The next afternoon, I plop my brown bag, filled with a meat-loaf sandwich, right down on the lunchroom table next to Irma Jean. She’s wearing a hand-me-down sweater with another pair of jeans that have white circles around the ankles. It takes her an extra long time to embroider over the circles, so the two of us still have one pair of jeans each with the special hand-done stitches around each ankle. The neck of her sweater is stretched out and sloppy. It has an especially roughed-up look—like maybe it was even worn by a couple of Pikes before it made its way into Irma Jean’s closet. I guess it would be pretty hard to cut up a sweater and stitch it back together in a new way.
“Auggie!” a voice cries out. When I turn, Victoria is waving me over. She’s acting like a super puffer fish, all blown up, I figure, after last night’s meeting. At her side, Lexie bristles.
I glance down at Irma Jean, who shrugs and motions for me to join them.
I get a worried knot in my stomach when I sit across from Victoria. She eyes my meat-loaf sandwich with pity just before opening her lunch box and peeling back the plastic lid on some prepackaged fruit.
My heart is drumming against a hard lump of anger. My legs are melting. And all I’m doing is sitting next to Victoria and my old best friend. On the opposite side of the lunchroom, Ms. Byron eyes us with her arms crossed over her chest like even she is expecting something rotten to happen.
“Auggie,” Victoria says, using a paper napkin to wipe off some of the liquid she’s splashed from her fruit cup onto her fingers. “I know you and your neighbors were upset last night, at the city council meeting. I wanted you to know that the committee’s not out to get you. They—we—are trying to show you.”
“Show me?”
Victoria cocks her head to the side and reaches out to pat my hand. I jerk away like she’s got electricity flowing through her arms and her touch shocks me painfully.
“How to take care of your things. You have to fix something in an acceptable way. There should be standards, right?”
“Standards?” I screech. “How to take care?”
I glance across the table at Lexie, who stares at her own ham and cheese on white. She knows my heart is breaking. Still, she doesn’t say a word.
At that moment, I remember the way my hands had looked with my neighbors’ under the parking lot light, all piled up on top of each other, a team in it together. I imagine Gus and Shoemacker and Hollis and the Bradshaws and Dillbeck and the Pikes squeezing into a tight ball all around me. I feel like they’re right here with me, all of them, nodding in agreement as I insist, “It’s my house.” When Victoria shrugs, I repeat, “It’s my house. Mine and Gus’s,” I add. “Not yours. Why should I have to paint it the same shade everybody else does? Why should I have to keep clear glass in the windows? Why can’t I reinvent my own house, if that’s what I want to do?”
“But my father—”
“Your father and his committee are going to come back out to Serendipity Place, and they’re going to see the work we’re doing, and the fines are going to disappear,” I snap.
“Auggie,” Lexie starts, but Victoria eyes her in a way that makes her shove down whatever she was about to say.
“You know something, Victoria?” I go on. “You like to remind me that my house isn’t as new as yours. Because it makes you feel good about yourself. That’s all your stupid committee does. It sticks its tongue out at everybody in my neighborhood because our houses aren’t as big or as fancy as yours.” Remembering the plans my neighbors and I made the night before, I straighten my back and blurt, “You don’t want me to work on my house, you don’t want it to be different, because then it just might turn out to be better than yours.”
“That’s really what you think, August Walter?” she asks, using my full name in a way that rubs me raw.
“That’s really what I think,” I tell her.
Lexie flinches as I snatch up my lunch and head straight back to a smiling Irma Jean. Right then, the matching white circles around our ankles don’t seem like horrible things. They feel more like friendship bracelets.