Connect the Stars (3 page)

Sheryce and the rest of the Philbrick Philosophers sat very still. Mr. LeBec drew a slip of paper. “And the bonus question is—”

Zzzz.

Me again, making sure we got a jump on things.

“Could you just wait till I finish?” asked Mr. LeBec.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Now,” he began, “please answer the following multiple-choice history question . . .”

Piece of cake. Multiple choice. The answer is right there in the question!

“How did the King of England feel in 1776 when his American subjects declared their independence? A, like a father who is disappointed in his children. B, like a judge who must mete out justice to miscreants. C, like a teacher who must teach his students a lesson. D, all of the above.”

Zzzz.

I had this.

And then . . . I thought—wait. How did the king
feel
? Was this written down somewhere?

I looked up to find Hardy, Jimmy, and Andrea gazing expectantly at me. Out in the audience, I could see Mrs. Dunaway's eyes swimming strangely behind her glasses.

I mean . . . I—I knew who the King of England was in 1776: George the Third. He imposed unpopular taxes
and wore a powdered wig. For that matter, I knew who the King of England was in 802: King Egbert. In 839, King Ethelwulf ascended the throne. I felt myself shaking.

“Hardy? Andrea? Jimmy?” I pleaded with my look. But they couldn't help me. I'd buzzed in. I had to answer.

After King Ethelwulf came King Ethelbald. My palms were clammy. Then King Ethelbert, King Ethelred, and King Alfred the Great. I felt very cold.

How did he
feel
?

Mrs. Dunaway gazed at me sharply from the sidelines. Her pupils were as small as pinpricks. She seemed curious. She seemed concerned. She seemed interested to see what I was going to do next.

There was King Ethelstan and King Edmund the Magnificent. How did the King of England
feel
in 1776? King Edgar the Peaceable. The answer was hidden—underneath all the other answers. King Edward the Martyr and King Ethelred the Unready . . .

Wait—did I say that out loud?

“I'm sorry,” replied Mr. LeBec, looking at me strangely. “‘Unready' was not one of the choices. Your score is now zero.” He turned to the other team. “Philosophers, would you like to attempt an answer?”

“What—the—” stammered Sheryce, staring at me.

“The correct answer is D,” said Mr. LeBec. “You lose
one point. Final score: Philbrick Philosophers three, Dolley Madison Destroyers zero.” He leaned back from his microphone, far enough so he thought nobody would hear, and he said, “This has got to be the worst Quiz Masters in history.”

Harriet Tubman Middle School

Greenwood, Delaware

AS SOON AS I HEARD Lyza's panicked shrieks in the gym locker room, even before they'd gone from high-pitched animal sounds—think giant, terrified guinea pig—to actual words, I knew I was doomed. I knew not because of any borderline supernatural ability, but just because that was the kind of day I was having. Someone might think that a day that begins with the most popular girl in the seventh grade screeching at you in the hallway in front of everyone about how you have no friends can't possibly get any worse, but I knew it could. I'd spent the day bracing myself for the next hit. Even so, when it came, it was worse than I ever thought it would be.

Somebody stole Lyza's bracelet.

And since, in the middle of gym class, my hair band had broken and I'd had to run back to the locker room for
another one, and since half the gym locker doors were so beat-up and bent that they didn't shut properly so that no one even bothered to lock them, and since by that point in the day, the story of my dustup with Lyza the Lyar had bounced around the school long enough to have been embellished and twisted into something way more dramatic and awful than it was (and it was pretty dramatic and awful to begin with), everyone thought I'd taken it. As soon as the girls in the locker room figured out what exactly Lyza was screeching about, every head swiveled, meerkat style, in my direction.

And because Lyza had spent the past eight months unabashedly flattering and sucking up to Coach Prouty, mainly to get out of doing anything in gym that might make her sweat (while the rest of us played volleyball or ran laps until we were half dead, Lyza recorded soccer stats or graded Coach Prouty's health quizzes or stood around fluttering her lashes), when Lyza pointed her manicured finger at me, Coach Prouty believed her right away.

It didn't help that in the face of her accusation, I got a little surly. There was Lyza crying her saucer-sized eyes out in front of the entire gym class and saying, “Audrey and I had a misunderstanding this morning, but I honestly thought we were friends again. I thought we'd both risen above it. We used to play soccer together, and she's always
been a nice girl, I mean mostly, and just the thought that she would stoop to
stealing
—wah wah wah, blah blah blah, sob sob sob,” and there I was, arms crossed, eyebrows raised, lip curled—surly.

It was all so ridiculous. I had reason to believe that I was quite possibly, almost definitely, the most honest person in the room.

“She probably took it herself just to get Audrey in trouble,” someone behind me mumbled, and I looked over my shoulder, hoping it was Janie, but it was Elinor Frack, one of the other non-invitees to Lyza's party. Even as I wished Elinor were right, I knew she wasn't. Lyza's shrieks over her missing bracelet had the unmistakable ring of truth.

When I turned back around, I did see Janie, though. She was in her regular clothes, leaning against a locker in the back of the room. She must have just gotten to school. Through the crowd of people, I caught her eye, and she gave me a quick half smile of moral support before she bent over to tie her shoe.

I was sent to Dean Amory's office. I'd been summoned to her office before, not because I was in trouble—because I never was—but because Dean Amory liked to keep an eye on the emotional and social well-being of her students, and she worried about me. She worried about my thin skin, my low tolerance for lying and deceit, my ever-shortening
friend list, my increasing withdrawal from the Harriet Tubman social scene. I knew that she liked me, but still, most of our conversations in her office began with her sighing like a deflating balloon, and this conversation was no different.

“I didn't do it,” I told her. “I have no criminal record. I've never even gotten detention. I shouldn't have to defend myself against this spurious accusation, but I will go on record as saying that I did not do it.”

“She uninvited you to her party,” said Dean Amory. “That must have hurt.”

“How did you know that?” But I wasn't really surprised. Dean Amory knew everything that happened at our school. This was such an accepted fact that she didn't even bother to answer my question.

“She told you it was canceled when it wasn't,” she said.

“Well, I was never going to go anyway.”

Dean Amory frowned her concerned frown, an expression I'd seen many times before. “Why not, Audrey? Social experiences are so important. And parties are fun!”

“Hold on,” I said, leaning against the back of my chair and eyeing her. “Do you think I stole Lyza's bracelet because she lied to me about her party?”

Dean Amory sighed again, her shoulders rising up and
up and then suddenly falling like someone had dropped something heavy on them, which, if I'd been in a better mood, might have struck me as sort of funny because her standard line to me was: “Don't carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Audrey. It's not your job.”

“I don't think you stole her bracelet,” said Dean Amory evenly, “and I don't not think you stole her bracelet. I'm more interested in why she would accuse you, in what passed between you regarding the party that would make her think you took it. How did you get here, Audrey? Can you tell me?”

“You don't
not think
I stole it?”

“Look,” said Dean Amory, opening her hands toward me. “I'm sure that if you did take it, it wasn't because you wanted it. And I'm also sure that if you took it, you will eventually give it back. Sometimes people do wrong things not because they're bad people, but because they feel helpless or lost. I certainly don't believe for a second that you're a common thief.”

To my supreme irritation, tears stung my eyes. I stood up.

“I'm not an uncommon thief, either,” I said. “I didn't steal it. Not for any reason. I am not a dishonest person.”

“Oh, Audrey, we're all dishonest sometimes.”

“I didn't steal it.”

“Okay. Fine. But let's talk about the deeper issues at play here.”

“Are you going to call the police? Suspend me? Throw me out of school?”

My voice trembled when I asked this, because even though I would have dearly loved to walk out of that place and never come back to it in my lifetime, I did not want to be
thrown
out.

Dean Amory gave me a long, drawn-out, searching look before she shook her head. “No.”

“Then can I go?”

Wearily, she nodded. When my back was to her, before I could open her door, she said, “It gets better, you know.”

Slowly I turned back around. “Are you sure? Because it seems like everything's gotten so much harder this past couple of years.”

“For everyone, honey. Self-consciousness is a necessary step in growing up, but it can also be a little painful. Remember when you laughed at whatever you thought was funny without worrying about whether other people thought it was? Remember when you wore exactly what you wanted?”

I thought about it. “I had these rain boots with strawberries on them. I wore them even when it wasn't raining.”

“And no one cared or probably even really noticed. Right now, everyone's trying to figure out who they are, where they fit, what their roles are. They don't always say what they mean. Sometimes they say things they don't mean. Maybe they aren't their best selves, but they're trying.”

“I wish it could have stayed the way it used to be. People lied a lot less.”

“I promise it gets better.”

I could tell she wasn't just saying this; she honestly believed it. I felt a sob rise in my throat. “I really do want you to be right about that,” I said.

“Good.” She smiled. “Keep the faith, Audrey.”

I shrugged, mostly because acting casual was the only hope I had of not bursting into tears.

“I'll try.”

I did try, sort of. But it was a lot easier to believe that people were good and doing their best when I wasn't actually
with
them. In the three weeks before the end of the school year, I spent as much time as I could alone in the woods. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I'm sorry to say that my motives weren't quite so lofty. Mostly
I went to get away from life instead of confronting it, but after a few trips, since I was there anyway, I decided to pay attention and try to learn what the woods had to teach.

I didn't learn the meaning of life, but I did notice, for the first time, how the forest was a big world that contained smaller ones. A dead tree, the cool, damp ground under a rock, an anthill like a pile of brown sugar, a stand of blue flowers, a patch of emerald-green velvet moss: they were all tiny worlds alive with busy citizens, every creature moving around with purpose, like they knew just what to do and where to go. A bronzy centipede slinking through the dirt. Roly-poly bugs like miniature minivans. An army of black beetles, marching. A cloud of white moths rising spookily out of the grass.

I'm not especially a bug person, but I loved seeing these things, and sometimes I didn't even look at anything. I'd sit with my back against a tree and my eyes shut, and just the stalky, tree-barky, brown-dirt smell of the place would make me feel peaceful. I'd breathe it in and know that my world—Harriet Tubman Middle School—wasn't even close to being the only world there was.

Sometimes, though, I got lonely, especially for Janie. She'd been my best friend since she'd moved to Delaware from Oregon when we were five, but Janie and I hadn't been spending as much time together as we used to. As
much as I hated to admit it, Lyza was right about that. But she was wrong about Janie being sick of me. Janie Franklin and I were friends the way moss is green, the way squirrels run up trees. We were a fact.

But a few months ago, we had just stopped hanging out as much. I guess I was caught up in the whole I-am-surrounded-by-people-who-lie thing, which seemed to get worse and worse as seventh grade went on, and she'd gotten strep and other more minor illnesses and started missing school, and I guess we both just got busy. My mom said that every friendship has its ups and downs, its natural fluctuations. When she put it that way, my friendship with Janie sounded like any natural part of life, like the ocean tides or the seasons, which is how it had always felt to me.

I'd called Janie a couple of times in those last few weeks of school, but she was bogged down with makeup work. Janie was as smart as anyone, but school wasn't always easy for her, and like I said, she'd missed a lot and was racing to get all the late work in and all the tests taken before the school year ended. I missed her. I'd even be in the woods, where I hardly ever thought about people, and I'd get this pang in the center of my chest, right where my ribs connected, and it would take me a second, but then I'd understand that the pang was missing Janie.

So on the day after the last day of school, I got up, got
dressed, and walked to her house. It was the hottest day of the season so far, as though even the sun had gotten word that it was our first day of summer vacation, and the sky was that true, deep summer blue. Under that sky, I suddenly felt like skipping, like the weight of the world Dean Amory was always talking about had fallen off my shoulders, or at least had gotten a lot smaller overnight.

As I stared up the sidewalk to Janie's front porch, I noticed that the big planters on either side of the porch steps were empty, which was weird because Mr. Franklin was a serious gardening guy, always pruning, and planting, and moving flower bulbs and bushes from one spot to another, and filling planters. By early June, they should have been overflowing, flowers flopping over the sides and vines trailing like kite tails. Everything else looked normal, though. Even the wind chimes hanging from Janie's porch sounded like summer.

But when Janie answered the door, she didn't look like summer at all, more like one of those days in late February that are so gray and dull you can't remember that spring is right around the corner; you can't remember spring at all. She looked rumpled, like she'd just gotten out of bed, which I knew couldn't be true. Janie was a morning person. Even at sleepovers, she'd be the first one up, and we'd all stumble sleepily downstairs hours after she did, to find
her talking to the parents in the kitchen, bright-eyed as a robin.

“Hey!” I said.

Janie didn't smile, just reached up and twisted a piece of her red hair.

“Oh. Hey.”

“You want to hang out?”

Janie glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “I can't,” she said. “Sorry. I still have some makeup work to finish.”

She was telling the truth, but the nervous look on her face made me wonder if there was more going on than just homework. When she glanced over her shoulder again, I guessed that maybe she'd gotten into a fight with her mom. Janie's mom was really nice, but even the nicest moms could get mad at their kids, especially when their kids didn't want to do their homework on the first day of summer vacation. But what kid would? No wonder Janie looked like February.

“That stinks,” I said.

From inside the house, I heard Mrs. Franklin's voice call out, “Who is it, Janie?”

“It's nothing, Mom,” Janie called back. “I'll be right there.”

I heard her mother's footsteps coming toward the door.
Janie stiffened and said, “Sorry, I have to go.”

She started to shut the door, but her mom was already there. She was smiling at me and didn't look mad at all, just a little tired.

“Hey there, Audrey,” she said. “Happy summer.”

“Thanks!”

“Mom,” said Janie, “just give us a minute, okay?”