Chapter 3

I'm going to be honest and come right out and say it: I don't like school. It's not that the place itself is bad; to look at it you'd say it was pretty nice, modern and bright, with red carpets and green blackboards. What's bum about the school, aside from some of the lunches they serve in the cafeteria, is the kids. It's not even that the kids aren't nice either, it's that they come in bunches, like grapes. There's the jock bunch, and they all hang out together near the gym, and then there's the East End bunch, who all live in the same housing development and cluster upstairs in the corridor, and there are the brains and they flock together near the math office. There's also the music and drama set, who all clump together near the auditorium. When they aren't huddled in these places, they sit together in the cafeteria or outside on the steps. Where do I fit in? That's the problem. I am not a jock, not an East-Ender, not a brain, and not a music/drama person. I like to take pictures and paste them in albums or fool around at the piano or just fool around; what's more, I'm sort of new. All the kids at Franklin Pierce Junior High came either from Remington Elementary or Lady of Mercy Parochial School.

I came from private school, and that, to the kids, is like I'm from the North Star. I didn't know any of the kids everyone else knew and I didn't know any of the teachers and I had a different way of doing math and I had read all the wrong books; like I said, practically like coming from a secondary planet. Half the time I wished I were back in private school where my friends are, but when my mother decided to have Geraldine come home to live, she had to give up her job and we couldn't afford the tuition.

I shouldn't say I have no friends in school. I have one friend, Joe Newbolt, who is in the music/drama group and wants to have his name changed to Jason Newley. He thinks a name like Joe Newbolt is not good for his image and now wants everyone to call him Jason. Half the time I forget and Joe/Jason gets mad, so we have our ups and downs, but he's someone I talk to.

When I told him Geraldine was coming home to live, he gasped. He practices gasping for theater a lot, and does it really well. "Watch out," he gasped, "just watch out." Then a minute later he said he really dug the name Geraldine–it had a tragic ring. Finally, he said, "Well, it should be a real trip, Neil-boy," and I couldn't help remembering those very words when we first took Gerri up in the elevator.

We live on the sixth floor, so with or without her suitcase it was never a question of walking up, although we should have been smart enough to realize that a first ride in the elevator for Gerri might seem like a parachute jump for anyone else. The funny thing was that she was gung ho to get on and followed Dad right without hesitation. What happened, unfortunately, was that in addition to Dad, Mom, me, and Gerri, there were two other people on board: Mr. Rasmussen from the fifth floor with his Scottie dog, and Miss Gropper from the fourth. Just as the elevator door began to close, another person, the delivery boy from the nursery, carrying a tree in a tub, pushed the button for the seventh floor. Dad had pushed six, of course, and Mr. Rasmussen had pushed five. Miss Gropper had pushed four.

I guess Gerri, watching everyone press a floor button, figured that it was a requirement of all elevator riders to push a button; before anyone knew enough to stop her, she reached over and pressed the most colorful, eye-catching, brightest of all the buttons–the one clearly marked EMERGENCY.

Immediately an alarm went off that sounded as if it were signaling the end of all life on earth, a scream of an alarm that must have been heard by the dead and the deaf, a shriek that felt like it could put a hole right through the side of the building. The button had jammed. Geraldine went wild. I guess she realized she'd made a mistake, and went to correct it. She leaped forward to push another button to try to make up for the goof and–no kidding–it turned off the lights and stopped the elevator dead with a jerk somewhere between two floors.

Gerri began to jump and scream, scream and jump, and was immediately joined by Mr. Rasmussen's Scottie, who started to yelp. Mr. Rasmussen is nervous (as I later found out) and tried to outscream Gerri, the alarm, and his dog. He was not just screaming screams, he was screaming words, but I didn't quite catch them. I think one of them was Help.

Miss Gropper is a heavy-type lady, with the sort of body that seems to fill up clothes and the sort of arms that use up whole sleeves. She began slapping the walls and making sounds like you might hear coming out of an orchestra pit when the violinists are tuning up. My father kept saying, "Calm! Stay calm!" but his voice sounded like someone was trying to push him off a cliff, and just hearing his voice come out so high took all the breath out of me. My mother sounded like she was practicing reciting the vowels. She was saying, "Aah, oh, eee, ooo." I could hardly breathe I was so scared. Was the elevator hanging there by a thread? Were we all going to plunge into the sub-basement and end up as a pile of broken bodies and bones in the cellar or just explode into bits in mid-air?

Finally my father (or someone) turned the lights back on. First thing I saw was the delivery boy holding his neck with both his hands, crouching in the corner behind his tree, looking as if he were waiting for death. Mr. Rasmussen, who had picked up his dog and was holding him under one arm, was hanging on to Miss Gropper with the other. Miss Gropper was hanging on to Geraldine, who was looking straight up and still screaming her head off.

Suddenly, the siren stopped. My mother had punched it with her fist and it turned itself off. The elevator wobbled and started up, shaking only slightly on its way to the fourth floor.

Miss Gropper, wiping her left eye with a tissue, was helped off. On her way out I heard her say, "Those kinds of children should not be allowed on elevators!" but I don't think my mother or father heard. Mr. Rasmussen, with my father's help, his head and body shaking like he was treading water, got off with his dog on the fifth floor. He said a bad word just as the doors closed behind him.

Gerri had calmed down, but my mother and father had to help her out of the elevator, She was breathing very hard, taking big, loud gasps, the very opposite of me, who was still hardly getting any air in my lungs at all. I kept thinking that if this was a sample of what life with my sister was going to be like, we were probably making a monster mistake.