Then here came sixth grade, and bring it on. We’d learned double last semester from Mrs. Stanley and Mr. McLeod. Probably triple. So what was left? And we were going to be the biggest, oldest class at Westside. Perry Highsmith and that bunch would be out of there. We’d even have a new teacher to break in. Mrs. Bickle had retired because she was older than the school.
These were my thoughts after Uncle Paul dropped me off at home that day. When I started upstairs, Mr. Stanley was coming down from Mom’s office. He wasn’t crying, so I asked him how Lynette was liking camp.
He said she liked it now that she’d adjusted to it.
“I suppose she met a lot of kids with bigger ones than hers.”
“What?” Mr. Stanley stopped dead on a step.
“Vocabularies?” I said.
“Oh,” he said. Then he went on downstairs.
Mom waved me into her office. “You can be my last customer.”
I settled on the sofa.
“Good day?” she asked.
“The best,” I said. “We poured some of Grandpa out onto—”
Mom’s hand slapped the desk. “Don’t tell me that,” she said. “I don’t want to be responsible for knowing that.”
“It’s not like we’re out on bail,” I said.
“Nevertheless,” Mom said. She might have been thinking about Grandma. “What else?”
“We had a burger and Diet Coke at a place on Sheffield. Uncle Paul didn’t eat his bun, and I had all the fries. I think he’s dieting, and now he’s gone to work out. He may be turning into a gym rat.”
“Hmmm. Possibly,” Mom said. “Anything else?”
“We talked about . . . Excalibur?”
Mom pondered. “Excalibur. Isn’t that a sword?”
“I think it’s something you rub on your face.”
“Exfoliant? You talked about exfoliant?”
“We touched on it,” I said. “Uncle Paul likes to keep his skin in shape. Also, he’s gay.”
“Ah. Well, yes,” Mom said. “We thought you’d know when you were ready to know.”
“Mom, I know when somebody tells me.”
Then Mom’s old MacBook Air pinged, and an email came in that changed everything.
Mom put on her reading glasses. She went to a link and printed it out. Finally, she said, “Big news. You won’t be going back to Westside Elementary for sixth grade.”
“What? Mom, what?”
“I quote,” she said. “‘Due to demographic shifts in the student population, your sixth grader will transition into the former Memorial Junior High now formatted in a grades six-through-eight configuration, to be re-branded Memorial Middle School.’”
“Mom, say it in English.”
“They’re moving your class from elementary school to middle school,” Mom said. “Monday.”
I keeled over on the sofa. “Noooo.”
“Honey—”
“They can’t do this.” I pounded a pillow. “We were going to be the oldest. Now we’ll be the youngest. There’ll be different teachers for different subjects. I won’t be able to find them. Lockers, Mom. With combination locks.”
I sat up. “Mom, I’m not ready. This isn’t the body I wanted to take to middle school. Look at it. I need another year. I’m pre—what?”
“Prepubescent?” Mom offered.
“Probably. You’ll have to homeschool me.”
She paled. “This shouldn’t come as such a shock to you,” she said. “The Board of Education’s been debating it all summer. It’s in the paper every day.”
“Mom, this is another case of everybody talking around me and not to me. I don’t read the paper.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Maybe I would if I had my own computer with Internet ac—”
“Or you could read the one that gets thrown on our porch every morning.”
“Mom, I’m not ready,” I said again.
“Archer, honey, change doesn’t care whether you’re ready or not. Change happens anyway.”
• • •
Then it’s the first day of school—middle school, just like that. Still August, of course. Labor Day’s still down the road. They’ve told us sixth graders to report to the auditorium, which smells of fear. Or is it just me? I looked to see if I had the wrong shoes. I probably had the wrong shoes.
We milled around because the two homeroom teachers were up there poring over printouts. And another nightmare. It wasn’t just us Westside sixth graders. It was sixth graders from Eastside Elementary and Central Elementary. A sea of strangers. I saw nobody I knew. How could that even be? A lot of friendship bracelets. A lot of headphones. A lot of hoodies. Hoodies in August?
Somebody came up to me out of the milling mob. Hoodie and shorts. Headphones and big gym shoes. Not quite my height, but his voice had changed.
“Dude, how great is it that Natalie Schuster isn’t here?” he said. “She’s like on the North Shore. In the New Trier district. Someplace.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard she wasn’t coming back.”
“Can you believe why?” this guy said.
Probably not. “Why?”
“Because her mother got married again, and they moved.”
“I didn’t know her mother wasn’t married,” I said.
“I guess we weren’t supposed to. But she’s married now. You know who she married?”
Search me.
“It was in the paper,” this kid said. “Mr. Showalter. Remember Jackson Showalter from first grade? Didn’t he pull a knife on you in the rest—”
“Right,” I said. It was going to take me a while to figure this out. Natalie Schuster’s stepbrother was going to be Jackson Showalter?
The guy with all the information turned away. He seemed to be working the room. He turned back. “Archer, you don’t know me, do you?”
“Ah . . .”
“I’m Josh Hunnicutt.”
What? “Get out of here,” I said. But I looked again, and it was Josh Hunnicutt. The same kid, but longer.
“I grew just under a foot this summer,” he said. “Eleven and three-eighths inches. Wore me out. I fainted six times. Once in the pool. They had to fish me out.”
“What about the voice?”
“That’s just now happening. I’m up and down with it. But it’s pretty deep this morning, which is great since it’s the first day of middle school.”
Rub it in, I thought. “Great,” I said.
“And look here.” Josh pointed to his chin. “I’m about to rock some teenage acne.”
“Way to go,” I muttered, and he went.
Bells rang. Everybody was sitting. I looked for a seat over in the invisible section.
Nothing happened until a girl kind of slinked up to the next seat. Out of the corner of my eye she had more of a seventh-grade vibe. Was she going to sit down? She made a fist and popped me on the shoulder, hard. The pain was intense and knocked me half out of the chair.
Lynette.
“Lynette? Look at you!” I rubbed my shoulder in disbelief. There was less of her but more shape. I can’t describe it. She was still eleven, but twelve was clearly on the way.
I wasn’t familiar with her hair. “Lynette, what happened?”
“Camp happened.” She sat down, crossed a leg. “Weight-reduction no-carbs camp.”
“Wait a minute. It wasn’t vocabulary camp? Because I asked your dad—”
“It was fat camp with forced marches,” Lynette said.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to use the fat word.”
“You can use it now.” Lynette looked down herself. “I had to get all new clothes. I’m going for a skirt and boots look. Is it working?”
“I guess,” I said. “I mean yes. But what about your hair?”
“There was too much of it once there was less of me. I looked like a demented dandelion. After I got back to civilization, Mrs. Stanley took me for a cut and some feathering. Then we decided to tone down the color.”
“You dyed your hair?”
“Rinsed,” Lynette said, “with some lowlights. New school, new look, right? And how hilarious is it that Natalie’s new stepbrother is Jackson Showalter—probably still two feet tall and heavily armed! You can’t make this stuff up. Do you suppose the two of them were ring bearers at the wedding?”
“How did you even hear this where you were?”
“The paper. I read it online. We were really off the grid up there in the Upper Peninsula. It was like Hatchet, so if I hadn’t been reading the paper—”
“Right,” I said. “You and Josh Hunnicutt.”
Lynette pointed at the two teachers sorting us out. “You can see where that’s heading,” she said. “Three sixth-grade classes into two homerooms. Do the math. It won’t be just our Westside class. We’ll be divided up and mixed in with these other people we don’t know.”
I hadn’t done the math.
“Poor us,” Lynette said. “Poor troops. In case they split us up, meet me for lunch. Not the food court. It’s what they call the cafeteria, and I’m hearing the seventh graders are going to run it as a scam. They shake you down. They charge admission, like a cover charge. But we’ll only have lunch together today, because I’m going to have to find some girls to hang with. I’ve got some peer-grouping to do.”
Now they were getting ready to divide us in half. The woman teacher was Ms. Roebuck. I never knew who the man teacher was.
“And for your information,” Lynette said, “I’ve dropped the ette.”
“The what?”
“The ette. From now on, I’m Lynn, not Lynette. I was never a Lynette anyway. It was never me, and it’s not the me I want to be.”
“Is Mrs. Stanley going to call you Lynn?”
“Probably not. She’s too old to change, but you aren’t.”
Her eyebrows rose up. They were new too. Plucked or whatever. And more black than red. I squinted at her. “Who are you?” I said. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m Lynn,” she said, and made another fist to help me remember.