CHAPTER 3 
Dazed, I rush into an oversize sweater and a pair of stretchy pants and two socks that don’t match and put my flashlight around my neck. I make a jelly sandwich and hurry back up to the attic to check on Mom, who’s already in front of her computer working.
I set the alarm on her computer to remind her to eat. “There’s spaghetti in the fridge,” I say. “And drink some milk. It’s good for you.”
I kiss her—a gesture she pulls away from. And then I race outside to the safe harbor of the bus just as it pulls up.
When I see Germ, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Seeing her familiar freckles, her impatient gestures for me to sit down, makes me feel like I’m safe, even if she is wearing that goofy eyeliner again, and now lip gloss too.
I plop down next to her as the bus lurches into motion. I’m on the verge of telling her everything that happened last night, when she turns to me.
“I think Eliot Falkor has a stomach virus,” she says. “He’s not acting like himself. I think he may have a fever. I tried to take his temperature by sticking a thermometer under his armpit, but his armpit isn’t really an armpit, you know?”
I do know. Eliot Falkor is Germ’s iguana. He doesn’t completely have armpits.
Germ continues, talking faster than I can think, with her usual lack of decibel control. “Maybe he picked something up when I took him to the park yesterday. I thought he’d start barfing. I mean, I don’t think iguanas barf, but he was green. I mean, not the normal green but a pukey green. But I read this thing once in Reptile Enthusiast…”
I glance back at the other kids as they board the bus. Should I interrupt and say something? What if someone overhears?
“Did you watch the news last night, the thing about polar bears?” Germ is obsessed with the news. She lies awake worrying about it, or sometimes stomps around in anger about something she saw. It does seem, even to me, that things on the news are always getting worse.
She talks about polar bears as we pass the immense Seaport Civil War cemetery and Founders Square, which make up the center of our small town. “Sometimes I feel like the world is ending,” Germ goes on, and then enumerates why. By the time we get to school, she hasn’t paused for breath.
And so, before I know it, we’re at school and my secret is still bursting to get out. But in the light of the day, my fears are also beginning to fade a little. The more I look around at kids doing the things they do every day, and the bored face of the bus driver, and the cars converging on the school parking lot like always, the more it feels like last night was a strange dream, and impossible. I guess it feels like ghosts couldn’t possibly exist in a world where some kid just threw fish filet all over the front of the bus.
And then, as a last aside as we’re walking through the double doors into school, Germ says—a little awkwardly—that she’s doing a talent for the Fall Fling with Bibi West on Sunday night, and I nearly fall over my own feet.
Of all the things Germ and I are known for in our class, the biggest is that once, in second grade, I bit Bibi West because she called Germ “Germ Fartley” instead of her real name, Gemma Bartley. Germ is famous for then promptly adopting the nickname and introducing herself that way from then on. The cruelty of the nickname, though, was not an isolated incident.
Bibi is this complicated combination of cruel and charming. She likes to make up funny dances and do them behind teachers’ backs (charming). She gives the people she likes little presents constantly—scented erasers, squishy soft pencil cases, special candy from her trips to Portugal to visit her grandparents (also charming). Once, in third grade, she even handed out lemons to a select few third graders, setting in motion a trend of lemon-giving that lasted several months and worked its way down to the kindergartners. She is the kind of person who can make you want lemons for no reason at all.
On the other hand, she loves to talk about people behind their backs (cruel). And she has a way of finding out people’s secrets and using the resulting information like money in the bank.
But recently Bibi—and seemingly everyone else in the sixth grade—has decided she wants to be friends with Germ.
Germ holds funerals for her lunches every day. She likes to run laps around the playground at recess to see if she can beat her previous time. She is blond and freckled and fleshy and restless, proud of her large, round, powerful body when some people seem to think she shouldn’t be.
But it feels like she came back from summer vacation with a new kind of air around her, or at least everybody else came back different. Because now the loud self-confidence that used to put kids off is something people admire. Kids who used to tease her have started seeking her out. Even the name “Germ” sounds suddenly cool in people’s mouths.
The new air has definitely not extended to me. I’m so small and quiet that sometimes people forget I’m there (although, I do have a bit of a kicking-biting streak). I’m ridiculously clumsy and unathletic and always get picked last for teams. I cut my own hair, so my head is kind of a disaster, and that doesn’t even come close to my clothes, which are a combination of Mom’s old oversize things and the results of a yearly shopping trip I talk my mom into, where she stares into space while I fail at figuring out the rules of coordinating. I barely talk to people I don’t know. Even when I make the effort (which is rare), my tongue just freezes in my mouth. Long story short, I tend to fade next to Germ. Although, Germ says that if I’d just share the contents of my brain with the rest of the world, they’d see it’s like the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz in there.
I’d rather keep to myself. But now kids gather around Germ in corners to talk, or laugh, or just linger. I walk into rooms and find Germ sitting with people I don’t know, chatting, and it makes my heart pound a lopsided jealous rhythm, because I’ve never seen Germ look so happy or flattered (and also nervous, tucking her hair every few seconds). And even though I’m really, really scared of the ghost I think I saw (did I see it?) last night, the Bibi thing is my worst fears realized.
We make our way to our lockers. I still can’t get a word in because Germ is telling me all the details of the Fall Fling excitedly: how Bibi asked her; how the talent they’re doing is so secret, she can’t even tell me.
And then my chance to speak up comes because Germ pauses to catch her breath. And instead of my telling her about the ghost, something else entirely comes out.
“But, it’s Bibi,” I say. Germ gives me a sideways, wary look as I falter on. “Remember when she used to chase Muffintop the stray cat around the parking lot, trying to step on his tail? Remember when she used to call Matt Schnibble ‘Freckly Little Schnibbles’ and make him cry?”
Germ gets quiet. “She’s not like that anymore,” she says, uncertain and a little annoyed at the same time. Her freckles stand out on her cheeks as they flush. “She was going through a hard time then. She was really insecure. She’s not that bad.”
I don’t reply. Something about the way she defends Bibi, like they’ve had deep talks, makes me shut up like a clam. For the moment, my thoughts of the ghost have flown to the back of my head. I don’t blame Bibi for wanting to be friends with Germ. Germ is bottled lightning; Germ is the most likable person I know. But my feelings are swirling a million miles a minute and…
“Bibi will be good, but I’m gonna be terrible,” Germ says. “They’re gonna spitball me.”
I think this is probably true, so I try to be helpful.
“Just make sure you don’t wear eyeliner,” I blurt out. It’s like the words just escape my mouth before I’ve really thought about them.
Germ is silent for a moment, blinking at me. “I like eyeliner.”
“I know. It’s just, it’s not very, um, you,” I muddle out, biting my tongue.
“I can like new things,” Germ says quietly.
I nod silently.
We get to our lockers. I unpack the lunch I made, and scribble a quick note to myself on my lunch bag before putting it into my locker. (I write poems to myself on my lunch bag every day in my mom’s handwriting so that people will think my mom is really loving and no one will think I’m being neglected. Probably 89 percent of the energy I spend at school is on making it look like everything is normal at home so no one will ever have a reason to take me away.)
D’quan Daniels, who Germ used to crush on in fourth grade, passes us and waves at Germ, who picks at her hair before waving back. He looks at me as if he might wave to me, too, but then quickly breaks eye contact. Some of the boys are scared of me because last year I kicked a kid in the shins when he tried to tackle me in keep-away.
Germ, blushing with a combination of self-consciousness and pride, watches him walk away. It’s a look she wears more and more, and I don’t like it. Germ has never cared what people think, but these days she seems to care a lot.
Still, as her eyes catch mine, she suddenly zeroes in on me. She cocks her head, looking at me and placing a hand on her hip, her annoyance with me gone.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “You look kind of off.”
“I’m fine,” I say nervously, now unsure how to tell her about last night, or even if I want to. “I didn’t get much sleep.”
Germ folds her arms, unconvinced.
“What’s going on with you?” she asks sharply. “Tell me.” Now that she’s focused on me, she reads me like a book.
I look around the crowded hall. Everyone is busy talking, laughing. My throat tickles with nerves. I suddenly feel ridiculous.
But I lean forward and tell her anyway.
“I think I saw a ghost last night,” I say, low, feeling my face flush.
I wait for Germ to laugh, or be annoyed, or both, as she looks at me for a long moment. Sometimes I worry that she is losing that strange, wild, fighting-spirit piece of herself that makes us fit together so perfectly.
But now she lets out a breath decisively.
“I’ll ask my mom if I can sleep over,” she says.