I hate my father. I hate school. I hate being fat. I hate the principal because he wanted to fire Ms. Finney, my English teacher.
My name is Marcy Lewis. I’m thirteen years old and in the ninth grade at Dwight D. Eisenhower Junior High.
All my life I’ve thought that I looked like a baby blimp with wire-frame glasses and mousy brown hair. Everyone always said that I’d grow out of it, but I was convinced that I’d become an adolescent blimp with wire-frame glasses, mousy brown hair, and acne.
My life is not easy. I know I’m not poor. Nobody beats me. I have clothes to wear, my own room, a stereo, a TV, and a push-button phone. Sometimes I feel guilty being so miserable, but middle-class kids have problems too.
Mom always made me go to tap and ballet lessons. She said that they’d make me more graceful. When it came time for the recital, I accidentally sat on the record that I was supposed to dance to, and broke it. I had to hum along with the tap dancing. I sing as badly as I dance. It was a disaster.
Father says that girl children should be born at the age of eighteen and married off immediately.
Stuart, my four-year-old brother, wants to be my best friend so that I can help him put orange pits in a hole in his teddy bear’s head.
I’m flat-chested. I used to buy training bras and put tucks in them.
I never had any friends, except Nancy Sheridan. She’s very popular, but her mother and mine are PTA officers and old friends, so I always figured that Mrs. Sheridan made her talk to me—Beauty and the Blimp.
School is a bummer. The only creative writing I could do was anonymous letters to the Student Council suggestion box. Lunches are lousy. We never get past the First World War in history class. We never learned anything good, at least not till Ms. Finney came along.
So my life is not easy.
The thing with Ms. Finney is what I want to talk about. She took over for Mr. Edwards, our first English teacher. He left after the first month. One rumor is that he had a nervous breakdown in the faculty lounge while correcting a test on noun clauses. Another is that he had to go to a home for unwed fathers in Secaucus, New Jersey. I personally think that he realized that he was a horrible teacher, so he took a job somewhere as a principal or a guidance counselor.
When Mr. Edwards left, we got a whole bunch of substitutes. None of them lasted more than two days. That’ll teach the school to group all the smart kids in one class. We were indestructible.
The entire class dropped books, pencils, and pens at an assigned time. Someone put bubble gum in the pencil sharpener. Nancy pulled her fainting act. We made up names and wrote them on the attendance list. All the desks got turned around. Mr. Stone, the principal, kept coming in and yelling.
And then Ms. Finney came.