CHRISTINA HAD MATH FIRST. The teacher, Miss Schuyler, was a plain young woman with odd, old-fashioned braids. I like her, Christina thought. Oh, please, let her like me!
Miss Schuyler said how lovely it was to have new faces this year. “Let’s welcome Brandi, who’s moved here from Boston,” Miss Schuyler said, pointing to a little dark girl cringing in the back. The class smiled. Everybody said, “Hi, Brandi. Glad to have you, Brandi.” The little girl stopped cringing.
“And Kevin, who was here up through third grade, moved away, and is now back,” Miss Schuyler went on, pointing to a tall, very thin boy in a sweatshirt so large it nearly touched his knees. The class welcomed Kevin.
Christina braced herself. Her purse, sitting on the desk, looked fat and stupid. Nobody else had spiral notebooks. Their paper was in three ring binders with impressive fold-out pockets and zips. Nobody else wore brand new jeans. All their jeans were old.
“And our third new face is Christina, who lives on Burning Fog Isle, and is boarding on the mainland for the school year!”
There was no teasing.
Everybody looked as if this were the most interesting, romantic thing they had ever heard.
Miss Schuyler said it had always been her personal fantasy to live on an island, but she was not brave enough: It took courage to live on an island, she said, and she knew through the year they would find Christina a person of courage.
Nobody laughed at this. They looked awed.
Two girls asked Christina to be sure and sit with them at lunch.
Next Christina had science. Both the girls who had asked her for lunch — Vicki and Gretchen — were in science with her, and she sat between them. The science teacher said how well prepared island children always were; it put the rest of the class to shame.
Nobody teased Christina about that either; they looked respectful of Christina’s superior knowledge.
Gym was what Christina feared most. Her knowledge of team games was almost zero. She discovered that nobody else knew how to hold a hockey stick, either.
She was as athletic as any of them.
It’s going to be all right, Christina thought. I’m going to make it.
Changing classes was not as scary as she expected. Most seventh-graders stayed together, and the classrooms weren’t spread very far apart. Choosing a desk wasn’t awful; nobody saved seats for best friends; they just walked in and slid down. All desks were modern and slick, seats attached like one-room schoolhouse desks. Christina found it difficult to get in and out of them. Everybody else was graceful. Except the boys, who kicked things, stuck their feet out, wrapped their ankles around themselves, and honked like geese.
Christina was fascinated by the boys.
So many of them!
They were all like Michael, with immense feet and hands and noses. They were noisier than Michael, though, and had specialties Michael did not. The boys showed off their skills at hiccuping, burping, and jumping on each other’s feet. This was what you were supposed to fall in love with? Where were the boys like Blake? She examined her classmates for potential Blakes and decided there were none. Seventh grade had a full complement of creeps, weirdos, future criminals, and nerds.
At lunch it turned out that Vicki and Gretch were fashionable. They were “in” — a phenomenon Christina had read about but never experienced, as the island had so few children. Other giggling seventh-graders angled for the chance to sit at the same table. Vicki and Gretch were given extra desserts. Vicki and Gretch’s opinions were sought and their jokes laughed at.
The girls were much more attractive than the boys. They were neater, cleaner, and prettier. Christina nevertheless could not take her eyes off the boys. How annoying that the boys sat at their own tables and the girls sat at others. Christina wanted to be next to the boys.
She was full of second-day-of-school resolutions. No purse, better notebook, memorize everybody’s names, scruffy jeans.
“If you’re not going to eat your Jell-O, can I have it?” Gretch asked. “I love it with whipped cream.”
Christina handed Gretch her Jell-O. She wouldn’t have eaten it anyway because she liked only dark-colored Jell-O (raspberry, strawberry) and never touched light-colored Jell-O (lime, lemon). It was a small price to pay for Gretch smiling at her, for being “in” like Vicki and Gretch, for sitting at what was obviously the best table.
The only thing wrong with lunch was that she did not pay for it.
Mrs. Shevvington had handed her a blue ticket to exchange for a hot lunch. Christina noticed that about a quarter of the students had these; the rest brought bag lunches, or paid money to buy a hot lunch.
“How come I have this blue ticket?” Christina asked Gretch.
“Because you’re poor,” Gretch said. “Island kids are always poor. The state is paying for your lunch.”
For the first time Christina saw that Gretch, too, was dressed in catalog Maine. That while Christina’s jeans were from a sale rack in a discount store, bought on a mainland shopping trip in July, Gretch’s jeans had a brand name Christina recognized from full-page ads in Seventeen magazine. I might be able to afford the three-ring binder, thought Christina, but not the jeans.
She wanted jeans like Gretch’s.
It was the first time in Christina’s life that she had lusted after a brand name. She hated her own boring, unstylish jeans. They embarrassed her, they hung wrong, and they were too blue. She resented her parents for being poor and living where they didn’t know anything about seventh-grade fashion.
Anya walked over to Christina’s table.
An honor roll, drama club, soprano solo, tennis team, senior girl — pausing at lunch to chat with a seventh-grader? Even Christina, who knew nothing of the social life of schools, knew this was remarkable. Senior high kids ate on one side of the cafeteria and lowly junior high kids on the other. Nobody crossed the invisible lines, not with their feet, their speech, or their eyes.
Gretch and Vicki were awestruck. Their giggles were silenced. Their Jell-O spoons hung motionless. Anya had never looked so beautiful. The eyes of all the seniors and juniors followed her, and so, in person, did Blake. Now the younger girls almost swooned. Blake was perfect. Anya was perfect. Anya and Blake together were twice as perfect.
At first Christina thought. Anya had come over to make Christina look good and stop any teasing that might have begun. But Anya’s eyes caught Christina’s with a strange, dark desperation. Anya was not crossing the cafeteria lines to be sure Christina was surviving her first day, nor to borrow a dime for a phone call, nor to give her a message — but because Anya was not okay.
Christina did not know what to offer. She could not imagine what had gone wrong for Anya.
Anya held her arms out for comfort.
Blake caught up to Anya. Certainly Blake wasn’t upset. Laughing, he took both of Anya’s outstretched hands and twirled her away, like a dance partner. The seventh-grade girls sighed in delicious envy. “Do you see a lot of Blake?” breathed Gretch. “He’s so wonderful! He’s so handsome!”
“What’s it like on that island of yours?” Vicki asked. Vicki was very tan, and wore a white cotton knit sweater, which made her look even tanner. Her light brown hair was absolutely straight, and it swung when she moved. She had a tourist look to her; she was the day tripper they scorned on the island.
“Oh, you know,” Christine said, “just a rock and some sea gulls.”
She flushed with shame. She loved Burning Fog. Why had she made it sound like a garbage dump?
“I adore sea gulls,” said Gretch. “They’re so beautiful and pure. I love how they tilt in the wind.” Gretch had blonde hair, cut exactly like Vicki’s, and they had a habit of tilting themselves toward each other, so their brown and yellow hair swung together and then swung apart.
“I don’t think pure is the word,” said Christina. “You should see them with baby ducks and baby terns. Why, one sea gull could goffle up a whole brood.”
Gretch’s blonde eyebrows lifted like punctuation marks. “Goffle?” she said, starting to laugh. She turned to Vicki, who giggled with her. They tilted hair. “Goffle. That’s so cute. What other cute little words do you know, Christina?”
Christina said lamely, “I mean eat. Sea gulls eat anything.” She would not tell them how her mother took the kitchen garbage, eggshells, crusts, and scrapings off plates to the top of the cliff, where sea gulls would swoop down like Roman gladiators.
Once they stood up from the table, junior high etiquette allowed the boys to join them. This turned the girls arch and silly. Christina did not know how to be arch and silly. One boy claimed to be able to spit tobacco farther than anybody, but as the cafeteria proctor was approaching, he could not substantiate this claim. One girl said out on Burning Fog Isle even the girls chewed tobacco. “I bet Christina can spit as far as you can,” she said. “That’s probably what she does when she’s not canning fish.”
Everybody laughed.
Another boy said he had been to Burning Fog Isle himself several times. Each summer his parents liked a day trip and a picnic on Burning Fog. Christina did not tell him what she thought of day trippers, but he was not so polite to her. He said he did not think much of islanders. He said they charged too much for soft drinks and yelled when you touched their silly dock.
It was probably Christina’s mother who had sold him the soft drink. It was probably Frankie’s dock.
Michael had told her to laugh it off. Christina could not find any laughs. But it was the other seventh-graders who laughed, closing in on Christina, talking louder and louder.
She had been afraid of being alone. Now she was afraid of being in the center.
“What’s your house like?” said the boy. He had a funny, knowing smile. She felt wary, the way she would around lobster claws. “Is it one of those little shacks that always needs a coat of paint?” he said.
Vicki and Gretch giggled. “Jonah,” they said, warningly — but coaxingly, so they could get credit for telling him to stop, but yet not stop him.
“It’s a cottage,” Christina said.
Jonah smiled triumphantly. “I know which cottage, too,” he said to the rest of the seventh grade. “Christina’s cottage has thirty-two rooms.”
Gretch and Vicki looked impressed. They blended their hair together like a fence against strangers.
Jonah said, “And notice that, nevertheless, Christina is getting free lunch. Another welfare cheat. Welcome to our midst.”
In English, Christina did indeed have Mrs. Shevvington.
The manners in her room were markedly different. There was no jostling or kidding. Even the boys behaved like human beings, without spitting, tripping their friends, or imitating tomcats in heat.
Mrs. Shevvington stood in front of the class, and the class sat in front of Mrs. Shevvington, and nothing else happened. Mrs. Shevvington gave a lecture while twenty-four children took notes.
When Christina picked up her pencil to take notes, her fingers smudged the page, and she left a sweaty palm print where the pencil couldn’t write. Class seemed to last forever, and yet when the bell rang nobody jumped up. They waited until Mrs. Shevvington excused them. Then they walked quietly out of the classroom, just as Christina had to walk quietly down the stairs at the Schooner Inne.
In the hall Vicki and Gretch walked on either side of Christina as if the cafeteria scenes had never happened—and they were a trio of best girlfriends.
“What’s it like living with the Shevvingtons?” said Vicki. “Mr. Shevvington is so handsome, don’t you adore him? If he weren’t a hundred years old, I would have a crush on him. But Mrs. Shevvington is so dull, isn’t she? It’s like being in first grade every year, absolutely nothing happens. Oh, well, at least she’s sweet. Her first name is Candy. I think it fits perfectly, don’t you?”
If they thought I was yarning about sea gulls, she thought, they’d never believe me about the Shevvingtons.
She walked down the hall, smelling school: a chalk-sweat-paper-floorwax-mimeograph smell she had never smelled before. As distinctive as low tide; the kind of smell you would never get wrong, you would remember all your life.
“Listen,” said Gretch, smiling. “Don’t be upset about Jonah finding out you’re a welfare cheat, Christina. He’s really into honesty, that’s all.” Vicki and Gretch escorted Christina on down the long hall, telling her that the next class was art. “You’ll hate art,” Vicki said. “Everybody hates art. The art teacher stinks.”
“I am not a welfare cheat,” Christina said. “I’m into honesty, too. We don’t own the cottage, we just — ”
“And don’t call it a cottage, either,” said Jonah, coming up behind them. “Anybody who lives in a thirty-two room house lives in a palace. And then you’re rude to the mainland tourists who end up paying for your free school lunch as well as buying your overpriced soda. It’s disgusting.”
Christina belted him in the mouth. When he staggered back, unprepared, she belted him a second time. This was so satisfying she was ready to do it a third time, when Miss Schuyler responded to the screams of Vicki and Gretch.
“That island girl hit him first!” yelled all the witnesses.
Miss Schuyler grabbed Christina by her sweater sleeve and Jonah by his pink oxford collar. “I cannot believe this,” hissed the math teacher. “The very first day of school, and you are starting fist fights. We do not do this kind of thing here, Christina. Nor, Jonah Bergeron, do we fight little girls who are here for the very first day of their lives.”
Jonah snorted. “Some little girl,” he said.
Miss Schuyler hauled them down to the principal’s office. They went through an outer office full of high counters and secretaries. Miss Schuyler knocked hard on a yellow door blackened around the handle with fingerprints, and pushed into Mr. Shevvington’s office.
When Jonah finished his explanation there was silence in the room. Christina was aware of tall filing cabinets, piles of papers, books tumbling sideways, and an open window through which came the smell of the fish cannery. Mr. Shevvington seemed not to be a part of his office, any more than his wife had been a part of her clothing. He was simply handsome and silvery and sad. He fixed his eyes on Christina, and the eyes never blinked.
He’ll call my parents, she thought. I’ve been away from home a day and a half, and look at me. In trouble with everybody.
Mr. Shevvington’s voice was gentle, and yet rough, like a luxury car driving slowly over pebbles. “Christina,” he said sadly, “I am so disappointed in you.”
Christina’s heart began to pound hideously, as if at thirteen she were going to have a heart attack. “I got mad at Jonah,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She felt as worthless as an empty soda can by the side of the road.
Mr. Shevvington sighed. Then he turned to Jonah. “Christina’s father is caretaker of a millionaire’s mansion. They don’t have access to the house, but live in the servants’ quarters because that’s what they are, Jonah. Servants. Christina needs free lunch more than anybody else. I don’t want you to gossip about her situation, but you might let people know that Christina is the kind of Maine native who knows poverty firsthand. So although yes, she’s on welfare, no, she is not a welfare cheat.”
Christina felt punched. “We have never been on welfare! My mother runs a restaurant.”
“Her mother serves toast and coffee to lobster-men from a little shack near the harbor,” said Mr. Shevvington to Jonah. “Now I want you two to be friends. That is your assignment for the fall, Jonah. You take Christina on as a friend and help her steer a safe passage among the rocks of junior high.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jonah. He was staring down at his shoes. Christina stared there, too. Yet another example of catalog Maine, only this time it was hunting boots, which most certainly had never been taken hunting.
I hate them! thought Christina. I hate them all. “I am not on welfare,” she said.
“What do you think a free lunch is?” said Jonah.
Christina flung back her head to shout, Then I’ll never take free lunch again! when she realized that her parents did not, in fact, have money to send for buying hot lunches, that Mrs. Shevvington was unlikely to buy her boxes of apple juice and Twinkies when the state would supply it free, and that she did not, at thirteen, earn any money herself.
Mr. Shevvington ordered her to apologize to Jonah.
“I’m sorry,” muttered Christina without looking at him.
Jonah was excused to return to class, with a little note from Mr. Shevvington to carry to his teacher. Mr. Shevvington’s handwriting was delicate enough for wedding invitations. His muscular fingers did not look right making such thin, graceful shapes.
The principal dropped back down into his chair and smiled at Christina.
Christina had thought she would never smile again, but Mr. Shevvington’s smile was so kind. Little by little Christina’s face and mouth relaxed, and slowly she managed a smile of her own. The worst was over. Mr. Shevvington said that junior high could be something of a shock. Children age thirteen, he explained, were barbarians. He knew Christina was not, of course, but she was not used to the pressure of a whole grade around her. She would have to be calm, and pliant, and let them all have their way.
Christina did not see why they should always have their way. She didn’t feel like being calm and pliant. She felt like belting Jonah again. But she did not say so. This is good practice, she told herself, and she made herself look pliant, like a flower stem in the wind.
“While you’re here, Christina, why don’t you fill out this form we will need to guide you through your school career.”
Forms! she thought eagerly.
Christina loved to fill in blanks. Mostly she sent away for folders and leaflets about anything at all, just to get mail. This would be a real form.
Christina accepted the clipboard Mr. Shevvington gave her to write on and the pen he passed her to write with. With each item, she felt more like somebody too poor or too stupid to have brought her own. “My things are still on the floor in the hall where Miss Schuyler grabbed me,” she said.
Mr. Shevvington nodded as if he did not believe her, but was willing to accept Christina’s fibs to save her pride.
I won’t cry, she told herself. I never cry. I won’t now.
She took the pen purposefully. She could make her script just as beautiful as his. She’d show him.
The form was entitled Getting to Know You. Computer generated sixteenth notes floated in the margins, like a happy song. Christina filled in name, address, parents’ occupations. Then she looked at the questions. Her brow wrinkled. They were very odd questions.
“How come I didn’t get this in homeroom along with the medical forms?” she asked Mr. Shevvington.
“It’s only for new students.”
“But all the students in my grade are new,” she protested, “starting junior high for the first time.”
Mr. Shevvington wound a pencil around in his fingers like a baton twirler. “Christina, I hope this is not a harbinger of things to come. Do you have difficulty with authority? Are you going to be continually presenting problems and arguing? Mrs. Shevvington and I decided to overlook both last night and this morning, because we know how nervous you must be, an island child away from home for the first time — but I am beginning to have doubts about your ability to handle yourself.”
Her hand grew sweaty around the pen. The metal chair poked her back like Mrs. Shevvington’s fingernail. It’s true, she thought. Nobody else argued. Nobody else got in a fistfight. Michael told me to laugh when they teased. I never even tried to laugh. I just socked Jonah.
Mr. Shevvington said gently, “Christina, I want you to think about counseling. We have a wonderful guidance department here. We have a social worker who understands troubled adolescents very well. I want you to consider working with her to sort out your emotional problems. Of course it will be your decision. We won’t force you into anything.”
Emotional problems? Christina thought. Me?
She had always been the granite of her family, the old strong stock of the island. It was Anya who was the endangered species, the fragile one.
Or was it?
“Now fill out the form,” said Mr. Shevvington gently. His eyes were warm, soft: eyes to wrap a child in comfort.
“But these questions — ” began Christina. She wet her lips.
“Will help us understand you,” the principal said.
Christina lowered her eyes to the page. The letters were soothing; the alphabet never changed; the white rectangle of the pages never changed.
She tried to breathe evenly.
What are you afraid of? asked the first question. Circle all that apply.
Rats?
Darkness?
Being laughed at?
Pain?
Acid?
Failure?
Being alone?
Most of the time, Christina Romney thought, I am afraid of nothing.
Some of the time, I am afraid of everything.
But I am not telling anybody which I’m afraid of, or when.
“I won’t fill this out, Mr. Shevvington.”
“You must, Christina, dear.”
“No.”
The word sat alone, like an island in the sea.
There was a long silence. Christina did not look at his eyes. The eyes, like the beckoning hand of the wet suit, might force her into something.
The silence lasted and lasted. What would happen in art without her? Would Jonah be there even now, telling them all how poverty-stricken she was? How her parents were nothing but servants? It wasn’t true. Her father was an excellent tennis player. Her mother was an excellent cook.
“Then you may go,” Mr. Shevvington said. “But I want you to know that I am your friend. All I want is to help you. And Christina — ”
She set the clipboard and pen on his desk and backed out of the office.
“ — you desperately need help.”