The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter (15 page)

“I’m ready to go home,” I said, putting the shoe down.

As we rode along, even though my mom had said that she thought it was a bad idea to stalk Sylvie’s block, she drove past her house. But I didn’t see anybody. Her house sat in her yard and looked like an empty shell. And I watched that empty shell until it faded away.

ven though Yearbook hadn’t turned out so hot, I hadn’t given up on becoming an official member of something. That week there were a lot of lunch meetings with a variety of clubs: chorus and math among them. I liked the idea of buying vending-machine cookies and eating them during these lunch meetings. And cheerleading tryouts were coming up too. They happened after school. And I couldn’t help thinking that if I made the squad, I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a lunch group. I’d have an automatic one.

I waited for the bus in my driveway. The sun wasn’t up yet. In fact, I could still see the moon and the North Star.
I stood beside the road, wearing my cute red jacket and matching red sneaker tongues. The cold morning air made me shiver a little bit. Even though fall had just begun, I was going to need to start wearing my winter coat. It was a bummer, because I liked my cute red jacket more than my blue puffer coat. I looked back at my humming porch light. No other lights in my house were on. My mom had probably gone back to bed.

I waited and waited. Then, even though I knew I shouldn’t abandon the bus line, I decided to go check on something important. I set down my backpack and crossed my yard to get to my neighbor’s yard. Noll Beck was still sleeping, so it seemed like a good time to spy on the Mustang.

I knew Noll would never be my boyfriend, since I was eleven and he was fifteen. As Grandma had pointed out several times, those were four very important years. But I couldn’t keep myself from daydreaming about him. Noll was tall, so I could see his gorgeous head popping up over our redwood fence when he played basketball.

He drove around in his shiny green Mustang, and when Noll saw me, he always asked me the same wonderful question, “Hey, Messica, what’s new on the menu?” And while Sylvie thought Noll was teasing me in an unkind way when he called me Messica and asked me about menu items, I knew that Noll Beck wasn’t being mean at all. He
was flirting with me. Because boys weren’t smart like girls. And so instead of saying smart, kind flirty things, they said dumb, weird flirty things. And this didn’t bother me at all. Because I really liked it when Noll Beck talked to me, no matter what he said.

When I got to the Mustang, I was bummed out right away, because other than some crumpled papers, it was basically empty. Normally, it had interesting stuff in it. And Sylvie and I would make a mental inventory and then go back to my bedroom and figure out what kind of person Noll was and what he did in his free time. Once, we’d seen a birthday cake for Noll and it was shaped like a football. So I knew that football was his favorite sport. And I repeatedly saw a chemistry book in there, so I knew that Noll must be brilliant. And I saw a bag of dog food in there once, so I knew that Noll liked animals. And one time there was a box of paint cans, so I knew that Noll liked color.

Sylvie would sometimes bring up that we didn’t know for sure what was Noll’s stuff versus other random people’s who he gave rides to. But I could tell. Noll’s stuff was cool and interesting. And other random people’s stuff was mainly the garbage in the car. One time I saw that the car was unlocked, and so I opened the door, but Sylvie got very upset and said that she didn’t want to violate anybody’s privacy. But I saw it differently. Getting in the car
would teach me a lot about Noll, because if he was a maniac, it was my duty to find out.

That morning, as I waited for the bus, I stared at the backseat, trying to figure out what the crumpled papers were all about. Were they garbage? Were they break-up letters from a girl he was dating? Why would any girl want to break up with Noll Beck? My mind was working so hard that I forgot that I was on my way to school. Then I heard the bus and remembered.

I bolted through the Becks’ front yard and through my front yard, and made it to the driveway right as the bus started flashing its lights. I scooped up my backpack and raced across the road before the bus driver even flipped out the Stop sign. I ran up the stairs.

“You look so eager!” the bus driver said.

But I didn’t say anything back. I didn’t even look at him. Because conversing with the bus driver was a surefire way to become less popular than I already was.

My bus wasn’t all that crowded, so I usually sat by myself. I didn’t mind that too much. It was better than sitting next to a weirdo. And, sadly, there were a few of those on my bus. I held my backpack close and thought about all the people I didn’t want to encounter that day. There were a lot. Maybe mallet-toe Betty was right. When it came to middle school, the kids were demons. Except me. I was normal.

When the bus squeaked to a stop in front of the school, I felt my stomach tighten. Getting off the bus had become a risky activity for me, because I never knew whether I was going to bump into one of the psycho-bullies. And they always teased me by asking the same question: “Are you going to walk, or are you going to run?” And I usually just ignored them and kept walking. Jerks. I didn’t even understand why psycho-bully Redge came to school. I mean, how did anyone expect to learn anything without a pen?

I hurried into school and went to my locker. My combination was still hard for me to remember. Sylvie had gotten 2, 5, 10. Which was a basic math problem. I’d gotten 40, 6, 23. Which wasn’t any math problem. It was just a bunch of numbers with no relevance that were challenging to remember. Once I opened my locker, I realized that I didn’t need anything, so I slammed it shut. Then I felt somebody breathing on me. Her breath smelled like pancakes. I turned around.

“You didn’t stay for Yearbook Club,” Cameron Bon Qui Qui said.

“Yes I did,” I said. “I just never went back.”

Cameron Bon Qui Qui smiled at me. “I’ve been chosen to be the lead photographer.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I felt even better about my decision not to join.

“Don’t think you can miss the first month and then show up once we start taking pictures or designing the layout.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Sometimes slackers think they can skip the hard stuff and then show up for the party.”

“I’m not a slacker,” I said. “But I usually like parties.”

Cameron Bon Qui Qui narrowed her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

I nodded. A couple of weeks ago, my hair would have flown around my shoulders when I nodded. But my pixie cut didn’t move at all.

“I just hung up more posters.” She pointed to one so I could see it. It was about a Going Green Club that was meeting in the gym on Friday after school. And there were a bunch about our school vote for mascot next week. There were a lot of pictures of wolves and bears. “If you take any down, I will report you. I know your name now, Bessica.”

And when she said this, she blew her pancake breath on me a little bit and it sort of felt like I was being threatened by the hall monitor. And I would have preferred not to feel that way.

“Don’t worry. I already know what animal mascot I’m voting for. And I’m not going to the Going Green Club,” I said. “I’ll be attending cheerleader tryouts.”

And then Cameron Bon Qui Qui held back laughter and walked off.

As I walked to my next class, I passed a bunch of familiar-looking faces. Some of them seemed friendly. But I didn’t know their names. And even if I did, I didn’t know what to say. They looked so comfortable walking down the halls. They looked like they knew where they belonged. I wanted to look like that too.

When I took my seat in Mrs. Mounds’s class, I grabbed a pen out of my pen case and handed it to psycho-bully Redge. He didn’t say thank you.

“Do you have one with blue ink?” he asked. “Blue is my favorite color.”

The bell rang.

I dug through my pen case until I found one with blue ink. I handed it to him, but he didn’t give my first pen back.

I held my hand out. He slapped it like he was giving me five.

“I want my other pen back,” I said.

“I want waffles,” he said. Then he growled at me and I turned back around.

“Today we are going to talk about the importance of sugar and the brain,” Mrs. Mounds said. She wrote something on the board in pink letters. Then she started drawing a pink glob of something.

“What’s that?” a student in the front of the class asked.

“This is a picture of your brain,” Mrs. Mounds said.

It looked like a gigantic walnut. And as I stared at that walnut, all I could think about was my pen. I turned around.

“Okay, you can keep two pens this time,” I told him. “But this means you don’t get a pen tomorrow.”

“Who’s talking?” Mrs. Mounds asked. She turned around and showed us her pinched, angry face. “It’s disrespectful to talk when I’m working at the board.”

“It was somebody in the back,” a student in the middle of the class said. “It sounded like Bessica Lefter.”

I sat straight up. How did anybody know what I sounded like?

Mrs. Mounds looked straight at me. And I knew what was going to happen next. I knew Mrs. Mounds was going to ask me if I’d been talking. And I was going to have to be honest and say yes. Then she would write my name down in brown marker. And I would lose more valuable points. And I would get further and further behind. I took a deep breath. Why did middle school have to be so terrible?

But none of that happened.

Mrs. Mounds cleared her throat. “Let’s focus on the brain.” Then she kept writing. “I plan on saying some enlightening things.”

I felt so relieved. I thought I was going to have another rotten day. But then it looked like I wasn’t. Because something good had happened to me when I didn’t even expect
it to, and I’d only been at school for fifteen minutes. At this rate, probably twenty more good things would happen to me by lunch. I took out a pen and wrote down everything Mrs. Mounds said about the brain.

“Your brain is about the size of a cantaloupe.”

“Your brain uses less power than a refrigerator light.”

“In one day your brain generates more electrical impulses than all the telephones in the world.”

Also, Mrs. Mounds went off track and mentioned interesting things that didn’t have anything to do with the brain. But I wrote those down too.

hen you are in middle school, it is a dumb idea to expect good things to happen to you. After nutrition I had English. And nothing good happened in there. And after English I had math. And maybe something good happened, but I can’t remember. Because I fell asleep. And when I woke up, class was pretty much over and we’d apparently discussed a formula that calculates all the fat parts of a circle.