Girl Unmoored (17 page)

I said, “Who?” just to make it seem like having a famous family was old news.

“
Those
people, that came in to talk to Ms. Frane. Those movie star people.”

“Oh
them
. My aunt and uncle. Yeah, they’re famous. They live in Hollywood, but they wanted to come to Maine and see what a regular school looks like. So my dad let them take his place for the conference.”

“Wow,” Annie Potts said.

Sherman Howl walked up to me next. “Hey, your aunt’s weird-looking.” I flicked another ant off my knee. “Well, she’s famous.” Which ended up being a good enough reason. I waited for Rennie and Jenny Pratt to chime in, but they didn’t. In fact, they weren’t even at recess. Annie Potts said they had been picked to help with the graduation decorating committee, and it hit me then: if Rennie had seen Mike, she would have remembered exactly who he was. I sighed so hard I almost fell over. Annie Potts said, “Are you sick?” But I smiled and said, “No, just perplexed.”

After school, I got my bike and walked it down to the lower school swings. My stomach had already started to curdle and I didn’t want to risk sweating anywhere, especially on my lips. I wished I could have asked Chad what to do; I bet he’d kissed plenty of boys in seventh grade.

The swing sets were empty. I leaned my bike up against a tree and slipped off my backpack. Then I waited. Johnny Berman played lacrosse in the spring, and suddenly I worried about whether or not he meant for me to meet him after practice. I sat on a swing. Lacrosse practice went for at least an hour, and I wasn’t about to wait that long. I stood up to go, but sat back down again. If I left, he might not ever ask to meet me again. And the fact was: my middle school life depended on it. If word got around that I had kissed Johnny Berman, no one, not even Jenny Pratt, would really mean it the next time they called me a loser. Ugly or weird, but not a loser. Johnny Berman didn’t kiss losers.

After a few hundred swings, though, I decided to leave. Just as I stood, Johnny Berman, in his lacrosse uniform, came running over.

“Hey,” he smiled, whipping his sweaty hair out of his eyes.

“Hi,” I said. I never really believed that thing about someone’s knees getting weak, until now. Mine were shaking like Grandma Bramhall’s neck. I had to concentrate to keep them from collapsing. Johnny Berman was a little shorter than me, but standing there alone with him he seemed like a giant.

“I gotta get back to practice,” he said.
Smile. Whip.

“Okay.”

“But listen,” he pulled a tightly folded piece of paper out of his shoulder pad. “I was wondering. Would you give this to Jenny Pratt for me?”

“What?” My knees hardened into cement.

He handed the note to me, so I had to take it. It fit into my palm.

“Thanks, Apron. I knew you were cool.”

“But, I’m not, really friends with her,” I stuttered.

He looked at me surprised. “I see you together all the time. Look, if you don’t want to, I can ask someone else.”

I wanted to say that was a great idea, ask Rennie. But I didn’t want to risk a cry. I should have guessed it would turn out this way. Johnny Berman wasn’t anywhere near the hottest guy in school, but even he was too good for me. “I’ll give it to her.”

He slapped me on the arm. “Thanks. All right, see you later.” And with that he jogged off, hiking his lacrosse stick over his shoulder.

“What did you say?” I asked Mike on the phone later, after I biked back from school so fast that my lungs still didn’t know I was home yet.

Turns out I had looked sad instead of perplexed. Mike said Ms. Frane was worried that I was upset about my dad not showing up and asked a lot of questions about how I was doing at home.

“I told her you were doing as well as can be expected, with everything that’s going on. A new mother and new sibling on the way.”

“You told her about the little whatever?” I asked, opening a jar of peanut butter, not sure if I should be mad about it. Although once Mrs. Perry knew something you might as well put it on a bumper sticker.

“I wasn’t supposed to? You should have told me that.”

Mike said that aside from Ms. Frane worrying about me, they had a great time. “In fact, she asked for our card.”

“You
told
her about
Scent Appeal
?” I stopped the peanut butter jar mid-rotation and pulled my finger out, a plop of it hanging there.

“Yeah,” Mike admitted. “We never even got to the Hollywood part. She mentioned the shop right away, said she thought she’d seen us before.”

“So you mean she’s seen Chad, as a boy?”

Mike didn’t say anything for a second. Then he said, “She did seem awfully familiar.” And even though my throat was still clogged up with all the things I wanted to call Johnny Berman, we got laughing so hard that my head cramped. I thanked him again for going to the conference and he said, “No, Apron, thank you.” He hadn’t seen Chad having that much fun in a long time. After we hung up, I took Johnny Berman’s note and threw it in the trash. I might have given it to any other girl, but not Jenny Pratt.

On my way upstairs I heard a laugh coming from the back porch. My dad’s laugh. He was lying down on the couch with his head in M’s lap.

“There,” M said. “He moves.”

When my dad saw me, he sat up. “Hey, Apron. How was school?”

I would have told him the truth: that it was its usual horrible self with a sprinkle of Chad and Mike on top. But M was there, waiting for me to complain about something so she could complain about
me
.

“Fine.”

“You want to feel your little brother? Margie’s sure it’s a boy,” he looked over at her with a smile. Then he looked back at me. “Come on.”

The truth was I
did
want to. So even though it was inside M, I decided I could close my eyes and hold my breath and pretend it was Mrs. Christianson’s stomach that I was feeling. My dad moved over for me and I placed my hand on top of M’s mound. Nothing moved except M’s breath. I picked my hand up to leave, but M caught it and moved it over to her other side. And then I felt it—a squirmy kind of roll. “Weird!” I said, smiling up at M. And M smiled back, making everything doubly weird.

Next to me my dad said, “It’s a real live person, all right. That’s going to be needing a whole lot of real live taking care of pretty soon. Which is why his real live mother needs to do some real live settling down before he gets here.”

It was funny, all the
real lives
he used, and I waited for M to chuckle about it, too. But instead, her grin fell off. She plucked off my hand and stood. “I forgots the meatloaf,” she said. Then she turned and waddled by us without another word.

I looked at my dad to see what had happened, but he looked just as surprised as me. He sighed and folded his fingers together.

“Hey, Apron, I have to talk to you about something.”

It wasn’t going to be good whatever it was. I could smell the dusty couch cushions filled with so many Maine winters it could choke you.

My dad kept his fingers folded in his lap. “I can’t come to graduation,” he said, looking up at me like I was going to be upset about it. “I mean, if I hadn’t found out about it
yesterday
, maybe I could have done something about it. But I have a three-hour final exam to give in the morning to a hundred and twenty-eight students.”

“Only eighth graders graduate, Dad,” I said, perplexed.

“I know,” he said, tapping his fingers together. “But. Listen, I’m just sorry I can’t be there, that’s all.”

Suddenly, I wanted to tell him about Mr. Perry. Except looking at him like that, with his legs crossed and his fingers mixed up in his lap, you could tell he was already filled to the brim with trouble. He didn’t need any more.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, looking out through the screen and watching some birds peck at the grass. Already mosquitoes buzzed at you every chance they got, and this was only the beginning. By August you would only have to walk across the grass once for your ankles to look like they had the chicken pox. One of the birds stopped pecking to chirp, then jerked its head around fast, trying to figure who had just made that sound. Before, I might have asked my dad why they did that, couldn’t they tell it was only themselves making that chirp? And he might have said, “No, Apron, they have peas for brains.” But these days, we just sat there, saying nothing about the same thing.

“Dad,” I said, finally.

“Yuh?”

“Do you think M likes it here?”

He jerked his head over to me faster than one of those birds.

“Of course I do, Apron,” he said, bad mood back on his face. “Listen. You’re going to have to face it. This is our new life.
Dixi
. Look it up.”

He stood and walked by me, leaving a cloud of madness behind. And when the screen door slammed shut, every single one of those birds got scared off, too.

Seventh graders don’t graduate, but we still have to dress up and watch the eighth graders.
I had no choice but to wear my Avon lady dress. I kept telling my dad I needed to get a new dress, the Lilly Pulitzer one wasn’t even an
option
for school, but he just kept on grading his papers so I gave up.

When I finally got to the bike racks, I could see that only four other people had biked to school besides me, and two of those bikes had been sitting there since March. I pulled off my sneakers and slid into my high heels, which were too small for me now. I decided not to tell my dad we were getting dismissed at noon today in case he made me go shopping with M for diapers, so I just said, “Bye” like any other morning. We hadn’t said much to each other since he scared off the birds in the backyard and I learned what
Dixi
meant: “I have spoken—say no more on the matter.”

Graduation was supposed to be outside except for the chance of rain so Principal Parker moved it into the gym. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, though. Ms. Frane wore a pink sundress, but didn’t really look any different other than that. The two barrettes in her frizzy brown hair still weren’t pulling anything out of the way. After both homeroom classes squished into our room, she put us in one long line according to the alphabet, which meant I was in between Joe Blink and Jimmy Cannon. Both of them were pretty normal, except Jimmy Cannon’s eyes were crossed and he wore glasses. Johnny Berman was on the other side of Joe Blink. “Hey, Apron,” he whispered to me as soon as Ms. Frane walked away. “Did she say anything?”

Jenny Pratt was in the back of the line, a head taller than every single boy around her. And Rennie’s dress was so puffed out it looked like she was going to need two chairs to sit. When they first saw me this morning, Rennie pointed at my Avon lady dress and whispered. I turned my back to them. You don’t have to do anything for some people to hate you, but it would have been nice to have a better dress.

“Yeah,” I told Johnny. “She said she’ll be there.”

That’s what his note said.

“Cool. Thanks.”

“Cool,” I smiled.

“Come on, kids,” Ms. Frane said. So we started walking in tight steps down the hall and the stairs, and past the cafeteria, which smelled like bleach now instead of meatloaf. When we finally snaked into the gym, the sun was shining so brightly through the windows some people in the bleachers had their sunglasses on. Every year a lot of people think Principal Parker’s time has come and gone, but after every summer it always comes back again.

Our class walked over to the seventh-grade section where somebody had lined up chairs. The eighth graders had another section with fancy white ribbon wrapped around their chairs and flowers at the ends of each row that would have looked a lot better if Mike and Chad had put them there.

Ms. Frane told us to move it, so we picked up the pace and sat down. From my seat I could see every single Perry in the history of the world sitting in the top bleachers. For a second, I thought I saw something, so I blinked hard and shook my head and then opened my eyes again and saw the same thing: M. She was sitting in between Mrs. Perry and Rennie’s aunt, waving her arms around like a crazy person, but not at me, at someone behind me.
Rennie
.

My blood boiled hotter than the square of sun coming through the window and frying the
F
s at the end of our row. I started fanning myself with the song sheet, but sweat kept pouring down my back and behind my knees. I turned my head like everyone else and clapped for the eighth graders walking in, but kept my eye on M, who leaned over and laughed at something one of those short Perrys said. I tried to sneak a look at Rennie, but I couldn’t see her behind the
LMNO
s.

Music started playing and Principal Parker got up and said what a great school Falmouth Middle School was except for the library that got caved in by the big tree after lightning struck, so now there were only about three books left in it. Everyone laughed. Then we stood and sang the school song. I could see M singing all wrong in English, even though she was reading the song sheet. On the second verse she said something to Mrs. Perry, who put her hand on that bump and smiled. Finally, Principal Parker started calling up the eighth graders so the rest of us sat there clapping one solid clap.

Huge squares of sun were blazing down and frying almost half the alphabet now. I looked down at my toes, crooked inside my high heels. Joe Blink was wearing black high-tops, which were lined up side by side, but Jimmy Cannon’s feet were tapping around and bumping into mine every second. All that clapping started sounding like rain, so I closed my eyes and pretended I was outside under a tree, listening to it.