The Georges and the Jewels (14 page)

Jem asked Ornery George to do this three more times. On the third time, as soon as he lifted the hand near the halter, George stepped over behind. Jem said, “There’s a fellow,” and gave him a good pat down the neck. Then he went around to the other side of the horse, switched hands, and did the same thing but in the opposite direction. George was better at it in this direction and moved over twice, with hardly any pressure, almost immediately.

I had never seen any of this stuff before, and I watched as carefully as I could, because I knew without being told that this was what Mom and Danny had worked out between them.

Now Jem waved the end of the rope, and George went around him in a tight circle, a few times one way, then a few times the other. He was clumsy at it and stiff. Jem had to insist, but eventually, he got it, and he got less awkward.

Jem led the horse to the gate.

I looked at Daddy. He looked like he didn’t quite know what to say. Jem said, “Athletic horse, Mr. Lovitt. Nice-made horse. Don’t know much about using his body at this point. How old did you say he was?”

“He’s six.”

“Young, then.”

Now he stood George up and ran his hands down his front legs, feeling his knees and fetlocks and hooves. Then he ran his hand down George’s spine, pressing here and there. At one point George flinched and tried to step away, right when Jem had his hand where Uncle Luke’s rope had been. I thought Jem might ask a question or say something, but he just ran his hand farther down and pressed again. Then he put one hand over George’s nose and the other hand on his neck and shifted his head back and forth. He didn’t once look at his teeth. All the horses were staring at him. Jack called out from his stall, as if to say, “Look at me! I’m here! I’m the important one, don’t you know that?”

Finally, Jem Jarrow walked over to the gate. He said, “Mr. Lovitt, what are you planning to do with this horse, if I might ask?”

“Well, we’re getting him ready to be sold, so—”

But really, of course, he didn’t have an answer for this question.

Jem said, “I’d like to ride the horse, but I’m wondering if I might come back another day, say, Wednesday? And, if you don’t mind, you might just leave the horse alone until then.”

I said, “We don’t mind.”

Daddy said, “Wednesday, Mrs. Lovitt and I will be at the church, setting up—”

I piped up. “I’ll be here. I can watch for you, Mr. Jarrow, and help you with whatever you need.”

“That’s fine. That would be fine,” said Jem Jarrow, and even
though Daddy didn’t look one hundred percent happy about it, he was stuck. And so he smiled and made the best of it.

It was fine with me not to ride Ornery George for another four days.

In the meantime, school was no better than home. In fact, school was so bad that the only thing I enjoyed about it was things we were doing in class—in history we were studying the missions, and I was making a clay model of the mission at San Juan Bautista with one of the boys in my class, Kyle Gonzalez, the sort of kid who is very quiet and always does a good job. In English, we finished with
Adam Bede
, to everyone’s relief, and we were reading
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
, which was pretty good. In math, we were making graphs. This is how bad things were with Gloria, Stella, and the Big Four—anything that was a break from them was good. I even tried being friends with Alexis and Barbara and Debbie, but Debbie and I had been bored with each other for four years. Alexis and Barbara were nice enough to me, but they were much more interested in a play they were trying out for at the community theater. It was called
Twelfth Night
, and they were hoping to play a set of twins—Alexis would play the boy and Barbara would play the girl. They couldn’t stop talking about this play, which I had never heard of, and they were both afraid of horses, so we didn’t have much to say to one another.

As for Stella and the Big Four, you could only call it a war. Brian Connelly was the prize. I couldn’t figure out why it should be Brian—there were several boys in our class and in the eighth grade who were cooler and better-looking, but he
was the one they were fighting over, and he made it worse by trying to be nice to everyone—he must have talked to some grown-up about it, and that’s what they told him to do. Every morning before class, he would stop at each locker—each of the Big Four, Stella, Gloria, and me, for sure, but sometimes also Debbie and Maria and Alexis and Barbara—and say something or other, even if it was only that today, his mom had fixed him tuna fish salad, with celery but not pickles, because he didn’t like pickles at all. Our lockers were alphabetical, so his progress ran Mary A., Joan, Stella, Maria, Linda, the twins, Gloria, me, Mary N., Debbie, Fatima, Lucia. Stella and the Big Four kept track of how long he spent with each girl. Of our group, he spent the shortest time with me, and that was good. Usually, he said, “Hey, Abby, how ya doin’?” and I said, “Fine, thanks.” It was this, and only this, that prevented the Big Four from focusing on me. If Brian wanted to talk to Stella about
The Munsters
, which was one of his favorite shows, then he might only say a word or two to Mary A. and Joan about what he’d had for breakfast and not even get to Mary N. For the rest of the day, the Big Four would monopolize Brian, and also criticize Stella, by saying things like, “Do those socks match, Stella? In this light, they look different,” or, “Did you know you have a little zit, Stella, right there beside your nose? I’m just telling you in case you didn’t know.” This would be said in a loud voice.

If Brian spent more time with Mary A., looking into her lunch box and admiring what her mother had sent, and didn’t get to Stella, then Stella (and sometimes Gloria) played their own games, and one of these was to ask Mary N. if she was losing weight. “You look thinner in the face,” was what Stella
said, knowing perfectly well that the very thing Mary N. wanted above all things was to look thinner in the face—she had dimples in both cheeks. When they were really mad, they said, “You should wear your skirts shorter.” We all knew that Mary N. had fat knees. They said these things in a sweet way, as if they wanted to be friends with Mary N. Since she was the least big of the Big Four, she was the easiest to pick on. Once, when Gloria went to Stella’s house for a sleepover, she and Stella called Mary N. twice and asked, “Is your nose running? Better catch it!” They disguised their voices, then laughed and hung up. Gloria told me about this when she called the next night, Saturday. I knew I was supposed to laugh, but I didn’t. I didn’t like the Big Four, but I wasn’t sure who was being meaner. Even so, I didn’t think there was anyone to be friends with besides Gloria, and if she liked Stella, then I was stuck with her, too, wasn’t I?

On that Monday after Jem Jarrow, everything was quiet for almost the whole day. Even at lunch, they sat at their table and we sat at ours, and the two tables might not have even been in the same universe. Brian had begun his day by chatting with Mary A. and Joan about watching
Mister Ed
the night before. I had never seen
Mister Ed
—even if we’d had TV, the show was on Sunday—but I knew Mister Ed was a talking horse. I had heard Brian say that they got the horse to move his lips by rubbing peanut butter on his gums, and I thought that was interesting. Worth a try, too. But apparently, this conversation was so involving that Brian never did get to Stella, even to say hi, and so she was mad about it for the rest of the day. Then, when Brian came a little late into the lunchroom, Joan and Mary A.
waved at him and moved over to make a spot. Brian hesitated, but he didn’t actually look at us. He just sat down.

The problem came in study hall, last period, which normally our class did not have. But our science teacher was sick, so we were sent to study hall with the other seventh graders—no doubt they didn’t trust the boys to leave the gas jets alone in the absence of the teacher. Anyway, about five minutes after the bell, our group filed into the study hall and took whatever seats were available, and by the time Mary A. and Joan got into the room (they had been brushing their hair in the girls’ bathroom), there was one chair by the window and another by the door, and that one was right next to Stella. I had snagged a chair just behind Stella, and we had already passed our first note—something from her to me, which I hadn’t had time to open yet. Joan sat in the chair near us and gave me a look, then gave Stella a look. Then she sighed and opened her science book and began writing a note, which she passed to Debbie, who passed it to Jesús Valdez, who passed it to Fatima, who passed it to Mary N., who passed it to Mary A. So far, so good.

But when Mary A. had completed her response, the teacher just happened to get up and walk around to make sure we were all doing our work, as she sometimes did, and so there was a new challenge. Mary A. and Joan met this challenge by deciding to sharpen their pencils, which they were allowed to do without asking permission, and so they both got up, pretending not to be paying any attention to one another, and headed for the pencil sharpener next to the blackboard. As soon as Joan got up, I saw that Stella was fiddling with something, and then, before Joan even got to the pencil sharpener,
I saw what it was—she had removed the cartridge from her fountain pen (black ink, because we were required to turn in final copies of our papers in black ink) and leaned over and set it on Joan’s desk chair.

Now Joan sharpened her pencil, exchanged her note with Mary A., and headed back to her seat. I was looking at the cartridge. I was sure she would see it—it was sitting right there as big as anything. But she was too busy making faces across the room at Mary A. and Linda, and so she turned around, twisted her body, and sat right on it. And then she slid around to get more comfortable. I looked at Stella, who was smiling and reading her history book. Stella didn’t look at me. Everyone else was studying hard. Even Debbie had her nose so deep in her book that I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know whether Stella knew that I had seen the cartridge.

Joan wasn’t wearing a white skirt, but it wasn’t black, either—she had a new mossy green wool skirt with pleats that were sewn to about four inches below the waist, and then flared out. It was pretty, and her sweater matched it. She also had on a white blouse. When the bell rang and she stood up, she had a long streak of black ink running across her skirt and then down. When she reached around to smooth her skirt after standing up, she got the ink on her fingers and then on her sweater. It was then she noticed the ink. She screamed and started cursing. She said the
G
word attached to the
D
word, and more than once. Very bad. Stella made no sound or gesture. She didn’t even ask what happened. She just wandered out of the room with the boys. The boys didn’t care, but all the girls except Debbie, who was already out the door, gathered around Joan and looked at
her skirt, her hand, and her sweater. “Oh, it’s ruined!” cried Joan.

Linda found the ink cartridge under the desk chair. The desk chair had a streak on it, too. Joan insisted that someone had left it there on purpose, but the other girls didn’t believe this—any one of the boys, they thought, could have forgotten that he dropped the ink cartridge or dropped it without realizing it. It could have been there for hours or all day.

I was the only one who knew that Stella had put it there on purpose.

After school I was waiting for the bus with Gloria, who had been sitting in her usual seat in the front of the study hall, under the gaze of the teacher, and so didn’t know anything about the skirt incident. She and I were watching the other girls. Stella had, once again, gotten picked up by her mom. Gloria said, “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. She got ink on her skirt, so what? Her mom will take it to the cleaners.”

I said, “I guess it was a new skirt.”

“Stella said that. She said they were talking about it at lunch, that it was a new skirt from some store in San Francisco.”

“She heard that?”

“She said she did.”

I said, “You know, I—” but I said it quietly, because I wasn’t sure how to tell Gloria about Stella. Gloria didn’t even hear me. She exclaimed, “Forget them! Can I come see the colt this weekend? I saved him some apples.”

“He doesn’t eat treats yet.”

“Well, I’ll give them to the others, then. But we can do something after. I’ll get Mom to bring me out for a while, then
you can get your mom to let us go someplace for the afternoon.”

“I’ll ask.”

So, I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen, but all the way home on the bus, I thought about how mean Stella had been. I wondered if the ink on the skirt equaled the pen tear in the stocking. I also wondered when Joan was going to realize that Stella had done it on purpose and whether Stella wanted Joan to know that. After all, what good was it, in terms of the war, if Joan thought it was an accident?

O
N
W
EDNESDAY AFTER SCHOOL
, I
CHANGED INTO MY RIDING
clothes right away and was on Black George when Daddy and Mom left for the church. As soon as they turned right out of the driveway, I jumped off him and put him back in the gelding corral—he was a willing horse, and Daddy always said, “Some days, ten good minutes is enough.”