring. Not until class started, anyway, and the teacher, Coach Redmond, did what no kid ever wants a teacher to do.

  “Ah, you ladies sitting in the group back there, let’s focus on the work at hand and not the cute new boy.”

  Waves of giggles rippled across the room. Bryce’s head flew up. He shot a quick look at the girls, then turned his chair so his back was to them and he faced me. His cheeks had gone from alabaster to pink to all-out crimson in just a few quick breaths.

  When class was over and everyone else had left, he raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Glad that’s done. You have lunch now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, me too. Let’s go.”

  My thoughts of finding a place for solitude vanished. I fell in behind Bryce and we made our way through the crowded halls to the cafeteria. When it was my turn to pay, I held out three one-dollar bills. The lady at the register shook her head.

  “We use the Payment Plus system here, hon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a card. Should have come with your new student paperwork.”

  I opened my backpack and dug around in the folder until I found a purple plastic card with my name printed on the front.

  “Is it this?”

  “Yup, sure is.” She swiped the card, then squinted at the computer screen. “No money in the account, though.”

  “Money?”

  “Your guardian is supposed to put money in the account to pay for your lunch.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know. Can I pay with the cash?”

  “Noooo,” she said, shaking her head. “We don’t take cash. I’ll get Mrs. Samuels to okay an IOU.”

  She reached for a button on a microphone, but before she could announce to the entire cafeteria full of seventh graders that I didn’t have money to pay for my lunch, Bryce nudged me aside and held out his card.

  “She can use mine,” he said. “Put both mine and hers on it, please.”

  “You related? You have to be related to share cards.”

  “Cousins,” he said, tapping my foot with the tip of his boot.

  “Yeah, cousins,” I echoed.

  “Got it,” the lunch lady said. “Cousins.”

  We found seats at the only empty table, which happened to be right next to the janitor’s closet. The smell of ammonia wafted through the air. Bryce stared at his plate of what might have been meat loaf but looked more like dirty tissues that had gelled into a mold.

  “Not sure which smells worse, the ammonia or the meat loaf.”

  That made me laugh. “Yeah, but at least lunch is a break from classes.”

  “True. You like history?”

  “Pretty much. Better than math.”

  “Definitely better than math.”

  Bryce pushed the corner of his meat loaf with a fork. It bounced back like it was made from rubber. “Ugh.”

/>   I unwrapped my turkey sandwich and sighed. White bread, no mayo, no lettuce, no tomato, no pickle, and probably no salt.

  “Looks boring,” Bryce said. He opened a pocket of his backpack and pushed an almond-berry granola bar and a clementine across the table to me. “Here, fill in with this. It’s not much, but at least you won’t starve.”

  “Thanks.”

  He peeled a clementine with his thumb and dropped the rind onto the table. The citrus smell mingled with the ammonia in a surprisingly pleasant way.

  “I always bring food from home,” he said. “I’m a part-time vegetarian with an appetite. You can’t count on school food to have enough options for people like me.”

  “Why did you get meat loaf if you’re a vegetarian?”

  He poked it again with his finger and grinned. “It looked humorous.”

  For the second time on a day when I did not expect to even smile, Bryce had made me laugh. By the time lunch was over, he felt like a longtime friend. And he hadn’t asked about where I lived or anything about my family. Not once.

  My last class of the day was English, which I decided was the reward for fumbling through everything from history and math to PE. Ms. Fitzgerald’s classroom popped with personality. Volumes of Shakespeare and Harry Potter were stacked along the windowsills, along with other classics and fantasy books. There was a pointy pink-and-green cactus on her desk and a purple orchid with sprays of blooms draping between collections of poetry books on shelves. Colorful rugs with rope fringe were tacked up on the walls, and Ms. Fitzgerald had pinned handwritten poems to each one. Different-colored plastic beanbag chairs on the floor were stenciled with “Reading is Rad” or “The Wonder of Words” and “Drop Everything and Read.” She also had an aquarium full of neons and angelfish.

  Ms. Fitzgerald didn’t look like a regular teacher, either. Her jeans had faded patches on the knees, and her sandals looked like they’d made a cross-country trek at least twice. A dozen black braids fell almost to her waist, and each one had a tiny wooden bead fastened on to the end. When she walked between the desks, looking left and right to make eye contact with her new students, she let her braids swing, and the beads clicked like miniature castanets. One of the first things out of her mouth was about poetry.

  “Every day we will read a poem out loud,” she said.

  She stopped beside my desk and smiled, like she already knew I was a poetry kid.

  “It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a poetry segment or not,” she said, moving on. “One of you will read out loud, right up here in front of the class.”

  She paused, listening to the shuffle of students wiggling in their chairs, then lifted a thick, worn leather book from the corner of her desk and unlaced two leather straps that were wrapped around to tie it shut.

  “You can tell which poems are favorites,” she said, flipping through the pages and showing us raggedy edges. “This may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but it is going to help you expand your horizons. Force you out of your comfort zone.”

  She scanned the room. Her eyes settled on me again, and her lips turned up in a small smile.

  “You’re safe in my class,” she said quietly, as if she was saying it only to me. “No one is going to judge you.”

  Seven

  It took the whole first month of school before I felt ready to read a poem in front of the class. I couldn’t bear the idea of standing up there, red-faced and fumbling over words in the big leather book like a lot of the other people did when it was their first time. Linda said I should pick one of my favorites, something I already knew by heart, so I chose “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” written by Robert Frost.

  Mr. Frost had lived in the same Vermont town where my grandparents grew up. Even though he died a long time ago, that made me feel like I knew him personally. I’d seen his cabin where he wrote a lot of his poems and imagined him sitting by a snapping fire at night, with snow falling outside frosty windows, scribbling his day’s thoughts onto yellow paper where they appeared in lovely, perfect form. Words that made my heart ache for a less complicated life.

  On my poem-reading day, I got through it in one piece, even though I almost choked when I read the part that made me think of Dad’s betrayal—the lines about promises to keep. The class clapped for me like they did for everyone else, and when I looked around, I realized I knew the names of only a few of the students. Privately, I had vowed to get through the year without being invited to someone’s house after school—someone who wanted to be a friend and who might expect a return invitation. Friends asked questions. If these people knew about Dad’s crime, they might judge Mom and me the way people back home had—as if we were the guilty ones, too.

  There was a girl in my English class, Jenna, who I might have been friends with but changed my mind the day she read her poem out loud. Jenna was bouncy and energetic and had masses of rust-colored freckles across her nose. She sat next to me and talked a mile a minute, not really caring if I was listening or not. Jenna talked about Jenna, which was good for me but was annoying enough that the other kids steered clear of her.

  On the day she read her poem, a couple of weeks after me, she didn’t just read it; she performed it, like she was onstage. She waved her hand through the air and swayed side to side, oblivious to the snickers rippling through the room and the boy in the back, Danny, silently imitating her gestures. Jenna’s voice rose and fell dramatically when she moved from one stanza to the next. By the time she read the last line, her eyes were damp and she was out of breath. Two beats of silence went by before Ms. Fitzgerald spoke, two beats in which the rest of the class waited awkwardly, not sure if we were supposed to just applaud or give a standing ovation for such a performance.

  “Beautifully done, Jenna,” Ms. Fitzgerald finally said. She had moved next to Danny, who now sat obediently with his hands folded on his desk. “You might consider a career onstage someday. But you didn’t tell us the name of the poem or why you chose it.”

  “Oh, right,” Jenna said.

  She licked her lips, lifted her shoulders, and smiled at me, like my approval meant everything. “It’s titled, ‘Invictus,’ by William Ernest Henley, and I picked it because it was the poem that helped Nelson Mandela survive during his twenty-seven years in prison.”

  “An excellent choice. Thank you,” Ms. Fitzgerald said.

  She went on to talk about some kind of project the class was going to be starting soon, but “twenty-seven years in prison” pounded in my ears like a drumbeat. I didn’t even know how long Dad would have to go to prison if he lost his trial, and right that second, I couldn’t remember what Nelson Mandela had done that sent him away for so long.

  Jenna smiled all the way back to her desk and whispered, “Thanks for the encouragement. I couldn’t have gotten through it without you.”

  I had no idea what encouragement she was talking about. I shrugged and focused on scribbling nonsense on a piece of paper, pressing my pencil so hard the tip broke off and flew to the floor. Jenna leaned down and picked it up.

  “Here you go,” she said. “I have an extra.” She handed me a pink pencil with cartoon unicorns all over it.

  Ms. Fitzgerald strolled between rows of desks, still talking about something called the Partners in Poetry Project. “Think about whom you’d like to work with,” she said, “and I would recommend choosing someone whose strengths will enhance areas in which you might need a boost. Perhaps one of you wants to write the poem and the other would create the visual aid.”

  Jenna touched my elbow with the eraser of her own unicorn pencil.

  “Hey, want to be partners? You could come to my house one time to work on it, then I could go to yours, and we could switch like that. It would be fun. Want to?”

  I shook my head. “No, but thanks.”

  “Really?” she squeaked. “You know I’m the only other one in this class who even cares about poetry, right?”

  “I can’t answer right this second,” I said
.

  She paused just long enough for me to know she was surprised.

  “Okay, well, think about it. We’d have fun, I guarantee you. And if you’d rather work at your house, that’s okay with me. Either house is fine. Yours is probably more fun because my parents work all the time. I mean: All. The. Time!”

  “Can we talk about it another day?”

  Jenna’s face fell. “Sure, no prob.”

  But I could tell it was a problem because she wouldn’t look at me for the rest of class. Finally, the bell rang and everyone, including Jenna, bolted out the door. I sat in my seat, twirling the unicorn pencil until the room was empty, then walked to the front and stood by Ms. Fitzgerald’s desk. My fingers drifted to the soft, faded leather of the poetry book.

  “Hey, Lizzie, what’s up?”

  “Um, I know there’s an odd number of students in this class, so I’d like to volunteer to work on the poetry project alone.”

  “Hmmmm,” she said, studying me. She sat cross-legged in her chair, tapping a pencil against her knee. “You know, Lizzie, I feel like this is a difficult year for you for whatever reason. I’m not asking you to share anything personal, but maybe it would be good for you to be part of a team so you can connect with another student.”

  I wasn’t prepared for her to try and talk me out of it, so I stalled by untying, then retying the leather strings around the poetry book.

  “I’m just better working on my own,” I mumbled.

  She looked at me, and I looked at her, and I knew whoever spoke first was going to give in, so I dropped my eyes. It was impossible to explain.

  “Could you work in a group of three?” she asked. “Would that be better?”

  I shook my head. “Please, I’d really rather do it alone.”

  Finally, she smiled kind of sadly, then wrote something in the margin of her big lesson planner.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Lizzie St. Clair, flying solo.”

  Flying solo. That was me.

  The first afternoon I slipped out the back door of Good Hope and could actually see a smudge of the red barn through the trees, I knew something was different. Not because some of the leaves were finally giving way to the changing seasons and lay scattered on the ground, but because the closer I got to the horse farm, the more clearly I could hear Joe’s voice piercing through the woods, sharp and alarming.