MS. LENORE HAS BROKEN us into our groups again and now she’s gone to the “office.” That means she’s calling her boyfriend.
Tim is bugging Clara about J.W. Reane because he saw him talking to her in the hall.
“I’m amazed you managed to have a conversation with that guy and not get wet,” he says.
“What?” Clara says.
“Didn’t Gwen tell you? Around here J.W.’s known as King Spit,” Tim says. Tony pokes him in the arm to get him to stop.
“Sounds to me like Tim’s jealous,” I say to Tony.
“She’s right, Tony. She’s got me.” Tim turns to Clara and takes her hand in his. She looks like she’s shaking hands with a cockroach. “I have a confession to make, Clara. I have a secret love...and it makes me crazy when I see him talking to anybody else.” Clara starts pulling her hand away, but Tim won’t let her go. “That’s right. I’m in love with J.W. and I’m going to have to ask you to stay away from him. My heart can’t take it. You don’t want to break my heart, do you, Clara?” She snaps her hand out of his grasp and he falls to one knee in front of her chair. “Please. I beg you. Don’t break my heart.”
Tim grabs on to Clara’s leg and she starts shaking it to get him off, yelling, “Get off, weirdo.” By this time the whole class is laughing.
Marcia comes to the classroom door and peeks in. When she sees that the teacher’s gone she comes straight up to our group. “What’s so funny?” she says, smiling like she’s part of the joke. That’s when we shut up. She’s wearing another one of those shirts that shows off her innie belly button.
“I was going to the washroom and I heard you guys laughing...Math is sooo boring. I can’t figure it out. Do we need algebra for shopping? I don’t think so. Like the problems are so strained. Nobody can figure it out except J.W.”
Tim guffaws. Marcia’s tangerine hair is done the same way that Anisha used to do hers, with the two barrettes at the front and then in pigtails. She’s looking at Tony who’s looking at Tim who’s looking at Clara.
I was right about Tim being jealous. Look at him looking at Clara! He likes her.
I remember what I said to Marcia about Clara becoming the most popular girl in the school. I thought I was joking. How can Tim like Clara? I mean, she’s nice but she’s got those glasses and her shorts ride up between her thighs when she walks. Her jagged black hair looks all right against her smooth skin, I guess. She’s not ugly, but she’s not Marcia.
“Hey, Marcia, when are you going to put that thing away?” I point to her belly button. I wait for the laugh, but everyone just sits there.
Then Ms. Lenore comes back and everyone goes quiet. Marcia backs out of the room, her arms crossed over her bare midriff. Ms. Lenore starts touring the groups and everyone starts talking again — except my group. I’m staring at the table, but I can feel them looking at me.
“So did anyone come up with an idea for the mural?” Clara says.
Tony opens his binder, and there are these beautiful sketches.
“Wow,” I say before I have a chance to think.
Tony’s idea is that we do Canadian wildlife, with each part of the construction wall representing a different Canadian region. So for the Maritimes he has lobsters, for central Canada he has beavers, moose and wolves. He has polar bears for northern Canada, buffalo for the prairies, and the west coast gets grizzlies and gray whales. He has drawn the animals in pencil crayon so you can almost hear them breathe. You can see the muscles in the wolf’s legs, and the moose, standing in a clearing of trees, looks like it is about to walk straight into the classroom. He pressed hard on the pencil crayon so the colors are bright.
Tony sits back while Tim and Clara go over his mini-masterpieces. Clara keeps flipping back to the beaver.
“He’s so cute,” she says.
“Thanks. You guys gave me the idea last week. Animals don’t need to wear uniforms to get strong. They’re naturally strong. Does your dad draw animals?” he asks me.
“No...you must have worked all weekend on those,” I say, thinking about how I wasted that hard work in the ghost room.
“I did them in front of the TV.” He shrugs.
“Liar,” says Clara. “You worked hard on these.”
“Yeah, don’t lie, Tony,” says Tim, mocking Clara. Then he pulls out his drawing of spaceships with books in them. It’s in pen and ink on lined paper, and the stars are the kind you can draw in two seconds without lifting the pen from the page. The spaceships are straight lines with semi-circles on top and little swirls of smoke coming out the back.
Tim is beaming with pride. “That was done in front of the TV,” he says. We giggle. “Besides, I thought the idea was that we come up with an idea. I didn’t know browner boy here was going to go whacko with the pencil crayons. Maybe mine’s not Michelangelo like Tony’s, but it’s still a good idea.”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too,” says Clara, pulling out her Don’t Bug Us While We’re Building idea.
“That’s a good idea,” says Tim, taking the picture from Clara and holding it close to his nose to see if he can smell the marker on it. At least she used markers and colored in the whole page. Tim puts the page down and they turn to me.
“Okay, okay.” I unfold my piece of paper.
“Hey, that’s not what you said you were going to do,” says Clara.
“I know, but - “
“Look at this,” says Ms. Lenore, pulling the page out of my hand. “Class, everyone quiet down for a moment. Look at what Gwen has done here. This is some original thinking at work. See? Gwen has a number of children here dressed up as superheros. It’s simply sketched out on the page, but that’s all right. This is exactly what I want. This is what we call a concept. That’s great, Gwen.” Ms. Lenore puts her hand on my shoulder. I can feel the squeeze in the edges of her long nails. Then the bell rings.
Lunch works like this. I go to sit alone in the lunch room and then Clara comes and sits with me. I didn’t used to count it as sitting with someone because I didn’t choose to sit with her, but now that I’ve been to her house, it’s stupid to pretend we aren’t friends.
How can I tell if my spell is working? Maybe what’s happening is what is supposed to happen. It could be I’m supposed to become friends with Clara. It could be that’s what the spell made happen. She came out of nowhere. That’s magic, right? Maybe she’s been sent here to keep me company while I wait for Mom to get the plane fare together.
Everything will be great when I get to France. Mom will do my hair like Mrs. Scanlan does Clara’s. I’ll compliment Mom’s clothes and she’ll tell me I’m pretty. I’ll go to visit her at the book store and help her in the back cutting tomatoes and onions. I’ll wear a white apron and she’ll call me Angel.
“Earth to Gwen.”
“Huh?”
“Hello? You were a billion miles away.”
“No. A few thousand actually,” I say, mostly to my sandwich.
“That’s giganormous,” Clara says, staring at my salami and mozz on crusty bun that Dad made me this morning. He makes me these sandwiches as big as my head.
The lunch room is so loud. It smells like burnt rice in here today. Sometimes I pretend that we are inmates in Kingston Penitentiary. The walls are gray with a puke-yellow stripe near the top. The windows have that wire mesh over the outside to protect them from balls hitting them. They haven’t been washed the whole time I’ve been at McBurney. The boys sit with the boys and the girls sit with the girls and J.W. Reane sits by himself at the small table in the corner behind the pillar.
All lunch long Clara talks about what she eats and doesn’t eat. I swear, she has two subjects: her brother and food.
“I wasn’t going to have lunch today, but then I read where it can be bad if you don’t eat. Your body thinks it’s starving and starts saving any little crumb of food you put into it. Wouldn’t it be cool if your body was a big fridge that held everything you’d ever eaten? Like there was this amazing carrot cake my dad made a couple of years back. I sure could go for that again. If my body was a fridge I could open up my stomach and get it.”
“That is so disgusting,” I say. “It wouldn’t come out like a triangle piece of cake.” Clara looks down at the yogurt she’s brought for lunch. She stabs it with her spoon.
“I can dream, can’t I? I’m not perfect like you, Miss Big Sandwich Eater.” I wish she’d stop that.
Tony and Tim pass by with their sandwiches. I see Clara checking out their food.
“So, did your dad help you with that idea?” asks Tony, barely curbing the edge in his voice.
“I have a mind of my own,” I say. It’s almost a lie, though. I got the idea from the card Leon made for me.
“It’s not a competition,” Clara says.
“Yes, it is,” says “Tim.
“Yeah, but we’re in the same group,” I point out.
Tony pulls on Tim’s sleeve and they move off to the table where the boys sit and try to impress each other with how much they know about sports and computer games.
I look across the room at J.W. Reane sitting alone reading a book and eating fettuccine out of an old cottage cheese container. He’s bent over it, shoveling the pasta into his mouth. He doesn’t finish one bite before he shoves another one in.
I look at Tony’s table again and spy Marcia on her way over to them from her table of Marcia worshipers. Marcia’s looking at Tony like he’s the special of the day.
“Will she ever give it up?” Clara says. “I mean, can’t she tell he’s got a crush on you?”
“He does not, Clara. You saw how he was in art this morning right after Marcia left. I make a joke about her belly button and he and Tim act like I punched her.”
“It was the way you said it.”
“How was that?” I ask. Clara shrugs and then shakes her head. I can tell she wants to say I sounded mean, but she’s too nice. “The point is, Tony was on Marcia’s side. That proves he doesn’t have a crush on me.”
“My dear girl. You don’t think he spent all that time on those pictures to impress Ms. Lenore, do you? It’s so obvious. Hey, when are you going to invite me over to your house? I want to see your dad’s art.”
I can’t think past what she said about Tony.
He can’t like me. My dear girl...Nobody talks like that. Clara’s crazy. I stare at Tony’s table.
Tony listens to Marcia and nods into the table.
“So?” says Clara.
“So what?”
“Can I come over some time?”
“No,” I say real fast. Clara’s face collapses. Her glasses travel down her nose so that I can’t see her eyes. “Sorry. I can’t have people over. It’s like a rule.” It’s my rule. “I could come to your house again.”
“Not tonight.”
“Why not?”
“We’re going out to visit this person. A friend of a friend. Have to put on a good show so she can see how happy we are. You know how moms are,” she says, trying to penetrate my brain with her stare. I haven’t been able to tell her about Mom yet. I can’t.
“Ask if you can stay over on Friday,” she says, pushing her glasses back up onto her face. “We can camp out in the living room. Dad has this tent that doesn’t need spikes. It poofs up on its own. Pooooooof.’ Clara makes a sound like blowing up a balloon and puffs out her arms as wide as anything.
‘”Ting.” I prick the air in front of me with a pretend pin. Clara, on cue, pops and shrivels down to size, picks up her spoon and eats her yogurt.
“I hate this stuff,” she says.
“Here.” I pass her half my sandwich and she bangs her hand against her chest as if to say, For me?
“Take it, you big hammy weirdo,” I say, as she tears at the sandwich like a starving hyena. “I couldn’t stand watching you watching me eat it anymore.”