THREE YEARS AGO—SPRING, EIGHTH GRADE
I never should have worn my jean skirt. I wasn’t fat, but I was definitely pushing the chubby border. I wanted to wear the skirt because I thought it looked good, but I quickly regretted it. It was too warm for tights, and my bare thighs had been rubbing together as I walked, and they felt like they were going to blister. I shifted again on the bleacher, trying to give my legs their own breathing space.
“What’s the matter with you?” Lauren asked. “Stop moving around.”
“I’m hot.”
“I know I am, but what are you?” she said with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.
“Ha. Lauren Wood, stand-up comic extraordinaire.”
Lauren took a regal bow. It was good to see her joking around again, even if it was a lame joke. The idea of starting high school seemed to freak her out more than me. For the past few weeks she’d been in a rotten mood, and everything set her off. That week alone we’d had at least four fights, one where she didn’t speak to me for a full day because she thought I was making fun of what she had brought for lunch. Lauren was a huge fan of the silent treatment when she was ticked at you. I would end up begging her to forgive me, even when I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything wrong. It had been established years ago that Lauren was the drama queen and I was the diplomat. I had pleaded with her to stop being mad about the lunch fight. I even declared I was sincerely sorry if her Oreos had suffered any emotional distress on my account. I didn’t care about sacrificing my pride. Keeping my best friend happy was worth it.
“Do you see that guy over there?” Lauren yanked her head to the left. I leaned forward to look, but she rammed her bony elbow into my side.
“Don’t look at him.”
“How am I supposed to see him if I don’t look at him?”
“I mean look, but don’t look like you’re looking. God.”
I leaned forward casually and then let my eyes drift over the crowd. The gym was packed. Lincoln High was huge, with at least seven hundred students in every grade. Students came from different middle schools all across the city. Each spring the school did a welcome event for the incoming freshmen so that we could bond as a class. We had already been given a tour of the school, taken to an extracurricular “fair” so we could see all the clubs and teams we had to choose from, and subjected to a hot lunch from the cafeteria. Now we were rounding out the day with a rah-rah school spirit rally. All of this was supposed to help keep us from freaking out next fall, as if not knowing how to find our way to our lockers was the problem. If schools really wanted to reduce the anxiety level, they would distribute student handbooks with useful information like which bathroom belongs to the stoner kids, and how the sink in the biology lab always sprays water, and how under no circumstances should you order the hot lunch on the day they serve “shepherd’s pie” because it’s leftovers from last week with boxed mashed potatoes on top. They never tell you the useful stuff. That you have to figure out on your own.
Lauren was taking the whole thing very seriously. She scribbled down notes during the fair, grabbed handouts from each table, and ranked activities in preference from best to worse. I suspected that later her mom would help her turn it into a spreadsheet complete with social acceptability ratings.
My eyes scanned the rows of people. At first I couldn’t figure out who had caught Lauren’s eye, but then I saw him. Lauren usually went for the Mr. All-American type, blond, fresh off the country club look. This guy was different. He was leaning back, his elbows on the bleacher seat behind him. He was wearing what looked like a vintage T-shirt. Not some shirt from Old Navy that was meant to look like a cool vintage shirt, but really wasn’t—his was the real thing, pale and soft from years of washing. He had red hair that was cut short in the back, but a little longer in the front. I was staring at him when he looked over and met my eyes. He gave a smile and then a small salute in my direction.
“Oh my God, he saw me.” I yanked my head back and Lauren leaned forward to see the situation for herself.
“He’s waving,” she whispered. She looked at me and we burst out laughing. “Is he looking at me?” Lauren asked.
“I’m not looking again. You look.”
“No way. You look.”
I leaned forward again and risked a quick glance. He was staring over. He gave another wave. I found myself smiling and then figured what the hell, and waved back. Lauren grabbed my arm, practically snapping it off at the elbow, and yanked it back down. I leaned back so fast I nearly fell off the bench, my legs kicking out.
“What are you doing?” Lauren asked. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed that she was stuck sitting next to me, the dork.
“Well, it’s not like he doesn’t know we were checking him out. We can’t act casual now.”
“Oh God, he’s coming over here. Do I look okay?” Lauren gave her teeth a quick wipe with a finger in case there was any hot lunch caught in there. I looked her up and down. She looked the way she always looked to me.
“Hey.” The good-looking waver guy stood at the end of our row, his hands in his pockets. He smiled and I felt my stomach turn over slowly, but in a good way, not in a hot-lunch-gone-bad kind of way. Lauren giggled but didn’t say anything.
“Hey,” I answered back as it seemed one of us should say something.
“I’m Tyler.”
“Helen, and this is my best friend, Lauren,” I said, and Lauren gave another giggle. She was doing this thing with her eyes like she had something in them; they were fluttering up and down spastically. It must have had a hypnotizing effect because Tyler was staring at her with a sort of vacant smile on his face. With everyone identified we seemed to have run out of things to talk about. I looked down at his T-shirt and felt myself break into a smile. It was the logo for the Sundance Film Festival.
“Movie fan?” I asked.
“Yeah, you?” he asked, breaking eye contact with Lauren.
“Uh-huh. I love old movies best, all the Bringing Up Baby or The Philadelphia Story stuff.”
“I’m into more current stuff. Sort of edgy. The Coen brothers … stuff like that.”
“Curtiz was better,” I countered.
“Who?” he asked.
This guy thought he was into film and he didn’t know Curtiz? Puh-leeze.
“Director of Casablanca,” I answered.
“Casablanca? Could you pick something more out of date?” Lauren interrupted. We both looked over at her. She gave her hair a toss.
Tyler laughed as if she had said something profoundly amusing.
“So what kind of movies do you like?” Tyler asked Lauren.
“Romances,” she said, doing the fluttery eye thing again.
“How can you say you’re a film nut if you don’t like Casablanca? That’s like saying you love ice cream except for vanilla.”
Both of them looked at me, but neither spoke. It seemed like everyone had agreed to act like I hadn’t said anything at all.
“Nice to meet you, Lauren.” Tyler smiled at her and then looked at me blankly.
“Helen,” I reminded him. “Nice to meet you too.” I felt my face flush. Someone at the front of the gym was testing the microphone, calling out for people to take their seats.
“I should go.” Tyler leaned over and took my pencil from my hand. “Here’s my number. Why don’t you guys give me a call if you want to catch a movie sometime.” He scribbled his number on the top of my sheet. I looked at it like I had never seen a phone number before. I certainly had never seen one that a boy had given me. I might have to frame it.
“Yeah, okay,” I mumbled, my face turning bright red.
“We’ll see you around,” Lauren added, and he gave her a nod before heading back to his friends. I watched him walk away. I turned around to see if Lauren noticed how nicely his jeans fit, and she was staring at me with her lips tight and thin. Uh-oh.
“God, Helen, why don’t you throw yourself at him?”
“What?”
“You knew I liked him, but you practically attacked him when he came over.”
“You like him?”
Lauren cocked her head to the side and then looked away. “Whatever.”
“I was just talking to him.”
“You like movies? Why, I love movies. Let me bore you with all the stuff I know about stupid old movies,” Lauren said in a high squeaky voice.
“Sorry.” I tried to think of where I went wrong. I could tell she was annoyed with me, but it wasn’t like I brought up movies out of nowhere.
“Just forget it.” Lauren crossed her arms and stared out at the gym floor. “You have to cut that out.”
“Cut what out?”
“Acting like a total dork all the time. We’re going to be in high school, so it wouldn’t kill you to act normal once in a while. I mean, it’s one thing to like all that weird stuff, but you don’t have to brag about it any time we meet someone.”
“Old movies aren’t weird. It’s not like I like taxidermy or something.”
Lauren sighed. “Talking about taxidermy is weird too. It’s like you don’t even know what normal is.” We sat there not talking until the band began playing the Lincoln school song and the assembly officially started. I risked glancing over at Tyler one more time. He was staring in our direction, and I turned away quickly as if I had been caught doing something wrong. I don’t know why I bothered. He was looking in our direction, but the only person he saw was Lauren. People always liked Lauren. I was the bonus item, what people got for free when they hung out with her.
The assembly went on forever. If one more person got up to tell us how many opportunities awaited us during the next four years I was going to stick a sharpened pencil in my ear.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered to Lauren.
“Thanks for the update.”
“Seriously, I have to go. Come with me.”
“Not now.” Lauren pointed toward the stage. Lincoln’s cheerleading squad was doing a routine. “We should try out in the fall.” She rummaged through the stack of handouts for the one that gave the details on the cheer squad.
I looked at Lauren as if she had announced that she wanted to take up cattle roping. We weren’t exactly cheerleader material. Cheerleaders do not have thighs that rub together, and Lauren, who didn’t have the same thigh issues, suffered from near terminal clumsiness. She couldn’t do a cartwheel without falling over.
“Are you kidding?”
“What? We could be cheerleaders.”
“Have you ever noticed that the cheerleaders are the most popular girls in school?”
“We’re not the most popular girls.” I hated to be the one to point this out to her, but you’d think she would have noticed by now.
“My mom says high school is completely different. It’s like a fresh start.”
I rolled my eyes. Fresh start, maybe. Complete life do-over? I don’t think so.
Lauren went back to watching them intently, as if her life depended on memorizing the dance routine. I slipped past her, leaving her to her cheerleading daydreams.
The bathrooms under the bleachers doubled as the girls’ locker room. The room smelled like a mix of chlorine, mildewed towels, and Secret deodorant. I pushed a stall door open and sat down. As soon as I was seated the stall door started to creep back open. I kicked it shut and it flew right past the latch and swung out into the bathroom. Great, one broken latch and now I was on display for the entire locker room. This was exactly the kind of thing that schools should give you a warning on but don’t.
Suddenly I heard someone laugh. I finished as fast as I could and yanked my skirt back down, trying to look casual. I waited there for a moment, but no one came into the bathroom. I took a few steps toward the sinks, and the voices and laughter got louder. There was a door leading to the pool, bolted from the locker room side. I pressed my ear against the door. The voices were coming from there for certain.
I slipped the bolt open, the click sounding very loud in the empty bathroom, but the voices on the other side didn’t change. They hadn’t heard anything. I pulled the door open slowly and peered through the crack.
Holy. Shit.
There were soap bubbles everywhere; bubbles spreading like a foamy blob across the tile floor. The swimming pool was covered in a frothy concoction, like a giant latte. At the back of the room near the diving board a group of seniors stood pouring bottles of lemon yellow dish soap into the water. They were laughing, and Matt Ryan, who I knew from the local paper as the school’s star athlete, was standing back trying to capture the whole thing on his camera phone. He was the one who saw me. He winked at me then pressed his finger to his mouth, in the universal symbol for shhh, and I knew I should pretend I never saw a thing. I shut the door quietly and slid the bolt closed.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped and whirled around to face Lauren.
“There are a bunch of seniors dumping soap into the pool.”
“Get out!” Lauren walked past me and slid the bolt back on the door.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to know about it.”
“Duh.” Lauren pulled the door open and peered through the crack. She gave a tiny squeal and shut the door. “It must be the senior prank.”
Senior prank was a long-standing Lincoln High tradition. Each class tried to come up with a way to outdo the class before. I figured by the time we were seniors we would have to come up with something worthy of making CNN, like kidnapping the prime minister of Canada.
“They must have dumped at least a dozen bottles of soap into the pool,” I said.
“We should go. The assembly is almost over, and we don’t want to be caught down here.” Lauren took off. Once we were in the hall I looked behind me. There was a wall of bubbles pressing against the frosted glass window in the door that led directly to the pool. I jogged after Lauren.
The whole thing seemed funny. It was a prank after all, a joke. Just good clean soapy fun. I thought I was pretty cool to be in on it, especially considering I wasn’t even officially a freshman yet.
The school administration took a dimmer view of the situation. Apparently dish soap and pool filters are a bad combination. Then there was the fact that one of the school janitors slipped on the soapy pool deck and fell, pulling his knee all out of whack. Rumor had it he was suing the school in some kind of worker’s compensation case for millions of dollars, but that part might not have been true. What was a fact was that the school administration was on a mission to find out who was behind the whole thing.
The day after my birthday party an article appeared in the Sunday paper saying the seniors responsible had been caught. The paper showed a photo of Principal LaPoint looking stern with his arms crossed over his chest. He was quoted as calling those caught the “ringleaders,” like it was a major crime versus a senior prank. He was forbidding those four students from attending either prom or graduation. He wanted to withhold their diplomas altogether, but apparently the school board wasn’t willing to go that far. There were quotes in the paper from people around town, most of whom thought the punishment was too severe, although there were a few who seemed to think the death penalty might be in order.
The first hint I had that anything was wrong, that the story would involve me at all, was on Monday morning. I was wearing a new soft white short sleeve sweater that I had gotten for my birthday. I was in a good mood until I got to my locker. snitch was written in black marker across the door. It was underlined three times. I walked up slowly, my finger extended. The ink looked still wet, but it was dry. It didn’t smudge. I heard someone laugh and turned around to see a group of girls looking over from across the hall before they scurried away, still laughing. As I walked to math class I noticed it—everyone was staying far away from me. An invisible force field between me and the rest of the world. No one got closer than a few feet. It was like I had developed leprosy over the weekend.
I was walking into the classroom when someone bumped hard into my back. My book and papers went flying to the floor. I whirled around and Bill from my math class stood there looking at me.
“What?” he asked, his voice flat. I could hear his friends laughing.
I bent down to pick up my stuff. No one said anything to me in math. I hadn’t been the social butterfly before, but this was different. I felt people staring at me, but when I looked around, no one would meet my eyes. My stomach felt hot and tight, and I wanted to throw up. Even Mr. Grady, our teacher, seemed annoyed with me. The whole morning was like that. I kept trying to find Lauren, but she wasn’t in English or at her locker between classes. When I saw her standing in the lunch line getting her food I had never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life. I had to fight the urge to run over to her.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Lauren looked at me like she had never seen me before. It was like I was stuck in a weird sci-fi movie.
“What do you want?” she asked holding her tray between us like a barrier.
“What’s with you? I need to talk to you.” I touched her elbow. Lauren yanked away and her tray lurched, slopping orange red ravioli sauce onto my new sweater. We both looked down at the spreading stain. Everyone else in the cafeteria was gaping at us.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Lauren? Why are you mad at me? Why is everybody mad at me?”
Someone standing in line gave a disbelieving snort.
“I didn’t think you would ever do something like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Tell on the seniors. I mean, it isn’t just you; by telling, you make our whole class look like a bunch of losers. We all have to fit in at Lincoln High next year, and now we’re going to be known as part of the class that ratted out the most popular seniors. Everyone will connect us with what you did. It was just a prank, Helen.” Lauren’s voice was so loud I was pretty sure everyone in the cafeteria could hear her.
“But I didn’t tell,” I said softly.
“There’s no point lying about it now. Everyone already knows.”
I felt a hot rush of tears in my throat choking off what I was going to say. I walked stiffly out of the cafeteria as kids yelled things after me. I didn’t even stop by my locker; I walked straight out of the school and went home. I peeled off my ruined sweater, stuffed it under the bed, and crawled in. When my mom came home I told her I was sick.
I stayed home sick for the entire week. It wasn’t even lying. I felt awful. I didn’t want to eat anything and even though I was tired, I couldn’t sleep. On Friday I went over to Lauren’s house. I had to find a way to make things right. I could live with everyone else being mad, but I couldn’t stand to be on the outs with my best friend. Lauren was in the backyard with a guy I didn’t recognize. They were both wearing sweats. I stood at the gate and watched. He was spotting her, helping her learn how to do a cartwheel.
“Keep your legs up, nice and straight.”
“I’m trying.”
“You can do it. It’s just a confidence thing. You think you’ll fall, so you do. Just believe, and then up and over.”
Lauren turned a perfect cartwheel. She gave a squeal and jumped into his arms. That’s when she saw me.
“Helen.”
We stood awkwardly looking at each other.
“This is Mark, my gymnastics instructor. My mom hired him.”
Mark made his excuses and left.
“Still thinking of trying out for cheerleading, huh?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I didn’t tell anyone, Lauren. You have to believe me.” The words came rushing out in one breath. My eyes burned and threatened to spill over. Lauren crossed her arms and sighed.
“Don’t start crying again,” she said, her voice sounding tired.
“Someone else must have told on them, or maybe one of them got cold feet and ratted out the others. Maybe together we can figure out who did it.” Lauren loved mysteries. I was hoping to convince her that this would be a fun one to solve.
“God, just give it up. No one else told.”
I looked at her and felt my stomach ice over. I felt things fall into place.
“You …” My voice trailed off.
“Me.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember when Principal LaPoint talked about how many opportunities we’ll have in the next few years?”
I nodded.
“I’m taking one of them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you know Emily Watson called me?”
“Who?”
“Emily Watson. She’s a junior. She’ll be a senior next year. She’s captain of the cheerleading squad. She was very appreciative that I was willing to tell who ratted out her friends. When I told her how I was scared that I wouldn’t have any friends since you were my best friend, she told me that I don’t have to worry. She’ll make sure I meet lots of people next year.”
“I didn’t rat out anyone. You did.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t a problem. The truth isn’t important. What matters is what people think is the truth. If I’m going to be somebody, then I need people on my side.” She looked over at me. “People who are in a position to get me what I want.”
I sat down hard on the ground, the air whooshing out me.
“But why?”
“There isn’t always a big reason why. It just is.”
“And you’re happy with good enough. You don’t care about dressing the right way or being invited to the right parties. You’re happy to rent movies on a Friday night. Not even new movies. You want to rent stuff no one has seen in like a hundred years. I want to go out. I want to be invited out. We were always second string, but now I have a chance to make the A-list.”
“And that matters so much?”
“Of course it matters.” Lauren tossed her hands in the air and paced back and forth. “My mom tells me that the friends you have in high school determine who your friends are in college, and then who your friends are for the rest of your life.”
“Well, my mom says you can’t buy friendship,” I countered.
“And your mom is a hippie who doesn’t even use deodorant.”
“She does too. It’s just that rock crystal kind.”
“Whatever.”
“So you’re just done with me? That’s it?” I could hear my voice getting tight and high. This wasn’t going the way I had planned. I had figured my problem would be convincing her I hadn’t told. I wasn’t prepared for this conversation at all.
Lauren sat down next to me and pulled a few strands of grass out of the lawn. We sat there quietly for a minute. “Nothing is forever, you know. Once I’m popular, we can be friends again and then you’ll be popular too. It will all be worth it.”
“What makes you think I’ll want to be your friend?”
“What makes you think you’ll have other options?”