But the plan didn’t really work.
Early Monday morning she was sitting on the side of her bed, looking down at her feet. She’d woken up in the middle of a dream and it was still dawning on her, slowly, that it had been only that. A dream. In it Alvin was there behind the wheel of the bus and he was driving along like everything was normal. And Figgrotten was sitting in her usual seat right behind him, feeling hugely relieved that everyone had been wrong. He hadn’t died after all. He was alive and he was right there where he had always been. The only thing in the dream that didn’t make sense was that when Alvin pulled the door open to let one of the kids aboard, it wasn’t a student who got on. It was the principal. And when Figgrotten saw her climb up the steps, she knew Mrs. Flynn was there to announce all over again that Alvin had died. And this is when she woke up with her heart beating hard in her chest. The dream felt so real it was as if she had just been with Alvin, and she sat trying to hold on to that feeling.
As she started to get dressed she felt a heaviness in her bones. While she could snap off the tears, she couldn’t make the sadness go away.
When she arrived downstairs she found Christinia sitting at the table, already eating breakfast. They both had toast every morning. Two pieces each, with butter. The only difference was Figgrotten liked a heavy coating of raspberry jam on hers, while Christinia liked it plain. Mrs. Pauley had gone down into the basement to clean the cat pan, so it was just the two sisters sitting at the table together. Figgrotten took her plate of toast and put it on her lap and turned and looked out the window while she ate. This way she didn’t have to face Christinia. She looked out into the trees, hoping to see the crows.
“Did you have fun at Fiona’s house?” Christinia suddenly asked behind her. Her sister’s voice, which had not spoken to her for a month now, sounded different.
Figgrotten froze and stopped chewing. Christinia was trying to talk to her? Figgrotten felt something stiffen inside. Then her face, she could tell, began getting hot with anger. She turned and looked over her shoulder and glared at her sister, then put her toast back on the table and stood up and walked out of the kitchen.
A few minutes later she was waiting for the bus and her stomach was grumbling with hunger. She was not going to forgive Christinia. There was that concrete block inside her, heavy and unbudging. Whatever the opposite of forgiveness was, this was that.
When the bus came lumbering around the corner, with the lumpy pimply driver in his orange hunting hat at the wheel, Figgrotten climbed on without looking at him and walked back to her new seat. A minute later Christinia got on and Figgrotten kept herself turned toward the window so she didn’t have to see her sister walk up the aisle and sit two seats in front of her, next to Ben Ekhart. But once the bus started rolling, Figgrotten could look at the backs of their heads. She saw them lean toward each other and say something and then laugh, saw that their shoulders were almost touching. She wasn’t sure what to make of it all. But it made her frown and feel confused. She now at least knew Ben wasn’t the terrible person she’d always thought he was, but she still thought having a boyfriend was stupid. And Christinia having a boyfriend was extra stupid.
While everyone took their math quiz later that morning, Mr. Stanley stood quietly next to the window. He had his hands clasped behind his back and he was gazing outside. Figgrotten kept glancing up at him and then going back to her math. They were working on long division, which was particularly annoying and pointless as far as Figgrotten could tell, and while she was still working on the second-to-last problem she heard someone else in the class set their pencil down and shift in their seat. She didn’t have to look up to see who it was, but she did anyway: Glancing up, she saw James sit back in his chair and look around. She squinted, remembering that Fiona had referred to him as cute. Then she went back and finished the last problem. Having James finish before her made her feel defeated, like she had been in a race without knowing it and had just lost. It now occurred to her that this was how she had started feeling ever since James had come to the class.
Mr. Stanley had yet to move. He was still staring out the window, looking up into the sky, which was a clear and brilliant blue. Figgrotten looked up at him again and her head tilted a tiny bit to one side, as something in him, she thought, looked wistful.
Just then he began to speak quietly. “Once you are done,” he said without turning around, still looking outside, “please put your pencils down and sit quietly and allow those who are not yet finished to continue their work.”
Figgrotten folded her hands on her desk. She and James were still the only two who were finished. And a minute later she saw Fiona finish as well. She looked around at the other kids in the room, who were all still working on the quiz, and she saw that some of them were bent too far over their work. Bent so close that their elbows sprawled far out to the sides. The kids who were bent that close, she could tell, were the ones who were having the hardest time. They were throwing their whole bodies into understanding each problem. She knew this posture from years of finishing tests early. She knew the kids in her class who were always the last to finish. She had to wonder what it must be like to be one of those kids. The ones who always got tons wrong, the ones who had Mr. Stanley take their tests away before they were finished. The whole thing struck her as unfair. Why would someone who tried to learn something and had a hard time learning something not get the same test score as the people who learned it easily? Wasn’t it just about trying? It was one of the many problems she had with school, like fencing off the woods. It didn’t make any sense.
“Okay, folks, time’s up,” Mr. Stanley said, and he went around the classroom gathering up the quizzes.
Figgrotten could see some of the kids frown when Mr. Stanley took their tests from them, but once he’d collected all of them, he put them on his desk and crossed his arms over his chest and looked around the classroom. Everyone was quiet, as they could feel something was about to happen. Mr. Stanley was smiling.
“Now, people, I think you have all been working hard and I want to give you a little something. Sooooo…for the next hour we’re going to have some fun. First, we’re going to put some music on; second, we’re going to all take off our shoes; third, I’ll give you each a choice as to what you’d like to do. You can either draw or write poetry or write a letter to a person you know, or you can lie on a yoga mat and take a nap. In other words, you can do as you like within reason. No jumping! Okay? Sound good? Oh, you can also read if you’d like.”
Mr. Stanley turned neatly around, walked over to his CD player and hit a button, and some very loud and peppy music began to play. Figgrotten had never heard this kind of music before; there was a lot of drumming and singing in a foreign language.
“Cuban music!” Mr. Stanley said, loudly, over the tunes. “Okay, all, shoes off. And sit in a big circle on the rug.” Everyone kicked off their sneakers and went over to the rug. Fiona came over timidly and sat next to Figgrotten, which made Figgrotten surprisingly happy. It seemed they were now friends.
They both sat with their backs against the wall and pads of paper on their laps. Fiona began drawing a horse that was absolutely perfect. It was grazing and had a long flowing mane.
“Boy, I wish I could draw like that,” Figgrotten said. “I can’t even draw a stick figure.”
“Yeah, but you sure write better than me,” Fiona said. “I loved that poem you wrote for our Thanksgiving lunch thing. It was so good.”
“Really?” Figgrotten made a scrunched-up face. She’d never thought of herself as a poet, but suddenly the idea of this made her feel good.
Figgrotten looked around the room. Her pen was poised above her paper but no words for a poem came to her. She needed to be alone to write something like a poem. Up on her rocks was the best place. It didn’t feel like something you could do with people looking at you.
“Draw a doodley design,” Fiona said to her. “Draw lots and lots of circles on your paper. Then fill them in with swirlies. It’s fun.”
And so that was exactly what Figgrotten did.
“My dad taught me how to do that,” Fiona said. “He told me that if you want to think, it helps if you doodle.”
The classroom was filled with chatter and excitement, but the one person who didn’t seem to be having a good time was, of course, James. He sat cross-legged with the big book on his lap, reading. He didn’t look up, and he let his hair hang down so that his face was hidden.
“Smarty-pants,” Fiona whispered into Figgrotten’s ear, looking over at James.
Figgrotten nodded, but the meanness she had felt about him seemed to not really be there anymore. Now she just wished she hadn’t yelled at him and told him to shut up.
She glanced around the room at the other boys, who were wrestling on the yoga mats and getting super wild. She had to wonder who James could be friends with among the group. He wasn’t like any of the other boys.
At the end of their free time, Mr. Stanley took everyone for one of his speed walks to “burn off the extra craziness.” They walked to the gym, then through the big lobby, then down around the library.
Fiona and Figgrotten walked together and giggled as they sped along. It was as they were coming back down the main hallway that Ben Ekhart, who had come out of his classroom and was ambling toward the boys’ room, fell into step with Figgrotten so they were walking side by side.
“Hey,” he said to her. “How’s it going?”
Figgrotten gave a tiny shrug because she felt too nervous to get any words out.
And for the length of the hallway, he walked beside her. Her cheeks, she knew, were glowing like two big brake lights.
“Later, gator,” he said. Then he peeled away from her and ducked into the boys’ room.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Fiona nearly shrieked, “Oh wow, he’s cute!”
“Sister’s boyfriend,” Figgrotten said, trying to sound casual about it.
“Oh boy, he’s, like, so cute!” Fiona said again, and out flew the chipmunk giggles.
And there was that word again. Cute. Figgrotten had never thought of any boy as cute, but Fiona seemed to know all the ones who were. This, she figured, was something she would eventually get the hang of, who was cute and who wasn’t.
That night, when Figgrotten was brushing her teeth, something on the floor next to her foot caught her eye, and she bent down and picked up one of Christinia’s little pink hair clips. Figgrotten held it in the palm of her hand and stared at it; then she set her toothbrush down, took the little clip, snapped it into her hair, and stepped back and looked at herself. How was it possible something as small as that could make her look so different? She unclipped it, but instead of putting it in the jar with all of Christinia’s hair bands and clips, she tucked it into her pocket and finished brushing her teeth.