Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 00.5 - Jolie and Scoobie High School Misadventures (2 page)

“My favorite book is
To Kill a Mockingbird
,” he said.

“Jolie?” Aunt Madge was behind me
. “Oh, good. You’ve met Adam.”

The boy gave a small scowl, but it cleared
. “Everybody calls me Scoobie. Except a couple of teachers. What kind of name is Jolie?” He pronounced the name as Aunt Madge had, with a soft J.

“Jolie is French
. My dad’s French-Canadian.”

Scoobie—he didn’t look like an Adam—looked at Aunt Madge and back at me.

“Jolie is my niece. Grand niece, to be precise. We’re going to be enjoying each other’s company for awhile.” Aunt Madge smiled as she said this.

“Yeah,” he said, “sh
e told me her parents were on that long trip.”

Aunt
Madge gave me a look that said she was keeping my secret about why I was here. “Yes, but it’s always better near the ocean.” She began to move away. “You want to walk back to the Cozy Corner?”

“If you’re leaving now, I’ll come with
.” I turned back to Scoobie. “Maybe see you tomorrow. No, Tuesday, I guess.”

He gave me a kind of cocky grin
. “If you’re lucky.”

CHAPTER TWO

I SPENT A LOT OF Labor Day thinking and wondering what to wear to Ocean Alley High on Tuesday. The early 1990s were a time of almost anything goes, at least in Lakewood, but I didn’t want to be dressed totally differently from the girls in Ocean Alley.
What do you care?  You don’t know anyone.

I did offer to help Aunt Madge with her B&B chores, but she is very precise about how the beds are made and how the breakfast tables are set. Not that there is much to either of these tasks, but she has done them the same way for years
.

“I can always use help walking Petey. You need to take the pooper-scooper,” she said, as we ate lunch.

“Hot times in Ocean Alley.”

“You asked,” she said
. “Oh, I almost forgot. Your parents left a couple of weeks’ worth of allowance.”

“Can I…?” I began.

“Have it all at once? Your mother said you would ask. No can do.”

The rage that came so suddenly left as Petey nudged my ankle
. “At home I made some money babysitting,” I said.

“Hmm
. I’ll ask around.” She made a shooing gesture toward Petey and me. “Off you go.”

So began my first
PPP chore—Petey Poop Patrol.

OCEAN ALLEY HIGH was supposed to have about five hundred students, which was about half the size of my high school in Lakewood, but it was still a lot of people not to know. It was almost ten blocks from the Cozy Corner. Not that anything can be far from something else. Ocean Alley is only twelve blocks deep, though it runs maybe a mile and a half or two miles along the ocean. The streets that run parallel to the ocean are named only with letters, but the first street is B Street. A Street and part of the old boardwalk got washed out in a hurricane, which I thought was in the 1940s sometime.

I had walked to school
. No way was I taking a school bus. At home I was in a sort of car pool with four other friends. None of us had our own cars, but each of us was allowed to drive to school in a family car one day each week. Miserable at the thought of them laughing as they drove together on the first day of school, I climbed the steps.
Did my parents tell their parents I’d be gone all year? Did they miss me?

I stepped to one side of the door as I entered
. There would be a sign for Guidance Office, or something like that, and Aunt Madge said they would have a schedule for me. Apparently my conniving parents had had my high school send records here. My eyes were filling with tears as a girl behind me asked, “Need some help with directions?”

It took me a couple of seconds to turn because I was blinking a lot, trying to keep the tears from spilling down my cheeks
. She had noticed, because she looked away for a moment and then back, this time with a bigger smile. “I need to go to guidance, or wherever they give out schedules,” I said.

“Student services
. I’ll walk you. I’m Margo.”

“I’m Jolie, Jolie Gentil.” I pronounced the name with the soft J and G, with the il at the end of Gentil sounding like a long e.

“That means…” she hesitated.

“Pretty nice, in French
. My father’s French Canadian.”

“I’ve had two years of French,” she offered.

“I’ve been avoiding it,” I said.

I glanced at her profile as we walked
. She was about five-six and at what my father would call a healthy weight. Her dark hair hung in loose curls around her shoulders, and she walked as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

We had come to an open door, and she gestured to it, then leaned closer and whispered, “Mrs. Collins is the nicest
.” She hurried down the hall.

I adjusted the canvas shoulder bag that held a binder and pens and pencils and began to walk in
.

“
Yo, Jolie.” It was Scoobie, and he had a big grin. “Missed you at the front door.”

Something in my churning stomach relaxed a little
. “Hi. A nice girl walked me down.”

“
I saw. Margo. She’s good. You want me to…”

“Let’s move on,” a man’s voice said
. The man was very tall, maybe six feet two, and he had on not just a suit, but one with a vest and a very expensive-looking tie.

Scoobie’s smile turned into a stony expression
. “I’ll catch you later, Jolie.” He turned sharply and walked down the hall, into the noise of slamming lockers and people greeting each other as if they hadn’t seen each other in ten years instead of two months.

“Do you need some help, young lady
?”

I was already out of sorts, and this man had made it worse
. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t scare away the one person I know.” Given my height of five-two, I had to crane my neck a bit to look into his eyes. My brown hair went halfway down my back when I craned my neck. His eyes were very dark, and not especially friendly.

He
regarded me with something akin to amusement. “I take it you’re new here.”

“My name is Jolie Gentil,” I said, “and I’m transferring from Lakewood High.”

He nodded. “Ah. I know your aunt, of course.” He started to say something else and instead focused his gaze down the hall. “O’Malley. Quit horsing around!” 

I followed his gaze and saw a guy with bright red hair do an exaggerated bow before walking down the hall.

“Mrs. Rogers is expecting you.” He said this with a quick nod and then moved toward a knot of kids who were looking at pictures in someone’s small photo album.

I walked in
to the office and took in two kind of harried-looking women. One was on the phone and scribbling notes, the other had a large stack of manila folders on her desk and was quickly going through at the tabs, apparently looking for a certain file. Both sat at desks behind a Formica-topped counter, and I approached it.

The one with the folders, whose desk name plate said Mrs. E. Rogers, looked up. “Come in
. New are you?” She was dressed more formally than the other woman, and did not smile.

“Uh, yes. I’m Jolie Gentil
.”

She went back to her pile and pulled out one folder, which I took to be mine
. “Come on back, and we’ll go over your day.”

BY THE TIME MRS. ROGERS had gone over my list of courses and given me a map of the two-story brick building, the homeroom period had already started. I listened to classroom after classroom saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a perky-sounding voice led from the public address system.

The hallway looked a lot like those
at my high school in Lakewood—tiled floors, lockers each about four feet high strewn between each classroom door, and fluorescent lights every few feet. The only difference was that the halls in Lakewood were a bit wider, and some of the lockers in Lakewood had spray paint that covered graffiti. Usually the lockers were repainted in the summer, so they’d probably be clean today.

I took a breath and walked into the last room in the hallway, my homeroom. I hoped to see Scoobie, or even the girl named Margo, but no such luck
. Instead there were about thirty students I didn’t know and a teacher who looked to be about thirty-five and had a lot of blonde curly hair.

The teacher looked up
. “Come in.” She gave me a brief smile.

I walked to the back of the room, feeling as if everyone was looking at me.

“Okay, welcome to your junior year homeroom. I…Mr. O’Malley, put your ruler in your binder or I’ll break it.”

I’m sure my eyes widened
. I looked toward the offending Mr. O’Malley and he grimaced at the teacher and stuck the ruler in the pocket of his binder. I couldn’t tell what he had been doing with it, but the girl in front of him was gently rubbing the back of her neck.
Can these people be more immature?

I had missed the teacher’s name, but she had mine, and she mangled it
. “Jo-lee Gentle?” She glanced at my barely risen hand and asked, “Did I butcher it?”

I supposed she was being friendly
. “A bit. It’s pronounced Zho-lee Zhan tee.” I said this very fast, hoping she would move on.

“You’re new,” a guy at the front of the class said.

“Great brains.” The boy with the ruler looked at me. “I’m Sean O’Malley.”

“I’ll get to you, Sean
. Welcome, Ms. Gentil.” Mercifully, the teacher moved down the roll without asking me any more questions.

BY LUNCHTIME I WAS ready to scream at anyone who talked to me. In Lakewood no one would have paid as much attention to a new student, at least not all the teachers would have. In every class here the teacher had recognized me as new. Consequently, there were a lot of people who knew my name, but I had not managed to absorb many of theirs.

I picked up a cafeteria tray, and a voice behind me said, “I saw you in church with your aunt Sunday.”

I looked into a friendly set of brown eyes and recognized the good-looking boy in the pew ahead of Aunt Madge and me. “I remember you.”

“Get your food and come over to that table
.” He pointed to a table against the far wall. “I’m Michael Riordan, by the way.”

He moved away before I could respond, and the knot in my stomach lessened a bit
. At least I would not eat alone. I wondered if the others at his table would mind. If any group met the definition of a clique they looked like one. Without staring, I could tell that all of the girls were wearing vibrant colors of pink, turquoise, and purple, which were in all of the department stores this year. The guys looked less like they were in uniform, but even from a distance I marked them as a crowd of Levi’s Docker-wearers rather than blue jeans guys.

I grabbed a sub sandwich, bottle of chocolate milk, and a bag of chips
. I was the only girl at the table who did not choose a salad and, from the looks of them, did not get regular manicures. I pushed these thoughts aside and smiled as Michael introduced the seven others. Names were quickly a blur, but I thought Jennifer had the voice of the girl on the PA system this morning, and two of the guys saluted. Jack and Sam, I thought.

Thou
gh they quickly went back to their conversations, several times someone asked me a polite question, always with a smile.
Maybe this won’t be so bad.
I glanced around the room for a moment and saw Scoobie at the doorway, scanning the room. I gave him half a wave. He saw me and turned around and left. I figured he must have a different lunch period.

There were only about tw
enty minutes to actually eat, and I said a smiling good-bye to the others as we walked back toward the hall. Michael caught up with me. “Did you wave at Scoobie?” he asked, in a casual tone.

“Yep
. He was at church Sunday, remember?”

“Yeah, well, his parents never go and he’s mostly by himself
. You might want to steer clear of him.”

“Oh, I…”

“Gotta get to the second floor,” he said, and smiled as he left me.

I wanted to be with people rather than mostly by myself, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted anyone’s advice on who to hang around with.

“SO, IT WASN’T AS bad as I thought
it would be,” I said, to Aunt Madge.

“People here are generally friendly,” she said
. “Petey, leave her alone.”

I stooped to pet him, and was rewarded with a very wet slurp to my hand
. “I’ll take him for a walk in a minute. Did my parents call?” They always called me at home on the first day of school. If work was too busy, their first question when they got home was to ask about my day.

“No,” she said
. “I think they may be on a trip.”

“A trip,” I said, slowly. “Do you know where?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think they went to Montreal for a few days.” She was slicing the still-warm loaves of bread and placing them on a serving tray. There are at least four or five B&Bs in Ocean Alley, but Aunt Madge’s is the only one that serves an afternoon snack.

“They said Dad’s family was extra busy this summer,” I said, slowly
. I couldn’t believe they would go without me. I especially liked my cousin Jeanne Marie and hadn’t seen her in more than a year.

Aunt Madge put down the knife and pushed the cutting board a couple of inches
away from her. “I realize it’s usually hippies who say live in the moment, Jolie, but for the next few months, that might be good for you.”

“What do you mean
?” I ignored Petey’s push on my calf.

“I’m not sure what their plans are for the next few months, but if you think about your day in terms of what they’re doing, it’ll just be frustrating
.” When I didn’t say anything she turned back to the bread. “Could you get the bowls of jelly and butter out of the fridge and put them on the sideboard in the breakfast room for me?”

I did this without speaking
. I wasn’t really mad at Aunt Madge, but I thought the least she could do was be as mad at my parents as I was.