Right off the bat, our teacher, Ms. Byron, flitters around the classroom in a halfway-panicked way, like a hummingbird that’s beginning to think it’ll never find its way out of a garage. She chews on chalky stomach pills, so that when she announces, “Please stand for the first Pledge of the year,” she looks like she’s licked an entire blackboard clean.
As I stand, my eyes rove out across the classroom. Dickerson has that new construction smell of paint and plaster and wood, and our classroom has a marker board instead of a chalkboard and fancy plastic desks and even a projector that’s actually hooked to a computer on Ms. Byron’s desk. What really gets me, though, is the coatrack. It’s crammed with backpacks branded with designer names. And lunch boxes—brand-new plastic lunch boxes, not like the brown paper bags that Irma Jean, Weird Harold, Lexie, and I have brought with us.
I glance through the window at the playground, which is filled with swings and monkey bars that don’t have a single scuff mark. And it’s dotted with the tiniest little trees you ever saw. Nothing more than saplings, really. It’s all pretty, I think. Even the skinny saplings. There’s a kind of gentle, fragile sweetness about a baby tree, same as there is for a puppy or a fuzzy yellow chick. But something’s missing. I can’t quite figure out what, yet. But it makes me start to miss Montgomery, in a way I never thought I would.
After the Pledge, Ms. Byron tells us to grab a partner. “Any partner,” she says. “Hurry, hurry,” she shouts, her nervousness spewing out everywhere. “For our getting-to-know-you first-day assignment!”
Before I can turn to whisper at Lexie, her chair screeches on the floor—away from me. I feel like the whole world has tilted in that moment. Lexie’s desktop thunks against Victoria’s. Inside my chest, my heart makes a sound like a piece of paper being torn in half.
When I finally look up, away from Lexie’s red horseshoe-shaped braid, I see Irma Jean pointing from her chest to mine.
I nod, trying to pretend that getting Irma Jean for a partner isn’t a disappointment. She’s a nice girl, Irma Jean. And she can sew like nobody’s business. But we’ve never been best friends. It happens that way, most times. The people who live right next door never seem as interesting as the ones who live a mile away.
As we scoot our desks together, it gets hard to breathe. All the reasons for missing my old school keep piling higher, faster. I decide right then to only miss three things. If I just let myself miss three, I tell myself, maybe it won’t sting so bad:
1. I miss the way the old wooden seats were all worn shiny, like they’d been given extra coats of varnish. But it wasn’t some coat of glop on those seats. It was that they’d had so many kids sliding in and out of them, to recess and lunch and gym class. We’d buffed those seats with our backsides.
Every Monday morning, as we said the Pledge of Allegiance, I’d look down at the glossy wood of my desk chair and imagine the faces of everyone who sat there before me. Generations and decades of them—even Grampa Gus himself. So many of them, if you piled our yearbooks on top of each other, they’d stretch all the way to heaven.
2. The playground trees. Those trees were so big, any one of them could have made an umbrella for the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk.
3. Lunchtime. I loved the way that everybody used to bring brown bags filled with last night’s supper stuck between two pieces of bread. Whatever was left—green beans or a pork chop or tuna casserole. Tastes of home smashed right between two pieces of white.