Gather your edible matter, fellow scientists,” Mr. Allen announced just before noon. “I’m due at a meeting in Mrs. Winger’s office in three and a half minutes.”
I shot my hand into the air. “But what about our Springville Spark editorial meeting?” I asked.
Mr. Allen got up from his desk. “I’m sorry. We’ll have to cancel it today. We’re going to have some free time this afternoon, and we’ll finish this week’s issue then. We’ll celebrate our study of space with this issue before we zoom back to Earth for our new science unit on insects. Now, let’s form our exemplary Room Twenty lunchroom line.”
Nick put his meal ticket in his pocket and trudged over to the line forming by the door. I dug around in my desk for my brown paper bag. It didn’t matter about the Spark, not really. We could finish the class magazine at free time. The problem was that instead of eating lunch together in the classroom, Nick and I would have to eat at separate tables in the zoofeteria.
I wished lunch could be the way it had been in third grade. I’d always sat with Nick. But in upper school’s lunch, the cafeteria was divided down the middle by an invisible wall—boys on the window side, and girls on the side near the hall. Now I’d have to sit with Lacey, Alima, and Jess, and Nick would be stuck all the way across the room at a table with Owen, Max, and some other boys.
I got in line behind Summer and followed her out into the hall. She was pulling her big sweater over her head. The faint smell of cat drifted my way, and of course I thought of that horrid Francis again. If you ask my almost-three-year-old brother Zack what a kitty says, he growls and hisses because that’s what Francis does.
“You don’t need that,” I said to Summer, whose head was still somewhere inside her sweater. Winter had just turned the corner to April, but a sky the color of dirty dishwater hung over the playground. “It’s still sleeting. We’re not going out.”
“I am.” Her head pushed through the neck hole and she shoved her arms into her sleeves.
“You’re not allowed to go out by yourself,” I told her. “School rules.”
“Where’s the cafeteria?” She brushed her hair behind her ears. The front parts escaped again right away.
I pointed. “Around that corner.”
Summer looked both ways like she was getting ready to cross a street. “See you there,” she said, slipping out the playground door.
I watched her run across the pavement and duck under the slide. What could she possibly be up to?
“Nadie, please stay with the class.”
I jumped about three feet in the air, and I wasn’t even the one who’d ignored the rules. The rest of the kids had already disappeared around the corner. Mr. Allen stood waiting for me.
I got on the end of the lunch line without looking at Mr. Allen, but I could feel him watching me. The sour smell of rubbery franks and beans filled my nose and clogged the back of my throat. Don’t ask about her, I prayed. Don’t ask, don’t ask.
“Nadie, wasn’t Summer back here with you?”
“Ye-es.” It came out like a squeak. The lunch line stopped moving. I looked straight ahead as if there was something enormously interesting on the wall outside the lunchroom doorway. All I had to do was get through the door before Mr. Allen asked me anything else. What was holding up the line? Summer might as well have taken a shortcut to Mrs. Winger’s office, because that’s where she was headed this time for sure. I squeezed past Alima and Jess, trying to get to Lacey.
“Hey!” they complained.
“Nadie?” Mr. Allen’s long arm stretched over them and clamped onto my shoulder.
I stopped. “Mr. Allen, I—”
“Did you think you lost her?” He turned me sideways by my shoulder. “She just got ahead of you—look!”
Summer was walking over to the other side of the room, past the lunch monitor, Mrs. Wolfowitz. Mrs. Wolfowitz was shorter than most of us and as wide as a doorway. She always sat on a chair in the middle of the room with her eyes shut for the entire lunch period. We’d learned that she didn’t much care what we did as long as we stayed in our seats to do it. The older kids say that a long time ago a fifth grade boy got up before the bell, just to throw something away. “That’s it,” Mrs. Wolfowitz had said. “Let’s go.” She took him away. No one saw where he went. The next day the lunch lady was back in her seat in the middle of the lunchroom. But they way they tell it, no one ever saw that fifth grader again.
Mr. Allen still had me by the shoulder. He gave me a little shove toward Summer. “She’s certainly learning her way around quickly, isn’t she?” he remarked.
I wasn’t so sure. Summer had gone outside, run around the building, and sneaked back in through a different lunchroom door. Now she was heading toward an empty table on the other side of Mrs. Wolfowitz—a table on the boys’ side.
As I neared her, I could see that droplets clung to Summer’s sweater. Her cheeks and nose were the color of supermarket strawberries.
“Got my lunch.” She held up a plastic grocery bag. Then she slung one leg over the bench to sit down.
“Summer, wait!” I yelled. But my words drowned in the voices of almost two hundred other Upper Elementary lunchers.
“What?” She plunked herself down on the bench. Then she yanked on my arm and I landed next to her.
“You just sat us on the boys’ side,” I wailed.
“Boys’ side?”
“Yeah. We were supposed to sit over there.” I pointed toward the safe area on the other side of Mrs. Wolfowitz.
“You mean girls can’t sit here?” Summer peered into her plastic bag. “Who made that stupid rule?”
“I don’t know—everybody,” I said. “It’s just how you have to do it.” I glanced from side to side. The way the boys were looking at us, we might as well have been aliens with three purple heads.
“I don’t get it.” Summer shrugged. “But okay, let’s move over to the other side.” She closed her bag and started to get up.
“No!” I pulled her back down. “We can’t!”
Summer stared at me like I’d gone completely nuts. “Just tell me this,” she said. “If we’re not supposed to sit here, then why can’t we go over there?”
“Because once you sit down, you’re not supposed to get out of your seat.” I pointed at the lunch lady asleep in her chair and lowered my voice. “That’s Mrs. Wolfowitz’s rule. If you get up, she makes you disappear.”
Summer Crawford twisted around and studied the woman in the chair. Then she turned back to me and raised one eyebrow. She took a napkin out of her bag and calmly spread it on her lap.
I could tell she didn’t believe me about Mrs. Wolfowitz.
So far no boys had sat down at our table, and I was beginning to think that I might survive the lunch period after all. I took out the yogurt, the carrot sticks, and the almond butter sandwich with raisins that my dad had packed for me. He’s a healthy-food fanatic. He says the three-to-eleven shift my mom works at Brennan Engineering is called the graveyard shift because all the junk they eat will kill you. Lacey thinks my dad and my lunches are not “normal.” The last time I had to eat in the lunchroom, she tried to get me to eat those blue and yellow gummy giraffes that stick your teeth together.
“It’s fruit,” she’d said, pointing to the flashy advertising on the package. “See?”
Looking at Summer’s plastic bag, I wondered if she ate those blue and yellow giraffes, too, or what.
“Why’d you have to go outside to get your lunch?” I asked her. I opened my yogurt and gave it a stir.
“Refrigeration,” she said. “I used that petrified snowbank by the corner of the playground.” She took a family-sized jar of mayonnaise out of her bag. Next came a turkey drumstick big enough to bat a Wiffle ball. It smelled like the day after Thanksgiving. She put the turkey leg on top of the empty bag and opened the jar. Then she ripped off a hunk of meat and used it to scoop out a blob of mayonnaise.
“Mmmm,” Summer said, chewing with her eyes closed. Her knuckles were shiny with grease.
Watching her made me want to take a break from eating. I put my yogurt spoon down on my napkin.
Just as Summer tore off another chunk of turkey, Nick walked by. He was so keen on looking straight ahead that he slipped on an empty juice box and almost dropped his tray. Having to pretend we weren’t friends this year had been a lot of work for Nick and me. But today it was turning out to be downright dangerous. And I knew Nick was wondering what in the world I was doing sitting on the boys’ side. I was wondering the same thing myself.
A loud voice at the other end of our table interrupted my thoughts. “Aw—no other seats.” Owen slammed his tray down. “Guess we have to sit here with the cave girls.” Max and two of their friends from Mrs. Novotny’s class sat with him. They looked over at us and snickered.
“Baked beans,” said Owen. “Great ammo!” He blew the wrapper off of his straw and loaded a bean into his shooter. A bean zinged right past his head from the direction of the next table. Owen aimed his straw for a return shot while the others loaded.
Figuring they’d forget about us now, I turned away and took a bite of my sandwich.
“It must take a long time to make all that.” Summer waved a piece of her slimed turkey at my lunch. “I’m not what you’d call an early riser, so I go for the grab grub.”
“I don’t get up early enough to make my lunch either,” I said. I felt a little embarrassed. “My dad makes it.”
“I don’t have a dad.”
I stopped chewing.
“Don’t worry,” Summer said. She gave a little laugh. “It’s not like I had one that died or anything. He left before I was even born.”
A baked bean flew right by us and smacked into the side of Owen’s head. It came from the table on the other side of us, but he must have thought I shot it. “Let’s get ’em!” he yelled.
“It wasn’t me,” I insisted, pointing. “It came from those boys over there.” Owen turned his attention to the table next to us, and I looked back at Summer.
I thought about what she’d said about her not having a dad. I held up my carrot sticks. “Want some?” I asked her.
She gave me this funny smile, kind of shy and wide open at the same time. “Thanks,” she said, which mostly just looked like her mouth moving because Owen and the others were now in some sort of shouting match.
“Put beans in it!” Max yelled.
“I’m putting Jell-O in it, too!” Owen bellowed. “And I’m shaking it up!”
Summer took a couple of carrots and ate them, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Here.” She pulled a hunk of turkey off the leg and tipped her mayonnaise jar toward me.
“Try some of mine.”
I could see greasy globs of mayonnaise shivering on the inside of the glass.
“NOW!” Owen shouted.
He leaned past me and sloshed the contents of his milk carton into Summer’s open mayonnaise jar.
“HAH-HAH!” he yelled. The other boys pounded his back and cheered.
Summer screwed the lid on the jar and shook it. Mushed beans and dots of mayonnaise swirled in a foamy pink broth. “Thanks,” she told Owen. “I am pretty thirsty.” She raised the jar like she was making a toast, then tipped it back and took a swallow. She smiled at the astonished boys through a chalky pink mustache.
“Yah! Gross!” Max slapped the table and high-fived one of the other boys. The rest of them looked like they might be sick.
Owen jumped up. His face was all red. “You—you can’t do that!” he yelled.
And just like that the lunch lady was at our table. The rest of the cafeteria suddenly went quiet, as if someone had hit the mute button.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Wolfowitz. “Let’s go.”