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Mom drove me to school Monday morning. It wasn’t necessary, and although we only lived a few blocks from the place, she went way out of her way to go through the drive-thru so she could get me some French toast sticks and a hot chocolate—her bribe for making me get up that morning and face the day. The chocolate tasted good on my tongue, but it soured in my stomach the moment I got to school and had to walk through all the teasing laughter and jeering of the kids in school to get to class. Clearly, the news about my house being papered had spread.
All morning while Ms. Overstreet lectured about different kinds of American Indian dwellings that had been constructed around the country based on the terrain, the sweets rolled around in there. I thought I might genuinely have to go home sick if it didn’t stop soon.
Ms. Overstreet finally brought her lesson to an end and said it was time to do a fun project. She lit up the way she does when she thinks she’s doing something that will get kids all excited about learning. She smiled bigger, her eyes widened, and her hands gestured wildly. Even that dark bob haircut of hers seemed to get animated.
“I want you to split into groups of four. I’ve got craft materials for each group. You get to create a structure: a teepee, an adobe hut, a pueblo, a wigwam, a longhouse . . . You get to pick, and you get to design it. Sound fun?”
I think one person said yes. I’m pretty sure that was Cathy because she loved crafts. I know for a fact I heard several groans from the boys. I held mine in, but it would have been loudest if I hadn’t. I hated crafts and the idea of being in a group. All I wanted was to throw up and go lie down somewhere.
At least Ms. Overstreet could have picked the groups for us, but she didn’t. She left it up to us to find a few friends. Naturally, no one picked me. I saw Michelle Blanco coming toward me (the only person who did), but Jackie said, “Not her.” Michelle changed direction and joined another group. When all the groups were settled, only three of us remained. Myles Tucker, Kimi Belyakov, and myself. Kimi was a Foreign Exchange student and didn’t speak English very well. She also had some unfortunate eyebrows and a big mole on her cheek. Myles was a big boy and had an unfortunate body odor. My former friends always kept their distance from these two unless they were in a teasing mood.
I glanced over at Jackie and the girls. By the way they were laughing and pointing, I could tell they were enjoying the fact that I was stuck with the two outcasts of the sixth grade. Over in the corner, Kimi smoothed the top of her hair with her hands and tightened her ponytail. Myles chewed on his nails. Both of them watched me carefully, surely expecting me to come over and say something horrible to them.
I turned my back to Jackie and walked to Kimi and Myles. “Would it be okay if I joined you two?” They both nodded, and we got to work.
It turned out that Myles was a wiz at building, and Kimi had lots of great ideas for making the structure cool-looking. Neither of them seemed to be aware of the hard time the popular kids had been giving me because they were super friendly and talked to me like they thought I was worth their attention. Despite Myles’s underarms, my nausea began to abate. I found myself laughing and enjoying their company. We made a pretty awesome building and were finished well before the cut-off time. I looked around and saw several groups panicking about finishing in time. Kirk was yelling at his friends and running his hands through his normally neat hair.
Jackie, Stacy, LaQuita, and Cathy weren’t freaking out. They also finished with minutes to spare. That didn’t surprise me. Cathy was pretty artistic just by herself, and I was sure the other girls had some talent for decoration. The four of them leaned against their desks, smirking like they thought they were hot stuff while keeping their project hidden behind them.
“All right! Time’s up!” Ms. Overstreet announced in her cheery voice. Kids groaned and yelped. “Let’s see what everyone made.” She held up a cardboard box that was open on the top. “Everyone grab a few scraps of paper from this box. Walk around and look at all the structures. On your paper score each project from one to five and put it in a neat pile to the side of the project. Five means it’s perfect. The structure with the highest number of votes wins.”
“Wins what?” Jackie asked.
“No homework tonight,” Ms. Overstreet said. “How’s that?”
“Aw, man,” Kirk whined. “If I’d known there was a prize, I’d have worked harder.”
Ms. Overstreet raised her eyebrows. “You should always work your hardest, no matter whether there’s a prize.” She shook the box. “Come on, everyone.”
I went to grab some paper for my scores. Most of my classmates chatted with each other about the houses and decided in groups what the scores should be. I kept my thoughts to myself, wrote my score, and slipped my vote under each pile so no one would know it was mine. None of the projects impressed me that much. I truly believed the one Myles, Kimi, and I made was the best. I already had a huge pile of make-up work for the days I missed, so I was pretty thrilled about the idea of not having any new homework to add to it.
I put my final score down on Kirk’s group project. It was awful and had already fallen over. I gave it a one. My finger had just left the pile of votes (all of which, I noticed, agreed with my opinion) when I heard a bunch of laughter coming from behind me. I flipped around to see what was going on. Nearly everyone in the class was gathered around the house my group had made. Oh, no! What happened to it? I rushed across the room and pushed my way between my classmates.
Our little, perfect longhouse made of individual clay bricks that Myles, Kimi, and I took care to create was completely covered in shreds of white paper. Some of it had been pressed into the clay, ruining the structure, and other pieces were piled on top.
“It looks just like Heidi’s house!” Stacy shrieked, laughing in a way that sounded a lot like a cackle to me. All of the other kids in the class laughed. Except Myles and Kimi. They were devastated and looked at me with painful eyes. Now they knew I wasn’t someone they should have teamed up with, but it was too late.
Rage took over. I dashed over to Jackie’s project, lifted it up, and threw it across the room. It sailed over three desks and slammed into the bulletin board on the side wall with a bang. The clay stuck to the bulletin board and ripped it off the wall, where the whole thing fell off and plopped to the floor. Push pins, toothpicks, notes, and clay scattered everywhere. I heard a collective “Oh!” from the class, but I refused to look at any of them. My blood felt so hot, and my fingers tingled. I thought I might pass out.
“Heidi Lansing!” Ms. Overstreet shouted at me.
“I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I slowly pivoted to find the whole class staring at me with their mouths frozen in this “O” shape. No one moved, including my teacher. I thought about apologizing, but right then Jackie started to smile. It was the meanest smile I’d ever seen, and it was directed right at me.
As quickly as it appeared, she wiped it away and began tugging on Ms. Overstreet’s sleeve. “Did you see what she did, Ms. Overstreet? She ruined our project!” That got LaQuita and Stacy into action too, and they also started whining about how I ruined all their hard work and must be punished. Cathy continued to stare at me like I was crazy, shaking her head like she couldn’t quite believe it.
I ran over to Ms. Overstreet and the girls. The other students in the class backed out of the way. I noticed that Mr. Roland, the teacher from the class next door, was poking his head in the door. He must have heard the bang and wondered what happened. Above it all, I heard the phone ringing.
“They ruined my project first,” I shouted. “They put paper all over it and ruined it. They came to my house over the weekend and toilet-papered my house. They deserved it!”
We were all shouting at once.
“Everyone stop!” Ms. Overstreet shouted. We silenced ourselves. None of us had ever heard her so angry before. “Go to your seats.” Everyone slunk back to their desks except for the girls and me. “I meant all of you,” Ms. Overstreet said to us.
“This is Jackie’s fault,” I said. “If she hadn’t been so mean—”
“My fault? You can’t pin anything on me. The whole class saw you throw our longhouse—”
“You ruined mine.”
“Oh, please.”
“Girls!”
We shut our mouths. Cathy, LaQuita, and Stacy snuck back to their seats.
Ms. Overstreet waved at Mr. Roland. “Could you send Ms. Latham over here to watch my class for a few minutes?” He nodded and left the doorway. We stood there silently until Mr. Roland’s assistant came over. Ms. Overstreet gave the class some quick directions about cleaning up the projects and reading until recess. Then she took Jackie and me to the front office.
Our principal, Ms. Hudson, sighed and huffed the whole time we were in her office. She listened to us argue, but she kept flicking her eyes at Ms. Overstreet as if to ask why our teacher was wasting her time with this issue.
“Jackie,” she finally said, “from now on, keep your opinions about Heidi and her brother to yourself. It isn’t your business or anyone else’s. Can you work on that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jackie said with a nod.
“We have a zero tolerance policy for bullying.”
“But I promise I didn’t—”
“If I hear about you bothering Heidi again, there will be consequences. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then Jackie left with Ms. Overstreet to go back to class. Because I’d committed a violent act and ruined school property on top of it, I got in-school suspension. My mom was called, and I had to spend the rest of the day sitting at a small desk behind the administration assistants in the front office. Kimi brought a stack of work and dropped it in front of me. I took her hand to stop her before she left.
“I’m so sorry, Kimi.”
She gave me a sympathetic smile. “It is not a worry, Heidi,” she said. “I too have not much friends. Sometimes I too get mad.”
“I’m sorry if I was ever mean to you.”
“You were not. You let me play the game of dodging balls.”
“That’s right,” I said, remembering how hard she could throw the ball. “You were good at it.”
“I like that game. We maybe play again sometime?”
“I’d like that.”
I hoped that would happen, but I had a feeling it would be hard to get anyone to play with us after what I’d done that morning. If there were kids in the sixth grade who hadn’t sided with Jackie in hating me yet, they certainly would now. I was glad I didn’t have to go back to class because I didn’t know how I’d be able to raise my head enough to look at anyone. The thought of going back the next day made me want to cry. Could I convince my mom to let me change schools?
Another hour passed, and my stomach growled. It was getting close to lunchtime. I raised my head from my work to see a teacher I didn’t recognize rolling a really small child into the office in a wheelchair. The kid in the chair didn’t even look like she was in kindergarten. Her wrists and ankles were twisted in a way that looked unnatural, and her head tilted to the right. Drool ran out of her open yet smiling mouth. Her black hair was thick and unruly. I watched her get pushed into the nurse’s office next to where I was sitting. They left the door open, and I leaned forward to see what they were doing.
Our school nurse, Ms. Wren, greeted the little girl warmly and pulled out a can of some kind of milk from the refrigerator. Ms. Wren and the teacher talked to each other and to the little girl, but the little girl just grunted and giggled. While they chatted, Ms. Wren poured the milk into an IV-type bag and pressed buttons on a square machine next to it. She then attached a long tube from the bag to the little girl’s stomach. A beep or two later and the milk was slowly going through the tube into the girl’s body.
“Is that how she eats?” I asked them.
Ms. Wren and the teacher looked up, a little surprised to find me watching them. They both explained to me how tube feeding worked and that they had to do this twice a day for her. It took about thirty minutes for all the milk to go through. The whole time I thought about the dance a few nights before and how interesting it had been to learn about Donald’s difficulties and meeting his friends. I wondered what it was like for this little girl’s brothers or sisters, the fact that she had to eat like this. Could they go to restaurants? Did they get embarrassed to have friends come over for lunch or dinner? Or did they just handle it?
I pulled the letter Bobby had written to me out of my pocket and read it again.
All I can say is maybe you can teach them what it’s like to be Donald. That might help, you know?
I let that notion roll around in my head for a little while.
By the time the tube feeding was done and the teacher rolled the little girl back to class, I had an idea. I gently tapped on Ms. Hudson’s door and asked whether she had a minute to talk. She took her hand away from her keyboard and sighed at me before waving me inside. Five minutes later, her eyes were bright and she was smiling at me. She patted me on the back and said, “That just might work.”