The (Almost) Perfect Guide To Imperfect Boys (15 page)

“That's not even English,” Drew Looper grumbled.

“Oh, but we can figure it out,” Chloe said loudly. “It's pretty insulting to Zachary, isn't it?”

Everyone stared at me then, even the boys.

“Look, it's not what I think anymore,” I said. I could hear my voice wobble. It didn't even sound like my voice.

“Finley's changed her mind.” Sabrina smirked
at Chloe. “She's a new person now. Since when—Monday?”

I peeked at Zachary. His mouth was tight, and his almost-purple eyes were fixed on me, trying to read behind my panicked expression into my brain. If he'd had a camera with him then, he could probably have taken an ungeneric portrait—
Girl Freaking When Her Thoughts About Boys—Specifically Zachary—Are Revealed to the Universe.

And that was when Maya made her move. Like a tiny wild cat who'd been stalking an unsuspecting mouse, she suddenly pounced on Sabrina, snatching my science binder from Sabrina's hands. Really, it was a basketball move, a steal, and you could see by the look on Sabrina's face that she was shocked at losing possession to a puny gymnast.

“Here,” Maya snapped, thrusting the binder at me. “Put that away! Or get rid of it!”

“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

Maya shook her head, her ponytail swishing furiously. As Mr. Coffee sauntered through the door, she took her new seat on the total opposite side of the classroom.

Sitting next to Zachary that period was torture. He kept avoiding my eyes and jiggling his leg the whole time, and once when I bumped his elbow semiaccidentally, he didn't even flinch or move or anything.

But then, about a minute later, he slid this note across our lab station:

So when I saw all that stuff in your notebook (when we were in the library) and you told me it was a newmonic (however you spell that word), you were LYING?

I wrote back:
Only because it was too complicated to explain!

Zachary:
You mean too hard for my amphibian brain?

Me:
Can we please talk about this?

Zachary:
CROAK.

That was it. He didn't write—or say—another word to me the whole rest of class. And as soon as science was over, instead of heading to English, I fled to the school library.

Ms. Krieger smiled as I crashed through the doors. “Some hot chocolate,
señorita
?”

She'd pronounced “chocolate”
cho-co-la-tay
. Like this was a pseudo-Spanish day.

I burst into tears.

Ms. Krieger sat me on her squishy red sofa. She handed me a mug, and a napkin, and said in a soft voice, “Talk to me, Finley. Fight with your best friend?”

I nodded. “And with everyone else. The whole class hates me now.” I guess my hand was shaking, because she took the mug from me, and I wiped my nose with the napkin. “How did you know?”

“Oh, wild guess,” Ms. Krieger replied. “And don't forget, I'm a student of character. Just like you.”

“Better than me,” I said, sniffling. “I'm terrible at it.”

“Oh, I'm not so sure about that.” She touched my shoulder. “What happened?”

I explained that I'd been “taking some notes about people,” making it sound more
Harriet the Spy
than
Amphibian
Life Cycle
. (Not to hide all the Croaker/Tadpole/Frog stuff, but because the last thing I wanted to do was explain all those standards to a teacher, and anyhow the specifics weren't the point.) And I described how Chloe and Sabrina had humiliated me, reading my words out loud in a way that made me seem boy-hating. Snarky. Even though I'd taken all those notes as a kind of science project. As a public service, almost. As a way of dealing with boy immaturity. Which, as all girls knew, was a major issue.

Ms. Krieger just listened. Finally she said, “You know, this sort of thing happens in the eighth grade every year.”

“It does?” I said. “Someone steals a notebook—”

“No, I don't mean this exact situation. I mean there's always some sort of end-of-the-year kerfuffle.” I must have stared at her blankly, because she said, “You don't know that word?”

I shook my head.

“Ah. So if we don't know something, what should we do then, Finley?”

I rolled my eyes. “Look it up.”

Sometimes I forgot that Ms. Krieger was a librarian.

She walked over to the big gold dictionary she kept on a stand beside her desk. I watched her flip the pages. “ ‘Keratin,' ‘kerchief' . . . ah, there it is: ‘kerfuffle.' ‘Informal, chiefly British. From Scottish Gaelic
car
, meaning twist, and
fuffle
, to disarrange.' The first definition is ‘commotion, disorder, agitation.' More colloquially, ‘hoo-hah,' ‘hurly-burly'—”

“I think I get it,” I said, sighing. “You're saying eighth graders are completely predictable, and that's why there's always a big fight this time of year.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” She looked at me over her lime-green glasses. “My theory is this happens because you're graduating soon. And that's scary, so you pick fights. To distract yourselves.”

“Actually, I think we pick fights because we're totally sick of each other.”

“It may seem that way now.” She smiled. “But believe it or not, some of the people you like the least in middle school may end up being your buddies in high school. I can't tell you how often I've seen that happen.”

I'd stopped shaking by then, so she gave me back the mug of hot chocolate. And I was grateful to have
it, because I had nothing to say to that last speech of hers. Buddies with Jarret and Chloe? Or with Sabrina? Because okay, I knew people changed, but there were limits.

I mean, there had to be. Even in high school.

Ms. Krieger closed the dictionary. “Anyhow, Finley, I was thinking. I desperately need to restore order to nonfiction, especially US history, which the seventh grade turned into mush after their last research assignment. If you have any time, I could really use your help.”

“Me?” I asked. “You mean now?”

She nodded. “It's a big job, so I'll need to write your teachers a note. But I'm sure they'll allow it, because they're all deathly afraid of me. Okay with you?”

Was she serious? It was better than okay. “Thank you, Ms. Krieger. For everything.”

“De nada,”
she replied. “Now finish your cho-co-la-tay,
señorita
, and then
v
á
monos
.”

•  •  •

She wasn't exaggerating; the seventh grade had rearranged practically the whole nonfiction section. It took me the rest of the morning to hunt down the books
and then get them returned to their right shelves. But when I finished, Ms. Krieger said I could hang out in the library, because,
quién sabe
, she might discover another kerfuffle on the shelves. That was the word she used: “kerfuffle,” even though it was a pseudo-Spanish day. So I stayed.

At dismissal I slipped outside through the cafeteria door. Maya was standing in our usual spot, and I knew it would be weird if I just showed up and acted all normal like,
Hey, Maya, and how was
your
day
? And I didn't want to deal with Sabrina, or with Sophie and Dahlia, for that matter, so I skipped basketball practice too.

The strange thing was, I found myself taking the long way home, on Zachary's street. What was I thinking? Maybe if we ran into each other I could explain? (Explain what, exactly? I didn't even know:
Yes, I wrote that stuff about you, but accidentally/as a joke/my pen was taken over by mind-control zombies?
) But still I walked down Spruce Street, passing the squirrels and the hydrants and the little kids, whose messes were the kind their mommies could clean up for them, literally and figuratively.

And in front of a rusty mailbox on the corner of
Cypress I almost crashed into Wyeth Brockman, who was putting out his recycling.

“Hey, Finley,” he said. “More surveillance?”

“What?” I nearly screamed.

“I meant of the block,” he answered. “Remember? You were taking photos? For
The Bug
?”

“Oh, right. No, I'm done with all that. I was just walking. Just to . . . walk.”

He picked up a milk container that had blown out of the recycling bin, and carefully squeezed it in with empty containers of cat litter, detergent, orange juice. All the stuff that made up a week of life in the Brockman family, I guessed. If I'd had my camera, I'd probably have taken a picture. And it would be a portrait, even though it had no people.

Wyeth watched me study his garbage. “School sucked for you today, didn't it,” he said.

“Yeah, that basically sums it up.”

“Well, you shouldn't feel so bad,” Wyeth said. “Chloe and Sabrina had no right to read your notebook. And hey, they should talk—they've called people worse things than Tadpole. Remember Freakazoid?”

I kept nodding. Of course I remembered Freakazoid.

And then I saw something in Wyeth's pale blue eyes, a flicker I probably should have noticed before now. Maybe I should just shut up, I told myself. Or maybe not.

“They picked on you, too?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he answered, shoving his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. “Since practically the first day of middle school. But mostly they acted like I wasn't there, like I was a negative number or something. And you never did, or Maya, either. So if you wrote that my voice was changing—”

“Which is not a
bad
thing,” I cut in. “By the way.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. It's not bad or good; it's just true—my voice
is
changing. It's supposed to, right? Anyhow, what I'm saying is, I don't care about your notebook.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I'm pretty sure other people do.”

The weather was chilly and raw, and I felt exhausted from this long day, but I thought how sweet Wyeth was to be talking to me like this.

Because really: I'd made fun of his Tadpole-ness, hadn't I? We'd never intended the
Life Cycle
to be mean, but it kind of was, the more I thought about
it. And now, despite everything I'd written, everything the class had heard, here was Wyeth acting Froggy.

If I'd still been keeping the
Life Cycle
, Wyeth would definitely have deserved an upgrade. Seriously, I would have switched his status to Frog right there.

But I wasn't the official chart keeper anymore. Nobody was. Anyway, the
Life Cycle
was over.

It occurred to me then that Wyeth's house had a basketball hoop in the driveway. “Hey, Wyeth, you want to play?” I said, pointing to the basket.

“You mean, now?” He looked confused. “You against me?”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Because you're a girl?”

“No duh,” I said, grinning.

“And you're on the team.”

“Playing bench, but yeah.”

“And you're much taller than me.”

“True. You scared I'll shame you?”

“No.” He laughed.

“Get your basketball, then,” I challenged him. “One-on-one. But I'm not going easy on you, Wyeth.”

“Yeah, Finley, I'm not going easy on you, either,” Wyeth replied.

For about a half hour we played in his driveway. It was fun, even though we didn't bother to keep score.

Although if we had, I'm positive I would have won.

•  •  •

By the time I walked into the kitchen, Mom had morphed into Detective Mom. Señor Hansen had e-mailed her to say I was “illegally absent” from his class, so she'd called Ms. Fisher-Greenglass's office to sort it out. Somehow Ms. Fisher-Greenglass had heard I'd spent the afternoon in the library, so Mom called Ms. Krieger, who used the word “kerfuffle” and said I'd seemed “a tad upset.” So Mom thought,
Oh, poor Finley, she's having a rough day; I'll pick her up from basketball practice and take her out for a cupcake.
But when she got to the gym with the Terribles, who were collaborating on a tantrum, Coach Malecki told her I'd never showed up for practice. Mom started to freak—she tried calling my cell, but Ms. Krieger had made me turn it off when I was in the library, and I'd forgotten to turn it back on. So then, from the parking lot, Mom called Maya's mom, who told her the whole story.

Well, not the
whole
story—Mrs. Lopez had heard from Maya about my notebook being read aloud, and how Maya had defended me, even though I'd insulted
Maya the day before. Maya hadn't told her mom about the
Life Cycle
, specifically—but she'd been updating her mom about what a good, loyal friend she was and what a bad friend I was being lately.