Libby on Wednesday (5 page)

I really wanted to tell her the truth. I really wanted to tell her that I wasn’t doing anything easily and well at Morrison Middle School and that all it was doing was making me miserable and that I wish she could be the one to be imitated and made fun of every day if she thinks that’s what it takes to
be socialized. But I didn’t, of course. All I did was agree with her and say how much fun I was having and how glad I was she’d talked them into sending me to school. It was really ironic
.

I don’t like lying to them, but I have to or my plan for the future will never work. My plan is to convince all of them—especially Mercedes—that one school year was enough to completely socialize me, so there won’t be any reason for me to go back to Morrison next fall
.

I know what would happen if I told them the truth. If I told them what it was really like, they’d be sure that Mercedes was right all along and that I’m hopelessly unsocialized. And that would mean they’d all be positive that I should stay in school forever. And it would be forever, because I know now that it’s not going to get any better. At first I thought it might, but I know better now. They’re never going to stop hating me
.

Libby closed her eyes and shook her head. “Never,” she whispered. It was some time later that she got up and pulled the camel-saddle chair up to the table.

It was almost completely dark by then, and it was necessary to hold the flashlight in her left hand as she opened the journal to the first blank page.

I guess there’s no way out. I’ll have to keep going to Morrison Middle School, and next Wednesday I’ll have to go to the writing group. And I’ll to have to read one of my stories to Gary Greene and those others
.

She sat for a while staring blindly at the round spot of wavering light before she sighed deeply and went on writing.

And then I’ll come home and tell everybody how it wasn’t so bad after all, and how I really liked it. Otherwise they’ll make me go on being socialized forever
.

    5

Recess had barely begun when Libby hurriedly opened the door to the reading lab. She had arrived early on purpose, reasoning that it would be worse to have to enter when the others were already there, just watching and waiting to stare and comment. The room was empty. She hadn’t been aware of holding her breath, but as she stepped inside, her starving lungs rebelled with a hungry gasp.

The reading lab, a small classroom used for meetings and special lessons, smelled of books and chalk dust. There was a teacher’s desk near the pale green blackboard, a scattering of student desk-chairs, and along one wall a number of large storage cabinets. Libby’s only other visit to the reading lab had been on the day of the Literary Festival, when the winners of the writing contest had gathered there to meet with Arnold Axminster. Remembering that fateful meeting, Libby felt her teeth clench and her stomach tighten.

She had picked out a chair and was hurriedly moving it away from its closest neighbor, when a voice said, “Oh, it’s
just you.” Libby gasped and whirled around in time to see a shaggy brown head emerging from one of the supply cupboards.

He came out of the cupboard in awkward angles, like an unfolding wooden puppet, and it wasn’t until he finally untangled himself and turned to face her that she recognized him as the winner of the second prize. The one from the special education class. The tall, thin, jittery one with the nervous smile, which he was doing at the moment—a strange, twitchy grimace.

Sitting down in a clattering, loose-jointed collapse, in the seat closest to Libby’s, he gestured by tilting his head back toward the cupboard. “That was just in case,” he said. “In case of G.G.” His voice had a jerky sound, too, almost—but not quite—a stutter,

Libby swallowed hard, and her own voice came out thin and wavering. “In case of what?”

“Who—not what. Our fellow prizewinner. Just in case G.G. turned up next, before there was anyone else here to witness the crime, if you know what I mean. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? G.G.! Gary the Ghoul. It’s not common knowledge, but old Gary and I go way back. Way back to second grade. Real buddies we were then—briefly. Until he lost his temper over a missing Tootsie Roll he thought I’d eaten. Actually I hated the things, but he didn’t believe me, so he pounded me into a pulp and threw me over the teeter-totter. And that was just the first time. The next time he really got rough. So you see why I wasn’t about to risk being alone in a room when he …” He paused as the door slammed open and then went on in a whisper. “Speaking of you-know-who!”

It was Gary Greene. Two girls, the other two writers’ festival winners, came in right behind him, but Libby barely noticed them. You didn’t notice anyone else when Gary Greene walked into a room. He had a way of making sure of that. It wasn’t because of his looks, that was certain. He was medium-sized, square and solid-looking, but not particularly tall, and his face was only normally homely for a person of his age and sex. And it wasn’t just because he stomped and shouted a lot, either. Even when he walked softly and kept his mouth shut, the threat was there, in his dangerous smile and the way his eyes slid around—as if looking for prey.

“Hey! Hey!” he said loudly, grinning at Libby and the thin boy. “Look at this. We’ve got the wrong room. This must be the psycho ward.” He turned to the two girls. “Look at this. What we got here is weirdo heaven.”

Libby bent over her book bag, pretending she hadn’t heard. But she had of course, and she also heard the laughter—a loud, squawking noise like a cackling hen. Glancing up through the curtain of her hair, she saw it was the big girl with the punk hairdo who had cackled. Someone else was laughing, too, but it wasn’t the other girl. It was the thin boy himself.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he screeched, “weirdo heaven.” Then he jumped to his feet in an awkward explosion of motion, held his arms out dramatically, and began to sing in a high-pitched voice, “Heaven. Weirdo heaven. It’s the place that only nerds and dorks can go. Aren’t you sad that you can never know, what a—”

He stopped suddenly as Ms. Ostrowski burst into the room, apologizing in a loud, cheerful voice for being late.
Stumbling back into his seat, he opened a notebook and bent over it. For a moment the others—Gary Greene and the two girls—went on staring at him, and then, as Ms. Ostrowski chattered on, they turned slowly away. The thin boy’s bent head turned toward Libby, and his mouth stretched into a brief, lopsided grin.

Libby’s lips twitched in response before she quickly bent her head again over her notebook. As she stared blindly at the blank page, her mind raced. Where had the song come from? The tune sounded vaguely familiar, as if he’d just made up new words to a real song. Had he really made it up that quickly? How could he? And how
could
he jump up like that in front of the others and make a fool of himself?

As Ms. Ostrowski arranged six chairs in a circle, she kept up a steady stream of chatter, about Mr. Axminster and his wonderful suggestion to form a writers’ workshop and about how much she was looking forward to being a part of it and on and on. While the teacher was talking, Libby watched the others—G.G. and the two girls—but mostly she watched the thin boy, who was perhaps crazy—or perhaps something harder to understand.

“So,” Ms. Ostrowski said at last, when they were all seated, “Are introductions in order? I think most of you know that I’m Ms. Ostrowski, but since that’s quite a mouthful, I’d like to suggest that you call me what some of my other classes do—and that is Ms. O. All right? And now about the rest of you. Do you all know each other?”

At first no one answered, but then the smaller girl, the one with sun-streaked hair and bluish eyelids, finally said, “I know Gary and Tierney, but I don’t really know …”

She paused, and Ms. Ostrowski—or Ms. O—took over
again, telling everyone’s name and grade and a little about the story each of them had written for the contest. The girl with the golden hair was Wendy Davis. Libby hadn’t ever spoken to Wendy Davis, but she’d seen her many times before—on the stage with the student council and doing other student-leader things like introducing people at assemblies. She always looked—well, the way you were supposed to at Morrison Middle School, with the right kind of hair and clothes, not to mention size and shape.

Wendy, Ms. O said, had written a contemporary story about a group of teenagers and their interests and problems. When Ms. O said her name, Wendy looked around the group smiling and nodding at each person, even at Libby and the thin boy. Libby ducked her head and didn’t smile back—not that she was afraid to. She just wasn’t going to play that phony game. She had been at Morrison long enough to know that someone like Wendy Davis wouldn’t smile at her and really mean it.

The other girl, the big one with the punk hairdo, was Tierney Laurent. As Ms. O announced that she wrote exciting detective stories, Tierney just scrunched down in her seat and looked the other way. She was dressed in what seemed to be several sloppy layers of expensive-looking clothing, and her legs were stretched way out in front of her. Her shoes were the black high tops a lot of people wore at Morrison. Except that the high lace-up shoes looked sharp in a stylishly ugly way on some people, and on the end of Tierney’s large legs they looked like something a bag lady might wear. While Ms. O was talking about her story, Tierney kept her face turned away and her lips curled in a sarcastic sneer.

And then there was Gary Greene, who, according to Ms. O, had written a science fiction story. “Yeah,” he said. “Like major action. Lots of blood and gore.”

“Well,” Ms. O said, “I think you’re selling yourself short, Gary. There’s a bit more to what you wrote than that, I think.”

Then she turned to the thin boy. “And Alex,” she said, smiling. “Alex Lockwood writes wonderful comedy. His entry in the Young Writers’ Contest was a very funny parody.”

“Parrotty?” Gary Greene said. “What’s that, parrot language? Hey, Lockwood. You write in parrot language? Like, Polly want a cracker?”

Tierney snorted, but no one else laughed, and Ms. O was obviously angry, her green eyes flattened like an angry cat’s. “That’s not particularly funny, Gary,” she said in a tight voice. “Nor very intelligent. Who does know what a parody is?”

Libby’s mouth actually opened before she caught herself. “Yes?” Ms. O asked, but Libby only shook her head and went on shaking it as the teacher waited, smiling. “All right, then, I’ll explain,” she said at last. “For your information, Gary, a parody is a spoof, a lampoon. An exaggerated imitation of something. Usually something famous so that everyone recognizes what’s being poked fun at. Alex wrote a very funny spoof of a popular horror story, Stephen King’s
Cujo
, I believe.”

For just a moment Libby was so caught up in Ms. O’s explanation that she forgot to worry about what was coming next. So it was with a shock that she heard, “And our
first-prize winner is Libby McCall, for a wonderful fantasy set in ancient Rome.”

Libby kept her head down, and Ms. O quickly went on. “I think the first order of business today might be to think up a name for our group and then, perhaps, to set up our standard operating procedure. Does anyone have any good ideas about a name? Think about it for a minute or two, and then I’ll ask for suggestions. Okay?”

Libby glanced around. Gary Greene was staring out the window and drumming his pencil loudly on the edge of his desk. Tierney was still slouched in her chair looking as if she were half asleep. But Wendy was bent over her desk chewing on the end of her pen and occasionally scribbling something in her notebook. As soon as Ms. O looked up, she raised her hand.

“How about the FFW?” she said.

“Standing for what?” Ms. O asked.

“Yeah, for what?” Tierney said. “The Funny Farm Writers?”

They all laughed, even Wendy. “No,” she said. “What I was thinking of was the Future Famous Writers. You know, like, there’s this Famous Writers Club, so we could be the Future Famous Writers.”

Gary and Tierney both groaned but they didn’t come up with any other suggestions, so Ms. O said that then it would be the FFW, at least for the present, so as to get on with the next order of business as quickly as possible—to set up an operating procedure.

In writers’ workshops, Ms. O said, the participants sometimes read their material out loud to each other. But
another way to go would be to make copies of each person’s work for the other members to read ahead of time. Either way, the process would then be to take turns commenting on each story and offering constructive criticism.

“Constructive,” she said, was the key word, and did they all know what “constructive” criticism was? They all said yes, but when she asked for examples, no one said anything—at least not at first.

But then Wendy Davis said it might be if you said something like, “I really think your characters are great, but it seems to me that you might need a little more work on plotting.”

Ms. O liked that, but then she made the mistake of asking for an example of nonconstructive criticism.

Still slouched down in her chair, Tierney said, “How about, your characters are stupid and your plot stinks.”