The first thing I notice about Stacey LaVoie
is her feet. We’re standing in the corridor outside the gym
and she’s wearing red tights—and not the textured kind.
Even I know that you stop wearing red tights after fifth grade.
But I like that Stacey wears them anyway,
and that her big white toe sticks out of a hole
like a marshmallow.
She tries to cover the toe with her other foot,
but I’ve already seen it.
The next thing I notice is that black eyeliner
circles her whole eye
and ends with a little wing,
and she has pierced ears (Mama would never let me),
and earrings that dangle
just short of disobeying the dress code.
Miss Bonne, our gym teacher, is weighing us.
We are lined up in our stocking feet
outside the locker room.
Miss Bonne holds a clipboard in her hand
and a pencil in her mouth
while she slides the weights up and down the scale,
nudging them, zeroing in on the target.
“Next!” she calls.
“Watch out for the cootie hole,” says the girl next to Stacey
as we move up another person-space in line.
“The wha-at?” Stacey asks,
sounding like my cousins talking Southern,
only Stacey sounds real.
The girl points to a little hole in the wall
near Stacey’s waist. “Don’t touch it, or you’ll get cooties.”
Stacey nods, making her dark hair bounce
like a girl in a Breck shampoo ad.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” she whispers
to me. “Do you?”
“I think they’re invisible bugs that you can catch.”
The thought of cooties running all over me
makes me shiver, even if they’re made up.
“Sounds kinda stupid,” she says,
and I agree.
“Next!”
We move up, and now I’m next to the cootie hole.
Cooties are stupid, but I move away from the wall anyway.
“I was new in September,” Stacey says.
“We came from Georgia. My daddy teaches at the college.”
“Mine, too,” I say, feeling happy
that we’re both new
and both professors’ daughters.
“It sure is different here, huh?” she says,
and shifts her weight to her other foot.
But she loses her balance
and falls onto me,
and I fall onto the next girl,
and on down the line.
“Stop pushing!” someone says,
shoving the girl who just knocked into her,
and the ripple swells up the line,
growing in strength and force
and intent.
When it comes back to me, I stop it
by falling into the wall,
against the cootie hole.
“Cooties!” the girl beside me says, and jumps away.
“I don’t want to catch them!”
“Cooties!” say the girls. “Mimi’s cooties.”
All but Stacey, who yells, “It’s my fault,”
over the chorus,
and touches my arm. “Now I’ve got them.”
“Next!”
As stupid as cooties are,
I’m happy she took them from me.
But even though she made a big deal about rubbing my arms
to catch the cooties, no one pays attention—
they just keep yelling
“Mimi’s cooties, Mimi’s cooties,”
as if they’ve been waiting to say that
ever since my first day at school,
and now they can.