by Beth Vrabel
Here’s what you need to know about Ryan (how can I phrase this?): he was a jerk. A nearly six-foot-tall, box-shaped, slightly cone-headed kid whose internal radio station was constantly tuned to full volume. Everything he said was booming and angry.
“Are you kidding me?” Ryan yelled.
I plastered on my most aggravating grin and waved my fingertips at him. He shook his head like a dog shaking off a flea. I followed Ryan to our spot on the court, which was, of course, across the net from where Mr. Chipps had assigned Max and Marshall.
Then Ryan and Max kicked off a crazy, whole-court game while Marshall and I vaguely waved our rackets and tried not to get plowed over. All of this was great until we had to switch serves. Ryan totally freaked when I couldn’t lob the stupid birdy over the net.
Max didn’t say anything. Didn’t even laugh along with Marshall as I threw up the birdy only to miss it entirely with the racket three times in a row. Finally, I managed to lob it over the net. Max deftly whapped it back.
“Are you even trying?” Ryan stormed when the birdy plopped me on the head. (Just to add to your mental picture here, let me tell you another injustice at this school: gym uniforms. Maroon shorts about five inches too short and gray T-shirts with the school mascots plastered on them. Remember? The mascots are fighting guinea pigs. Just wanted you to be able to really picture me in all of my humiliation.)
“Dude, one eye,” I snapped to Ryan, matching his volume. “Twenty-seventy vision. Remember?”
“Wait, what?” Mr. Chipps said. He stood in front of me, staring at my face. I almost felt sorry for the guy. I could practically see him mentally revisiting all the times he had said things like “Good eye!” and “Eye on the ball.” Quietly, he whispered, “Do all the other teachers know about this?”
I nodded.
“Okay!” Mr. Chipps blew into his whistle six times. “Listen up, Guinea Pigs. We’re going to spend the rest of class working on our skipping. Okay. So, um, power gallops and skips. All right? Go.”
Great. We skipped like baby kindergarteners for a half-hour thanks to Artie.
That was last week. I hoped Mr. Chipps would be back to his regular curriculum this week. But when we got to class, Mr. Chipps motioned for us all to get back into the stupid skipping lines again.
“All right, Guinea Pigs.” Mr. Chipps clapped his hands together heavily. “We’re going to start a brand new section today. It’s competitive. It’s fast. And it’s intense.” He whistled slowly and then winked at me. I felt my hopes plummet, even as the rest of the guys cheered.
“That’s right,” Mr. Chipps said. “Today, we’re all going to push ourselves.” Too much emphasis on all.
Mr. Chipps held up a mesh bag. I was too far away to make out what was in the bag, but I heard a whole lot of grumbling and muttered curses from the other kids. “Competitive cup stacking!” Mr. Chipps upturned the bag, dumping dozens of plastic cups onto the gym floor, where they landed with a clatter.
Here’s the thing: I know this whole competitive cup stacking is a pity sport. A let’s-give-the-visually-impaired-kid-a-break move. But there are so many sports where I’m actually decent. Like track. And believe it or not, I’m also good at archery. (Side note: Did you know that many sharpshooters are one-eyed? I’m serious! Of course, their seeing eye is usually, you know, twenty-twenty. Still, I can hold my own with archery.) But cup stacking? If Mr. Chipps was looking to make everyone in this stupid school hate me, he was off to a fab start.
Worse yet, I was stuck stacking next to Lash Boy.
At first we both sort of just made pyramids. But I made mine a little faster. Then Lash Boy nabbed a couple cups rolling by from someone’s destroyed pyramid, so his was a bit taller. I got a few more of my own and perfected letting them slip out of stack in rabid fire. Pop, pop, pop. Pyramid! Soon other guys were rolling theirs our way.
Max made a taller tower, but in the same time I made three smaller pyramids and dismantled them. “Okay, boys,” said Mr. Chipps, holding a timer in his hand. “Now see who can be first to make three stacks of three.”
I housed Lash Boy. A couple other guys whistled.
“Go, Ryder!” Marshall cheered.
Another guy I didn’t know muttered, “Can’t believe it, but this is actually kind of awesome.”
“Now, one pyramid of three, one of ten, another pyramid of three. Go!”
Max finished his a half-second before me.
“Rematch,” I muttered, pushing back my hair. Okay, so I was sweating. Whatever.
Even score, despite my useless glasses fogging.
“Again!” Lash Boy and I called at the same time. Someone even clapped, and Marshall hooted.
I flexed my fingers, hands hovering over my tower of cups. “A cycle this time,” Mr. Chipps smirked. “First three, then ten, then three, then work backward. Another three, another ten, another three.” He mimed piling the cups back into the single tower after each formation. “Got it?” he asked.
Lash Boy and I glared at each other. I took off my glasses and fixed my eye on the cups. “Ready,” I said.
Lash Boy nodded.
“Go!”
We were off. For the first second, there was total silence, just the clapping of cups onto the gym floor. Then the guys started cheering. “Go, go, go!”
My hands were slick with sweat. Heart thumping. Pyramid up, cups stacked. Bigger pyramid, cups stacked again. Third pyramid up, stacked back down. Boom, back through the cycle. I didn’t glance toward Max, even as I registered the sound of his towers. I was focused entirely on my towers. Boom, boom, boom.
“Done!” I shouted. Mr. Chipps pressed the timer.
Lash Boy had his hands still on his cups. My eyes swiveled to Mr. Chipps, making sure he registered my time.
Okay, here’s the thing. When you have one eye, you’ve got to blink. Got to moisturize Artie, you know? If you don’t—say when you’re whopping somebody’s butt in cup stacking and forget to blink—Artie gets dry. I rubbed at it, still moving in fast, jerky motions, and accidentally—accidentally—knocked Max’s pyramid over with my elbow as I dismantled the last tower.
“Seriously?” Max yelled. “Cheater!”
Mr. Chipps shrugged. “Kid still won, regardless.” He thumped me on the back as I rubbed Artie. A stream of tears leaked from the eye.
“Wow,” someone whispered, “he’s crying.”
“Probably never won anything before,” another answered.
“It’s discharge!” I snapped. “From my eye!”
Max still grumbled. Just for sport, I threw up another couple towers while Max dismantled his.
“Whoa,” a kid whispered to the other. “Maybe we should change our mascot to the Cyclops.”
“Whatever,” cone-headed Ryan Cashew grunted and kicked at my tower. “It’s cup stacking, dude.” Just like that, everyone snickered and headed to the locker room. Like I said, herd mentality.
Quilting club was the highlight of my week, another sign of serious trouble. All the other members spent the hour spilling deets about their lives. Honestly, I knew more about my fellow quilters than anyone else, aside from maybe Alice. I offered as much helpful advice as possible (“Janet May, God’s honest truth here, no boy is going to appreciate the quilted tissue bag as much as you deserve.”), which seemed to have opened me up to getting advice despite never sharing anything remotely personal. That is, until today when I blabbed about my cup-stacking superiority. Instead of cheering for me, they were standing up for Lash Boy.
“Look, you’ve got to give Max Waters a break,” Janet May said as she waited patiently for me to thread her quilting needle. The club members make a big deal out of me threading their needles. I think it’s because no one wants me working on their quilt squares. Apparently I have “sloppy stitches.” Janet May nodded in approval when I knotted her thread.
“He’s a sore loser,” I said.
“Richie Ryder, he’s a nice guy.” Janet May loves double names, so I couldn’t e
ven slight her for using both my names. When someone doesn’t have a double name, she just uses first and last names. Two braids went down the sides of her head to join into a ponytail, which she whipped back and forth. She was working on a double ring quilting patch.
I knew what Janet May was thinking—I had seen the photos on Instagram. Last week, she had a booth at a church craft fair. Janet May had been posting about it endlessly, asking people to come and “support the arts” and promising “custom, one-of-a-kind pieces.” People started busting her in the comments. Someone asked if she could special order one of Janet May’s quilted vests with teddy bears. The commenter said, “It’ll go great when I borrow my mom’s high-waisted jeans.”
Here’s the thing, though: Janet May didn’t realize all the people “complimenting” her photo gallery of quilted wall hangings, coasters, and purses were making fun of her. She didn’t know that the girl who left that comment was being mean. And Janet May made the teddy bear vest—even tagging the girl in the photo she posted.
Max was the only one who stopped it. He commented on Janet May’s photo that the girl was a jerk. He said he’d see her at the fair. And you know what? He showed up. Janet May posted a photo of them. Suddenly, no one made fun of her anymore. The others deleted their comments. That’s the way Lash Boy rolls. He’s disgustingly decent.
I mean, I didn’t comment or anything. I felt awful for Janet May. But I didn’t stop it, either. I didn’t do anything about it.
Suddenly, an image of Max in the hall, his arm around Jocelyn, flashed in my mind. Whatever. He might be nice, but he was still a jerk.
“Max is the reason no one will talk to me at this school,” I pointed out.
“Maybe,” Janet May said. “You know, I’d sit with you at lunch but I have my own crew.”
“I know, Janet May. I know,” I said. Say what you will about the quilting club, but they stick it to you straight. (You got that, didn’t you?)
Next in line was Madelyn, whose natural hair color could rival Alice’s for white-blond, but she had dyed it pitch black. Her coarse hair crinkled across her back as she moved like it was made of straw. While we had initially hit it off due to my all-black first-day wear and her all-black-all-the-time approach, we don’t have a lot of similar interests. She liked to quilt dragons with teeth dripping blood on her quilt patches, for example. And I didn’t quilt. I pretty much spent the hour threading needles.
“Well, you didn’t know it when you moved here, but Max is, like, a god around here. He’s a hero. He saved …” Madelyn’s face flushed.
“Jocelyn,” I said. “Yeah, I heard.”
“Everyone has heard the story. Everyone knows Max. Everyone wants to be like Max. And you went and made him out to be a stupid bully on your very first day,” Madelyn said.
“It was an accident,” I mumbled around the thread in my mouth.
“Yeah, maybe. But you haven’t stopped picking at him since! Stop blaming Max,” Madelyn said. “It’s your fault. You antagonize him all the time. Lay off him and just be yourself.”
I let my gaze fall from her inky hair to the white pancake makeup coating her face to the black nail polish and huge combat boots. “Just be myself, huh?”
“Yeah,” Madelyn said. “Just you, toned down a bit, maybe.”
“How do you tone down being yourself?” I popped the thread through the needle eyehole and handed it to Madelyn.
“Well,” said another quilt club friend, Jess, and then she sighed. Picture a mouse who overnight morphed into a fourteen-year-old girl. That’s pretty much Jess. Squeaky voice and all. She spends all of quilting club piecing together tiny hammocks for real guinea pigs. “You could maybe not say every funny thought. Maybe forget a pun now and then.”
“My thoughts are hilarious,” I pointed out. “Everyone loves a pun.”
Silence from the room. Miss Singer coughed into her elbow.
Janet May crossed her arms. “Maybe if you spent less time trying to make Max Waters look silly and everyone else laugh, you’d have someone to sit with in the cafeteria.”
“Seriously? You guys need to develop a sense of humor. Maybe all of these synthetic fabrics have rotted yours.” I tossed an empty spool into the trashcan, missing spectacularly. “My self-esteem is hanging on by a thread here.”
The quilt club let out a collective groan.
“I’m sorry,” Madelyn said. “You’re just not nearly as funny as you think you are.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Silence.
Miss Singer cleared her throat again. “Richie Ryder, I want to try a little experiment. Bear with me a second.”
“Uh, I don’t know …” I said, looking around at the club members. I knew they had been talking about me behind my back.
“I suspect,” Miss Singer said, “that you are a gifted observer of what goes on around you.”
“Very funny.” I fake laughed.
Miss Singer shook her hands in front of her. “I’m not referring to your vision, Richie Ryder. I’m referring to what goes on around you. For example, tell me, what do you know about Jess? This is a safe place and I know you’ll be kind,” she added when both Jess and I gaped. “Simply tell me what you’ve learned about her in the few weeks you’ve been with us.”
Confused, I blurted, “Quilt club was her first pick of experientials. She has more school pride than anyone in the history of time, despite our mascot. Or maybe because of it. Jess has five guinea pigs and hasn’t told her parents yet that she’s pretty sure Hester is actually a Henry and soon they will have many, many guinea piglets.” Jess’s face flushed as I added, “She has a crush on Georgie Wilson and dreams of one day owning an alpaca farm.”
“It’s true,” Jess said. “I love alpacas.”
“And Madelyn?” Miss Singer asked.
Automatically I replied, “She claims to love emo eighties bands but hums nineties boy band hits when she quilts. She smells like vanilla because she bakes cookies for her little brother and sister after school. Madelyn uses scotch tape to fix bent flowers in the courtyard.”
Madelyn sucked in her breath. “I do not like the Backstreet Boys.”
“Yeah, but you love *NSYNC. This I Promise You,” I sing-songed. Madelyn rolled her eyes.
“Janet May?” Miss Singer prompted. I glanced at the girl, whose eyes widened and cheeks flushed.
“Janet May got a double dose of honesty and is the one you go to if you want to know if you’ve got spinach stuck in your teeth or if the cat hair on your pants is noticeable. She is not the one to go to if you want to hear that you’re right in an argument.”
Janet May shrugged. The other girls nodded.
“And me?” Miss Singer asked softly.
I bit my lip, still not knowing where this was headed. “You think about your students all the time, years after they leave your classroom. You love biology but can’t stand blood, which makes it really hard to be the quilting teacher, where—before yours truly and his awesome one-eyed-needle-threading powerhouse talent—you routinely stabbed yourself in the thumb. In fact, I’m pretty sure you hate quilting, given how I have yet to see you keep a stitch. I think you only took on the job because if you didn’t, there wouldn’t be a quilting club and you like getting to know us more than you like teaching us.”
Miss Singer nodded. She got up from her seat, the sound of her chair pushing back against the cement floor echoing in the loud silence of the room. When she kneeled in front of me, her hand squeezing my shoulder, she looked me straight in the face. Her green eyes flicked back and forth across my eyes, finally steadily staring at the one that could stare back. Even though she was watching me, she addressed the rest of the club. “Okay, ladies. Your turn. Aside from the fact that he has a visual impairment and a fondness for puns, what do you know about Richie Ryder?”
No one spoke. Janet May opened and closed her mouth like a guppy then quietly shook her head. Madelyn scratched at the nail polish on her thumb. Jess rolled her lips
nervously.
“Maybe what I’m trying to say sounds harsh,” Miss Singer added. She folded her hands and rested her chin on them. “It is harsh. But look at all you’ve learned from us, Richie. You deserve the same in a friendship. Any relationship you want will only work if you show up, too. I don’t think anyone really knows you. They know you’ll make them laugh—or roll their eyes. But that’s all you share. We don’t actually know you.”
I felt something boil inside me, starting in my feet, which suddenly drummed against the ground. My knees jerked up and down. The churning bubbled up my gut, gushing into my chest, across my shoulders, and down my arms to my fingertips. Like a wave crashing into a bucket, it filled my head. My eyes—yes, both—stung from the inside out.
This storm raged in me, and I knew that if I opened my mouth it would erupt, scalding Miss Singer and melting down the whole room. This whole stupid, joke-in-itself quilting club filled with stupid losers who thought they had a right to talk about me. To judge me. Whatever. I ground my teeth together to keep the unfamiliar rage inside.
A nasty voice in my head whispered that the rage wasn’t really all that unfamiliar. It had simmered from the first moment I saw my seven-year-old self with a bandage over one eye. It had boiled to the surface whenever I saw Max with Jocelyn. It was what made my voice edgy and mean when Gramps confronted me about Dad. It was always quietly bubbling away. Usually, though, it was easier to squash with a witty comeback.
Squeezing my shoulder again, Miss Singer said softly, “Richie, all we know about you is that you’re someone who jokes around.”
Janet May stood and moved just behind Miss Singer. “When you turn everything into a joke, Richie Ryder, you become the joke. Is that what you want?”
I felt my nostrils flare as I fought for a steady breath. I wouldn’t wipe at my eyes but there was no way I was letting one of those tears fall, either. I never cried. Never. Didn’t cry when I lost an eye. Didn’t cry before that when Mom wanted a “normal” picture of me. Didn’t cry when my dad picked watching freaking buffalos over living with his kid. So there was no way I would cry now.
