Pretty Is

It rests in my pocket, powerful and secret. Only I know it’s there. I look small and ordinary, but I have strength and dignity and more courage than anyone would ever guess.

I carry myself straight, arms folded across my chest. Around me the villagers go chattering about their business-thoughtless, knowing nothing of the danger, nothing of who I am.

I find myself in a room with a circle of chairs: the Council of Elrond. There’s argument all around me, but in a moment my voice will silence them all. My voice, firm and clear: “I will take the Ring. ”

But instead I heard another firm, clear voice—“Take your seat, Erin”—and it was like I’d been on a long plane ride and my ears had finally popped. Mrs. Winsted, my teacher. Fifth grade. A circle of desks, and I was standing just outside it, still holding my backpack. Everyone else sitting down, their things put away, looking at me.

I slunk into my seat, not Frodo of the Shire anymore, just plain Erin, caught daydreaming again. Now Mrs. Winsted would probably tell Mama—again—that I didn’t pay attention.

I slid my backpack under my desk, then glanced hastily around the room to see if anyone was still staring at me. Most of the kids, I saw with relief, had gone back to flipping through their notebooks or whispering to each other or gazing out the window; only Ricky Talmadge was giving me a puzzled look. Hannah McLaren caught my eye and grinned as if we were sharing a terrific joke, and suddenly I felt better. Hannah could do that—could make you feel like things were fine, without saying a word. She had this grin that somehow said, Who cares? It’s funny—we’re all funny!

Mrs. Winsted’s heels went clicking around the circle behind me, and I straightened up and tried to listen as the loudspeaker crackled on and the principal, grouchy old Mr. Stimson, read the morning announcements in his gravelly voice: Academic Fun Night this Thursday, bring in your pledges for the Readathon, no climbing on the wall beside the playground.

As soon as he was done, Mrs. Winsted started talking about the tour of J. B. Marsh Middle School that she’d planned for next week. As usual, she paced around the room while she talked, as if she had too much energy to stand still. “Permission slips went home yesterday,” she reminded us. “I only got six or seven back this morning. The rest of you better get those in before Wednesday—signed by a parent—or you’ll be sitting here going boo-hoo while everybody else gets on the bus.”

Then she gave us one of her 1-mean-business looks—chin down, eyebrows raised, a brief stare down her nose—that always followed a warning like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. By this time of year, heading into our last month at Sandy Creek Elementary, we knew for a fact that she did mean business, but we also knew that nobody was going to be left behind.

Mrs. Winsted had a ton of frizzy blond hair and a loud voice. After the last parent-teacher conference, Mama said, “Erin Chaney, it’s a mystery to me how anybody could not pay attention to Mrs. Winsted.”

Around the middle of last fall, when the newness of fifth grade had worn off, I’d started noticing how babyish the kindergartners and first graders were, and how the school assemblies were more for them than for big kids like fifth graders. I was too big for some of the structures on the playground; I was bored with the library and the art room and the gym. By Thanksgiving, and ever since, I’d been eager to get out of Sandy Creek and go on to middle school.

As I lay in bed I heard Mama rattling around in the kitchen, accompanied by the low hum of news on the radio, and some floor creaking followed by a thud that meant Daddy had reached the limit of his morning push-ups. I heard the scrape of coat hangers in my sister’s closet, the closing of a drawer. Normally these were cozy sounds, when I was still drowsy, lying in bed with sun streaming in, and no one making me get up.

But today I didn’t feel cozy, and middle school didn’t sound so wonderful. I woke up thinking about Kayla, who was in my class and sort of a friend of mine, and Kayla’s big sister, Claire, and some things that had happened lately. I was caught up in a swirl of thoughts that seemed to have surfaced somewhere in my dreams and carried over, filling my head, awake or asleep. And I started to have this bad feeling about sixth grade.

Mama was calling me to get up. I pushed the feeling away and turned into Frodo, camping with the elves, waking up high in a tree. A breakfast of cold water and lembas, the elves’ bread, then dressing in my tunic and the magical gray cloak the elves gave me for my journey.

As Frodo I walked to school; as Frodo I did not think any of those swirling thoughts or feel the weight of that bad feeling about sixth grade.

But now, in class, I was only Erin, and as soon as I heard about the middle-school visit, the bad feeling jumped me like a springy trick snake out of a box.

The day before we’d had a soccer match after school, and I’d gone over to Kayla’s house after the game. We’d lost, 3-2, and I’d missed a clear shot at the goal.

“No way is that girl in fifth grade,” I muttered, up in Kayla’s bedroom. I rubbed my ankle where this huge girl on the other team had accidentally-on-purpose tripped me. I’d been griping about her as Kayla’s mom was driving us home.

“She’s a cow,” Kayla said, but without a lot of feeling. She poked a finger around delicately in her jewelry box and pulled out heart-shaped earrings. She’d already changed into blue shorts and a white shirt the minute we got there, but I was still in my sweaty soccer clothes, the shiny shorts and kneesocks and the team T-shirt. Kayla hated to be sweaty.

She didn’t even seem to care that we’d lost, and I remembered how at the last practice she’d sat out some of the drills. She told Ms. Ruston, the coach, that her knee hurt, but she told Hannah and me she was bored to tears. She pulled a Walkman out of her backpack and lay back on the grass, listening. The trees next to the soccer field were full of tiny white blossoms and baby leaves the color of Crayola spring green, but Kayla was only looking at sky.

Losing had already made me cranky, and remembering that practice made me cranky toward Kayla. “You don’t even try to win,” I muttered.

“Yes I do!” Kayla shot a look at me, then looked away, turning her head aside as she put on the earrings, as if that was the only way she could do it. “Anyway, it’s just a game,” she said in an oh-so-mature voice. I pretended to be interested in her bulletin board.

It still had lots of pictures she’d drawn the summer before, when we were into drawing these sequences of pictures, almost like stories, of two girls and their horses. Sometimes we drew the horses with ribbons braided into their manes and tails, and sometimes we drew the girls in proper riding clothes, like we’d seen in a book, and then laughed at the funny-looking pants.

The pictures, I thought, should be in a museum. Not because they were good, but because they were old, they were ancient history. Kayla could draw a lot better than me, but she even had a couple of my drawings on the bulletin board, too. Whoever’s house we drew them at, that person kept them. Not that Kayla exactly treasured them—she just never cleaned her room. Her bulletin board also had the program from the third-grade play. Which she wasn’t even in, except in the chorus.

I still had a lot of the horse pictures in my room, too, but they were in a drawer. I stuffed them in there the first time Kayla said she didn’t want to draw together anymore. I got used to that after a while. She wanted to play CDs and look at magazines and do our fingernails in glitter polish. She was my friend for that kind of thing and Hannah was my friend for mancala and Monopoly and soccer, which Hannah was really good at and definitely wanted to win at all times. But she never liked to draw.

Sometimes I wondered if I was the same Erin with Kayla that I was with Hannah. And did anybody else ever change to be like me, or was I the only one? Like Silly Putty that takes the shape of whatever you put it on.

I was picking up the little china horses on Kayla’s dresser one by one, rubbing the dust off their smooth coats, when Kayla’s sister, Claire, paused in the doorway, leaning against it. The word willowy was invented for Claire.

“Kayla,” she said, but Kayla was bent over, brushing her long blond-brown hair upside down, and didn’t look up. “Oh, hi, Erin. Kayla, did you take my blue eye shadow?”

The rhythm of the hairbrush paused briefly, then resumed. Kayla always made a big show of brushing her hair for about a hour, it seemed like. What made this especially annoying was that her hair really was gorgeous—long and golden and shimmery.

Claire twirled back toward us on her toes and draped herself in the doorway again. “Oh jeez, this is too funny. You know that new jacket she got?”

I did. It was a cheap, light jacket, a navy-blue wind-breaker with snaps in the front. Nothing like the Polartecs or jean jackets or anything else the other girls would wear. Monica’s kind of tall and gangly, and the jacket makes her look really dorky.

I hadn’t said anything when she brought it home from the mall, or the first time she wore it. Now I wished I’d said “Take it back” about fifty times and rolled my eyes and ridiculed it until she slunk back to the store for a refund. Except it would never have worked. I knew Monica. The more you objected to something she was doing, the more she would keep on doing it.

“The lunch lady,” Kayla put in gleefully, pulling her hair into a ponytail and putting a ribbon around it. “She’s about a hundred years old.”

“And she talks funny. I think she’s like retarded or something,” said Claire. “She’s like, ‘Mash pertaters? You want some mash pertaters?’ ” She twisted her face into a big-eyed, goofy grin. Kayla giggled.

“Anyway.” Claire returned her face to normal and spun around once on her toes like a ballerina, arms in a circle over her head, before continuing. “Wesley’s got so much nerve. In the lunch line he’s like, ‘So Monica, you and Miss McGill got matching clothes, huh? You two going shopping together this weekend?’

“And then Mark Malone goes, ‘Hey, Wesley, be sweet to your girlfriend-Monica likes you.’ And Wesley says the S-word, and Mark goes, ‘It’s true, man. I have inside information. Girls talk, in case you ain’t noticed.’ And Monica turned so red, everybody knew it was true, and anyway, I already knew it, ’cause Wendy got it out of her one day and told a whole bunch of us.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Can you imagine Monica with Wesley Brennan? Everybody in the whole line was laughing, and some of the boys started saying ‘Wooooh’ and ‘She wants you, Wesley’ and stuff like that. She was red as fire, and Wesley got embarrassed too, and he kept saying the S-word till a couple of teachers came over and told everybody to settle down.”

I felt my face go hot and red under their stares, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Finally I muttered weakly, “Yeah, that jacket is really dorky.”

Claire giggled. “I bet she and Miss McGill go down to the Goodwill store every Saturday. Miss McGill gets herself a couple of those old-lady housedresses—”

I felt about five or six things at once—mad at all those kids for laughing at Monica, ashamed of being Monica’s sister, mad at Monica for being such a dork, ashamed of not knowing what to say. Maybe most of all I felt mad at Claire and Kayla for making me listen.

I wished I had Frodo’s ring so I could put it on and disappear. Not that Frodo ever had a stupid problem like this. All he had to deal with was mortal danger.

After Claire strolled off to the bathroom in search of her eye shadow, I told Kayla I wanted to go home and take a shower. I walked home even though Kayla’s mom offered to drive me.

Kayla was my first real friend after we moved here—Shipley, North Carolina—at the start of third grade. I missed the hills and trees of Asheville, where we lived before. Our house in Asheville was out in the country, with woods all around, and I’d loved wandering there. Deer came right into our backyard, and in the woods there were quartz crystals in some of the rocks, and chipmunks and squirrels, and strange things, too—creepy cicada shells clinging to tree bark, mysterious holes where maybe snakes lived, and big fungus things that were orange or white or brown.

No mysteries here. Everything flat as a board, and not so many trees. Shipley was a half hour from the coast—a flat, sandy, tiny little town. I did like the beaches, and chasing waves and finding shells. But right in Shipley there was nothing. I mean zero. Downtown was about three little stores in old brick buildings. There was one medium-size grocery store, and no place at all to shop for clothes or see a movie in a real theater, unless you counted the mall where Daddy worked, which was at least ten miles away, down the road toward New Bern. I don’t think Shipley had any big companies for people to work in, except maybe the furniture factory and the chicken-processing plant.

In Asheville, everywhere you looked there were movie theaters and pizza places and malls and bowling alleys and ice-cream stores and parks—there was always something to do. I started calling our new town Sleepy Shipley, that August when we moved here, when I couldn’t believe how small it was, and how the heat settled like a blanket over everything. There were hardly any sidewalks, and big grasshoppers whirred along the edges of the streets in the Bermuda grass and the hot, glinting sand.

I didn’t call it Sleepy Shipley out loud except at home, after the time I said it in front of Kayla and she got mad. We were new friends then, early in the school year, and we were so crazy about hanging around together that I wasn’t being careful about what I said. And of course Mama was right when she said, later, “Well, what do you expect? This is Kayla’s home.” Kayla was born in Shipley, and her father ran the furniture factory. Her mother sold houses and her name was on signs all over the place. The Mortons were pretty important in Shipley, I guess.

I had to apologize to Kayla then, and she forgave me and it was all right. But now I wanted to insult her again. Sleepy Shipley, I thought. Kayla Moron Morton, queen of Sleepy Shipley.

I tramped along past smooth flat lawns, palmettos, clumps of grasses as tall as me. A right turn, a long stretch down Bow-man Street, then a left on Grady Street, and our house the fourth on the left. An average-size, red-brick house. Same flat lawn as all the other places around here, a palmetto at the corner of the lot, pink azaleas by the front door.

Ordinarily, walking by myself, I’d be Frodo tramping across fields and mountains, or maybe Arwen galloping toward Rivendell to save Frodo, or Aragorn tracking Merry and Pippin after the Uruk-hai captured them. But this time I didn’t feel like it. The whole way home all those mad, ashamed feelings and all those thoughts about Kayla and Claire and Monica and me were like boxers slugging it out in my stomach and my head. I kept picturing my sister in her dumb jacket, and Claire smirking, and all those loud boys making fun of Monica.

Another thought was hanging around on the fringes, but I ignored it. Until this morning, when I woke up with it heavy in my head, as if it had sneaked up during the night.