TWO
Junior High Stinks in More Ways Than One

I had looked forward to that first day of junior high for many reasons. Number one: I wouldn’t have to spend the entire day with Myra Sue or Isabel St. James. Number two: I could see my best friend, Melissa Kay Carlyle, and number three: I like school.

So, after riding good ole bus number 9 for nearly an hour and finally being let off at the front of Cedar Ridge Junior High, I was all set to have a memorable experience. In fact, I expected it would be great. But guess what? I thought wrong.

Melissa Kay Carlyle met me at the front door of that building, which probably was built twenty years before Columbus discovered America. It stunk like his sailing crew had left their gym socks in the old, beat-up gray lockers that lined the hallway. The smell was so bad, you could almost taste it.

“I’m glad you’re here!” Melissa said, grabbing my forearm so hard I nearly dropped my brand-new red-and-blue Trapper Keeper.

During summer break, Melissa’s mom always sent her to summer camp, so I hadn’t seen her most of the summer vacation. We had a lot to catch up on.

That day, Melissa’s light brown hair hung in a shiny bob just below her earlobes, and her pale hazel eyes sparkled, as always, like clear creek water. Melissa has a tiny little nose and rosy mouth that look more like they belong to a baby doll than a girl of eleven, but my mama says that when she grows up, those round features will keep her young-looking.

That morning, she looked wide-eyed and pretty scared.

“What’s wrong?” I said, feeling some alarm.

“We don’t belong here, that’s what’s wrong!” she said. “I am telling you, April Grace, sixth graders have no business being in the same building as seventh and eighth graders.”

I frowned at her.

“What d’you mean? Of course we belong here. We are—” Someone shoved me right into Melissa, who bumped into someone who pushed her back into me.

“Out of the way, worms,” said the boy who pushed Melissa. He had a pink, pimply face and a turned-up nose.

“Yeah, worms,” said the boy who pushed me. “Don’t you realize that sixth graders are the worms of junior high?”

“I’d rather be a worm than a doofus like you,” I said. I started to shove him back, but Melissa grabbed my arm again.

“Sorry,” she said to the boys as she pulled me over to the wall and out of their way. They sneered and swaggered away.

“Melissa Kay Carlyle, do not tell them ‘sorry’ when they—”

“Listen, April Grace. We aren’t in elementary school anymore, and we don’t fit in here. Take a look around.”

I glared good and hard at her because I saw no reason to be all apologetic to those nasty boys who had shoved us and called us names. Then I noticed my friend’s frightened face.

“Look around!” she said again.

So I looked. Here’s what I saw: Except for some of us sixth graders, most of the girls looked like Jem and the Holograms cartoon rock stars, complete with leggings, slouch socks, and oversized sweaters with big shoulders. They wore their big hair pulled into banana clips or on the side in ponytails. Their makeup jobs consisted of bright blue gunk on their eyes, spots of red blush on their cheeks, and vivid pink lipstick.

The boys came in all sizes. Most of them looked like their hands and legs had grown too big for the rest of their bodies. They wore their hair all poufed up, too. They swaggered when they walked. Oh brother.

Most of us sixth graders wore the kind of clothes we wore last year. For instance, I wore red shorts and a white T-shirt. Melissa’s own blue-and-red shorts outfit was new. We looked like we always did as far as I could tell. Some of the girls wore their hair in regular ponytails or had new, short haircuts. Those older kids were looking at us all like we were weird.

I’ll tell you something: the Cedar Ridge sixth graders might have stuck out like a pimple on Myra Sue’s face, but as far as I was concerned, we were not the weird ones in that noisy, stinky hallway.

“So we don’t exactly fit in,” I said to my friend. “So what? There’s no way I’d ever wear my hair fixed like that.” I pointed to one particular awful-looking hairdo. “Her bangs look like a rooster comb. I like my braid.” I grasped that thick, red braid and pulled it over my shoulder, waving the end of it at Melissa. “And wearing makeup is about as dumb a thing as anyone can do. Who wants to look like a clown?”

“But don’t you want to be fashionable?” Melissa said as if she could hardly believe what I’d just said.

“Fashion is a big fat pain!” I declared. “That’s my motto.”

“April Grace, you have a lot of mottoes.”

We stood there eyeballing that milling herd while the odor of perfume, aftershave lotion (what boys need that, I’d like to know?), armpits, mildew, and floor wax nearly gave me a lung disease from the foulness of it all. I liked grade school, where the air smelled like books and chalk dust.

“Wait until you see Lottie Fuhrman,” Melissa muttered.

“Why? Is something wrong with her?”

“You know how she spent an entire month this summer in Little Rock? With her cousin Cassie?”

I nodded.

“You know how her mom and new stepdaddy went on their honeymoon and then moved into their new house? Did you know it’s over there in that fancy new neighborhood, Acacia Heights?”

I nodded again.

“Well, oh brother, has she changed!”

“Changed?” I asked. “Changed how? What do you mean?”

Lottie had been friends with me and Melissa since we were little. She wasn’t a best friend, like Melissa, but we did all go to the same church, and we’d had sleepovers and birthday parties and stuff. She had always been prissier than me or Melissa, but we always had fun and got along just fine. I couldn’t imagine her being any different than usual.

“Right there,” Melissa said. “Look!”

My gaze followed her pointing finger.

That first day of school, in that hot, narrow, smelly hallway full of scared sixth graders, loud seventh graders, and swaggering eighth graders, one thing stood out more than anything else. A group of five girls stood together, and it was as if an invisible cone around them kept everyone else away. Let me tell you, they looked like a clump of vividly identical, blond-haired, overdressed, red-lipped, clown-cheeked Barbie dolls.

Mystified, I said to Melissa, “What is that?”

She sniffed. “That is ‘the Lotties.’”

“The Lotties? What in the world are the Lotties?”

Melissa shrugged and wrinkled her small nose. “That bunch of girls.”

I looked again and saw Brittany Johnson, Aimee Dillard, Heather Franks, and Ashley Cummings. I didn’t know them very well because they had always been kinda standoffish.

“You are not allowed to speak to them unless they say you can,” Melissa said.

“What? How do you know?”

“Because when I said hi to them a bit ago, Lottie said in a snotty voice, ‘You cannot speak to us unless we tell you that you may do so. It’s a rule, and don’t forget it!’”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She shrugged. “That’s the way it is, April Grace.”

I squinted hard at that silly group of girls.

“Well, I’m fixin’ to find out what this is all about,” I told Melissa.

“Oh, April, I don’t think—”

But I wasn’t going to let her stop me from speaking this time. I waved off her warning, shook her hand from my arm, and marched right over into the awfullest cloud of perfume you can imagine.

“Hey, Lottie,” I said, friendly as all get-out and trying not to sneeze. “Did you have a good time with your cousins and grandparents? How’s your mama and her new husband?”

That girl slid her mascaraed gaze over me, then started whispering to that goofy Aimee Dillard, who has always thought she was the hottest thing since fried potatoes because her daddy owned the only hardware store in Cedar Ridge.

“Lottie? Aren’t you going to say hi?” I was still just as warm and friendly as a piece of apple pie.

“Lottie,” said Aimee, “I’m not sure everyone understands our rules. Especially certain bus riders. Especially riders of bus 9.”

“What are you talking about, Aimee?” I said. “You ride the school bus.”

Ole Aimee looked at Lottie and said, “Isn’t it funny, Lots, how some people think that riders of bus 7, who live on the west end of town, are like riders of bus 9, who live on Rough Creek Road?”

“As if anyone from the west end of town would ever in our lives hang out with hicks from Rough Creek Road. Gross me out!” Brittany added, rolling her eyes.

All those girls laughed way too loudly.

“Maybe we should post our rules on the bulletin board,”

Aimee said, “so everyone will know them.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Aims,” Lottie said with all the snootiness you can imagine. “That is your assignment tonight. Make a list of our rules and post them in the morning. In the meantime, those who are not a Lottie should mind their own beeswax.”

“Have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind, Lottie Fuhrman? We’re friends.”

“I just hate that annoying buzz in the air,” she said, swishing her hand back and forth as if she were waving away a bad smell. Those girls giggled and waved their hands, too.

“It might be the smell of the barnyard,” Aimee said.

“It might be the smell of those red shorts,” said Heather.

All of them giggled even more, then they turned as a single unit and walked down the hallway. Students moved to the side for them, half on one side and half on the other, and the hall looked like the Red Sea parting for Moses and the children of Israel.

“See what I mean?” Melissa said behind me.

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” I declared just as the bell rang.

The sad thing is, that might have been the high point of my day because the rest of it went downhill from there.

We all clomped over to the gym for First Day Assembly, in which square-built, gray-haired, flat-footed Mrs. Patsy Farber, the principal, lectured us about the rules of junior high. All that mess went on and on until I thought my ears would bleed.

From the gym we went to our homeroom. Our school was so small, there was only one homeroom class for each grade—and wouldn’t you know, I had to sit next to that obnoxious ole J.H. Henry. For some reason, J.H. decided he was too cool or something. He like to have driven me nuts winking and calling me “baby” and “hot stuff.” Where in the world did he come up with that? Since I have made a decision to be a nicer person, I didn’t hit him with my history book or tell him to go jump up a stump or anything, but I figured if he kept up that nonsense, he’d be winking out of two black eyes sooner or later.

Even if I hadn’t been feeling completely yucky by lunchtime, the gross food smell of the cafeteria and my one bite each of the rubber macaroni and cheese, cold, greasy green beans, and too-sweet applesauce would have put me over the edge. I took my tray right up to one of the lunch ladies and handed it over. She looked at my full tray, then she looked at me.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.

“I am starving out of my mind, but I guess I’ll survive.” I sighed and trudged back the way I came.

The one bright spot in that day was Mrs. Scrivner, the English teacher, who told us we’d be reading literature and writing stories. Now, I figured that right there might make junior high worth the trouble. I nearly stood up and cheered.

But, even with that bit of good news, I was glad to get home from that first day.

I walked up the lane to the house beside my sister after the bus dropped me and Myra Sue off. The junior high shares buses with the high school, so there was no peace from Myra Sue at the end of my school days. My empty stomach growled like eighteen grizzly bears who were eyeballing a solitary Snickers bar. All I wanted to do was eat until I exploded. And with all that school nonsense and Lottie stuff and J.H. Henry irritations, the only thing my brain wanted was to read my book until my eyes crossed. But it didn’t happen that way.

Instead Mama met us at the door with her car keys in her hand.

“Put your books on the table, girls, then pile in the car. Isabel’s in the hospital.”