After my strep throat, I wanted to get the flu, mono, a broken leg—anything that wasn’t terminal or disfiguring. But I stayed healthy.
When I went back to school, nothing changed. And nothing had changed three months later when I met the old lady on the subway. I didn’t expect her to make any difference either, and she didn’t. On the subway stairs I was surrounded by laughing, yelling kids, but I was alone. The usual.
Outside, it had just stopped raining, and the breeze was chilly. I was cold, even though it was May twenty-sixth.
The old lady must have guessed about my wanting to be popular, I reasoned. Most kids want that. Though how she knew my name was a mystery. Nobody names a kid Wilma. The last person before me to be named Wilma was prehistoric—a Flintstone.
Maybe I look like a Wilma. My neck is short, and my front teeth are long, like a beaver. Everything else about me is average, although my brown eyes add to the beaver look. A friendly beaver, that’s me.
At the corner of West Twenty-fourth and Tenth, I saw Ardis half a block behind me with a few billion of her friends. Even though she had talked to me on the “beloved Wilma” day, she hardly knew me. Claverford is small enough for everybody to know everybody, but I knew her better than she knew me. It’s like you know things about the President of the United States, but he—or she—doesn’t know you from a lima bean.
Ordinarily, I would have kept on walking. But this morning, because I was cold, and tired of being invisible and alone, and because of the old lady, I decided to talk to Ardis. I waited at the curb for her.
One of the bunch with Ardis was Razor Mouth Suzanne. Suzanne had always clung by her fingernails to the popular clique. She lived in the same building as me, and I’d known her since we were five, when she decapitated a snowman I was making.
Suzanne was tiny and perfect and had a teeny voice that carried a million miles. She reminded me of a Pomeranian—fox face and needle-sharp bark, and nervous, darting brown eyes.
Ardis, on the other hand, was tall and big boned and regal. She was African American, with the shaggy hair of an Irish water spaniel. Her nose was hawkish, but her eyes were huge and an amazing blue-gray, and her mouth was made for lipstick ads.
The group was getting closer. What could I say to Ardis? I thought of possible topics of conversation. She was on the track team and in the debating club. In the fall, she’d been elected to SGO, but I’d once overheard Suzanne telling somebody that Ardis was failing half her subjects and might get kicked out.
“Hi, Ardis,” I said.
“Wilma—beloved!” Suzanne yelped.
Somebody giggled. I heard a low “woof.”
Suzanne went on. “Sniffed any yummy—”
Ardis interrupted her. “Hi, Wilma.” She smiled at me.
She was so nice.
“Hi,” I said.
“How’re you doing?” It wasn’t really a question, and she didn’t wait for an answer. She started to cross the street with her friends.
But I pretended she did want to know. “I’m okay,” I said. So far, so good. Now what else could I say? I stood on the curb, thinking. If she was failing half her subjects, maybe I could say something to help. I called after her, “If you want, I could help you out in science and history.” My best subjects.
She turned and yelled at me while walking backward across the street. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “Who says I need help? The last thing I need is—”
A truck drove between us and drowned her out. It was near my side of the street, and it plowed through a puddle, drenching me from my waist to my feet.
When the truck had passed, Ardis and her friends were way down the block. I was soaked and cold and dirty. That was so dumb of me, to remind Ardis of her bad grades. How could I possibly have thought it would make her like me?
And now I’d given Suzanne something new to laugh at me about.
Some help the old lady had been. If she hadn’t tottered into my life, I wouldn’t have waited for Ardis. And if I hadn’t waited, I’d be dry and unpopular right now, which would be an improvement.
I stood there, hating to show up at school looking this way.
There’s Wilma. She splashed through a puddle to chase a stick.
There’s Wilma. Another dog peed on her.
There’s Wilma. Gross.
I started squelching to school. At least I didn’t have far to go. Claverford was straight ahead, on the northeast corner of Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. It stood out on a block of shoe-box factory buildings because of its zany architecture, which it was famous for. It looked like it had been assembled by a goofy giant playing with blocks. The small blocks were classrooms. The big ones were the auditorium, the cafeteria, and the library.
It was also famous for being the richest middle school in the country. If you went there, either you were smart and had a scholarship, or your parents were loaded. In spite of our ugly uniforms, which were supposed to make it impossible to tell, everybody knew who was a Brain and who was a Wallet.
Suzanne and I were Brains, although in her case I think they made a mistake. Ardis was a smart Wallet. You couldn’t be a dope and survive in the debating club.
Some of the most popular kids were Brains and some were Wallets. Money didn’t matter. Beauty didn’t either. For example, everybody liked BeeBee, my debate opponent, even though she had no chin and almost no forehead. And her boyfriend was Carlos the Adorable, the same Carlos I’d had a crush on for the last two years.
The crowd of kids grew denser as I approached the school’s tall wooden doors. Two girls jostled me, and neither one apologized. A four-hundred-pound hiking boot squashed my foot. We weren’t supposed to wear hiking boots to school.
I limped under the overhang and took a few steps into the building.
Ardis and some of her friends stood under the clock in the lobby. “Hey, Wilma.” She waved and moved toward me, and her group moved with her.
“You’re wet.” She smiled at me. “A bus splashed me last week. It was terrible. I was soaked and muddy for hours.”
“Wilma . . .” Suzanne began.
She was going to ask if a hydrant had opened on me. Or something nastier.
“. . . I never noticed your eyelashes before. They’re gorgeous.” Suzanne looked around at everybody. “Aren’t they?”
They all nodded and looked friendly.
Huh?