I was too worried about middle school. I was too worried about the murderer. I think I dreamed that the murderer was my teacher! Now I’m super tired and I’ll probably get lost. I’m already lost, I have no idea where my homeroom is! I can’t find my paper that says where my homeroom is!
“Oh great,” Tana says because Mom said she had to walk me to my first class. Her lips are covered in that pink lip gloss that makes them stick together a little when she talks.
“I found it!” It was in the front pocket of my backpack. This backpack has too many pockets. “25A.”
The hall is so long! It’s like a road, it’s like a tunnel. It’s loud and crowded and it makes my eyes sting. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two—
“Maggie!” Tana says because I went too far, I walked past 25A.
One, two, one—
“Are you counting again?”
“No.”
“Yes you were, I heard you.”
“Two,” I whisper while Tana’s saying hi to some boy. I have no idea who that boy is.
Tana says she’ll meet me here after school. She says, “I hope you have a nice day,” but I bet she only said that because Mom told her to.
Kelsey is already sitting at a desk. She takes her notebook off the desk next to her. “I saved you a seat.” Hailey isn’t here because Hailey has a different homeroom teacher.
“We should have worn jeans,” Kelsey whispers. “We’re the only ones in the whole class wearing skirts.” Kelsey’s wearing a green skirt I’ve never seen before and boots I’ve never seen before. She says, “At least you have leggings under yours.”
I only wore leggings because Tana said I better if I didn’t want to look dumb. Kelsey doesn’t have a big sister to tell her how to be. “That girl’s wearing a skirt,” I say.
“But she’s fat!”
I kind of know what Kelsey means but I still think it wasn’t a very nice thing to say. I hope that girl didn’t hear her. Also, Kelsey didn’t have to say fat. You can say heavy. You can say a little on the heavy side.
Our teacher has short gray hair and a little bit of a mustache. “Class, when the bell rings you should already be settled in your seats. If you are not settled when the bell rings, you will be marked as late.” She points to a piece of paper taped to the whiteboard: 3 LATES = 1 ABSENCE. I don’t think I’m going to like Ms. Morris. But she just smiled and said, “Welcome to middle school,” so maybe she’s nice? It’s hard to tell.
Now she’s walking around the room putting little pieces of paper on our desks. They look like fortune cookie fortunes but they aren’t fortunes, they’re our locker combinations. Mine is not a fortune at all! It’s like the opposite of a fortune, two evens and an odd. But there are three numbers, which is another odd so that’s two odds, which makes even, so I guess it’s okay.
“Did you get a good number?” I ask Kelsey but Kelsey isn’t looking at her combination, she’s looking around the room.
“I am totally wearing jeans tomorrow,” she says.
At lunchtime, all the girls from Riverside Elementary are sitting at the same cafeteria table. We all agree that the Jell-O here is much better than the Jell-O at Riverside, it’s softer, but we don’t like one of the lunch ladies. She was mean to Josie because Josie couldn’t remember what the brown stuff was called and when she said she wanted the brown stuff, the lunch lady said sloppy joes in a really mean voice that made Josie cry a little.
“It’s so embarrassing that we aren’t wearing jeans,” Kelsey whispers, so now I’m kind of embarrassed too. Kelsey says she feels like everyone’s staring at us, but I don’t see anyone even looking at us. “Those girls over there,” she whispers. “Don’t look! They were just staring at us.”
I miss our cafeteria. I miss Ms. Olsen, I miss Mr. Brazil. I even miss Ms. Brownstein. I miss our playground, I miss the dinosaur and the chestnut tree and the green slide. I miss the soap in our bathroom that smelled like SweeTarts.
In middle school, all the kids are giant and all the classrooms look the same, and there isn’t one single soft chair anywhere in the whole building!
In middle school recess is called break, and we don’t have a playground, we have a courtyard and a field. The courtyard has a basketball hoop and bike racks and a tetherball pole without the tetherball so it’s just a pole. There’s a wall covered in tiles with art and words on them, LOVE and PEACE and JOY, but mostly we just have concrete.
In middle school everyone cusses. Even the girls. Even the F-word. The girls don’t play, they just walk around the courtyard and around the halls, around and around like they’re going somewhere except they aren’t. I wonder if they play at home like Tana sometimes plays, even though Tana doesn’t play-play anymore, she just bosses me and Polly.