This has to be some kind of joke. Like a really bad, unfunny joke.
We’re all sitting around Ms. Gloria’s table in her little room. Alex is across from me. Kicking distance. Candace is next to me, and across from her is Oscar. His hair is still full of those little balled-up pieces of paper that Alex was throwing at him in Ms. Meg’s room. Ms. Gloria sits at the head of the table.
“You can’t keep me in here with her.” Alex pouts and points at me. He has a Band-Aid across his nose.
“Scared?” I ask.
Ms. Gloria’s giving us that look that tells us to cut the crap. “You done?”
Alex and I both cross our arms and slump back in our chairs. Ms. Gloria gives me the sign to turn my hat backward, so I jerk it around hard.
“Good,” Ms. Gloria says, all no-nonsense. “Then we can start.”
She holds a wand in front of her that has purple and silver glitter floating slowly from the top to the bottom, then she turns it back over and the glitter starts falling again slowly, top to bottom. “This wand holds a lot of power,” she tells us.
I’m waiting for someone to break through the door and say they’ve made a mistake and that I don’t have to sit across from Alex Carter ever again in my life and that Ms. Gloria is not about to put a spell on us with some stupid sparkly wand.
“All the students who have ever participated in Group Guidance have held this wand when they speak up and share their feelings in the conversation,” she explains. “That’s why it’s so powerful. There are a lot of words and emotions and bravery captured in here.”
“Group Guidance?” I scoff.
Ms. Gloria tells us how we’ll be meeting in this group at least three times a week and how the wand is the talking wand and no one speaks unless they are holding it. I want to grab it from her so I can say, Is this for real? You put me in a group with Alex?
Ms. Gloria can make me sit here, but there is no way I’m sharing any words or emotions or bravery or whatever else. If I just stay shut and refuse, maybe they’ll rethink my suspension so I can go do something worthwhile like help Grandpa in the garage.
Ms. Gloria rips off a piece of chart paper and uncaps a black marker. I can smell its licorice from here. I hate licorice. “Before we begin, we have to make some rules together. Then once we make the rules, we have to promise to stick to them.”
She writes Group Guidance Norms across the top of the chart paper.
“Ideas? Anyone?”
Candace starts. “Don’t talk unless you have the wand. Respect the wand.” I roll my eyes even though I’m trying to be nicer to her. Why does she need to be in Group Guidance anyway? Because she puts her head down on the table sometimes? She’s probably the nice kid they threw in with us so we wouldn’t fail. Teachers always put a good kid in every group. Otherwise crap never gets done.
Ms. Gloria writes down Respect the wand! on the chart paper.
“Respect each other too,” Candace adds. “No laughing at what someone says.”
Ms. Gloria writes that one down. “Anyone else?”
I look at Oscar and realize I don’t think I’ve heard him say one word since Ms. Meg introduced him to our class the day he moved here from Brooklyn. That’s where the Dodgers are from, but when the Dodgers moved they went to Los Angeles, not to Vermont like Oscar. I don’t know why he has to be here either. Maybe every group needs a good kid who raises her hand a lot like Candace and a quiet kid like Oscar who will balance everything out.
Alex is the bully. And I’m the kid who won’t let him get away with it.
“Robinson?” Ms. Gloria asks. “What do you think is important to a group conversation? Can you add to our list?”
I want to tell her that I don’t think group conversations are important at all, but I just sit there.
Ms. Gloria would wait me out forever because that’s what she does, but Candace jumps in. “Eye contact!” Ms. Gloria writes it down.
By the end we have a list. Candace basically created the whole thing, but Ms. Gloria makes us read it over together and sign it on the bottom, which means that we agree to stick to the norms. The list looks like this:
GROUP GUIDANCE NORMS
1. Respect the wand!
2. Respect each other. No laughing at anyone else.
3. Use eye contact when someone is speaking.
4. Be present. Listen to what others are saying even if you’re not sharing.
5. Everything we say stays in the room.
6. Passing is OK.
alex carter
Candace Barnes
Oscar Oates
Robinson Hart
Ms. Gloria
Number six was mine. I mumbled it out when Ms. Gloria was capping the licorice marker. That way I won’t have to say stupid crap.
“Today we’ll just do a group check-in, and next time we’ll be able to have a longer conversation.”
Ms. Gloria explains how we’ll pass the talking wand around and each say how we’re feeling today on a scale of one to ten. If we want, we can say more about why we’re feeling that number.
Candace starts. “I’m a five.”
She’s looking down at the wand. I’m wondering how someone so nice can only be a five. And then I’m wondering why she isn’t saying more about why she feels like a five. She likes to share. But she isn’t.
Then Alex laughs and mumbles something under his breath. I’m pretty sure I hear what he says and I think it’s how Candace is chubby so she could never be a ten, and my fists tighten into balls, but Ms. Gloria speaks up while I take three deep breaths and loosen my hands.
“Are you having trouble with the norms already?” Ms. Gloria asks. “You just laughed at someone else and talked without the talking wand.” She keeps staring right at him with her no-nonsense look. Finally it’s Alex Carter that gets that look instead of me.
Candace passes the wand to Ms. Gloria, who says she’s an eight. “There are a couple of things troubling my mind, but overall I’m really happy to be starting this group today.” Then she passes the wand to Oscar.
“Five,” he says, but it’s almost like a whisper, so I still don’t even really know what his voice sounds like.
“What?” Alex jumps in. “No one can ever hear you.”
And I should be taking three deep breaths and waiting for the talking wand, but I can’t. “Maybe he’d be more than a five if you weren’t such a jerk,” I snap.
Ms. Gloria glares at Alex like she could cut him with her eyes, and I wish she would. Then she glares at me too like I did something wrong, which I didn’t, except talk without the stupid purple glitter wand.
“Robinson—” Ms. Gloria tries, but even her no-nonsense stare won’t stop me, or the fact that I don’t have some talking wand.
“Ms. Gloria, Alex threw those balls of paper in Oscar’s hair in Ms. Meg’s room!”
“Did not!” Alex screams like the baby he is.
Oscar shakes his head back and forth and runs his hands through his hair. It’s raining paper balls on the floor beneath him.
“I watched him do it!” I never tattle on people, but I’m so mad at Alex and I’m sick of him getting away with everything.
“I saw it too,” Candace says, quiet and nice and to her hands, and now I’m starting to feel OK because even Candace is breaking the norms.
“See?” I shout.
Ms. Gloria almost never raises her voice, so when she does we all go paralyzed.
“Enough!” she yells. “Alex, if this is true, I think it’s time for a little meeting with your mom.” He tries to whine something back, but she talks right over him. “And I want you all to look at your signatures. You signed this list of norms.” She takes a deep breath and points at where we signed the chart paper. “Unless your word and your name mean nothing, I expect you to follow them.”
And I want to yell back that my name does mean something, which is why people better say it right, but that’s against the norms, and Robinson Hart is written right there near the bottom of the list.
Oscar passes the talking wand to Alex.
“Nine-point-five,” he says with his prissy little mouth, like he’s better than everyone else and his life is so perfect.
Then he passes the wand across to me. I’m about to say that he’d be a ten if his nose didn’t look like a tie-dyed green-and-purple monster bulging out from his face. But I don’t because I think it breaks norm number two, and I don’t want my grandpa coming in here today to shake his head for anything at all. But Alex deserves it.
I’m really feeling like a two, but I say, “Pass.”
It’s nobody’s business how I’m feeling, or that I can’t forget my grandpa’s scared face when he wandered off and that we have to do this stupid family tree project, which is making me feel more like a zero.
And I know what Ms. Gloria is trying to do. She’s trying to push us to all get along and bond and be nice and make friends because she’s like Grandpa and she thinks that there’s sweetness at everyone’s core, like a maple tree. But there’s not. There’s definitely not sweetness at Alex’s core and not at mine either. I don’t know what my core is made of except maybe Grandpa’s one-quarter, but it’s not all syrupy sweet, that’s for sure. It’s not like the center of a perfect sugar maple. It’s tight like a knotted piece of firewood, gnarled and hard to chop through.