100 Days (3 page)

I was wearing my Hannah Montana wig that first day, the one that best covered up my sticky-out ears. The fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bhamra, had obviously told the students about me already; not one of them dared to so much as look my way when she introduced me. Except Moira. She was sitting in the front row desk to my right. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, staring for so long that I finally turned with a frown and mouthed,
Can I help you?
Between dealing with my parents' divorce and changing schools, it had already been an especially stressful year. I wasn't in the mood to be gawked at today.

“Miss Watkins will be showing you around,” the teacher said.

At that, the staring girl smiled and held out her hand for a shake. “I'm Moira.”

“Oh,” I said. “I'm Agnes.” Her hand was huge when it closed around mine. Everything about her was huge. She could have squashed me like a bug, but the handshake wasn't rough at all. Just firm and certain, like something between us was being decided once and for all.

 

5

MOIRA

DAY 96: MARCH 21

Monday morning I pick Agnes up at her house as usual and force myself not to protest as she slides her favorite mix tape into El-C's old cassette player. I know every song on the tape by heart, and not because I want to. The song she loves most, “Dream” by Priscilla Ahn, sounds a little warbly now, probably because Agnes has rewound and replayed it over and over more times than I can count. I guess it's a pretty enough song, if you like schmaltzy, tear-jerker stuff, which I definitely do not. Sometimes I find myself humming it for no reason other than because it has been drilled into my brain over the past couple of years. I'm actually grateful for the song this morning. It seems to be distracting her, because she doesn't mention the name of my old nemesis even once.

Sixth grade flashed through my mind for only a split second as I stood in that cafeteria line with Boone Craddock looking like he was about to go all postal. But that split second was enough to make me shudder.

Looking back, I think some major hormonal event must have happened to everyone the summer after fifth grade, especially to the girls. All I knew was that when I returned in the fall, there was a new glint of meanness in the eyes of my classmates. It was as if the queen bees had gotten together over the summer and decided what part each kid would play in the Stephen King movie we'd all be forced to reenact. Some kids, the smart, quiet ones, got to be innocent bystanders. Others, the bees included, got to be perpetrators.

I, as it turned out, got to be the star, if not the heroine. My parents are hippies, which meant I usually wore clothes my mom made from tie-dyed cotton fabrics. For lunch, I brought reusable containers full of kefir and tabouleh, sandwiches made with tempeh instead of store-bought lunch meat, everything vegetarian. To top it off, I was already five foot eight and weighed as much as my weight-lifting brother, Grant, who was a senior in high school at the time. It didn't make sense that I could weigh so much eating the way I did, but my mom has always been the same way. One thing she started telling me that year was:
We just have slower metabolisms.
Another was:
You're beautiful, Moira. Embrace who you are. Someday, you'll be the kind of woman Peter Paul Rubens would have painted.

As if that solved everything. Who'd want to model for a seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, anyway?

It didn't help that much of the weight was in my breasts, which were the most recent gifts bestowed by the Puberty Fairy during my own summertime hormone surge. It took the boys a while to figure out what to call me. The nickname “Dolly Farton” was in heavy rotation, as was “Booby McGee.” But I was big everywhere else, too. Hence the moniker that topped all others during that year for sheer usage: “Shamu.” Killer whale. Between the name-calling and the fact that Agnes, my only real friend at school, spent most of her time in the Resource room, it wasn't long before every day of sixth grade felt like a slow lead-up to Carrie's prom night.

Thing is, this wasn't a new story. People who are different get bullied all the time. Interesting adults who contribute to society in amazing ways got bullied when they were kids, too. Even back then, even in the middle of it, I knew this. I'd watched
Sesame Street
when I was little. I'd seen the PSAs. Plus, my parents reminded me of this stuff all the time. But knowing I might one day help save the world wasn't much of a comfort when I was twelve and just trying to survive the school year. I was, after all, the one who'd been cast in the starring role by the queen bees at school. I was clearly the girl destined to end up drenched in pigs' blood under the disco ball.

 

6

AGNES

DAY 95: MARCH 22

I was twelve when I got my first digital camera. It was cheap and had only a handful of megapixels, but it seemed like no small miracle to be able to take pictures at school and then go home and look at them on the computer. In no time, I figured out how to crop images, adjust the brightness and saturation, even add some basic effects.

From that point forward, I never went anywhere without the camera. I used it mainly for taking pictures of my friends and family, but there was another reason I loved it. I couldn't remember not being stared at constantly every time I entered a public space. I couldn't remember strangers' eyes not taking me in, judging me, and then revealing the verdict of what those strangers thought of me. I was funny looking, scary looking, a complete oddity. All of it was out of my control. But holding a camera up to my face gave some of that control back. It gave me a real sense of power for the first time in my life. It was a way of saying,
I'm looking at you, too. And I have thoughts about what I see.

 

7

BOONE

DAY 94: MARCH 23

There was one teacher in grade school who I especially liked. Okay, maybe the truth was I loved her a little. Ms. Marilyn ran the Resource room. Her job was to help kids who needed a little more time to figure out the stuff we were learning. Unlike my sixth-grade classroom, Resource was always quiet. It was a great place to concentrate, or would have been, anyway, if being around Ms. Marilyn wasn't such a distraction. She had dark hair and a warm smile, and she was curvier and softer looking than any girl I'd ever seen. She made me think of angel food cake and roller coasters, though I didn't exactly know why. Maybe it was because my insides felt like I was on a roller coaster any time she leaned over my desk to help me with a math problem or to correct my spelling. She smelled like the woods near my house in midspring, when the pine trees started releasing their vanilla scent.

She was also the first teacher who encouraged me to “explore my options” when I felt the need to give some other kid a beatdown. My dad always said I'd been born with his short fuse. When I was little, my parents both laughed about it, but they stopped laughing when my anger started flaring up at school. I tried explaining to them that it only happened when I didn't understand some of the concepts we were supposed to be learning or when I got teased about taking more time than anyone else to finish my work. That's when Mom insisted I get extra help. At first, I stormed around the house like my dad did whenever he'd had a hard day at work. I'd never thought of myself as stupid before. I'd always thought some stuff just took me longer to figure out. Now I wasn't so sure. I was convinced that being pulled out of the regular classroom to spend time in Resource was going to be the end of the world. As it turned out, it was anything but.

Ms. Marilyn taught me to count to ten when I got angry, to use my words instead of my fists when other kids teased me. “You're a good kid,” she said. “You just need to learn to deal with frustration in healthier ways.” The thought of not seeing her anymore the following year when seventh grade would start nearly did me in.

The two hours I spent in Resource were the best two hours of every day. Sometimes, though, when I got back to my regular classroom, I felt more like a visitor than a regular student, an awkward antelope that didn't quite fit in with the rest of the herd. It didn't help that I started kindergarten a year later than everyone else and so was older than my classmates. By all rights, I should have been smarter and surer of myself than all of them.

Like me, Agnes spent a good chunk of time in Resource. I thought of her as the “little old lady girl.” There was nothing wrong with her brain, that much was clear right off the bat. She was there mainly to get help catching up on work she'd missed when she was out of school for medical stuff. A couple of times, she was even in the hospital. I never asked her for details when she got back, but I figured it couldn't be good. Sometimes, when Ms. Marilyn was busy with other students, Agnes helped me with reading. There's no way I would have read out loud in front of anyone else at school, but being embarrassed in front of Agnes just felt wrong somehow. Like,
Hey, I know teachers have explained to us how you have this terminal disease that also makes you look like someone's grandma when you're twelve, but I can't read out loud to you because I'm afraid I'll get some of the words wrong.
That would have been too self-conscious even for me, and I was about the most self-conscious person I knew, other than Moira Watkins.

Moira was Agnes's best friend and unofficial bodyguard. The only time I wouldn't read aloud was when she came to Resource to hang out and study with Agnes. Moira was smart and fierce, and she could be sharp-tongued when she wanted to be. I thought she was extremely pretty, too, though I could tell she didn't think so herself. She was almost as big as I was; she towered over the other girls, even when she walked around with her shoulders slumped and her head down, which was most of the time.

Ms. Marilyn clearly loved Agnes and Moira. In fact, I was pretty sure she loved every student who came through the door of the Resource room, which caused me no small amount of torment. She was like Miss Honey in
Matilda
, which Agnes read aloud to a group of lower-grade Resource kids over the course of a few weeks. I was right there in the room, as usual, and I couldn't help but listen as she read. It was a great story. I wouldn't admit that out loud even if someone was holding a Kalashnikov rifle to my head, but it was true. Matilda was a badass. Moira was probably a badass, too, underneath her shyness and the way she'd retreat when other kids teased her about her size. They were harder on her than they were on me, even, which was saying something. Maybe it was because Moira hadn't beaten anyone to a pulp yet. I thought about mentioning this as a potential strategy to her, but then erased it from my mind immediately.

Boy, was
that
ever a mistake.

One day at lunch, I came out of the boys' bathroom and found Jared Vandercamp cornering Moira in the covered corridor between our classroom and the playground. “Fat ass, fat ass, fat ass,” Jared was saying over and over again, his face only about an inch away from hers.

I didn't doubt he was spitting on her a little as he said it. Without thinking, I stepped between the two of them and shoved Jared backward. “Hey! Leave her alone.”

“Boone,” Moira told me. “Don't.”

Jared looked surprised at first, but he quickly regained his balance and squared himself. “What are you going to do about it, Tardboy?” He made his mouth all droopy and stuck his tongue out the side of it as if to demonstrate what I was, what I would always be.

And that was it. A few seconds later, I was standing over Jared, every muscle in my body tensed and coiled as Moira screamed, “Stop it!” The whole thing happened so fast that I didn't even recall the flats of my hands on Jared's shoulders, propelling him backward yet again, this time onto the concrete walkway. He looked up at me, wide-eyed and helpless. A brief wave of utter peace flowed through my veins at the sight. If he attempted to get up, I'd strike like a rattlesnake. I wouldn't even have to think about it. At a certain point, these kinds of things became instinct.

Meanwhile, Moira was still screaming at me to stop, to leave Jared alone. Over on the blacktop, other kids had registered the chaos and were running over to surround us with the usual chants and jeers that started up any time a fight broke out. Teachers were hurrying toward us, too.

Ms. Marilyn wouldn't even look at me when I returned to Resource after doing time in the principal's office. I'd been told to gather my things and wait to be summoned back. My mother had been called to pick me up early, and I was being suspended for three days. Moira wouldn't look at me, either, not at first, anyway. After a few minutes, she got up to sharpen her pencil. She dropped a folded-up piece of paper on my desk as she walked by, and I allowed myself to breathe a small sigh of relief. I'd been afraid she'd never talk to me again. Not that I understood why. She could have at least shown me a little gratitude for decking jerkface Jared. I waited until Ms. Marilyn's back was turned to open the note.

I can take care of myself,
it read.
Go to hell.

Five minutes before I was called back to the office, Ms. Marilyn finally spoke to me. She knelt down next to my desk and let out a big sigh. “I was really disappointed by your behavior today.” She whispered it so the other kids wouldn't hear. I could feel Agnes's eyes on the two of us. Moira was acting like I didn't exist at all. Ms. Marilyn spent the next few minutes whispering about the whole “words instead of fists” thing. I felt awful, of course, but I forced myself to look at her out of respect anyway. It was a good excuse to watch her mouth as she spoke, like I couldn't quite understand what she was saying and had to lip-read.

Still, the message got through. I started to clean things up after that. I started to try harder in school and take pride in my grades. Mom was thrilled. Dad, not so much. It's not like he encouraged me to go around clobbering people or anything, but it was no secret that he was proud of the fact that I
could
clobber a guy if I wanted to. I spent less time in the Resource room and more time mainstreamed, even though the teacher that year, Mr. Carter, didn't try to hide the fact that he wasn't too pleased to have me back in the classroom for most of the day. The first time I got an A on a math quiz (thanks to Ms. Marilyn's tutoring), Carter was shocked.