Break the jinx, break the jinx, break the stupid jinx!
My lips twitch with these words streaming through my head as I sit ramrod straight on the bus on the way to school, my fingers gripping the edge of the nubbly vinyl seat. I’m too anxious to even take off my backpack. Last night was endless and awful, mostly because I stuck with my decision not to tell my mom and dad about the jinx. And you know what? I do NOT like keeping things from my mom and dad. I mean, I used to read my diary entries out loud at breakfast! I am going to be terrible at being a secretive teenager. I do know a girl’s got to have her secrets. Like the fact that sometimes I raid the cookies Mom hides in the prehistoric box of Vegetable Medley she brought with us from Brooklyn for the precise reason of hiding things in the back of the freezer. Or that sometimes I like to rock in the chair on the front porch of the Dentist’s House and imagine being an action hero and saving the world. Or that sometimes I practice kissing on my pillow, except not French kissing because that leaves a drool spot and drool is gross, which may present a problem when I participate in actual kissing. Parents really don’t need to know about those things. But being forgotten by my friends? That’s the kind of secret that gives me a sour, prickly feeling in my stomach, the kind of secret you’re supposed to tell your parents before the sour, prickly feeling eats you up.
And I will tell them.
Later.
Unless my plan works today, and then I’ll never have to think about the stupid jinx again.
I barely slept last night, but I’m not even really tired.
Well, maybe I’m a little tired. Just like in that part of my brain above my left eyebrow, that spot feels a little fuzzy, and it feels like my top and bottom eyelashes are magnets trying to snap together. And also one of my eyelids keeps twitching.
I give my head a quick shake. This is no time for twitching!
I slide back a little on the seat as the bus turns up the tree-lined driveway to school. I look out, pressing my forehead to the rattly window to see if I can spot my friends up in the courtyard. The cold glass feels good on my head, and the vibrations of the bus feel kind of soothing. The heat is blasting, the bus is gently rocking. My eyelids droop. I take an extended blink.
“Hey. Kid. We’re here.”
I make a sound like “Muh?” and pull my face away from the glass, leaving a cold, flat feeling on my forehead. I stand up quickly, fumbling to adjust my backpack, which must have slipped down my shoulders when I dozed off. The bus driver watches me in the long rearview mirror as I hurry down the aisle, mumble “Thanks,” and join the throng of kids soaking their sneakers in the still-wet leaves brought to the ground by yesterday’s storm.
My five-minute bus nap has left me feeling all discombobulated and sleepier than I was before. Now I’m kind of unsure about my plan of just marching up to where my friends are clustered together on a damp bench and somehow popping the bubble of forgetfulness that has made them erase me from their memories.
I get this pull of yearning, seeing how complete they look, sitting so closely that their corduroy knees touch, the hoods of their stripy sweatshirts pulled up over their heads against the morning chill, their coordinated backpacks propped against the colorful laces of their high-tops. Do they feel my absence at all? Like a phantom limb?
I gulp, and weave my way through the crowd until I’m standing right in front of them.
“… it awful? You can tell me the truth,” Piper is saying with comic anxiousness. She has her sweatshirt unzipped barely an inch, exposing a pie-shaped sliver of her T-shirt, which is glaringly bright with wide, neon yellow and red stripes. I’ve never seen the shirt before, so I’m guessing Ms. Packenbush has pulled down another bag of her older daughters’ used clothes from the attic.
“Whoa,” Fee says, pointedly putting on her sunglasses, “turn the volume down on that thing.”
All Celeste can do is wince and say, “Well, it’s … colorful?”
“I knew it!” Piper wails, yanking the zipper back up and laying her head on Celeste’s shoulder and groaning. “I look like the Undead Hot Dog Ladies Man!” My heart lurches a little; I know just which hot dog man Piper’s talking about because I was there with them at Hampton Beach when we saw him at the end of summer. I’d managed to get a sunburn on one butt cheek, and Celeste had a stomachache from eating a piece of fried dough as big as her head, and Fee had a between-the-toes blister from her fancy new flip-flops, and Piper was freaking out because we were going to be late to meet her mom, and we rushed past this hot dog cart manned by a guy who looked like he was just dug up from a grave. He saw us running by and called out, “Hot dog, ladies?” We laughed so hard that we forgot all about sunburns, blisters, and bellyaches. At least, the bellyache was forgotten until Celeste ralphed in the car.
“I like it,” I rush out. It comes out a croak.
“Excuse me?” Fee says as all three look up at me.
I clear my throat, slip my hands into the pockets of my own stripy sweatshirt. “I said I like your shirt.” I look at Piper. “A lot of kids were wearing them in Brooklyn.”
“You’re from Brooklyn?” Fee asks, lifting her sunglasses. “That’s SO cool.”
I shrug like Yeah, I know. No biggie.
“Hey, you called me last night, right?” Piper asks, a smile playing at one side of her mouth. “That was kind of weird.”
“Oh, yeah,” Fee says, “you’re the new kid working with Zooey in social studies, right?”
“I guess. Yes, but … ” I falter, wondering if this is what I’ll have to do: Start our friendship over from scratch?
“Just so you know,” Fee says conspiratorially, “that girl is kind of persona non grata right now.”
“Fee!” Celeste says in shock. “Don’t spread that bad mojo.”
“What?” Fee asks hotly. “The new kid should know what she’s getting into.”
“Anyway!” I look around. There are still a ton of kids in the courtyard, and if my plan fails, I don’t want anybody to see it. “Can I sit down?”
“Oh, sure,” Piper says, nudging Fee over to make room for me. “Make sure you sit just on the edge; the bench is kind of wet.”
“My mom goes to New York City all the time for business,” Celeste offers. “I got to stay with her once. They put us up at the Mandarin.”
“Must be weird, moving here from Brooklyn. What was it like there?” Fee asks.
“It was fine,” I say quickly as I sit down. Fee looks disappointed. “The thing is,” I say, looking each of them in the eye, “we actually didn’t meet just yesterday.”
“What do you mean?” Fee asks. “You’ve, like, visited before or something?”
“Not exactly.” I lower my voice. “We’ve actually been best friends since summer.”
“Ooookay,” Piper says, chuckling uncomfortably.
“We were best friends, but over this weekend, at the Harvest Festival”—I pause, they lean closer, curious—“I was jinxed. And you guys forgot me.”
I watch Piper anxiously for her reaction. Her eyes widen for barely a second with something like recognition, and I feel this cool wash of relief start to spill over me, but then … she blinks. And then blinks again, and her brow gets all wrinkly. She gives her head a sharp shake and then reels back a little as she looks at me.
“Do … do we know you?” she asks, as if she just noticed me sitting next to her.
“Yeah, are you new here?” Celeste asks, ticking her head to the side and looking at me like she’s trying to place where she’s seen me before.
“Wait, what?” I ask, the feeling of relief quickly morphing into cold dread.
“If it is your first day,” Fee says as she and the others stand up, “you should get inside before the late bell.”
They leave me sitting alone in the courtyard, Celeste holding one of the glass doors behind her for a second, before looking back to see that I’m still on the bench. She shrugs and goes inside.
“What just happened?” I whisper to the wind, shivering as it answers with a gust that sends fallen leaves skittering across the cobblestones.
They forgot me. Again. But it seemed different this time. More permanent. Was it because I told them about the jinx? Did I somehow make it worse?
My stomach lurches as I have a terrible thought: What if EVERYONE has forgotten me now? I yank my phone out of the front pocket of my backpack, because if this isn’t a reason to break the no-phones-during-school-hours rule, I don’t know what is!
“Lucia! Is my dad there?”
“He’s with a patient, Hattie,” she says, her voice concerned. “Everything okay?”
I let out a small breath of relief when she says my name. “Fine. Can you just … tell him I’m on the phone?”
A moment later, the familiar high, gravelly tone of my dad’s voice almost sends me into tears. “Hattie Cakes? Everything okay?”
I swallow back relieved tears. “Fine! I just … I wanted to tell you that, um”—my mind spins, trying to think of something—“I have to … um … stay after school today.”
“Oh, okay,” he says. “Field hockey, right? I have late hours tonight, so just come by the office when you’re done with practice.”
When I hang up, I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. It comes out as a shudder. So at least my dad and Lucia remember me. But what if it’s just grown-ups who do? What if no kid in the entire world remembers me?
I look frantically around the empty courtyard and am about to bolt for the front doors of school to accost the first kid I see, when I notice a sleek black car idling at the curb. The passenger-side door opens, and out steps none other than Zooey Dutchman Zervos.
“GAH!” she cries as I interrupt her scan of the courtyard by jumping in front of her and demanding, “Do you know me?”
She somehow manages to scowl down at me, even though I’m taller than her. “Maybe?” she says, shrugging and walking past me.
“What’s my name, then?” I ask, locking step with her as we walk across the wet cobblestone courtyard.
She huffs impatiently at me. “I don’t know. Marcia or something?”
“Marcia?” I cry, stopping cold. It’s so far off from my real, actual name that it doesn’t even sound like a name at all, which somehow makes the fact that she doesn’t know me even worse. “This can’t be happening,” I whisper, a sense of surrealness crashing over me.
“Look,” she says over her shoulder, sounding annoyed as she yanks open one of the glass front doors to school. “Are we going to meet up about our project or what?”
“You DO remember!” I practically yell, pushing after her through the door.
As soon as the warm inside air of the towering atrium hits my chilled skin, my nose starts streaming and my glasses fog up, rendering me pretty much useless for the minute it takes me to find a balled-up tissue in my sweatshirt pocket, wipe my nose, and then, realizing I don’t want to wipe my glasses with a booger cloth, lift the hem of my T-shirt to wipe the condensation off my glasses. When I slide them back onto the bridge of my nose, Zooey comes into focus. Standing there smirking at me.
“You done?” she asks.
I raise my chin. “Yes. Quite.”
“This project is like a third of our grade,” Zooey says seriously. She unzips her coat. “Of course I remember my partner.”
“But you don’t remember my name,” I remind her as we start across the linoleum tile inlay of Joseph Trepan’s silhouette, which stretches across the whole floor of the atrium.
She sighs again, a chunky sound. “You’re Hattie.”
“Wait. You DO remember me!” I practically shriek.
She recoils, the same motion she made the second day of school when Piper asked if she could borrow a pencil. “Calm yourself,” she says.
“But you remember who I am?” I ask firmly, ignoring her tone.
She shrugs. “I guess.”
“You were just messing with me to be mean?” I ask. “What kind of person are you?!”
Going toe-to-ballet-flat with Zooey Dutchman Zervos is not on my list of things to do today, but today has gone so wackady-wackadoodle already that it’s like all normal rules of self-preservation are off. This can’t be my real life. This can’t really be happening right now. I can’t really be standing here glaring at Zooey, the person who Piper says can sense both fear and whether or not a girl has gotten her period.
Zooey kind of smirks and shrugs. But then she winces, and then she sighs.
I raise my eyebrows. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“I am sorry,” she says, enunciating.
“Okay,” I say, enunciating back.
Something in her face changes when she flicks her eyes up over my head for a split second. I turn and look behind me at the sleek wall of windows that line the front office. Sitting next to each other in the waiting area, throwing Zooey some major hairy eyeball, are Teagan and Tess.
The heat of their gaze shooting past me makes me snap my eyes down at my shoes, and I pretend to be really interested in the fact that I am standing right on the pointy chin of the Joseph Trepan silhouette outlined in the rubbery linoleum tile. I sneak a glance back up through the glass. They’re still looking, a synchronized snarl aimed right at Zooey’s face. I look at her to see if maybe she’s crying or bursting into flames or something, but she’s just smirking back at them like it doesn’t even affect her, which is pretty amazing because I feel singed just from the secondhand heat.
Finally, Zooey starts walking toward the sixth-grade locker hall. “Meet me after school so we can get started on the project.”
“Today?” I ask, hurrying after her. “I can’t today.”
She doesn’t slow her stride. “Why not?”
“Because I said so!” I snap, since telling her the truth is not an option. I’m guessing that telling even one more person about the jinx would send the whole world into insta-amnesia.
Zooey slows just a bit so she can look at me. In fact, she looks at me like she’s never seen me before, and I am suddenly about to barf from fear that she’s suddenly forgotten me, too. “You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Seriously?” I say, almost laughing from shock. “Who just calls people names to their faces?!”
Zooey makes a frustrated sound in her throat. “Sorry!” she says. “This is why I try not to speak!” She takes a deep breath and then says firmly, “You’ll meet me. Unless you want us to fail.” She comes to a complete stop and glares at me. “And failure is not an option.”
She stalks away, her ballet flats making soft scuff scuff scuff sounds across Joseph Trepan’s giant chin.
“You’re not the boss of me!” I call after her, and though my voice barely makes it out of my mouth, she gives me a very rude gesture in response from the other end of the hall.
I’ve never been to the nurse’s office at my new school because I kind of assumed it would be the same as the one at my school in Brooklyn: a cramped room that smells like old Band-Aids with no place to lie down.
But there is no way I can just waltz into first period and act like this whole day isn’t one hundred percent CRAZY! I need to, like … meditate or center myself or something for, like, half a minute, until I can get my bearings and figure out what to do.
So ten minutes later, I’ve made my way down the back corridor of the school to the nurse’s office; I am lying on a cot in a dimly lit room, covered by a soft white blanket, the comforting weight of a hot water bottle on my belly. Fibbing is not my strong suit, so instead of saying I had cramps, I said I thought that I might be about to get a cramp. Which is true. Because cramps are definitely in my near future, according to both the library and my mother, who, combined, know everything there is to know about puberty.
Meditate, Hattie, I tell myself. CALM YOURSELF DOWN!
Is shouting at yourself inside your own brain part of meditation?
I wish Celeste were here. She could tell me. Celeste is excellent at meditation. She says it’s her secret weapon to keep from barfing before competitions. Once, before a math test, I was sort of stuck in the hallway, so nervous that it felt like I couldn’t physically make myself walk through the door. Celeste took one look at me and said, Give those here. She took my books and told me to close my eyes. She told me to take a deep breath. Belly breaths, she said, and then I felt her palm press gently against my belly button. Fill up your belly. I did what she said a few times, until I felt her hand drop away. I opened my eyes, blinking, and she gave me a small smile, handed me my books, and walked into class. Right then is when it dawned on me that Celeste and I almost never hang out, just the two of us. And I wondered why that was.
This time it takes me only seventeen seconds of belly breaths to send me straight to dreamland, and it feels like eighteen seconds before the nurse wakes me up again. Apparently, I’ve slept through first period and didn’t meditate and still don’t have my bearings and still have no idea what I’m going to do. As the nurse empties the water bottle into the sink and waits for me to tie my high-tops, I take quick stock of my situation.
The bad news:
I’ve been jinxed.
The really bad news:
The jinx is getting worse.
I don’t know how to break it.
The good news:
It’s only my friends who’ve forgotten me. Everyone else seems to remember.
The really good news:
…
That one stumps me, until I realize there has to be a way to break the jinx. I mean, some official way, like jumping in a circle three times while holding my breath.
“You must be feeling better,” the nurse says, watching me with a confused look. I just nod in response until I finish jumping my last rotation, let my breath out in a gush, and then stand totally still. Do I feel any different? Not a bit. I didn’t think that would work. I mean, not really.
“I’m fine, thanks,” I grumble. I need answers, and with a little excited gasp, I realize just where to find them. “I’m going to the library!”
“You need to go to social studies first!” she calls after me.