FIRST DAY OF GRADE EIGHT. I’M BEHIND the willow tree in the McBurney schoolyard. Marcia Whittaker’s in the yard and I can tell she’s looking for me.
Anisha hated Marcia. When she saw Marcia coming down the hall, she would turn her back to her.
I don’t hate Marcia, exactly. She’s always flipping her shoulder-length fake-orange hair so that you want to chop it off, and she wears too much make-up, and tops so short that you can see her skinny ribs sticking out — but I don’t hate her.
I watch her find Tim. She walks over to him and they start talking but they are both looking over each other’s shoulders for someone more popular. They talk for a while and then they seem to give up pretending to be interested in one another.
I’m chuckling under my breath when someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn with a start.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. The girl’s thick glasses magnify her large brown eyes. Also, she’s got a gap between her two front teeth, which I can’t help noticing because she’s smiling like a rabid dog. I’ve seen her around the neighborhood. I thought she went to Central.
“What’s so funny?” she says, smiling, like she’s ready to get the joke, whatever it is.
“What?” I say. She’s got on knee-length navy blue shorts and one of those striped T-shirts that looks permanently wrinkled. Her boobs are big enough that the shirt tents up between them. She looks like she walked out of a funhouse mirror — one that makes her top half seem squashed and her legs all gangly. She’s a bit chub round the middle and her arms look short, or maybe they look that way because her legs are long. Her black hair is plastered to her high forehead with bobby pins, as if it’s a toupee and might fly off.
“I heard you laugh. What’s so funny?” she asks again.
“Nothing. I wasn’t laughing at anything.” I start walking toward the school. She keeps pace beside me.
“I’m Clara,” she says, holding out her hand for me to shake.
“Gwen,” I say, but leave her hand hanging. She laughs and slaps her leg. The sound cracks the morning air. Marcia is watching us.
“You mean, like Gwendoline?” Clara says.
“Yeah. I don’t see what’s so hilarious about it.” I’m ready to walk away but then Clara puts her hand on my shoulder. I want to squirm away from it and run.
“I wasn’t laughing at you, my dear. I was laughing with you. How too bad for you to be stuck with that. You should have been called Isabel.”
“Why should I be called Isabel?”
“Why not?” she says, shrugging. The long arms of the willow bend in the wind behind her. I imagine them dusting off the spot on my shoulder where she touched me, wiping me clean.
“You can’t call a person anything you want. A person has the name that he or she has and that person is stuck with that name. There are rules in life.” I move off.
“Isabel,” she calls after me. I stop, aggravated by the sound of my new name. She catches up to me, grinning like an overgrown hyper kid who’s tricked someone into eating a bug.
“I prefer to be called by my correct name. It’s Gwen, not Isabel. Why would you think to call me that? You don’t know me.”
“Because it’s beautiful. Isabella. It’s-a-beautiful,” she says in an Italian accent and moves her arms wide apart like she means the whole world, like she thinks the whole world is-a-beautiful. “It’s way better than Gwendoline.” The soft edges of her voice tickle my ears like feathers. A strand of too-long bang has worked its way free from a bobby pin and is blowing against her wide nose.
“I’m Gwen, okay? Just plain Gwen,” I say. I lift my eyes to the sky like J.W. Reane, and walk away in time to avoid Marcia. Maybe those two will make friends.
Marcia passes Clara who’s looking at me, laughing like I said something funny.
I wander the halls, pretending to search for my classroom. Like I wouldn’t know exactly where it was after eight years at McBurney. I looked up to the grade eights when I was little. I still remember Mom picking me up at lunch time in grade three, and me whining all the way home because I wanted to eat in the lunch room with my friends.
What a brat I was.
The halls are bare without little-kid art on them. Pretty soon Mr. Kurtzman will have his grade ones busy doing Black Magic crayon drawings and construction-paper leaves. Maybe I’ll be in Paris by then.
I turn a corner and Tony’s coming down the hall toward me. He stops short.
“Oh. Hey,” he says. He’s grown. Anisha told me that he was going to Toronto this summer to work at his brother’s corn-dog booth at the Exhibition.
“Hey,” I say and walk on by.
Anisha thought Tony was so hot when he started here last year. He grew up in Toronto, but his parents decided to move because his cousin got arrested for dealing drugs and they didn’t want Tony getting into that. It used to be Anisha had a thing for Nick Kotopoulis, but his family switched him to a private school because he scored high on an IQ test. I don’t know who Anisha would have gone for if Tony hadn’t shown up. She went on and on about his hands and his hair. “His hair is so soft and springy, like those little curls would stay in even if he had just taken off, I don’t know, like, a motorcycle helmet,” she said. I had to listen to stuff like that all the time.
The bell rings.
Marcia is not in my class. That’s something, at least. I’m so relieved that I smile at Clara, the new girl, when she chooses a seat beside me. Except then she also chooses the stall next to me in the washroom when we’re changing for gym. We’re supposed to get a new gym this year — one with change rooms so we won’t freeze walking down the hall in our shorts. I’m glad we don’t have a change room now so that I don’t have to watch Clara watch me undress. I change slowly on purpose so that Clara will finish first and leave, but after I hear her door open, I look under my door and see her feet outside my stall. When I come out, she’s standing against the wall smiling at me. I try to avoid her eyes.
Later, I take my time getting to the art room so that Clara will be sitting down by the time I get there. Instead, she’s waiting by the bulletin board outside the room. She follows me in and sits down beside me. I raise my hand and ask to go to the washroom.
I have to keep my life clean and uncomplicated so that I’m ready to pick up and go to France at a moment’s notice. That means absolutely no friends.
Everyone turns to look at me when I get back to the studio. Ms. Lenore is droning on about what an exciting year it’s going to be. I take an empty seat at the back.
And then it happens. Clara gets up — while Ms. Lenore is talking — walks over and sits beside me. I watch Ms. Lenore follow her with her eyes, but she doesn’t stop talking.
When we go back to our classroom, Clara sits beside me again. She leans over and says, “You’re shy, aren’t you?” I give her the dirtiest look I can muster and she gives me one back. Her narrowed eyes are laughing at me.
I see Tim look at Clara and whisper something to Tony and then they both break up. Knowing Tim, it was some snide remark about her chest. Clara gives them this real sarcastic look. At least she’s not stupid. She moves her head around a lot, like she thinks there’s tons of action going on and she doesn’t want to miss any of it. Makes her look like a chicken.
I take my lunch outside so that she can’t sit beside me in the lunch room. I make plans for France. I mentally pack my bags. I want to take one of the portraits of me and Dad. That will need special packing. I thought about taking the one of the three of us, but I don’t know how Mom would be about that. I mentally stuff one of the smaller portraits into Dad’s green duffel bag, but it’s not wide enough so I mentally tie it to the bottom of Leon’s big purple knapsack. I can mail it back to him once I get there.
The clothes don’t matter, because I don’t know what’s in fashion in France. I’ll need new clothes. If Mom doesn’t have the money for them, I’ll get a job. I’ll get a paper route and become fluent in French by reading the paper, watching TV and listening to the radio. I will read the paper on the balcony off my bedroom overlooking the Seine. I will have a small table beside me where I will rest my bottled water, cheese and baguette. I will go out there in the morning to eat strawberries for breakfast out of a blue bowl. I will lean out over the river and Mom will call to me to be careful and I will call back to her that I am trying to feel the sun on my cheek.
I’m waving to my daydream French neighbors when the bell rings.
I’m ready to be completely rude to Clara the second she opens her mouth, but she doesn’t say anything. Every time I look over at her, she turns her head and smiles.
They let us out at two o’clock. I stall, organizing some stuff in my desk. Clara waits. When I lift my head, she pats her desktop like it’s a lost friend.
“It’s the tiniest room in existence,” she says. I stare at her and the classroom fades. The postcard walls of my spell box snap up around me like Pop-Tarts. Instantly, I am transported into my tiniest room. I touch the indents of the pen-pressed walls with my mind’s fingers.
“Hello? Isabella. Where’d you go?” Clara’s waving her hand in front of my face. The box room collapses and I land at my desk in Room 13 at McBurney Public School. I stand up and gather my empty binder, pens and owl-head eraser.
“The tiniest room in existence,” I repeat to cover. “Or a ballroom for ants if you leave your lunch in there too long.” I can hear her fake laugh echoing behind me as I run down the hall to the main exit.
At least she doesn’t try to walk with me on the way home. Lucky me, we go the same way. I pretend I don’t notice she’s behind me. I keep waiting for her to try to catch up, but she leaves me alone except when she turns off at Raglan. Then she yells, “Bye, just plain Gwendoline Isabella. See you tomorrow,” like she thought we were walking together. She must live somewhere in the Fruit Belt, where the streets have names like Cherry and Plum and you can never figure out which way you’re going because the roads go diagonal and around and stuff. I’ve twice gotten lost up there looking for Division Street.
I don’t know what to do when she waves at me.
I wave back.
That’s all she’s getting out of me, though. We are not going to be friends.