| |
––––––––
Dear Heidi,
You’re selfish and stuck up, and nobody wants to be friends with you anymore.
The note wasn’t signed. I couldn’t even tell who’d passed it to me. I’d been reading, and when I looked up from my book, the note was on my desk. Free reading time on Mondays meant the kids in class could move about in order to fetch books from the bookshelves or borrow passes to go to the library. The substitute teacher, Ms. Hill, wasn’t very good at keeping everyone from talking, which bothered me because I kept getting distracted from reading an awesome book about the discovery of the bones of an unknown species and the suspicion that they came from aliens who had visited Earth thousands of years ago. The movement and the noise of my classmates drove me crazy.
And then the note.
Stuck up? I had never acted stuck up. At least I didn’t think I’d ever acted stuck up. Maybe I bragged about sports, but I really was the best girl athlete in the sixth grade. People complimented me about my ability a lot, but I tried not to go on and on about it, no matter how proud I felt. Usually I just said thank you, and that had always seemed right.
Was that what the note meant? If so, why now? I hadn’t done anything braggy or worth accepting a compliment over lately. Why didn’t someone give me this note months ago when I was organizing the dodgeball games? I was kind of showing off then. I didn’t even wear my soccer pin anymore.
Also, the note said I was being selfish. About what? What did I have that I wasn’t sharing? I was so confused, and I wished that whoever wrote the note had just put his or her name on it so I could ask what I’d done wrong and fix it. If I could prevent someone from being mad at me, I’d like to try. Clearly, whoever wrote the note intended to stay mad and didn’t want the problem resolved at all.
I considered showing the note to Ms. Hill privately, but then I figured that, as a substitute, she wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do about it. To wait until the next day when Ms. Overstreet came back might be too late to change anything. Besides, if the person who sent the note found out I’d shown it to a teacher, he or she might get even madder.
Showing it to Jackie was an option. If anyone would know who’d written it, she would. Jackie knew all the gossip, who hated who, and all of that kind of stuff. But what if it was Jackie who’d sent it?
Now that I thought of it, that made the most sense. Sure. I had no doubt that on Friday afternoon Cathy had run off to tell Jackie all about how weird Donald was, and now Jackie was tormenting me.
But why stuck up? Why selfish? It would have made more sense if Jackie had written something mean about Donald.
Another note dropped on my desk.
I looked up immediately to see who left it. I still couldn’t tell, but I caught a flash of LaQuita plopping into her seat and Stacy peeking over the top of her book to see whether I’d read it.
It’s a conspiracy, I thought. They’re all out to get me.
I opened the note.
Dear Heidi,
We heard about your deep, dark secret. You should have shared.
Again, it was unsigned. I didn’t need a signature this time to know for sure who’d written it. I looked up at Jackie, who kept her eyes on her book while twirling her long brown hair around her fingers. Jackie wasn’t really reading. She was just playing innocent. I knew her well enough to tell. Stacy and LaQuita snickered from their side-by-side desks, and I wished Ms. Hill would move them apart. I searched the room for Cathy, who was mysteriously absent. At the library maybe? Did she know what Jackie was doing?
I slouched in my seat and propped up my book on my desk so it would block my view of them or the possibility of any of them seeing my face. With effort, I squinted to focus on the sentences on the page and what they could possibly mean if I were really reading them. It was all gobbledy-gook because my ears were busy listening for whispers of my name, and sensors on my body were on high alert for anyone who might be passing close to my desk. A wisp of air and a soft click on my desk, tiny sounds that shouldn’t have been heard over the noise of the chatter in the room, were like bomb blasts to me. I lowered my book to find another note on my desk, this one disguised as a paper airplane. Someone had tossed it, and I had no idea who.
I unfolded the note. This one had different handwriting. Messier. No bubbly letters with circles instead of periods. It was almost hard to read, but the signature wasn’t. I read that first.
Kirk.
Kirk? This had to be a joke.
I read the words he’d supposedly scribbled.
Hide,
Do you want to hang out sometime? Maybe a movie with me on Saturday?
A date? I was being asked out on a date by the best basketball player in the school? By the boy with the curly black hair? By the boy who actually combed his curly black hair?
Nah. That couldn’t be it. His note said “hang out,” so I took that to mean it was just an invitation to become better friends. No one went on dates in sixth grade. Mostly when boys and girls decided to be a thing, all they did was pass notes and talk on the phone at night. Jackie said sometimes her parents dropped her off to meet a boy for lunch or to stroll around the park for a while.
So I twisted around in my seat, intending to smile and nod at Kirk instead of bothering to write him a note in return. However, his face was bright red, and he struggled to keep his eyes hidden behind his paperback horror novel. Tim, his best friend, sat behind him and kept poking him in the back with the eraser of his pencil. Finally irritated enough, Kirk reached back and swiped the pencil out of Tim’s hand. Tim merely laughed harder. Kirk hazarded a look around his book at me and then went back to reading.
Okay, he was acting a little sheepish. If all he wanted was to be my friend, I didn’t think he’d be weird like that. Only a couple of girls in the sixth grade had boyfriends already. Jackie, obviously. Every boy in the school had a crush on the girl who wore make-up and had begun to grow a figure, and she’d already broken the hearts of two of them. Stacy went steady with Aaron Giles for two weeks. There were a couple of girls in Ms. Stemple’s class who were always holding hands with boys on the playground during recess. Of course, all the girls had crushes on someone or other, but most of the boys weren’t super into girls yet.
I thought about how I must look right then. It was still early in the day, and I was sleepy. My hair was hanging in front of my eyes like it often did because I didn’t have bangs and hated headbands. My fingernail polish had mostly flaked off. I didn’t like to wear skirts, so I wore my denim capris. Though I wore my favorite t-shirt, it was covered by my dad’s dingy gray college sweatshirt, which I kept on because the classroom was always freezing cold.
Boys didn’t ask girls like me out on dates. They asked well-dressed, pretty girls like Stacy and LaQuita. Or popular girls like Jackie. I went back to my original thought: Kirk wasn’t asking me on a date date. Just a buddy thing. Yeah. That made more sense. He was just all red and embarrassed because Tim was making a big deal out of it.
Stacy and LaQuita’s chatting got louder. It was easy to hear that they were talking about the third note I’d received. They wanted to know what it said. I looked at them and then down at the invitation again. Why didn’t Kirk ask one of them to the movies? If I were a boy, I would have. They were so much prettier and more popular than me.
That was it.
He didn’t really ask me out, buddy or no. He wouldn’t. I bet that Jackie put him up to this tease because she knew how much I liked Kirk. A cruel joke.
I scribbled a note of my own then, certain that if I passed a note it would be the one to be discovered by Ms. Hill. I took the chance anyway and lucked out.
Dear Kirk,
I don’t think it’s very funny.
Heidi