OKAY. I LIED. THAT DAY AT LUNCH, WHEN ROSE HOLLAND ASKED me what my thing was. I told her I’d only written one poem, which isn’t true.
One poem earned me my nickname. But I’ve actually written hundreds.
I keep them in a notebook under my bed, like Deedee and his box of dice. It’s nothing special, just your regular spiral-bound notebook, college-ruled, with a navy blue cover. I fill the pages late at night when I’m supposed to be asleep. The real Frost supposedly wrote his poems in an overstuffed blue chair. I write mine by flashlight, belly down on my bed with my feet in the air.
I don’t bring the notebook with me to school because there are certain people—certain types of people—who would take one look at it and find a way to use it against me. I realize most kids wouldn’t care. Some of them would even think it’s cool. It’s the few who don’t—who read way too much into a thing—those are the ones who will make your life miserable. Kids who wouldn’t know a heroic couplet if it was tattooed on their forehead but who would take writing poetry as an excuse to be mean. Kids who would steal it, tear out the pages, and read them out loud in class. Tape them to the bathroom mirrors. Use them to stop up the toilets.
They would come up with other nicknames for me. Names worse than Frost. Names that start with P, and “poet” wouldn’t be one of them.
Some things are better kept to yourself. I don’t share my poems with anyone. Not even Bench or Wolf or Deedee. Not because I’m afraid of what they would think. I mean, we play Dungeons & Dragons. It’s hard to be embarrassed when it’s the four of us. I just prefer not to share. We all need something that’s ours. A thing that we know absolutely about ourselves that others can only guess at.
One day, I think, when I’m good enough, I will pull the notebook from its hiding spot beneath the mattress and open it up for others to see. I will sound my barbaric yawp, as Mr. Sword calls it, over the rooftops of the world. But I’m sure as sushi not doing it while I’m in middle school. I’m not an idiot.
I know what words can do.
Deedee broke out the sticky notes again in art class later that afternoon. We were sketching still lifes of plastic fruit that had been set on the front table—taking the fake perfection of the glossy apple and golden-tinged banana and making them imperfect again through our rough, wobbling lines. It struck me as odd, making a copy of these copies, but real fruit would have rotted before we ever got around to finishing our drawings. Sometimes it’s better to fake it, I guess.
I was sketching the bunch of rubber grapes when Deedee peeled off the top note from his pad and gave it to me. Passing notes had nearly gone extinct back when everybody snuck their phones into class. But only two days into the ban, the furtive art of note passing had experienced a resurgence, and teachers were probably wondering if it wasn’t better before when it was just screens being tapped and not elaborately folded sheets of paper being shuffled under desks like some gossipy game of telephone.
Deedee stuck his Post-it to my sketch when Mr. Stilton, the art teacher, wasn’t looking.
What was that all about? the note said.
I knew what he meant. He meant Rose Holland crashing our lunch.
Guess she just needed somewhere to sit, I wrote back. It was the simplest explanation. It obviously wasn’t the one Deedee was looking for, though. As soon as I handed the sticky note back to him he began to scrawl across it.
Yeah, but why us?
That was the better question. Because she has a soft spot for the tortured and misunderstood? Because she knew somehow, instinctively, that Wolf would ask her to? Because I smiled at her in first period, even though I tried to keep it just a polite kind of thing, like how you smile at your waiter when he refills your glass, and not a hey-just-feel-free-to-come-plop-right-down-at-our-lunch-table-if-you-feel-lonely kind of thing.
Or maybe she thought we were the cool kids and she was looking to score popularity points by being seen with us.
Yeah. That had to be it.
I pointed to Deedee’s pack of sticky notes and snapped my fingers until he pulled a few off for me. I had no idea where mine were, probably stuffed in my locker somewhere. There was absolutely no talking allowed in art; Mr. Stilton said it “disrupted the creative energy flows that emanated from each artist’s soul.” We weren’t even allowed to whisper. I used my charcoal pencil, filling the top yellow square. Maybe if you hadn’t shot her with an applesauce wad, I wrote.
Deedee scrawled something quickly. He just held his note up for me to see.
Not my fault. I didn’t ask her to sit.
I wrote just as quickly.
I didn’t ask her either.
Deedee scribbled and flashed another note.
Do you like her?
I shook my head vehemently. Gut reaction. He shook his head back and continued writing.
No. Not like that. I mean, would you want her to sit with us again?
Again? Like tomorrow? I hadn’t really thought about it. I assumed it was a one-time-only thing. Rose Holland was getting her bearings. Window shopping. Tomorrow she would sit somewhere else. Then somewhere different the third day, and so on, until she found her people. Because that’s how it worked.
We weren’t her people. She had to see that. We were at maximum capacity. Once was fine, but I couldn’t imagine her really fitting in. She was funny, sort of, and you kind of had to admire the gutsy way she just inserted herself, but she stuck out. She drew attention to herself, and that was a problem. Because who you sat with mattered. Who nodded to you in the halls. Who saved your seat on the bus. Who signed the back of your yearbook. It all meant something.
Do you want her to? I wrote back, handing the sticky note to Deedee, but he didn’t reply, partly because Mr. Stilton was making the rounds, polished shoes clicking against the floor, inspecting our handiwork. It didn’t matter, though. Deedee’s silence was answer enough. Sometimes the truth was hard to admit. My mother was the one who taught me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, which goes a long way toward explaining why the house was so quiet in the last few years before Dad left.
Mr. Stilton stepped up behind me and looked at my sorry-looking sketch with its lopsided banana. “Nice work,” he said. Which is pretty much all he ever said, whether you were a junior Picasso or some kid who couldn’t even make a straight line.
Maybe his mom had told him the same thing once.
When we left art, Deedee got nudged. Hard enough that he winced and dropped his backpack, rubbing his shoulder where he was hit. Noah Kyle got him, leading with his shoulder, though he had to stoop a little to get a good shot.
There are other names for it. A bump. A check. A brush. At BMS we called it a nudge. When someone—usually someone bigger than you, or in Deedee’s case, always someone bigger—steps into your path and slams into you, catching you on the arm or the shoulder, preferably the one your backpack is slung across so that it gets knocked off. Better still if you’re holding something—a bottle of Gatorade, or a stack of books—something you can spill or scatter, to multiply the embarrassment factor, so that the rest of the students standing around you clap at your apparent clumsiness or even take pictures (before the Great Confiscation, anyways) as you bend down to gather your things.
Nudging is a fact of middle school life. It’s inevitable, like puberty and armpit stink and lame assemblies. You just learn to live with it. It’s better than getting tripped and probably a heckuva lot better than getting hit. I wouldn’t know about that—I had never gotten in a fight—but I’d been nudged a dozen times, maybe more. Some of them were by accident, other kids honestly not looking where they were going. Most of them weren’t.
Some kids you can see it coming. You can track the shift in trajectory, the other kid working the angle to guarantee impact. Sometimes they even smile at their friends before it happens. A premeditated shoulder slam. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like you’ve been shoved into a locker or had your head stuffed into the john. It’s marking territory. Good fences make good neighbors. You just pick up your books and move along. It’s not something you tell your parents about. It doesn’t bear a remark of any kind. It was just an accident. That’s what you tell yourself.
Sometimes they would mock-apologize, the girls more than the boys. Make a big production out of it—“Oh, I’m sooo sorry. Did you get in my way?” That was the real insult. They made it your fault you got nudged. Your fault for being invisible, for not stepping aside.
Wolf didn’t get nudged much, not that I saw, anyway. More often he got dirty looks or snide comments from the kids who sat behind us in class. Deedee was an easy target for nudging, though. His size was a big part of it. A stiff enough shoulder could actually send him spinning. And the drama. Watching his face contort, seeing his cheeks burn. I’m pretty sure some kids nudged him just to hear him say “Hey, man, knock it off,” in that nasally whine of his.
Fortunately, nobody ever nudged Deedee—or any of us—when Bench was around. But Bench wasn’t always around.
We stepped out into the hallway after art and headed toward the last period of the day when Deedee suddenly spun sideways, his backpack slipping off of his left shoulder, his math textbook tumbling out of it along with a bunch of papers. “Hey! Watch it!” he squealed.
Noah Kyle twisted his head, turned down his bottom lip. “Whoops. I didn’t see you down there.” Beside him, Jason Baker laughed. They were the usual suspects. Noah. Jason. Cameron Cole. A few others. Kids we’d been through the past two years with. Kids whose shoulders we were used to. Kids whose laughs we could identify with our eyes closed. Some of them had been nudging Deedee since elementary school. Though they certainly weren’t the only ones, they were at least the most reliable jerks in the school. Cameron once “accidentally” dumped his orange juice down my back in the sixth grade. And Jason seemed to be gunning for Wolf for over a year now, whispering things by his ear in class, flicking paper wads at his back, though in true Wolfish fashion he’d just shrug it off. Deedee was a different story.
I bent down and helped him gather his stuff. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Whatever,” he said, sniffing and stuffing his papers back into his math book. He looked down the hall, the opposite way of Noah and his friends, not wanting to look me in the face either. Then he stood up with a deep breath and reshouldered his pack. “C’mon,” he said.
Just a nudge. Though Deedee walked a little slower than before. And kept between me and the wall the rest of the way just in case. No doubt he was imagining a Balrog bursting through the tiled floor, picking up Noah Kyle and crushing him in its fiery fist.
Or maybe that was just me.
After the last bell I went to my locker to grab my books before meeting up with Bench and heading out to our bus. On days when he didn’t have practice—which weren’t many—we at least got to sit together on the way home.
When I got there I found another yellow square of paper stuck to the door. I figured it was from Deedee—some little quip or stupid drawing, maybe of Deedee skewering Noah on the tip of a sword. As I got closer, though, I realized the note wasn’t from him at all. It didn’t have a name, and I didn’t recognize the large, looping script, but I knew immediately who wrote it. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then peeled the note from the door, folding it twice and shoving it in my pocket.
Thanks for lunch, it said.
And beneath that was a drawing of a snowman.
I went to go find Bench.