Girl Unmoored (3 page)

But my dad said, “No, Margie. Apron can clean it up,” and turned toward the coffee. “You’re not going to forget the tunics again, are you, Apron?”

“Nope,” I said stepping away from M.

“What did you say?”
Nope
was a four-letter word around here.

“No, Dad,” I said, picking up my bowl, which was plastic, not even scratched. “I will not forget the tunics.”

He went back to his pouring and I scooped up as much of the soggy mess as I could. “It might finally be our
Dies Faustus
,” he chuckled. M didn’t know what that meant, but I did: Lucky Day. “Margie’s never seen a touch football game,
American
football, the
real
kind. She’s in for quite a show with all of us old-timers out there, isn’t she?”

I shook my head.

When I opened the broom closet, something scurried. I froze. One time we found a raccoon in the corner. I couldn’t see any raccoons anywhere, but the scurry happened again. I stepped closer and saw a scurry this time. It was The Boss, behind the mop, rummaging around in his cage. “Hey,” I cooed. “What are you doing in here?”

He twitched his salt and pepper whiskers at me and that was all I needed to hear. I picked up his cage and turned around.

M and my dad were standing by the icebox. “Who put The Boss in there?”

My dad looked confused, but M looked away. Then we both looked at her.

“Dad,” I pleaded. “It’s freezing in there.”

He stepped back. “Margie,” he said carefully. But before he could say any more, she covered her mouth with her hand and ran out the door.

We both watched her go. I prayed she would run all the way out the front door and back to Brazil, but no such luck. Pretty soon she’d have to, though. Her work visa was only good for a year. Now, she just walked up the stairs, leaving a trail of Fruity Pebbles so she could find her way back for more glue after my dad left.

My dad sighed. “Sorry, Apron. I’ll tell her she can’t do that again.”

I put the cage down. “He could have died,” I told him. “Guinea pigs cannot survive below sixty-five degrees, Dad.” Which may or may not have been true. My dad knew just about every fact out there, but hopefully not this one.

He looked at me, exhausted. “Just try to be a little more patient, okay?” He said this like she was our new maid, which, when I thought about it, made me wish she was. Then she could get fired.

“Dad,” I said. “You’re still married to Mom, right?”

He tipped his head at me. “Of course I am. Now get to school, Apron.”

He walked out the door and I left The Boss on the kitchen table, twitching and munching, while I went back to the closet to get out the mop. The truth was, he looked plenty fine to me. But M hated him almost as much as she hated me. “Why do all you Americans keep rats for pets? It is disgusting.”

I grabbed the mop. I had never trusted M around The Boss, and now that she dared get close enough to move his cage, who knew what she would do to him next. Maybe she’d even take him out and set him free.

The Boss stopped munching when he saw me. “Save yourself!” Jesus had warned everyone. But what he should have said was “Tell your owner to get a combination lock.” Because in the real world someone had to save you.

Hello Maine!
was wrong as usual.
Today was going to be
humid, humid!

When I finally made it to the bike racks at school, the back of my shirt was soaking wet and two seconds later the bell rang.

Before I got to my desk, I stopped at Rennie’s. Today, her black pigtails were wrapped up in pink bows and her part was so straight it looked like a chalk line. “What, Apron?” she rolled her eyes at me.

“Hi,” I smiled.

“Look. I need to talk to you at recess,” she said, suddenly serious.

“Why?” The last time she said that, she told me there was a rumor going around that I had kissed Johnny Berman in the boy’s room. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have. Maybe not in the boy’s bathroom, but behind the lower school swing set, where everyone else did, I might have at least considered it. We never found out who started the rumor, but I kept hoping it was Johnny Berman himself.

Rennie’s eyes flashed over to Jenny Pratt at the end of her row. “I can’t tell you here.”

“Why not?”

“
Because
, Apron,” she said. But then she looked up at me. “Look, I think we need to start making new friends, okay?”

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach, but slowly, like I was watching it happen.

“I mean, we’ve been friends for so long it’s just
boring
.” She looked back over to Jenny Pratt. This time, Jenny turned her perfect face toward her and smiled. When she noticed me though, she scowled. Jenny was the most popular girl in our class and we hated her. The only way you could be friends with her was if she picked you to be.

I frowned at Rennie. “Jenny Pratt? But we hate her.”

“I never said that,” Rennie whispered, panicked.

“Yes you did. We both did.”

“No. Apron. I never said that. You did.”

I stared at her. I wasn’t a liar and we both knew it.

Just then, Ms. Frane walked in and told everyone to sit. I gave Rennie one last look before I went to my desk, two rows in front of her.

When everyone was seated, Ms. Frane, who was kind of pretty but still wasn’t married, probably because she always wore the same blue skirt and messy hair with two barrettes pulling it back for no reason, said, “Grammar books, please. Today we begin to study Latin roots.”

Johnny Berman, who only sat next to me because Ms. Frane liked to keep things in alphabetical order, let out a groan. But I smiled. Even if you didn’t know my dad was a Latin professor, you might think something was up from our bumper sticker:
Sona si latine loqueris!
“Honk if you speak Latin!” Hardly anyone ever honked.

I wasn’t exactly good at it, but my dad was determined to teach me. For a while, things got too serious for me to practice. But now with M hanging around, I was back to studying it full time. She could hardly understand English, no way could she understand Latin.

“Page 132,” Ms. Frane said. “Today we’ll start with
homos
.”

Johnny Berman snickered into his hand. I felt my cheeks turn on. It
was
kind of an embarrassing word.

“Now. Can anyone tell me what the Latin root
homo
means?”

A few more boys chuckled and Johnny Berman whispered, “Paul Green,” loud enough for only some of us, and Paul Green, to hear.

“Anne, do you know?”

A few seats down from Rennie, Annie Potts flipped her mousey brown hair over her shoulder and sat up higher. “Um. One?”

“One
fudge packer
,” Johnny Berman whispered, coughing to cover it up. But Ms. Frane must have heard this time. “Another interruption and you get a red card, Johnny,” she warned, so he lost his smile. “Good guess, Anne. Not quite, though. Anyone else? Paul?”

“Man,” Paul Green answered quietly, which made Johnny Berman cough again.

Ms. Frane said, “Yes,” then added, “Perfect, Paul,” because he was one of her pets. “Can anyone give an example of a
word
using this root?”

“Homicide?” Billy Moore called out.

“Good,” Miss Frane nodded, writing it on the blackboard.

“Homosexual?” Lynn Aouerbach said, like she said the word out loud every day. Which maybe she did. She always wore black.

Johnny Berman let out a hoot this time and the room fell silent. Miss Frane turned to him with her lips pinched together. Everyone knew that if he got one more red card he was going to get suspended. “Yes. That
is
a proper use of the root. Lynn is correct.” She didn’t turn around to write it out, though. She just kept staring at Johnny. Deciding.

“
Homo habilis
,” I called out quickly. Once in sixth grade, I’d seen him walking home in the rain, so I’d given him a ride on my bookrack. And ever since then he’d been nothing but nice to me.

Miss Frane shifted her stare over, impressed. “And can you tell us what this means, Apron?” She caught me studying my dictionary again last week. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she said, meaning to be nice but scaring me just the same.

“A species of primitive man that first used sticks and stones as tools.” It said this a few pages later in our grammar book, but nobody else had probably read that far.

“Very good,” Miss Frane said turning back to the board and writing
Homo habilis
on it. Johnny Berman exhaled and sat back. I smiled at him and he bugged his eyes out.

“All right, now. Please get out your writing notebooks and give me three full sentences using the Latin root for
homos
. And if you’ll excuse me, I have someone waving at me from the hallway.”

We looked over to the long skinny window inside the door, but all we could see was the back of a head. Principal Parker.

As soon as Ms. Frane was gone, everyone started talking. “I hope she’s getting fired!” Johnny Berman said standing up. I watched Rennie stand too. But I got to her before she could go anywhere. “Rennie,” I said, careful not to sound desperate. “We need to be Avon ladies this weekend.”

“Ucch,” she said. “See what I mean, Apron.
Boring
.” Then she shrugged and turned toward the end of her row. Toward Jenny Pratt. “We’re teenagers now, Apron. Not babies.”

I lowered my voice. “It’s an emergency.”

“What?” She turned back to me, which I hoped she would. Rennie loved emergencies.

“M’s going to kill The Boss. I need a lock.”

Rennie crossed her arms.

“She
is,
Rennie. She started hiding him in closets. You don’t believe me?”

But then suddenly she looked like she did.

“Well, too bad,” she said anyway. “It’s the Meaningless Bowl. Seth Chambers’s dad is bringing a real
Patriots
football.” She said this loudly, but no one looked over, not even the boys.

I shifted in my sneakers. “It won’t take very long. I just need one with a combination. They’re cheaper.”

Rennie pinched her forehead in. “They are?”

I nodded. She believed me when I told her things like that because my dad was a professor. Rennie’s dad owned Perry’s Plumbing so all he knew about were pipes.

“We can definitely still get to the game on time.”

But Rennie shook her head and looked back around to Jenny Pratt, who had already stood up to go talk to Nan Wetherly, her last best friend. Rennie tried not to look hurt when she turned back to me. “No way. I have to make cookies. It’s our turn. And this time I’m making little footballs. My mom says I need to make like a hundred.” She flipped back one of her pigtails, which meant she was serious.

A few boys started clapping, egging Johnny Berman on to do something. Then we all watched him jump up on Ms. Frane’s desk and start break dancing, which gets pretty boring pretty quickly without music. I turned back to Rennie.

“Fine. What if I help you bake them Friday afternoon?”

“So you’re inviting yourself over now, too?”

“No, I’m not,” I said begging my freckles to stop burning. We used to just swap weekends at each other’s house. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself.”

She grabbed my arm. “Wait! You can’t be Avon ladies
alone
. It’s in the rules.”

“No, it’s not,” I said pulling away.

But Rennie grabbed my wrist this time. “You can’t sell stuff we found together.”

I smirked. “Fine. I just found a new pair of sunglasses. With the tag still on.” They were in the passenger side of our car, probably M’s.

“Like movie star ones?”

I didn’t even need to nod. Rennie huffed. “All right. You can sleep over. But only because Jenny is going away this weekend.” It was sad for a second, the way she said it, like she wasn’t entirely sure it was true.

But then she told me to bike over fast if we were going to get the cookies done by four-thirty, which I already knew. No one can be in their kitchen after four-thirty because that was when Mrs. Perry started making dinner. She went to cooking school with Julia Child, and there’s a picture of her with bobbed-out hair in a yellow dress, holding a cake and smiling big in their dining room. Hardly anyone else knew that the cake was made out of wax and was so heavy that Mrs. Perry got tennis elbow from it. At six o’clock, usually something like a whole fish with a head on it comes out the door.

“She’s coming!” Matt Curtis warned us. He was half the size of most of us girls, but might be foxy someday.

I got back to my desk and watched Johnny Berman rip it over to his seat. He was still panting when Miss Frane walked in. “Sorry, class,” she said, like we were sorry about it too. “Never a dull moment. Now, who’d liked to read their sentence? Oh, and before I forget, each of you needs to pick up their reminder slip for year-end conferences next week. Your parents should have marked their calendars off when I met with them in the fall, but just in case.”

I looked out the window. Outside, dark branches were criss-crossing everywhere and it would take until after lunchtime before the sun finally started shining down on them. But every once in a while a branch might move for no reason and then if you looked carefully you could see a bird in there, jerking its beak around, searching for something.

Stinky people buy stinky things.
That was what Rennie talked about while she skipped ahead and I pulled our wagon through the bumpy woods between our houses. The Perrys lived off of Route 88 too, but closer to Portland, and their road was paved and smooth and had a name: Thornhurst Landing.